Hello cocky

We drove from the north to the south of Portugal last week, occasionally swerving around a renegade galo de barcelos which had escaped from its legend and was lolling about on the road.

As I pecked at crumbs of bolo rei, my stick legs tanning in the rays of a beating sun and strong Atlantic winds reaching through the window of the car to feather my hair, I began to understand the landscape of Portugal. However, when it comes to the terrain of the Portuguese language, I remain little more than a trained bird reciting the phrases Havi has handed me and mimicking the words of the people I encounter, an obrigada here, a bom dia there.

I've finally got to the point where i'm not struggling as much with the French language and the events of my days in France are no longer completely overcast with mystery. [One incident which epitomises these past days of mystery springs to mind. I was with French and some of his neatly-tucked cronies on a weekender in Brussels. Somehow knowledge of the existence of most European singers had managed to escape my life up until that point and from the words I picked out of the flying french conversations around me it seemed we were all shaking off last night's sleep and getting dressed to go to an afternoon performance by this Belgian guy called Jacques Brel. I was looking forward to a lazy afternoon being serenaded by a weeping guitar and so I nearly wept myself when we arrived at the venue and I discovered with my eyes rather than my ears that Jacques Brel was long dead. In fact we were going to an exhibition of his work where I would be forced to interact with cardboard cut outs and background tapes. Obviously a seance to summon him from the dead would have been better than that.]

In Portugal, particularly in the part of the voyage we spent in the north with Havi's family, i'd once again flown into a situation where i was flapping about, trying to fly in the current of conversation. Words and everyday activities were little mysteries.

Havi's aunts and uncles and family friends who have lived all their lives in Portugal don't speak any French (or English) and so at those dinners where the table was extended to cater for the extended family, I found my words flopping around in the air like flying fish and falling heavily to the ground.

After an initial, confusingly warm welcome from two old aunts, complete with kisses all over my arms and heading rapidly towards my legs (H later explained that i'd been mistaken for Cousin Natalie - who i was disappointed to learn also has a cumbersome nose), my conversation was reduced to a tiny ball of nods and smiles and I had a constant elbow banging against H: what did they say? why are they all laughing?

Of course H's parents speak French, but his mother speaks with such a heavy Portuguese accent, particularly when she is on her home turf, that I often think she is speaking to me in Portuguese when she is speaking in French. Some of the time, unperturbed by my blank face, she is actually speaking Portuguese, caught up in the beauty of her own language she wants all language barriers to tumble and everyone to share its sugary tones with her.

H's father speaks a timid French, so timid that often this French is not addressed to me at all, but to H: [in French] "Make sure elle has enough vegetables because I've noticed elle doesn't eat meat. Make sure elle eats some goat's cheese. Do you think elle needs a jacket?" I forgot that my name is Pinochiette and I started thinking of myself as Elle. Je m'appelle Elle.

When H's father does actually address me directly it's usually not even in French at all, but rather through the medium of plastic spiders and I'm expected to scream in response. I'm pleased to say I did let rip some fairly boisterous screams at least the first and second time he put one of these spiders on my plate (as the saying goes: first time is funny, second time is silly, third time is a spanking).

I guess the thing that struck me the most about once again being out of my depth in terms of language is that suddenly French became my language. In this world encircled by pine trees in the north of Portugal where English had been forgotten or never invented, I was suddenly grateful for conversations that were in French. When we came across French travellers I felt an affinity with their language, this language which bumps against me in Paris and gives me no end of bruises. It amuses me to think that a language which I botch - where I sometimes call a she a he, or say "they is" and where often I call a spade, a hammer - could feel like home. But it did, briefly.