Talk Talk Talk

Like the ancients, Brazilians embrace the oral tradition. Conversations are their eyes on the world.

I was staying in a hotel in Fortaleza, a large costal city in the northeast of Brazil. The equator runs right through the northern part of Brazil, providing all-year-round, bathtub-temperature, ocean fun. There is precisely twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness at the equator, a mundane and irrelevant fact I kept repeating to my wife as if to convince her that my ignorance was somehow germane to our beach vacation.

When my wife and I entered the hotel elevator, Good Mornings were exchanged with other guests, people we didn’t know or even recognize. Similarly, it’s customary to greet strangers when entering a waiting room in a doctor’s office or on line at the supermarket. Only the most ardent recluse could be alone in Brazil. You could pretend to be a deaf mute, but even sunglasses faking blindness would elicit strangers taking your arm to guide you.

In a judicial decision affecting presidential politics, I watched the decision of the 3-judge panel of the Appeals Court on TV. Each judge had air time to express his opinion and reasons for his decision. The first judge began, “I won't have time read my entire decision because it's over 400 pages.” He then proceeded to speak without notes for two hours. With the other two judges also speaking, the broadcast was five hours long. One of the lawyers for the defendant, a former president of Brazil, drifted off to sleep during the proceedings. These televised legal monologues are the norm.

Somebody has probably written a dissertation on the relationship between great orators and political leaders. Before the invention of TV, radio and whistle stop tours required eloquence from politicians, and before radio and newspapers, the only communication was the spoken word. The man with the greatest articulation and loudest voice could lead a crowd, a village, and a nation.

If you're determined to commit a cardinal sin in Brazil, tell someone, “I'm sorry I don't have time to talk to you.” There's a good chance she'll never speak to you again. My wife, who is Brazilian, talks to her sister on the phone every day, sometimes for hours, and she lives a few blocks away from us. For Latin Americans, talking is an ongoing verbal ticker-tape like reality TV with color commentators, “Okay, now she’s tying her shoes.”

Thoughts are silent speech, and talking is amplified thoughts like someone inserting a microphone inside your head. Since we never stop thinking, there’s no cause to stop talking. Latin Americans talk so much more than I do it seems their mouths never close. Even when they're gargling with mouthwash, it sounds like a conversation – there's intonation and changes in pitch. To better understand an important text like a medicine label or food recipe, they'll read it aloud to themselves.

I am star-struck by the garrulousness. People who speak a lot display fabulous verbal dexterity. As words are external thoughts, I imagined all Brazilians were intellectuals and avid readers. However, Brazilians are not big readers. They are more like social critic Eric Weiner described the people of Thailand:

They are deeply suspicious of thinking. For them, thinking is like running. Just because your legs are moving doesn't mean you're getting anywhere. You might be running on a treadmill. Thais don't buy self-help books or go to therapists or talk endlessly about their problems. They do not watch Woody Allen movies. They are too busy being happy to think about happiness.

People address each other by name in conversation. “Michael, I’m taking off my shoes,” my wife will say. In a five-minute conversation, she'll say my name three or four times, and that's when she's not mad at me. It's the same when she's talking on the phone. From my experience, a verbal exposition that begins with the wife stating her husband's name is a sure sign of trouble. Why is she telling me she’s taking off her shoes? I know – she’s saying we won't be going out tonight because she's pissed off at me. She’s verbally acknowledging her shoes are coming off so I know they are being replaced by slippers. In fact, if my wife says, “Michael, I’m taking off my shoes” it means absolutely nothing. It’s the oral tradition at its most glorious, an account of verisimilitude sans analysis or ulterior motive. It's a running commentary on the world.

In an oral culture, using another person’s name while speaking directly to them is merely a signal of a message’s importance. It's meant to discourage interruptions, which are common and not considered impolite. No one notices when they're interrupting or being interrupted.

On the plus side, you never have to worry about awkward silences on a first date or a second or a third. Brazilians talk to themselves, their computers, and to their TVs, expressing disgust at a news story or a character's lovely wedding dress in a soap opera. When the news anchor ends the network evening broadcast and says Good night, my wife returns the farewell.

A Sunday family lunch lasts for hours. People are talking nonstop and interrupting each other with discussion threads lost in the discord as a result of overlapping dialogue. They speak with astonishing volume, gesticulation, and speed as if they cannot withhold one word, like their thoughts have an expiration date. Every meal is a forum for discussion, which is why the work day is nine hours, so people have a full hour for lunch. It doesn't take an hour to eat lunch especially at a buffet, the most common lunchtime restaurant, unless you spend that time gabbing. Colleagues tell each other stories they've told numerous times, but it's better than eating in silence.

My wife and I made dinner plans with a Brazilian couple. After we were seated, we discovered our friend wouldn't eat because of a toothache. Nevertheless, she didn't think of canceling the dinner plans as she was still able to talk.

There's a distinct similarity between Catholic Italian family meals and Brazilian ones. Roger Cohen on a recent visit to Italy described it this way:

Conversations veer here and there in the elasticity of Italian time, loosened from the constraints of time as a metric of productivity.

Additionally, body movements accompany conversation. As speech isn’t sufficient to convey everything the brain can conjure, oral cultures like the Spanish and Italian speak with their whole bodies. A personal universe is exposed in a conversation like visible thought bubbles.

No story, paragraph, or sentence ends on time. It's a lazy meander down the stream of parenthetical glory, twisting and turning, and often ending with no point whatsoever. Unfortunately, unlike the writers of 19th century English, the end of the stream in Portuguese rarely circles back to the beginning. Oftentimes, the parenthesis is so elaborate no one can remember the beginning, including the speaker. It takes forever for two friends to say goodbye even if they've already arranged to meet again tomorrow. Saying goodbye seems painful as if the separation marks the end of an era. They are so engaged in the present moment the future is nonexistent.

Brazilians talk so much they talk while eating. They don't cover their mouths when they cough or yawn or sneeze. (The verb for sneeze is espirrar, which can also mean to splatter, like the spray from a squeeze bottle.) They talk with their whole bodies to express, “I'm taking off my shoes.” They are so exceptional at conversation that I've heard tales of Brazilian men negotiating with car jackers. “Take the car, just leave me my wallet.” “Take the car and my wallet, but leave me the keys to my house.” The negotiations can continue for five or ten minutes, with the gun-toting thieves patiently engaged. “Take my car, wallet, and house keys, but I'm not getting in the car with you and going to an ATM.” Are Brazilian men fearless, or is it an imperative of the oral tradition to converse with everyone including armed hoodlums? Is it impolite to nod in agreement with car jackers?

Don't expect to watch the news by swallowing a few sound bites on the latest political scandal. Sound bites don't exist because everyone, including the newscasters, speaks longer and more eloquently than the last guest. A simple question, “What's the situation with the landslide in Rio?” will elicit a 5-minute answer – it's not a sound bite, it's a sound meal. Without a doubt the easiest job in the world is a TV talk show host in Brazil. “How's everything” from the host is followed by a 30-minute answer from the celebrity – show's over.

Every restaurant, hair salon, and waiting room has a TV on. Nothing is more important than conversation. Walk by the key-making shop, big enough for two customers to stand, and there are two guys chatting with the owner about the soccer game on TV over their heads, this despite the fact that the shop may be the only establishment in the city that doesn't offer free shots of coffee.

The chatter is as nonstop as the singing of the birds at dawn, and the rumors and gossip proliferate. It's central to everyday news, in fact there's no difference between rumor and the news because they both involve people talking. Brazilians receive the information of their lives verbally and are more likely to believe what a neighbor tells them than what they hear on TV. Who knows if the journalist is reliable, whereas we know our neighbors.

Not surprisingly, social media loves Brazil. Why talk to one friend when you can talk to them all at the same time. Could there be a better invention for spreading rumors? I think not. Mr. Zuckerberg loves Brazil. The interweaving of rumor and news creates a dense stew of ambiguity. The murky mixture is migraine material. It's hard enough trying to understand another culture in a foreign language, but cultures where the oral tradition flourishes not only tolerate ambiguity, but it's welcomed as natural. People are flawed and multifaceted, inconclusive and enigmatic by definition. A news story works on the opposite premise, with the facts in black and white.

Brazil encourages ambiguity. For every news event, one segment of the story is the opinions of people on the street. TV journalists will interview anyone willing to go on camera. Everyone's opinion counts equally, and the interviewees' opinions last longer than the actual story. A stroll through a popular shopping area on any given day will reveal a TV news crew soliciting opinions for that evening's broadcast. It's a democratic system of reporting events, and it keeps the information stew dark and impenetrable.

One TV news show has as its slogan: “Never wrong for long.” Even CNN has been known to get a story wrong, but in Brazil when that happens no one is surprised, and an apology or retraction isn't necessary. Not surprisingly, journalists receive even less respect in Brazil than in the US. No one accepts a news story as factual. Instead, they repeat it as something heard on TV.

Ambiguity flourishes everywhere in Latin America from the news to tourist attractions. In Quito, Ecuador, there is a monument to the equator with a sphere statue and a yellow line on the ground marking the exact center of the planet – zero degrees latitude. Tourists take selfies with one foot on either side of the line, standing in the northern and southern hemispheres. However, with the advent of GPS tracking, it's clear the line is about 260 meters south of the true equator.

The stew of fact and fiction is evident in the popularity of soap operas in Latin America. Women in particular are religious about watching the soaps, several each day, six days a week. Soaps initiate fashion trends and influence social debate.

Verbosity pervades the advertising business as well. Stores place large speakers in their doorways to blast music for no reason, or to celebrate a store's anniversary by offering free shots of vodka offered by a vodka model, who of course will pose for a selfie with you. Sponsors who can't afford to advertise upcoming events rely on word of mouth. If that fails, they hire cars to drive around the city with loudspeakers on their roofs. These cars are considered a public service whether they're used to advertise products or demand the impeachment of the president. In the name of freedom of speech, you don't need a permit from City Hall to broadcast. There's a family in the city where I live that bakes a small cake called sonho (dream) that resembles a donut. They've been driving through my neighborhood for at least two decades, selling from their roof speaker “Sonhos!”

While it's easy to be condescending about the blurring of fact and fiction, the reality is Latinos may be ahead of the curve. We could be witnessing the final days of facts. An aide to Donald Trump stated after his election: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts” (or grammar, apparently). In a press conference held by Trump's first press secretary, Sean Spicer, he made it clear to the international media that he and his team “reserve the right to disagree with the facts.” Or as Trump's spokesman, Rudy Giuliani said: “Truth isn't truth.”

For us expats adjusting to life in an oral culture, it feels like we've been dropped on our heads, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. It doesn't help that the talking never stops. In a social setting, half a dozen people sitting around a table, the conversation continues for hours. The discussion is like a ricocheting pinball machine: A man describing his aunt being kidnapped in her car and taken to an ATM will spark a new story, interrupting the ATM story, about another aunt. The second aunt has nothing to do with the first one, but it's an aunt story. The tangential connections are as thin as thoughts. For those of us who listen carefully and expect logical threads, it's conversational vertigo.

Robert’s Rules of Order say it’s impolite to interrupt someone. But if you don’t interrupt, it will take a week to utter one sentence. A conversation features multiple interruptions and more than one person talking at a time. It’s not hard to imagine what happens when five women have lunch together, which is common among office workers at noontime. Asking a Brazilian to focus on one topic in a conversation is like asking a teenager to focus on geometry.

With the plethora of conversation, there's competition. The innate ability Brazilians have to navigate the waters of competing chatter is just this side of remarkable. Every doctor’s office, nail salon, and ice cream parlor adds to the hubbub. There are TVs in elevators and coffee shops and sidewalk vendors' booths. Cacophony isn't a distraction. Despite the myriad of cafés and bakeries serving up freshly baked bread, you won't see anyone reading a book or newspaper or writing a blog. Can you imagine if Starbucks decided to install TVs?

I find public TVs annoying or at the very least distracting, but Brazilians aren’t in the least perturbed. It doesn’t conflict with their conversations, as if not listening is second nature. They are so good at tuning out the noise they can count their sets of crunches at the gym while the personal trainer is talking to them. On one occasion, neighbors in my apartment building were contracting deafening renovations, knocking down walls, etc. A visitor to my apartment sat down for a chat and didn't mention the clamor.

Cacophony doesn’t conflict with concentration. Not listening is second nature. At the beach, the young men park their cars and open the trunk to blast music from massive speakers. Later another blasting car will park alongside and project different tunes, and no one seems to mind. The level of enjoyment seems to increase with the level of cacophony. Oral culture affords people an aural skill that processes overload and filters through dense interference, like whale clicks traveling hundreds of miles through the deepest waters.

My wife is a genius at the tuning-out technique, which isn't fun when it's just the two of us. While she’s watching TV, she won’t hear me ask a question. Once, after repeating my question three times, I suggested she might have a hearing problem. She replied, “I hear okay, but if you want me to listen, you need to say my name. Then I know it’s important.”

As an avid diarist, I've always been under the impression that words were for communication. I thought talking was a manifestation of the written word. However, when five people are talking simultaneously while eating, communication is deliciously limited. Unlike me, no one cares if others are listening because if the information is important, it can be repeated and often is. Or you can lock eyes and address someone directly using her name and touching his arm. Listening takes a back seat. Conveniently, in Brazil's laissez-faire lifestyle, no one gets offended if others aren’t listening. While there may be less communication going on, there’s a mountain of verbal energy. What sounds to me like noise is fun. The greater the commotion, the higher number of decibels, the more everyone is enjoying themselves.

Before I studied Portuguese, I often heard the word escute to start a conversation. Based on its sound, I thought it meant excuse me because people were interrupting each other. I later learned escute is the imperative form of the verb, listen. Everyone was saying, Listen to me.

My local barber shop provides a free beer with each haircut because nobody needs a reason to drink. When I asked them what they were celebrating, I was told, “We're celebrating life.”

When audience members for a liveTV show are given a microphone, they speak with astounding calm and eloquence to millions. I witnessed an 8-year-old boy give a three-minute impromptu speech at a birthday party for his 5-year-old brother. In the US we would call them storytellers; in Europe they're raconteurs; in Brazil, they're everybody.

Brazilians are masterful and dynamic speakers. From the Latin American Herald Tribune: “The Brazilian diplomatic corps is one of the world’s most highly regarded.”

With their natural joy for expression, it's a logical to assume Brazilians would be master communicators, but you would be wrong. They often misunderstand each other for various reasons, like overlapping chatter. The diversity of accents and slang throughout the large country doesn't help. Also, Portuguese can be deceptively vague, with one word having conflicting meanings. Explorar, for example, can be to explore or to exploit. Not to worry, people readily admit they don't understand what's being said, and no one is offended – it's further invitation for more repartee.

I'm still trying to understand why people who are seemingly in love with words place such little importance on communication They interrupt themselves, circle back, stop a sentence midway and start another like Roger Cohen's Italians. Their words are rhetorical feelings and so predictably lack organization. Because it's a talkfest, it can have an air of superfluousness. Brazilians never use one word when two will suffice, including hello and goodbye. With the cacophony and interruptions, exchange doesn't always bring results. It's as if an athlete training for the Olympics were to say, “Winning isn't everything; it's just a sport.”

On the last night of our beach trip in Fortaleza, my wife and I were having an early dinner in the hotel restaurant because we needed to get up at 5 am to catch a flight back. When we entered the restaurant at 6 pm, it was empty. However, there were two TVs on, situated over the bar. Both flat screens were alongside each other, their edges touching, but they were on different channels. Is it possible to watch two TVs at the same time, or to ignore them both and have pleasant dinner conversation? For Brazilians, it's a walk in the park.

Lest we question Brazil's conversational zealousness, it's worth remembering this from Darwin in The Descent of Man: “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.”