There are lots of cliches about love being a language of its own. There are tales of how people who don't speak each other's language fall in love and live happily ever after. Let me tell you, it's all bullshit. You need to be able to have a conversation to be able to get to know someone. You can't do that with gestures, unless both of you know sign language. Or, worse, let your eyes speak. Whoever propagated that mawkish notion must have smoked a particularly potent batch of weed that day. Or he was one smart dude who knew how to get the ladies to swoon for him with unadulterated poppycock.
How do I know? Well, I've tried it. I speak a little Spanish. And I used Google translate to help me start an online conversation in Portuguese with a woman in Rio de Janeiro. As long as I had the translator handy, we were able to exchange some information. Now if you've used the program before you'll know that it's no human. It runs into trouble often, confuses itself and its user periodically. So, sometimes what she wrote got translated into nonsense in English and I had to try all kinds of disambiguation techniques to figure what she might have said. And if all failed, I'd resort to writing back, 'Nao entendi' -- 'I didn't understand' -- and she'd try the say it in a different way.
She was 42, and had a grown son who had a girlfriend. She lived in one of the neighborhoods in the northern part of Rio. Generally, the southern neighborhoods are the wealthy ones. The northern ones belong to the middle and working class.
We chatted back and forth in this manner for a few days. And I was brave enough to ask her out on a date when I visited Rio for a few days. I wouldn't have Google Translate with me, I know. But I'd bought into this silly notion that two people could talk with their eyes.
She asked me to meet her in downtown Rio in the evening after her work. She worked in an office that did something with legal documents, and I was never able to figure out exactly what (Google failed me there). I showed up at the location she'd mentioned, but there was no sign of her. Due to a strange issue with my mobile phone, every time I tried to text her a message, it kept auto-correcting it to such an extent that I was simply unable to compose even a simple sentence. So I finally called her. She answered. And I didn't understand a word of what she said. I tried Spanish, and so did she. Still nothing. I kept telling her the names of the streets whose intersection I was at. Now, you should know that spoken Portuguese is nothing like the written language. At least in Spanish, even if you didn't understand a word, you could read it and say it out loud and more often than not, you'd be right. But if you read Portuguese the way it's written, you'd be speaking gibberish. And that's exactly what I was apparently doing. I thought I was speaking a few words and sentences I recalled seeing on Google Translate. But if she understood anything, I didn't know, for what she said back to me was just as alien as Swahili.
After a couple of such attempts at talking to her, I hung up glumly, thinking I'd just been taken for a ride by a woman who had no intentions of meeting me. Just as I was about to turn and leave, she showed up, smiling. She looked lovely, a lot younger than the 42 years she claimed to be. She had olive skin, dark eyes, dark hair (she probably had Arab blood). She was voluble, pleasant, and chattered away as I listened, unable to comprehend a single word.
Finally, with gestures and monosyllables, we established that we should go to a cafe and attempt a conversation there. We walked a block or two and came across a restaurant. I gestured towards it and she agreed. So we sat at a table. After a few smiles back and forth, she attempted another conversation. A stream of words emerged from her lips, and I understood nothing. It later turned out that even words I would have recognized in writing, went right past me. It didn't help that she didn't slow down and enunciate the words the way you would to a demented child. Occasionally, when we did stumble upon a couple of words that we understood -- like pizza or cafe or 'voce e linda' ('you are pretty') -- we kept repeating them, hoping that the repetition would magically lead to a more meaningful conversation.
We ordered pizza. As we struggled to converse, I became increasingly anxious that she would lose interest and just walk away. She was sweet and lovely. I really wanted to get to know her. And I wanted to kiss her. Finally, after we'd eaten our lousy, excessively salty pizza, I told her, 'Quero beijar voce' -- 'I want to kiss you'. Her reply wasn't a simple yes or no, and I had no idea what she said. She repeated it a few times, and each time I kept saying 'Que?' ('What?') like a dimwit. Finally, sighing, she leaned forward, puckering her lips, and gestured me to lean forward as well.
'Not here,' I said in Portuguese. 'Later.'
She understood and said something as she nodded. She probably said, 'Then why did you ask for it, you moron?' But, fortunately, I had no clue, and I smiled like the moron she probably thought I was.
I paid and we left. I wondered what was next. With all this trouble with even a simple conversations, I could hardly expect her to walk with me around downtown and tell me about the many interesting and historical buildings. To fill the silence, I turned her towards me and kissed her. She responded with enthusiasm. She was a curvy woman, with ample breasts that pressed against my chest as we embraced and kissed. I mustered enough courage to ask her if she wanted to go back with me to the apartment I was staying in. Hastily, I added, 'Nao quero sexo.' I wasn't even sure if it was a proper sentence in Portuguese, but I wanted to assure her that I wasn't looking for sex. She appeared to understand me, but her response was incomprehensible. I kept repeating 'meu apartamento na Copacabana' ('my apartment in Copacabana'). But it was hard to understand each other. What I did gather was that she didn't want to go with me. Whether she was just being coy or pissed off at me for the suggestion I didn't know. The nuances of feelings could hardly be communicated when we were struggling with basic phrases.
We went to the subway station and she said she would go home. I hoped she wasn't mad at me. I hoped she didn't think I was a freaking joke. She said she'd chat with me online the next day. 'Amanha?' I asked. 'Sim, amanha.' ('yes, tomorrow').
So with hope I went back to my apartment that night. She didn't some online the next evening. My heart sunk. I texted her the next day. She replied that she may be able to meet me the coming weekend. My hopes rose. We decided we would meet that Sunday in the evening.
Sunday came along and I texted her to confirm the location. I didn't hear back from her for a couple of hours. I called her and she didn't pick up the phone. My hopes came crashing down again. And then she called back. And, of course, I didn't understand a word of what she said. How the hell were we going to engage in a complex negotiation over where and when to meet? The conversation came to a pause, and I interpreted it as the end of the conversation. I had no idea if she'd confirmed our meeting or had given me a reason why she couldn't meet me. I hung up, dejected. That, I thought, was the end of this little affair.
But we've kept in touch on Facebook and Skype. She'd disappear for a few days and then reappear online and attempt a conversation. I gave up trying to figure her out. I even actively ignored her chat requests a few times and at other times told her that I was busy with something else. But we've also had a few basic conversations. She always addresses me as querido, 'my dear'. We still talk about wanting to kiss each other. We still flirt. I sometimes tell her I want to make love to her. And she responds saying she wants it too. She even says she misses me. But, of course, all of this is playful, and I don't take any of this seriously.
And this evening she initiated a skype session. She blew me a kiss. Then she licked her lips in a flirtatious manner and laughed. I flirted back. 'You have large boobs,' I gestured to her, feeling naughty. She laughed. 'I want to see them,' I wrote on the chat window. She laughed and pretended to slap me, but I could tell that she was being coy. I persisted. I lifted up my shirt and touched my nipples. She had a mock shocked expression, eyes open wide, her mouth open into a perfect O.
'Just once,' I wrote to her. She looked uncertain for a few moments. Then she sat up on her bed and showed me her cleavage. Oh, she looked sexy! 'More,' I wrote. Finally she pulled out a boob. Her dark nipple was thick and erect. She played with it for a few seconds and covered herself. She giggled. She looked like a young woman, trusting, innocent, entirely comfortable with me despite all the communication issues. I wished I was with her, making love to her. It was painful to watch her on my screen. 'Next time you're here we'll make love,' she said.
But she knows, as I do, that there probably won't be a next time. And even if we were to meet again, we'd have very little success talking to each other. You can't build a friendship or a relationship on puerile gestures and kissing noises. It's a pleasant diversion at best, our chats, something we'll indulge in periodically to occupy our moments of boredom. But she has her life. I have mine. We inhabit different worlds. And we don't even have the vocabulary to share our worlds with each other.
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