If I’m at home by myself in Israel, and there is a knock at the door, my heart sinks. ‘Oh no!’ I think. ‘Now I’m going to have to answer the door and talk to someone.’ (For those of you who don’t know, I am, much of the time, one of those people for whom lockdown has legitimised the habits developed over decades.) On the other hand, if I am at home by myself in Portugal, and there is a knock at the door, it is a completely different experience. ‘Oh no!’ I think. ‘Now I’m going to have to answer the door and be completely unable to talk to someone.’
Last November, when Bernice and I were in Portugal, one afternoon, when the kids were both out, having taken Tao (and Shir, their business partner) with them, there was a knock at the door. I contemplated hiding under the table, but the salon window is right next to the front door, and I might have already been spotted, in which case my embarrassment would have been even harder to endure than my humiliation at being unable to speak a word of Portuguese beyond ‘Hola!’ and ‘Bom dia’. (It strikes me that it is less than efficient, if you are able to express only two ideas in a language, that they should turn out to be by and large the same idea!) So, I opened the door, gave an inviting smile and a welcoming ‘Hola!’, which in my anxiety was possibly just a tad louder than necessary, and waited to be plunged into total incomprehension.
The youngish man on the other side of the doorstep was not wearing any uniform or other clothing that might give a clue as to the nature of his visit; he was not standing next to a horse pulling a milkcart, or a van with a helpful picture of a household appliance or farm produce on it. He was not dressed in an over-bright rustic shirt and carrying a wicker basket of clothes pegs. He didn’t even have a wart on his nose and a large, shiny, red and green apple in his hand. In short, he was carrying no clues beyond a glossy, multi-coloured cardboard folder. I politely waited for him to finish his first sentence, then inquired ‘English?’, with what I planned to be an apologetic wry smile, but probably looked more like a simpering grimace. Wonder of wonders! Our visitor spoke enough English for me to understand that his visit was not unconnected to electricity supply. However, he seemed to be denying that he was a representative of EDP, our electricity supplier, and, when I invited him in to read the meter, he made it clear that that was not the purpose of his visit. (This was, of course, before I knew that, in Portugal, meters are not read by the supplier at the point of consumption.) He seemed to want to offer us a deal, but I could understand no more than that.
At this point, thankfully, Shir returned. Having spent some time in South America, Shir’s Spanish is not at all bad. When he suggested ‘Espagnol?’, our visitor happily graduated to a language he was more comfortable with. Over the next few minutes, Shir was able to understand that our polyglot friend was a representative of a rival supplier, and was indeed offering us a special deal, the details of which failed to leap across the linguistic gap between his and Shir’s Spanish.
At this point, doubly thankfully, Micha’el returned, and, with his Portuguese, was able to get almost the full story, which need not concern us here. My takeaways from this experience were three.
First: Micha’el’s knowledge of Spanish (from a few months in Ecuador), combined with the Portuguese he had by then acquired (2 months after arriving in Portugal), and enhanced by his ease and confidence and complete lack of concern over the possibility of making a fool of himself, all added up to him punching way above his weight in the spoken Portuguese ring.
Second: How many door-to-door electricity salesmen in Britain, I wonder, can make themselves even partially understood in two languages other than English? Perhaps things have changed in the 33 years since we left Britain, but I bet they are still pretty thin on the ground.
Third: Unless I am happy to continue to be humiliated over my inability to hold even a fragment of a conversation in Portuguese, I really must do something about learning the language.
And did I? Well, yes and no….but on the whole: Did I heck as like! (which translates roughly as ‘No’).
I did actually start (both Bernice and I did) an online Portuguese ‘course’. However, it soon became apparent that this was little more than sets of vocabulary lists, and was not what we needed. Bernice, of course, saw this more quickly than I did, and she dropped out a week or two before I finally saw the wisdom of her ways. My only gain from this experience was that I now know the names of the days of the week, which are actually very easy for a Hebrew-speaker to grasp, but, I imagine, as confusing for others as the Hebrew days were for us when we first came on aliya. Saturday and Sunday are Sábado (from shabbat) and Domingo (the Lord’s day). However, uncharacteristically for Christian countries, Domingo, Sunday, is regarded as the first day of week, and Monday to Friday are known by the ordinal numbers 2nd to 6th. (These ordinals refer to market fairs throughout the week, and, formally, the weekdays are Segunda-feira (2nd fair) through to Sexta-feira.) So, Monday is Segunda or 2a and Friday is Sexta or 6 a, just as in Hebrew. Depressingly, I have so far found this the only easy aspect of learning Portuguese.
Having tried the online course with little success, I found myself thinking about phrasebooks, and, in particular, the Portuguese phrasebook I remembered reading about in my youth, the one that opened with the sentence My postilion has been struck by lightning. Incidentally, if, like me, you have never been quite sure how a postilion differs from a coachman, a postilion ‘drives’ the carriage by sitting on the horse, or, if there is a team of horses, the front nearside horse. The post part of his title is a reference to the fact that he drives a post horse, so-called because it is one of the horses kept at the staging posts on post-roads, to be used by stage-coaches, which exchange their horses at these staging-posts, so as to always have a fresh team. (Incidentally, did you know that the Finnish have a word – poronkusema – for the distance that a reindeer can travel before requiring a bathroom break. What I do not know is whether this is a term used generically to indicate a rough distance, in the same way as a day’s ride from here is based on an estimated average, or it is a term used in comparative tests carried out by the monthly magazine What Reindeer: Dasher achieved a 40-km poronkusema on the open road, but Rudolf could only average 32.)
My postilion has been struck by lightning. Oh, how we laughed at the absurdity of this appearing as the very first example in an English-Portuguese phrase-book! Googling this book, in the last couple of days, I have discovered that our laughter may have been hasty.
First of all, what I always understood to be a Portuguese phrase-book is, variously, cited as Hungarian, Russian, French and Dutch, an indication, at the very least, that social media have always half-borrowed, adapted and distorted, whether wilfully or carelessly. The references to this phrase begin around 1916, and appear in the magazines Punch and New Yorker (the latter example penned by James Thurber). In addition, James Michener refers to it, Dirk Bogarde adapted it for the title of his autobiography, and the poet Patricia Beer wrote a two-stanza poem inspired by it, which you can read at the bottom of this post.
The reason for all of this interest, I am sure, is that the phrase sounds to our ears completely removed from real life. Under what circumstances, we ask ourselves, would anyone ever need to use this phrase? Indeed, Linguistics Professor David Crystal coined the term postilion sentence for language which, although grammatically correct, has little or no chance of ever being useful in real life. it conveys a structural meaning, and a lexical content, but that is all.
Just a little more research, however, reveals that our amusement may well be misplaced. First of all, for the English lady or gentleman undertaking a 19th Century European grand tour, the post-coach would have been the usual means of travel, and the postilion would have been a common element of the journey. Indeed, the post-coach and its positilion might have been among the first elements of foreign life that the traveller encountered abroad.
‘All very well’, I hear you protest, ‘but how likely is it that the poor postilion would be struck by lightning?’ Well, remember that, on his horse, the postilion would have been the highest point of the party – a perfect lightning rod. Indeed, travelling across open, flat country, he might have been the highest point for miles around.
My only question is: Who are we to imagine the traveller addressing the sentence to? A coach with a postilion does not normally have a coachman as well. The postilion himself is, if not dead, then at least unlikely to be in a mood for conversation. Perhaps our traveller is sharing a coach with strangers.
Before I finish, here are two other postilion sentences, both from genuine phrasebooks:
Czech: Who is this man/woman in my bed? (Who do you imagine you would address this to?)
Spanish: My tailor is rich. (I defy you to construct a conversation where this is the next sentence you want to say.)
And finally, as promised, here is Patricia Beer’s poem:
The Postilion Has Been Struck by Lightning
He was the best postilion
I ever had. That summer in Europe
Came and went
In striding thunder-rain.
His tasselled shoulders bore up
More bad days than he could count
Till he entered his last storm in the mountains.
You to whom a postilion
Means only a cocked hat in a museum
Or a light
Anecdote, pity this one
Burnt at milord’s expense far from home
Having seen every sight
But never anyone struck by lightning.