"Sobre O Tempo"

I don't speak Portuguese.

In the past I used to correspond with several Brazilian colleagues, preferably in English (I avoided Portuguese). So, even though our mother languages were (are) closer, I preferred this intermediation of English.

Several communication problems appeared. First, as much as they tried, my interlocutors weren't very fluent in English. Second, a heavy accent persisted thus rendering some words, or phrases, unintelligible.

The real problem, however, was my insistence that people communicated in English. I wasn't very flexible. I remember opening an interview with the following:

"Please, no Portuguese, I don't speak Portuguese".

This, of course, wasn't very polite. Imagine a Frenchman coming to your office for a journal interview, the first thing he asks not to speak any English during half an hour, but rather Spanish -or German.

There is a whole field of management studies that deals with cultural differences (a certain Hofstede comes to mind). There's something Byzantine about these rules: whether you should do (or say) this or that (or you shouln't) whether there is a certain personal distance to respect, whether non-verbal language counts more than spoken language...

Seen in retrospect my contempt for Portuguese was insensitive, arrogant. Portuguese is the second language of Latin America. I never realised, until I visited Rio de Janeiro for a technology conference in the mid-ninetees, that there could be this other universe of music, television, literature, cinema, culture in a different language.

In my mind there are images of Brazil that have stood the test of time. I remember a very rapid, elevated highway in Rio. The whole delegation would criss-cross the city unperturbed by the traffic below. There was also a drive Between São Paulo and Campos do Jordão. While our air-conditioned van moved at fast speed, on both sides of the road factories kept appearing and reappering. At the time, the Rio highway seemed to me a more 'European' solution to traffic (as opposed to a 'North American' approach). On the other hand, the industrial corridor in São Paulo reminded me more of Asia's economic might than of Latin America's industrial stagnation of the eighties.