04 May 2008
Saudade
)Published on May 4th, 2008 @ 06:22:37 pm, using 430 words, 47 views
“What does saudade mean to you?”
She didn’t understand what he was driving at. Couldn’t quite isolate his tone (which had come out uncharacteristically flat this time) much less put a convenient label on it. Maybe just ‘thoughtful’, it occurred to her for a fraction of a second. But conjectures were to be neglected today. Not worth her time. The prospect of certainty… that yes, was attractive. Concrete poured into a fist-shaped mold. The image of holding on fast. The image of solidity.
Still, it was an unfamiliar sound he was leaning on for expression. Yielding uncertainty. So she left the tone of her own reply as open to interpretation as possible. Returning an unexpected serve to the best of her ability and waiting - waiting out those long short seconds. She gave him an ‘I don’t know’ that could have led to three or four different returns. She gave him a choice of tennis court surfaces from which any given ball would bounce at differing angles. His pick would determine everything.
It could’ve led to a joke - the likeliest of possibilities, the kind that raises its hand faster than the rest - had that been his inclination. It could’ve led to his teaching her something as he was so fond of doing, being the bridge that linked her to knowledge. But neither of those was the case here. There was a wall of gravitas behind the question and a veil of it in front. She felt as though she were receiving a suprise visit from a distant relative she didn’t know existed. She experienced a subdued version of the reaction such an encounter would elicit.
A long pause followed her ‘I don’t know.’ A universe of possibilities behind it. Tropical forests with all their exotic fauna, rivers, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, wind gusts… all devoid of sound. A lifetime of natural phenomena behind those weary blue eyes.
Then, like a wave that arrives at the shore diminished but even and far-reaching…
‘To me, it means separation.’
Saudade (singular) or Saudades (plural) (pronounced [sawˈdade] in Galician, pronounced [sawˈdadɨ] in European Portuguese and [sawˈdadʒi] or [sawˈdadi] in Brazilian Portuguese) is a Galician and Portuguese word for a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Saudade, question, tone, thoughtful, reply, joke, teaching, knowledge, gravitas, wave, shore, separation
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