He’d been learning Portuguese for eleven months. He hadn’t told her why.
The classes were Wednesday evenings — he’d said it was for work, which wasn’t entirely a lie because he did have clients in Lisbon, but it was a lie in the way lies are when they’re protecting a surprise.
He told her on the anniversary of the day they met, in the garden of the restaurant where it had happened, and the sentence he’d prepared — practiced, honestly, *practiced* — was a version of what he’d thought about saying for a year.
He said it. Stumbled on one word. Recovered. Finished.
Beatriz looked at him for a long moment.
He’d learned her language. Not the language she spoke at work, not the one she used for everyday things in the country they lived in. The one she dreamed in. The one she’d argued in as a child. The one she sometimes slipped into when she was very happy or very tired.
“That was grammatically imperfect,” she said at last.
“I know.”
“You practiced.”
“For months.”
She was quiet for a moment. A couple at the next table laughed at something, and a waiter passed, and the evening light made everything golden and slightly unreal.
The most intimate distance you can cross, she thought, is into someone else’s interior world. To say: I want to know the parts of you that exist before me.
“Say it again,” she said.
He said it again, slightly better this time.
She took his hand across the table. “We need to work on your subjunctive,” she said.
He smiled. “I have time.”
✦ Today’s Reflection
What part of your partner’s world — their culture, their history, their inner life — have you made an effort to learn, and what did that teach you?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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