Ser Portuguese by Randy M. Ataide

Dispatch from Loures, Portugal

"Ser Portuguese" ("To Be Portuguese") starts the well worn but wonderful volume I picked up today for 2 Euros at the market at the top of old Lisbon, crowded with Portuguese from many nations, tourists from Germany, Italy, France and even the United States, on a sun splashed August day in the ancient city. The author Jose Mattoso starts his text with "Para descobrir a natureza das coisas nao ha como tentar saber como elas foram outrora." ("To understand the nature of things there is nothing like trying to find out how they used to be.") Is it possible for people from other 'younger' cultures and nations to have some sense of "how things used to be?"

This is now my tenth trip to Portugal, all taken within the past seven years. Indeed, last year I was here a total of three times, including one stretch of six weeks where not only did I host some MBA students and colleagues, but my wife and I were able to rent an apartment in a local community and begin to sense and feel and experience the normal rhythm of things in a small town. It was equal parts exhilirating, frightening and transformational.

In California I am accustomed to the things of life that I have come to know in nearly 55 years of life--the language, the patterns, the customs, the slang and even the idiosyncrasies. With time, I come to accept and practice them--they are my reality. But do I have a sense of "how things used to be?"

Well, if I visit the mansions of the industrialists who forged the modern state, I see a glimpse of life from a hundred years ago. Perhaps I may visit one of the Spanish missions, which form such a prominent part of California history, and they may take me back two hundred years or so. But the traces of the ancient people, the native Americans, are long gone, save a model village at Yosemite or some pictures in a museum. And who preceded even these natives? We are not sure.The old things are lost to us, and my sense of time and ultimately life inevitably looks ahead and rarely back. I am pushed, whether I am aware of it or not, always forward, ahead, to something I have not yet attained.

It is not this way in Portugal. As I sit here in an apartment in Loures, some fifteen miles north of Lisbon, I look across a small valley and can see the whitewashed walls and tower of a small parish church. Last fall, near dusk on our final night in Portugal, we jumped in the car on a whim, to drive to the church we saw every night from our window. We did this for no other reason than to see what was there. Down the road carved in the side of a hill, we passed a few cafes, industrial sites and villages, and wound our way through the town towards the landmark.

So what did we find at the small church in Frielas, Portugal that fall evening? We arrived as the sun set over the great Atlantic, and there sat but one more small church in another small town, neat and clean and with an old cemetary next door. Surely, it was at least two hundred years old--perhaps even three or four hundred years or more. We were not certain.

But here in Frielas, just a few miles off of the highway, next to the small church sat an archeological dig that from all appearances had long ago stopped work, sat the ruins of a Roman villa, five to ten feet underground, surrounded by a small fence. We stood in the gathering darkness and looked down at the work of men and women from 2,000 years ago, the marble columns, the mosaic floors, the rooms and antechambers where people gathered, ate, lived, fought, loved and died contemporaneously with the time of Jesus. It was mysterious and magical and something so unlike my own life in California that few words could really explain how I felt at that moment.There was but a small sign in English and Portuguese providing some information of what lay at our feet. (Photo credit to Paulo Juntas)

I thought of the movie 'Gladiator' from some ten years ago, and the capacity of modern magicians behind computers to create amazing graphics of coliseums and roads and battles of long ago. But here it actually was before me, the real and authentic thing, with little fanfare and no ceremony, nothing more than the crickets and birds and occasional passer by to take it in.

Nine months later, I am struck that in Frielas that fall evening, and at the market today, or as we drove past the Tagus River, and even at the local restaurant where we enjoyed chicken and potatoes for lunch, that at these times I am pointed to "the way things used to be." And it is something that is simply impossible for us who count the centuries of our history on but a few fingers to grasp until we come face to face with it in ancient culture.

So I encourage each of you, and in particular the North American reader, to pursue the wisdom of something or someone or somewhere that is much older than we are. It is there that we can not only discover the old ways but perhaps even a clearer understanding of the new ways.