Portuguese Letters

There is an ocean of silence between us… and I am drowning in it.

Ranata Suzuki

The Letters of a Portuguese Nun was part of the assigned reading while we were in Portugal. You have to have some familiarity with this work, to understand The New Portuguese Letters by The Three Marias. And you really should understand that work to grasp Portuguese feminist literature at all. Our class felt very much like a two month long incident of, “I told you that story, so I can tell you this story.”

The original letters were purportedly written by a 17th-century Portuguese nun to a French noble who had seduced and abandoned her. It’s been argued that no woman could/would say those things and these must be the fiction of a talented male writer. The Cranky Korean was solidly in the “these must have been written by a man,” camp. Most, quite possibly all, of the women in class believed that these letters had to be written by a woman. 

I think both sides of this debate found it hard to believe that the other gender feels love and/or lust so deeply, or expresses it so frankly. My own emotions are so overwhelming most of the time, I find it hard to believe that the world could carry on if everyone felt like this. How many times have I been ready to quit the day before its begun, worn out by simply reading the morning headlines?

There is so much suffering in the world, how could we all just carry on with our business if everyone’s heart was breaking like this? And yet, most of us are bearing unspoken burdens and going about our business as if we aren’t. I’m over here having an existential crisis, but I’m going to make a grocery list about it? Being a productive member of society is such a trip when you really look under the surface. 

I don’t like to inflict my big feelings on captive audiences, preferring to keep it pretty chill in person, but I hold very little back when I write. I totally would have written The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, had I been in Mariana Alcoforado’s position. Which, other than the 17th century and convent, parts so many modern women have. She was wooed. She fell in love. Things got hot and heavy. Then without explanation she was brutally ghosted. The timeless relatability of this tale made me so grateful I was already booed up. I never want to deal with dating again.

This nun was not in the convent because she had felt personally called to religious service. She was basically imprisoned there from the time she was twelve. It was a thing, back in the day, for reputable families to warehouse spare daughters in convents rather than let them become old maids, or marry beneath their station. The families, in turn, made financial contributions to the order. In some cases these arrangements allowed for their daughters to keep private chambers and some servants and still be a financial boon to the convent. 

All parties involved knew it wasn’t about religious devotion so much as appearances, and if the family was wealthy enough these young women could get away with quite a bit, discreetly of course. The relationships between families and convents was mutually beneficial, and both sides were willing to compromise a little here or there to keep a good thing going. And so it was that sometimes these healthy young women who had never wanted to live a life of solitude had torrid love affairs. I don’t blame them one bit.

The eponymous Portuguese nun wrote ridiculously earnest letters to this selfish boy who showed up looking like a man, wherein she pleaded, guilted, forgave, and basically ran herself in circles, wanting him to come back, and not wanting to sound like she’s cross with him, but wanting to understand how he could leave her and being angry because she could imagine, but not wanting to be angry because she wanted him back and trying to somehow sound chill in the midst of her frantic desperation. So yeah, it turns out that being ghosted really is a tale as old as time.

I’ve told the work bestie so many times that his silences all sound the same. I cannot tell the difference between busy-with-work silence and dead-in-a-ditch silence. The Work Bestie tends to avoid people rather than tell them things he’s decided they wouldn’t like to hear. He also tends to isolate himself when he’s hurting. He started getting hit with crises almost immediately after we started fooling around. We didn’t get much of a honeymoon period, and just as his crises settled, I fell into a few of my own. 

Isn’t this what love is, though? I spent hours on the phone calling social workers and homeless shelters to help him help his ex, and if you know me, you know that I would rather donate one of my organs than make phone calls. Real love isn’t about late-night games of no-you-hang-up. It’s about rolling up your sleeves and taking care of business with, and for, each other. Maybe we fit together so well not despite, but because, things got real so early on. 

Summers seem to be the worst for us. It’s the busiest time of the year for the Work Bestie’s day job. Long-distance relationships are hard. We’ve had to go for long periods of time without seeing each other. Sometimes that distance feels like space on the map that you could draw a line across and show how we’re still connected. Sometimes, it feels like he’s a memory or maybe just a dream I had, like I can’t feel any connection at all. It scares me.

So when his silences grew starker during my summer abroad, I reminded myself that we’d been through this before. We’d start over again in the fall, as we had so many times before. It’s not all bad, the ebb and the flow of things. It feels like we’ve been together for the first time so many times, butterflies and all. The time had come to stop starting over, though. I realized with increasing clarity that this was the last summer I was willing to spend missing him. 

I said, honey, I don’t feel so good, don’t feel justified
Come on, put a little love here in my void
He said it’s all in your head
And I said so’s everything, but he didn’t get it
I thought he was a man, but he was just a little boy

Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh, it kills ’cause
I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up
I got to fold ’cause these hands are too shaky to hold
Hunger hurts, but starving works when it costs

too much to love

Fiona Apple
Paper Bag