The misadventures of the Portuguese-Brazilian and the Brazilian-Portuguese on the outskirts of Nowhere

It was a Friday, around 6pm, and I had only been in this country for a little over 48 hours. After a day of too much information about my new workplace, I decided to have a beer because, after all, it was a Friday and I had been bitten by the “Sextou” [“Fridaying”] bug that hits so many Brazilians every Friday.

 

Because of the good reception I’ve received a couple of days before, I opted once again for 100 Montaditos, ordering for a 50cl glass of beer. As soon as I arrived, I noticed that there was a very talkative guy at a nearby table. He appears to be Brazilian, but he speaks half like a Portuguese half like a Brazilian, in a hybridized Portuguese language, with the grammar being almost 100% like Portugal’s Portuguese, but the accent was clearly Brazilian Portuguese, more specifically from the Northeast region of Brazil. This guy, who I’ll call Brazilian-Portuguese from now on, says that he can strike up a conversation with anyone, as long as the person is also willing to chat. He and his colleague are talking briefly about Brazil, with the Brazilian-Portuguese saying that things are much easier in Brazil than they are here in Portugal, but I don’t understand exactly what they’re talking about, I guess that it’s about bureaucracy in general. It’s hard to understand due to the many different conversations all-around, as 100 Montaditos is quite full on this day, but our Brazilian-Portuguese seems to have had a rather difficult childhood, citing some episodes of domestic abuse when he was still a child. Apparently, he met his friend recently, if not on the day in question.

 

As I observe the tables that surround me, I notice that there is another solitary man listening to music with a single earphone in his ears, perhaps so that he can observe the surroundings as well as this writer. In these first few days, I notice that it’s relatively common to sit on the terrace and just observe the surroundings, as there is another solitary woman sitting by herself and doing the same. In my São Paulo, I think that would be quite impossible, as the frenetic pace prevents us from just enjoying and observing the environment.

 

Figure 1. The beginning of the misadventures – still by myself

 

I listen to the Brazilian-Portuguese table once again and wonder if his colleague, who I’ll call Portuguese-Brazilian, is either Portuguese or Brazilian. From the fragments that I hear, the Portuguese-Brazilian has never been to Brazil and at the same time he tells the colleague at the table besides them that “he’s fucked up with this Brazilian”. However, the Brazilian-Portuguese seems to speak more of an European Portuguese than the Portuguese-Brazilian, because the Portuguese-Brazilian uses many Brazilian expressions and slang, in a certain phenomenon of linguistic hybridization that inverts the colonizer-colonized logic. At the other tables, you can see that most of the customers at 100 Montaditos are black and quite dark-skinned people who speak a Portuguese that is closer to Portugal’s Portuguese, i.e. they probably come from the PALOP countries or are descendants of them. At the Padaria Montalegrense, just next door, you can also notice that the public is almost exclusively made up of Portuguese people, while at 100 Montaditos the majority are immigrants.

 

It’s 7:15 p.m. and I see that the solitary woman has gone to the bathroom, leaving her purse on the table with no one to keep an eye on it. A couple even sits down at the table because it’s empty, leaving her purse untouched. For me, this whole scene would be inconceivable in Brazil, either leaving your belongings without asking someone to watch over it, or having other people sitting in a place that would normally be occupied and with somebody else’s belongings.

 

As I turned my attention back to our “intercultural” table, I heard the Portuguese-Brazilian say that “if you’re a gypsy, there’s no respect”, and I couldn’t understand whether this was a demonstration of his intolerance for gypsies or a kind of self-criticism of his own kind, since in my ignorance, the Portuguese-Brazilian resembled the stereotypical idea I would have of gypsies living in Portugal’s social districts, due to his simple clothing (jeans and a white tank top akin to “Vin Diesel”) and expansive, explosive behavior. Our Brazilian-Portuguese countered this argument by saying: “my guy, you need to be more open towards people. I’ve been in the slums myself, I’m from the streets and I like everyone. Everyone has something to contribute and we only find out if we talk to each other”.

 

A brief argument broke out between the two, as the Portuguese-Brazilian received a phone call and informed the caller that he was already on the bus going home, but the Brazilian-Portuguese stopped him from leaving and they decided to have “the last one”. In the meantime, the Portuguese-Brazilian tries to capture the attention of two women sitting at another table, who don’t react at all to any of his advances, to which the Brazilian-Portuguese replies: “if we were in my country, this would be resolved in two minutes, because when a woman wants it, she wants it and there’s no way around it”. It’s worth mentioning that, in a later discovery, still on the same night, I learned that the call received by the Portuguese-Brazilian was from his wife. Poor woman, it was very unlucky that her husband hopped in the slowest bus in the universe…

 

We’re now around 8 p.m., although it was still sunny, and I felt that I was in for an interesting story so I decided to approach them, asking them to keep an eye on my backpack while I went to the bathroom. When I returned and thanked them for watching over my backpack, the Portuguese-Brazilian — very excitedly —  greeted me and ended up knocking over his beer glass, which was still almost full. I offered to buy him another mug, a gesture that made the Portuguese-Brazilian stand up and say: “Are you crazy, my brother? You’ll pay because I knocked it over? Actually, I’ll buy you one because you’re a good fella!”. So I joined them at their table and was able to find out a little more about these two unique individuals. They both work “on a building site” as construction workers and had received their paychecks, in cash, on that very day. They had met about two weeks ago and, as I suspected, were still getting to know each other, with that night of beers being the first time they had been out together. 

 

The two of them couldn’t see a woman that they thought was pretty, because then the conversation would focus solely on that — discussing women (and their attributes) was what they had most in common. The Portuguese-Brazilian even had the attitude to join another table next to us and insisted on buying drinks for a trio of women who appeared to be Angolan. After the Brazilian-Portuguese persuaded him to return to our table, the Portuguese-Brazilian shouted: “Do they think they’re better than me because they’re black? We’re from the same family, man!” and pointed to his arm, which was somewhat tanned, but clearly the arm of a white, non-black person. This scene caused me great confusion as to the application of ethnic concepts here in Portugal. In any case, after much resistance, the Brazilian-Portuguese persuaded the Portuguese-Brazilian to go for another bar, as he felt that his colleague was going beyond what was acceptable and could cause us problems. Still, we couldn’t leave Montaditos without the Portuguese-Brazilian promising a round of beers to the supposed Angolan women.

 

Finally, at 9 p.m., we made our way to the “University’s bars”, which I called “the outskirts of Nowhere” because of the name of one of the bars on the premises, whose name seemed rather poetic to me. As soon as we approached the bars, the Portuguese-Brazilian suddenly stopped and started shouting: “I can’t go there, cousin. I had a fight with a guy around here, about last week”. I found it curious how, as we got closer to each other, the Portuguese-Brazilian stopped calling us “brother” or “little brother” and we became “cousins”. While I was convincing the  Portuguese-Brazilian that we wouldn’t have any problems, the Brazilian-Portuguese was asking him for respect and appealing to him that, even though he already had four children, he didn’t want his “cousin” to behave like a child.

 

Figure 2. The crowd at the “outskirts of Nowhere”

 

As soon as we sit down at our new table, our Portuguese-Brazilian takes a package out of his pocket and, suddenly, there is a snowy mountain on the surface of his cellphone. The Brazilian-Portuguese is astonished and appeals: “Cousin, you can’t do that sort of thing here. I don’t want any trouble, if you’re going to do that kind of thing, go to the bathroom”, taking the guy’s cellphone and heading towards the bathroom, indicating that he expected the Portuguese-Brazilian to follow him. This wasn’t the case, as the Portuguese-Brazilian remained seated at the table and said to me: “Hey chavalo [lil’ bro], this guy thinks he can boss me around, you know? I do what I want because nobody tells me what to do!”. As he said these words, our Portuguese-Brazilian picked up a new packet, lined up four rows straight on the table and sniffed one of them as if he was a newly-bought vacuum cleaner. I was shocked and wondered where had I ended up in, while the guy at the table next door was also surprised and exclaimed: “Fuck, that’s 120 euros, man!”. This new Portuguese guy, who I’ll call “Spliff” – due to his fondness for smoking weed, suddenly joined our table and asked the Portuguese-Brazilian’s permission to sniff one of the rows, which the Portuguese-Brazilian allowed him to do so without hesitation: “Of course, little brother! It’s all ours here, this is my crew!”.

 

Figure 3. The “crew’s” table

 

The following 30 minutes were some of the most frenetic I’ve ever witnessed. For starters, the new friends Portuguese-Brazilian & Spliff got along very well, as their behavior towards women was very similar, i.e. they looked at them like pieces of meat, salivating, and sometimes even howling. One scene that still hasn’t left my mind is when they watched a girl and said (or shouted) to each other: “Look, she’s going to turn now. Ouch, aaah, aww-ooh… what an ass, ouch, aaah, aww-ooh… look at the crack, ouch, aaah, aww-ooh…” while yelping and howling like dogs. Sometimes, they tried to engage with the women (always immigrants, I should note), invading tables and conversations, offering drinks and inviting them to our table. What could justify such behavior? Was it a relationship of colonial power, gender or both? Or is it linked to a particular social imaginary? Let’s take the case of the “Brazilian woman” in Portugal as an example, whose imaginary “refers to physical aspects (beautiful, bodies, buttocks) and behavioral aspects (sensuality, attractive, uninhibited, unashamed, at ease, openness, easygoing). In some cases, Brazilian women are explicitly identified with sex. The ideas of beauty, sensuality and sexual availability seem to be intertwined in the imaginary of a Brazilian women [looks like]” (Gomes, 2013, pp. 873-874).

 

At a certain point, I go to the bathroom and decide to get myself another pint of beer, while revising a bunch of ethnographic notes. It was at this point that the Portuguese-Brazilian appeared alongside the three Angolans from Montaditos. Our Tuga-Zuca was finally going to pay for the drinks he had promised (and which they were actually charging him for). As he assured them that he would pay for the drinks, he whispered in my ear: “Cousin, pay this one for me so I don’t embarrass myself and I’ll pay for yours later. I’d promised two beers and now I’ve gotta pay three”. Had he forgotten that they were a trio? It’s possible. “This guy is nuts, it’s worse if he stops liking me” – so thought I, deciding to pay then.

 

We went back to the table and the Brazilian-Portuguese tried at all costs to calm the Portuguese-Brazilian down, pleading: “Cousin, sit down and stop chasing women. That’s not how it’s done, where I come from we have a conversation with them, it’s not like you’re doing it. Back in Brazil, you’d get beaten up if you did what you’re doing”. The Portuguese-Brazilian “Cousin” promised to behave, but then he disappeared and the Brazilian-Portuguese asked me to help him and pick him up, with a look of panic on his face while telling me: “This guy is crazy and forgets that we’re immigrants. He’s in his own country, but if anything happens here, we’re the ones who pay for it, you know what I mean? Do you understand or don’t you, my guy?“. This wasn’t the only time he made this appeal by evoking our immigrant status. Zanetti (2024), in his article “Portugal migrante: activismo e resistência…” [Migrant Portugal: activism and resistance…] highlights this “negative” climate towards migrants, which was pointed out not only by his interviewees in the study but also by the 2021 report “Discurso de ódio e imigração em Portugal” [Hate speech and immigration in Portugal], in which according to Zanetti (2024, pp. 10-11), it indicates that:

 

“The negative representation of the ‘Other’ and the positive representation of ‘us’ are used as the basis for hate speech against minorities, including immigrants, which are frequently seen as a burden on the State and a threat to national identity. Additionally, the rise of the populist far-right in Europe, including Portugal, has also been an important factor in spreading hate speech against social and ethnic minorities”

 

We found the Portuguese-Brazilian in the bar next door, during an apology to the bar owner for the previous week’s disturbance. We managed to pull him back to our table, but only for a short time, as he was yelling about going to the “Gypsies neighborhood”. The impression that I had was that it would only be a matter of time before the Portuguese-Brazilian got involved in some trouble.

 

However, in my case, the end of the evening was somewhat anticlimactic, because after getting what would be my last pint of beer, I didn’t find the two of them again and my table had already been reconfigured, leaving only Spliff and three new friends, including two Brazilians and the most Brazilian Argentinian I’ve ever met. I still don’t quite understand the behavior of those bars, whose tables keep changing despite the fact that people don’t know each other. Perhaps this was a special night, because even though I’ve seen this phenomenon happen other times in the same place, there have been very few.

 

After a few weeks, I ran into the Brazilian-Portuguese again, and he updated me on the outcome of the evening. In the end, the Portuguese-Brazilian really did get into trouble, breaking his hand and never appearing on the construction site again. The Brazilian-Portuguese, on the other hand, ended up getting beaten up because some guy thought he was trying to get close to his girlfriend, which led to an argument and then justice with his own hands. I don’t doubt that this may have happened, after all, the Brazilian-Portuguese partially shared the same womanizing behavior as the Portuguese-Brazilian, although not as explicit and imposing. However, it is ironic that it was only the immigrant who faced the consequences of this behavior.

 

Reflecting on that night, I still ask myself: “so this is the first world?”. I’m not saying that scenes like these don’t exist in my homeland, but I’d never witnessed such howling misogyny or such inconsequential attitudes as vacuuming up a snow mountain directly on a bar table. But above all, I had never witnessed a look of panic as genuine as the Brazilian-Portuguese had when he tried to calm his colleague down and reiterated “if anything goes bad, the blame will be placed on us who are immigrants”.

 

Text and images: Lucas Novais (CECS/University of Minho)

Published in January 31, 2025

 

References

Gomes, M. S. (2013). O imaginário social <Mulher Brasileira> em Portugal: uma análise da construção de saberes, das relações de poder e dos modos de subjetivação. Dados, 56(4), 867-900. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0011-52582013000400005

Zanetti, L. A. (2024). Portugal migrante: ativismo e resistência em tempos de ascensão da extrema-direita. Cadernos De Campo (São Paulo – 1991), 33(1), e220715. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-9133.v33i1pe220715