Phones stayed, uncharacteristically for that evening’s banker set, in purse and pocket. We had wine and peanuts and it was a Friday night, all of us 30-somethings. We had a low-volume playlist in the background.

Did you see what happened? Conversation went, naturally, to the latest in local corruption. I had nothing to say, and hereby confess to purposeful abstinence from the local press. This is how I make space for binge-reading in English; it was this paper-copy reading that filled the largest and earliest voids as a Lisbon newcomer (they made me feel less unemployed, more engaged with the world). But they’ve got nothing on local corruption.

I sat back and listened to a heated string of complaints that ended in sighs of “Only in Portugal,” a phrase the Portuguese find comfort in repeating, as if a birthright. Conversation moved on. It went from tariff tantrums to climate change to soft Brexit to Theresa May’s type 1 diabetes. I made a mental note to start a Salon.

The evening happened in Portuguese. Mine is accented but I suspect pretty respectable, despite my freestyling tendencies. With good intentions of speaking Portuguese, I often slip into Spanish, completely unaware. Think Cristiano Ronaldo giving an interview for Real Madrid and then invert the languages.

I watched the group of Lisbonites around me discussing the scandal at hand and my mind went to Paris. This is what had been missing, I thought, about my time in that city, when mingling with the French in French was implausibly difficult to come by. Amongst my group of foreign-lawyer-friends it was known fact that the only real chance of this would involve dating a Parisian, and my antipathy towards cigarettes and Vespas rendered the whole thing Game Over.

One of the friends who had grouped around this gathering of wine and peanuts had just switched jobs. She told us about her first week working for a private hospital. Conversation shifted squarely onto healthcare and I had some things to say. It came out all wrong. What I’d actually meant to express had more to do with the comparative benefits of the National Health Insurance model as compared to the Beveridge system, but what came out landed somewhere at the intellectual level of a strongly left-brained pre-teen.

Me: “It is horrible how long it takes to see a doctor in England,” and this was not at all the point. The point existed in my head and became lost somewhere in translation, unsaid, gone.

It was the feeling I had that afternoon on Ninth Street when I’d misunderstood the entire exercise. I’d smoked the joint from start to finish, not knowing what a single-portion looked like, in that first and final dabble that left me staring at a ceiling fan speechless. There were thick layers of air above me, and they trapped my words beneath their weight, the experiment clearly having gone all wrong. There was a feeling that without my words, I was not me. [1]

This was the feeling over wine and peanuts, and I was struck by the fundamental dignity inherent in the act of native speech.

(Need convincing? Take the time I asked a salesman for a new cock. The young man looked appalled, and I immediately understood I hadn’t found the right Portuguese words to replace the battery on my Swatch).

Our first languages are the tools of essential emotional and intellectual expression. By default we curse and count, dream and cry in our mother tongues. To “express” comes from the Latin “expressare,” meaning “to press out.” Native speech is the means by which we can best extricate that which needs outing. It fills a primal need.

Not having the words to participate, I do more listening than speaking, more agreeing than opining. I am unrecognizable: hesitant, reticent, even agreeable.

Jhumpa Lahiri is an American writer. She moved to Rome to learn Italian and then write in it exclusively. In the English translation of her latest novel, she writes: “I don’t recognize this person who is writing in this diary, in this new, approximate language. But I know that it’s the most genuine, vulnerable part of me.”

By having lived in a few different places, immersed in a few foreign languages, I’ve learned that English is my playground of choice. I was recently in Scotland and felt an immediate kinship with Scots, who had me somewhere between “wee” and “hello.”

In foreign language, I’m less steady. This makes non-native speech my mental exercise of choice. Lahiri writes that “from the creative point of view there is nothing so dangerous as security.”  There is a reason why writers move and stay abroad. Is this why the Lost Generation found its way to Paris?

A few weeks ago, I visited Denmark for the first time. I deplaned in Copenhagen with that blend of optimism and entitlement that seems common in Romance language speakers, that sense that had me thinking, surely I should discern something.

There were blue and bright yellow signs for AFSLUT, graciously translated into English, without which I wouldn’t have guessed my way to the exit. I eavesdropped and understood nothing, other than the three Danish words I’ve picked up from Scandinavian noir crime dramas. All I could gather was sensory, and mostly, it was the smell of cinnamon pastry that filled the wooden-planked departures lounge.

It was a 20-minute færd on the tog from the lufthavn to the forretningskvarteret. At each stop, an automated female voice came over the loudspeaker announcing the name of a station that did not sound the way it was written. I traveled alone, steeping in the sound of the city. Hej! and Jah! and Nej! were all around me. I wanted only to listen.

Traveling in Copenhagen felt like experiencing life underwater. It was neither an exercise in native speech nor an effort at non-native communication. It was pure immersion in foreign sound. In verbal detox, I was able to see and hear differently. I was simply being, with no words of my own for doing.

The pace was slow and time was dream-like, making all sorts of unexpected leaps. Norreport station smelled just like the tube stop at Westminster, a little bit like metal and air ducts. The shopping streets, too, felt vaguely familiar, with the metro stops at Stroget and Bond Street smelling too strongly of waffles. I watched the locals sunbathe shirtless and iguana-like on that cloudless week in May, drinking wine in public spaces amongst potted flowers and plants in café shops. In my mind I was back in my first London summer.

Equally, Copenhagen’s waterways had all the feels of Canal Saint Martin, lined with people dressed fashionably, in black and muted tones. In my mind I was in Paris.

I spent an afternoon looking at chairs, in silence. I thought of Jakob from 8^th grade English, who I hadn’t given much thought to since we left Atlanta. I remembered his face and how he’d introduced himself on the first stay of school. It was a memory I thought I’d forgotten. “My name is Jakob and I’m from Denmark,” he said. “It’s a small country that no one here will know.”

I suddenly understood Tivoli Park. Not the original, but the one I remembered from childhood. As I walked through the gardens of the Danish Tivoli, my mind flashed to an afternoon in Rio, to an early memory of a day spent at an eponymous amusement park in Lagoa, the one with the age-inappropriate haunted house ride that I cried my way through.

I said few things during my time in Copenhagen, other than to buy tickets (Design Museum) and order food and drink (outstanding coffee, enormous selection of natural wines). In the absence of an effort to speak – natively or not – what was left was space for improbable connections.

I landed in Lisbon and put in my SIM card, connecting, also improbably, to the network of data that had my phone flooded with equally improbable Emoji’s – the stuff of the world’s soon-to-be most-broadly spoken language.

 

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[1] In this predicament, I deemed the only possible solution to involve marching as purposefully as I could to the neighborhood Kinko’s with a copy of my Honors Thesis on a USB key for single-side printing and binding for the English Department. I recall a confused teller at Kinko’s and a slight uptick in my powers of speech.