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“Show me your tongue,” a boy once asked of her. Gabriella complied, stuck out her tongue, the kid observed it well and squinted doubtfully. "Your tongue looks exactly like mine... Why do you speak differently?". Conversations in Portuguese and Italian become easier with sharing. The sharing of knowledge, the sharing of time, of intimate space, of another’s pain... Gabriella shares everything with the children that the legal courts entrust to her. No matter which language is chosen, she has no way to escape the dialogue. Neither does she want to. 

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Gabriella Cortinovis

Born in Rome, Italy

70 years old

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Obedience and commitment. These were the vows of Gabriella Cortinovis when, as a young woman, she became a nun in the service of the Passionist Sisters of Saint Paulo da Cruz, a congregation of Italian origin founded in 1815. Outgoing and energetic, she was about 40 years old when her superiors assigned her to help the Spanish sisters who opened a mission in Santa Maria da Feira and that was how she moved to Portugal, where those first Passionist nuns started by creating a day center for the elderly and then specialized in welcoming minors taken from their families by judicial order.

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After a three-day train ride, the Italian woman with gray-blue eyes found herself in an urban area then surrounded only by bushes, but discovered herself among people that she still describes today as “warm, welcoming, friendly”. In the list of similarities to her homeland, the “mentality and openness” of the Portuguese stood out immediately; as for the differences, what contrasted most with the “more restrictive and familiar” customs of her homeland was mainly “the habit of people having meetings and activities throughout the night”.

 

Gabriella then focused on learning the language, a task that, as she recognizes, was facilitated by the Latin roots common to both Italian and Portuguese, even if, for years, she still hesitated whenever someone asked her to do things in the “quarto” – which in Italian only means “fourth”, but in Portuguese means both “fourth” and “bedroom”. “Go to the 'quarto'? Why do you want me to go to the fourth floor? There’s no fourth floor in the building!”.

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Scheduling tasks was another problem: "Vamos amanhã/Let's go tomorrow" seemed absurd to her outside of meals, because "magná" – which sounds equal to ‘manhã’ – is Roman dialect meaning "to eat". The trees also betrayed her, as in Portuguese they are female, as opposed to what happens in Italy. And then there was still that curse-word which starts with the letter M that “appeared in every Portuguese sentence” (as would be the case with the S word in English), which she considered so much more monotonous and repetitive than the grand insulting lexicon of the Italians.

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The differences were few and interrupted the natural flow of conversations, that’s true, but, still, it was the predominance of similarities that has allowed Gabriella to continue to speak mostly in Italian for 30 years and see that everyone (almost) fully understands her. The adults find her accent funny and become even more solicitous, especially when she is wearing the habit. One among them even asked her to marry him without raising objections to the linguistic obstacles, so captivated he was by her clear and warm eyes, and by her discreet beauty, of rare features in these landscapes. The only ones who still squint at her sentences, made of wide-open vowels and unknown Italian words, are the children, who let their jaws drop and get mesmerized by those unknown terms. “Show me your tongue,” a boy once asked her. Gabriella complied, stuck out her tongue, the kid observed it well and squinted doubtfully. "Your tongue looks exactly like mine... Why do you speak differently?". That one time it was the nun who gave the boy a geography lesson, but most often it is she who has learned from the children's books, as she helps them with school homework. This is one of the reasons, in fact, why the Passionist Sister identifies the Italian “condividere” as the word that best portrays her life in Santa Maria da Feira: “The reality is that we spend most of our time at home, in hospitals and in courts, which are places we visit more often. We have to share the time, share the space, share the pain... Everything here is shared”.

 

Her clock is governed by the lives of the children who are in the center’s custody, whether for just a few months or for long years. There is not much room for personal pleasures like the trip that delighted Gabriella with the Azores islands. "Portugal is a very beautiful country," she says. "In the North I already know a lot, but I’d still like to see Sintra, Évora and I know I won't be able to, because I don't have the time for it". The blame rests on this “condivisione”, but there are no regrets. In the Italian nun's speech another common word is “adesso” and that exact “now” demonstrates her conviction that the past should not hold us back and the future is not guaranteed: “We only have today. What we do adesso is what matters”. ■

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