Luís entrusted his life to Portugal out of love for his wife and the country has reciprocated his preference by giving him a front row seat in successive manifestations of identical feeling. Each pregnancy that the doctor attends in his health center is a different “embarazo”, from which he derives something special: he already followed the clinical history of those women before they became mothers and, after they deliver, he also commits to the new human being they entrust to him, so tiny and fragile. Geography has been irrelevant. Whichever the country, the Portuguese idiomatic expression always applies: love with love is paid.

 

 

José Luís de la Fuente

Born in León, Spain

64 years old

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Times change, desires change and (some) proverbs should also adapt. If during medieval monarchies “neither good wind nor good marriage came from Spain”, in more recent years what comes to Portugal from its neighbor country are mainly doctors and nurses, and not just to earn a living. José came to Portugal out of love. Born in León, he moved to Santiago de Compostela as a young man to study Medicine and there he met Olga, a Portuguese woman who graduated in Galicia in the same scientific domain. For a few years, he divided his time between Spain and Portugal, exercising there and attending a second Dentistry Degree here, but at some point he moved to Lusitanian soil and started a family. After a wedding at the castle known as Paço dos Duques de Bragança, which was mandatory since the bride was from Guimarães, the two health professionals took up residence in Porto, for Olga to work in Gaia and José in Oliveira de Azeméis. In 1997, they then chose to live in Santa Maria da Feira, a peaceful town halfway between one’s job and the other’s, and also particularly suited for schooling the couple's two daughters, who were still quite young.

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By that time, José was already signing his name as Luís. “Since it is very difficult for the Portuguese to pronounce the Spanish letter J”, which is vocalized with a sound emitted in the throat, more like an RRR, the doctor opted for the easier noun. “It was the same with my daughters' names. They were about to be called Joana and Rita, but as it would be very difficult for me to pronounce J and R in correct Portuguese, they ended up with the names Inês and Marta”.

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Some 30 years after his arrival in Portugal, Luís feels Portuguese and thinks in Portuguese, but he is still surprised by how often he is mistaken for a foreign tourist. That’s because of his Castilian accent, which doesn’t abandon him: “I say everything in Portuguese, with the Portuguese construction and words, and people answer me in Portunhol. That is why, when someone mistakes me for a Brazilian, I am even happy”.

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The conversation that results from this mixture of languages ​​and pronunciations, whether in a restaurant or elsewhere where Luís isn’t yet well known, always reflects a pleasant constant: it demonstrates that the Portuguese people are hospitable, try to be useful and do anything to help, even if that means speaking a language that they clearly do not know. “They are a very welcoming, friendly and humble people”, insists the doctor. Humility can be seen in a more formal behavior towards doctors than would happen in Spain: “People always say 'senhor doutor this', 'senhor doutor that'… They are very respectful and this, in part, has to do with their literacy”. Affection and familiarity, on the other hand, are shown in the amount of kisses and handshaking distributed here every day (at least before the covid pandemic). “In Spain, we only greet one person by hand after one year of contact. Here, everyday I greet everyone when they get to work”, explains Luís.

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It was at his job, in fact, that the doctor from Léon discovered one of the realities for which he believes Portugal should be particularly proud. When he arrived here in 1988, “the country was far behind Spain. The ladies walked in the street in aprons, went to the café in slippers and that just didn't shock me because everyone was really friendly and welcoming”. By then, Spain had already more resources in the area of ​​health, whether at the level of professional staff or technical equipment, and differentiated itself by “a totally free public service”. But it is also a fact that, today, the primary health care units in Spain still do not offer maternal and child health consultations, and this is the domain in which Luís found himself most accomplished in Portugal. “I really enjoy exercising in this area, it is a richer and more rewarding job”, he defends. “In Spain, the health of child and mother isn’t treated in the health center, which means losing the advantage of following both the patient and his family from birth to death. Here, in Portugal, we get to know the whole family, we evaluate the health of each user in his family environment, we provide a more comprehensive and complete service, we bring together all the care they need in a single place”. That’s why, in this ongoing relationship with the same doctor, there is little room for embarrassment – “embaraço” in Portuguese – and joy occurs at every “embarazo” – which is the Spanish word for “pregnancy”, reflecting one of the dissimilarities that Luís finds interesting when comparing the two languages.

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Obviously, there are other differences between such close cultures, some better than others. “In Portugal you live less on the street, you go more often to the café, you are always with people around” and that is positive. Less so is "living 500 or 1,000 meters from the city center and having to walk on the road lane because there are no sidewalks". There’s also an entire treaty on gastronomy: “I miss Spanish food, which is made more of fried food and sausages, but I got used to Portuguese cooking and, above all, to the amount of meals we are served here every day. In Spain we eat much less; we prepare something and that’s it. In Portugal, there’s always a complete meal, with everything set on the table, and it took me some time to get used to it”. But what Luís remembers most is an embarrassment – a real Portuguese "embaraço" – motivated by quantity surprises and chromatic differences. “I’ll never forget in my life the day when I arrived at my in-laws' house and they served me shredded cod with chickpea. The quantity was such that, at my parents' house, it would last us a week, while here it didn't completely vanish in that meal but it was close enough... The first time I had a fried egg there, when looking at it, I also whispered to my wife: 'Do you see this color? It must be spoiled’. She replied that it wasn’t: ‘The eggs here really are this yellow'”. Luís didn’t know it could happen. “I was almost 40 and I had never seen a homegrown egg before”. ■

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