Chapter Six – Portugal

Portugal is one of those countries that seems to be all around me. For some time I seriously thought my destiny was rather to study Portuguese, than Hungarian, and life has a funny way of pointing that out to me. First of all – back in the day I originally wanted to apply for Portuguese studies when I was preparing for university, but it wasn’t possible, because the admission exam was probably in any other language of the world, but English. And since I was applying with English – I had no chance. This way I ended up in the Hungarian department (not a single regret, don’t get me wrong!). Then one of my closest friends, A., picked up Portuguese studies as a second major in university. She was a second year public administration student when she got accepted to the Portuguese department, right across the hall from us, baby-Hungarians. I would stand there and listen to those nasal vowels, those lovely “sh” sounds (we have a lot of those in Hungarian, too, though) and I would just melt down. Then of course friends started visiting Portugal, didn’t they, Inga? So it was only natural for me to include Portugal in this list. Plus I’ve only ever read one book by José Saramago, so I desperately felt the need to catch up. And so I turned to A. for help – this lovely creature I miss a lot. As someone who knows a lot about me, and a music/literature lover with a similar taste, she really knew what to suggest and how to make picking a title a very difficult task for me. She only needed to mention four names. I would immediately find three books to each and I would sit in the office, with 12 tabs, 12 books, hiding them from bosses and colleagues, and trying to choose. The hardest 30 minutes of my life, because usually if I can’t pick one, I buy them all. That’s probably about the time when I realised I would need to go back to most of the countries on my list and pick up some other books as well. I realised how incredibly hard it is to choose only one. But. My final decision went with Jose Luis Peixoto and his The Piano Cemetery. I’ve always loved the piano. Since my childhood, but that’s something I’ll tell you more about in one of my next posts. Give me a contemporary minimalist piano music, and I’m happy. And having a story with pianos involved is something I could not resist. Especially with a title like this. And also it was around this time that I started becoming a bit more interested in running, and this story is actually a loose interpretation of the life of Francisco Lazaro – a Portuguese athlete, who participated in the Olympic games in Stockholm in 1912, who died after running a 30 km marathon. The Lazaro family is a family of carpenters, who would prefer repairing pianos – they have a room full of broken pianos, which provide them with spare parts they need for repairing the instruments. This one goes for Portugal.