Except for “thank you,” I don’t speak Portuguese. Before a recent trip to Lisbon, I spent a few weeks on Duolingo trying to learn Portuguese phrases such as “I have an apple” and “I am a boy/I am a girl.” During my trip, I wanted to be able to converse with Portuguese as an act of understanding (I am trying to understand your language) and as a way to show off in front of my kids the way I do in Israel or sort of did in Mexico City. I am normally good at languages, but even with Duolingo’s help, I struggled to understand much about Portuguese except that “o” can be “the.” Knowing the word for “apple” came in handy, however, when I tried to buy my son apple juice in a padaria where no one spoke English. I also dropped a newly purchased pasteis de nata on the floor in the same padaria. The woman behind the counter brought me a new one and likely thought I was an idiot.
The one section of French theorist Roland Barthes’ The Natural I quickly remember is a lecture on Buddhism he gives. After the lecture, a student writes him a note that says something like: “Your reading of Buddhism is all wrong.” During the next lecture, Barthes addresses the student’s note in front of the class and says something like: “Who said I know anything about Buddhism?”
I feel that way, too. What do I know? Nothing, I often feel. “I Know Nothing,” screams Tel Aviv graffiti that I photographed and made the cover for my book Authentic Writing. Who said I know anything? I feel that way about fado, the Portuguese musical genre that often is about sadness and longing. Fado evokes saudade, a Portuguese word for nostalgia and longing — for home, for food, for someone, for love, for a past, for what is no more. The Portuguese blues is what many call fado. I know nothing about fado other than that I am interested in it. I spent weeks listening to it on Spotify before the trip, I visited the Fado Museum in Lisbon, I started writing about it in a very rough chapter about Anthony Bourdain and suicide. But I don’t speak Portuguese, other than my ability to say “thank you,” “I have an apple” and “I am a boy/I am a girl.” Thus, I can’t understand the sadness expressed if I only focus on the words. I can try and feel that sadness through the music and its various intonations. I listen to music in other languages all the time. People who don’t speak English. as well, listen to American music. When I listen to fado, I don’t, however, know what a particular song is communicating about loss or sadness since I don’t speak Portuguese. This point might challenge my ability to properly write about fado. Who said I know anything about fado? Not me. It also doesn’t matter if I know anything or not — the way it doesn’t matter if Barthes got Buddhism wrong. Writing does not always require expertise.
In the taxi from the airport to the apartment I had rented, I told the driver I had been in Lisbon thirty years earlier. “Much has changed since then!” he proclaimed. And then he added, “Except the salaries.” Lisbon, as Anthony Bourdain noted in his only visit on the show No Reservations, does not look like other European capitals. There aren’t any slick sky scrapers or modern looking buildings that tend to signify financial districts or an expertise at running a successful economy. Most building facades look dilapidated in the way parts of Tel Aviv look. In some places or neighborhoods that climb up through hills and narrow stone streets, the city feels like it’s the 19th century still. The city feels small even if it is not. This, of course, is not an expert’s view of Lisbon. I’ve only been twice.
I went to Portugal because many writers describe the Portuguese as the saddest people of Europe. I am writing a sad book. Maybe, I thought, I could learn about sadness during a short stay of eating, walking, visiting sites, taking notes, eating shell fish, and saying thank you in Portuguese (obrigado, by the way). I also wanted to walk a tiny bit in the footsteps of an imaginary figure who very much evokes sadness, Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain once ate lunch at Cervejaria Ramiro, a now famous restaurant specializing in shell fish and steak (prego) sandwiches for dessert. You need a reservation usually, and with that reservation, you have to make a twenty five euro deposit which the waiter writes down on your paper placemat as you are seated. The waiters don’t speak much if any English and point at the QR code so that you can read the menu as quickly as possible. The menu consists of mostly shell fish dishes and a steak sandwich. Even though many places are called cervejaria, they are not breweries, and most sell Super Bock or some other basic lager. Bourdain also ate at O Trevo, a sort of diner looking place with limited seating where you can order prego (steak) or bifana (pork) sandwiches. I don’t eat pork. We went there, too, and got prego and cheese sandwiches and ate them on the steps of the Praça Luís de Camões across from O Trevo since there was no place to sit inside. As he descended the steps, my son slipped on something pink and disgusting and dirtied his entire backside.
It probably sounds stupid to eat at places a food celebrity who committed suicide once ate at. I think it’s stupid too. But there is a part of me interested in walking in the steps of imaginary giants, particularly if they took their own life. As a theorist, I try and walk in Roland Barthes’ steps, asking what things mean and why do they have to mean anything at all? Bourdain, too, is an imaginary giant for me. By that, I mean that I do not worship Bourdain or admire him or idolize him or even consider myself a fan. I see him as imaginary. And I am attracted to the imaginary. I ask myself the same question most fans or writers asked of Bourdain’s suicide: how could someone famous, who travelled the world, who was wealthy from his TV and writing success, who seemed to have it all, kill himself? What sadness was inside of him? We can’t speak the language of those who have taken their own lives. We don’t know what they are saying.
I am reminded of a No Reservations episode when Bourdain returns to Provincetown, Massachusetts and stands outside of a beach house he once lived in. There is longing in his voice as he remembers this home where he spent his early ’20s and where he became addicted to heroin. He also began his restaurant career there. He likely feels saudade as he narrates his past and calls this period of his life “golden times.” “I look back on those fuzzy memories, and they seem golden anyway,” he says. Anyway. That is an interesting word to use when describing a supposed great moment of one’s past. It could also mean: Maybe not so: “Maybe I’ve got it all wrong; it doesn’t’ matter though; I still remember.” Anyway is the imaginary we cling to with memory. Any moment that seems golden, that we cling to in memory, may indeed be an anyway moment. It wasn’t really so, but.. .. Anyway is the opposite of authentic. Almost the entire Massachusetts episode is about opioid addiction. Very little is about food. It’s such a strange episode in the Bourdain canon of food and travel. Can someone long to be an addict again? I don’t think Bourdain wanted to be an addict again. Maybe, though, he still was an addict when he hung from a door knob in a French hotel. Maybe he was addicted to something other than heroin. Something like sadness. Or saudade. Anyway.
Barthes’ most famous book on the imaginary is Empire of Signs, where he imagines a fictive writing about Japan. The Japan he writes about, he tells us, is not really Japan. It’s the Japan he imagines; the stereotypes, the icons, the topoi, the first things that come to mind. It’s never meant to be a historical or authentic Japan. This is, I assume, how Barthes lectured on Buddhism. This is, in a way, how I write about fado or Anthony Bourdain. Whatever I imagine these two to be, I don’t claim them to be authentic representations. My book Authentic Writing was about this point as well, but not about fado or Anthony Bourdain (or much about him). Isn’t sadness an imaginary too? I don’t mean that people aren’t sad for legitimate reasons. I mean that sadness or why we are sad is something we imagine. There doesn’t have to be an authentic representation (a loss, a death, a breakup, a mistake) in order to be sad. You don’t need an object or image to refer back to. You need, maybe, something like saudade. You simply need the feeling of sadness. You need this emotion’s affective state. Or you need an imaginary figure. You don’t need to speak the language of sadness to experience it.
The only memory I have from my first trip to Lisbon when I was in my early ’20s was eating large grilled sardines with a couple I had met and travelled a little bit with. Like many before me, I travelled alone through Europe, taking trains from city to city, somehow figuring out how to get anywhere without a cellphone or GPS or much language skills or a companion. Was I sad? I don’t remember. I probably was. I remember two Moroccans on the train from Rome to Paris eating sardines out of a large plastic bag. “Do you want some?” they asked. I said no. I wish I had said yes, though.
I wish I knew if Roland Barthes ever went to Portugal. I wish I knew if he went to the same tin fish shop, Loja das Conservas, as I did. I wonder if he ever had a beer at Outro Lado. I wonder if he ever talked about saudade or fado. Should I have tried to follow in his imaginary footsteps too? If I were a historian of Roland Barthes or an expert on him, I’m sure I’d know if he did any of this or not. I would have an authentic representation of this theorist, not an imaginary understanding of him as I do now. I want to assume that all people who live in Europe simply travel to other European countries on a daily basis, whether to eat tin fish or to eat shell fish. After all, you can take a train from Paris to Lisbon or fly between the cities in two and half hours. I might imagine him taking a holiday there or saying thank you to a woman behind a counter at a padaria or being sad. One real fact I know about Roland Barthes is that he died from injuries sustained when a laundry truck hit him as he was crossing the street. I do not feel like an idiot for not being an expert in Roland Barthes.
I am the kind of academic who, like Barthes, does not see a reason for expertise. I like to eat and cook, but am I an expert in food? I play guitar, but am I an expert musician? I write, but am I an expert writer? No. No. No. Instead, professionally at least, I focus on the broad application of ideas and theories and how they might assist in whatever communicative act I engage in: writing a book, writing a Medium piece, teaching, persuading, narrating, promoting, talking, not talking, writing down what I feel, listening to music in a language I cannot understand, and so on. In my research on suicide, Bourdain’s and others’, I discover that even experts — from Emile Durkheim to contemporary psychologists — struggle to understand it or what one might mean by its act or by a note left behind. Suicide is a form of communication — someone is trying to say something, to express a lack of hope, to say they have given up, to evoke revenge for being wronged, to follow through on a threat, to play out their sadness in the most extreme way possible, and so on. But no one really knows what exactly was communicated in a given act of suicide. No one really knows, for example, why Bourdain committed suicide. No one. No one has that level of expertise or insight into who this man was or what he felt. Sometimes, an act leaves us without us knowing what it ever meant.
One night, we climbed the stairs in the Alfama neighborhood to Tu e Eu 2, a small restaurant at the top of the stairs whose walls are covered in graffiti past patrons have drawn or written. “The octopus is tender” one drawing declared. “Food like at home,” someone had written in Hebrew. We ordered too many dishes (as I often do when I want to taste everything), and the waiter, kind and warm but probably sure we were idiots for wanting so much food, recommended taking one dish off our list. “The clams?” my daughter suggested. “But no,” he said. “They are done in garlic and parsley and are so good.” “Maybe the alheira?” he then asked. “No,” I said, “I’ve been wanting to try that.” “You know what it is?” he asked as if surprised. “Yes,” I said as I were some kind of expert in Portuguese cuisine and not someone who did a little Google research before the trip, jotting down dishes and specialties in Notes so that I might know what I was eating or would want to eat. He believed me for a minute there and left it on our order. Despite my dependence on Google or Duolingo or Spotify for knowledge about anything Portuguese, it turns out I actually did know something. For once. For once I knew something. I knew what something meant. And then I ate it.
