When Terezinha returned home from the local market, she was surprised to find Samuel sitting in the kitchen with his blue, palm-sized notebook open on the table. Usually, at this time of night, he would be playing football with the schoolboys in the local praça, wiping sweat or rain from his eyes as the ball drew clean parabolas under the kerosene lamps.

“Boa noite,” she said.The plastic bags crackled as she lay them on the counter beside the metal sink. One by one, she began taking out the evening’s haul: three tin cans of coconut milk, a large bottle of dendê, peppers, tomatoes, frozen shrimp.

“Boa noite,” Samuel replied, using a pen to hold the page in his notebook. His wire-rimmed glasses were slightly dented at the point where a football had hit him the week before, making his angular face more striking than it already was. In a town like Palmeiras, he attracted attention in ways that Terezinha had never known herself. Earlier that same evening, Claudia at the market had asked how the japawas doing at home. When Terezinha corrected Claudia and said that the boy was, in fact, American, Claudia had chuckled — ah, tá, she murmured — and asked how a woman like her communicated with a menino americano when English was so difficult. Sure, Terezinha worked with tourists, sometimes, but there were all those exceptions and rules and speakers who slurred the kinds of words that crackled on the radio from Californiaand Nova Iorque,and how did Terezinha deal with that?

Samuel was learning Portuguese, Terezinha had replied. Between living with her and doing his research, he was getting better at it every day. He kept an inventory of new words in his notebook, its spine slackening with the growing number of definitions she explained when a paperback dictionary didn’t have the context Samuel wanted. What had begun as a rainy day ritual — the signal would fall when the rains came, which was often — had become, over time, a regular evening exercise as helpful to Terezinha as it was for the boy, and for reasons beyond improving her English.

Claudia did not need to ask what those reasons were.

While the young cashier placed the shrimp in the plastic bag, finishing up Terezinha’s tally for the night, she off-handedly remarked that Terezinha had better rush back if she wanted to make it home dry. The sky looks like it’s about to pour, she said, and the two women exchanged, in their expressions, what was better left unsaid.

The boy moved his chair from the table so he could better see his host, who stood by the kitchen sink unpacking the shrimp. In Palmeiras, fresh fish could only be found in the early morning trucks arriving from Salvador, the necks of their rearview mirrors heavy with dangling, card-sized portraits of Yemanjá. Now the sea deity’s hand-drawn portrait hung freshly nailed above the kitchen sink, and every night Terezinha would look upon the picture and wonder whether heaven resembled an ocean opening into sky, as she had always imagined, or if it was somewhere in the clouds, as her mother had wished.

“Terezinha,” Samuel asked, “how would you define compromisso? Does it mean what compromisemeans in English?”

“Com-pro-mise,”Terezinha repeated. She rolled the minor bursts of its consonants around in her mouth as she put the shrimp aside. Then she began slicing an onion into flaking rounds. It was not quite the English word promise, which she had learned from a movie she watched with three American tourists at a hostel in Capão years before. Promise me you won’t leave me, the bob-haired protagonist had whispered, as her love interest — a hulking man, towering above her in a coat too woolly and thick to wear in a Bahian winter — made his way towards a wooden door with a brass handle. Terezinha had gone to bed that night repeating the words to herself, over and over: promise me you won’t leave me, promise me you won’t leave me, as if practicing for an eventual loss she had to endure, for some inexplicable reason, in English.

“What is the meaning in your language?” Terezinha finally asked. She moved on to slicing the tomatoes and peppers in the same circular way, placing them above the onions in the metal pot. “Pro-miss and pro-myze are the same? Or no?”

Samuel shook his head. “They’re two different words,” he said. “Compromise is like, is like…” He rubbed his chin with his index and thumb. “It’s like when two people want different things but must agree on only one. So they choose something in the middle instead.” Then his expression lifted as it rose to the sharp, clean surface of realization. “Like this, Tere,” he said, triumphant. “What you and I are doing right now is compromising.” 

There was a sudden puttering on the roof’s metal sheets as rain began to fall. Terezinha doused the vegetables in oil and turned on the gas stove. She let the mixture cook as she turned to face her lodger, who was writing something in his book. To compromise meant to meet someone halfway, she thought, just like compromisso.

She looked at the boy, who had once struck her as unusual for many reasons. First, he was a foreigner from America, which to her remained a formidable mass sitting above Brazil on a map. It was the promised land where her wealthier compatriots went to make new lives for themselves, and yet had little to say except that life in that country was difícil. There was also the fact that Samuel was a foreigner to America: he looked so different from the americanosClaudia had mentioned, who were blond and tall with deep, sultry voices. Or they were strong, forte,like Gisele’s futebol americanohusband and unlike Samuel, who was skinny and never wore anything besides t-shirts and thick shorts that ended just above the knees. His hair was as black and shiny as beans soaked overnight for feijoada, his eyes thick-lidded and slim behind his glasses. The closest analogy she could muster was that his kind were to America what the Nikkei were to São Paulo, and yet it was completely different. It was different because here, in Palmeiras, where neighbors like Claudia frequently asked her about the japaat home, she would have to correct them by saying that he was in fact a coreano americano. Two reliably Brazilianizable English words, and yet a concept that did not exist in Brazil.

The more Terezinha understood of Samuel, the more she realized that she did not know enough. Besides the fact that he was in Brazil studying geological formations, which she could hardly understand even in Portuguese, she knew very little about why he studied what he did, and what motivated him to learn her language. The only thing they could do was to meet each other halfway in the world of their words, where they approximated each other as if in a dance: stumbling on the other’s feet at times, but on certain, serendipitous occasions, meeting in sync. Like when, one morning, she poured a bag of yellow grains into a cuscuszeira, and Samuel was delighted to hear the word for the metal tool that would make his breakfast. What a good name, he had remarked, for something that makes cous-cous. With Terezinha’s assistance, the word was one of the first things Samuel had written in his notebook. It suggested a logic to the Portuguese he was trying to crack, one that felt familiar with its homonyms and yet remained distant with its nasally vowels and whip-like speed.

When the vegetables had softened, Terezinha poured coconut milk into the pot and let the mixture simmer. “In Portuguese,” she began, “compromisso can be a plan, an activity. Tipo,you can have um compromissoand not go to a party.”

It could also mean duty. Terezinha’s mother had often used this sense of the word in the days before she passed. Cuidar da mãe é um grande compromisso, she would say, as she lay in bed swaddled in a blanket. To care for your mother is a great commitment. By then, the old woman had been bedridden for weeks, clutching a Bible on the very dahlia-patterned bedsheets where Samuel now slept. She was adamant about having the book beside her when Terezinha was around, as if its visibility, combined with her suffering, would inspire her daughter’s conversion. Yet she had taken her final breath before the tactic could take effect. When she died, her body had been taken to the local cathedral, where it had lain in a casket before a flow of neighbors in white blouses and polished shoes. Amid the crying and the words exchanged between churchgoers who professed to having loved the dead woman, Terezinha could only pay attention to how every stranger’s bed of hair, brushed with thin-toothed combs, was fixed tightly in place with gel that glimmered in the sunlight filtering through the mosaic windows. Terezinha wore her hair long. She did not hold a copy of the holy book in her arms, and she wondered how many of those women had known her mother in the way she had, or if she knew her mother at all. On her way out of the service, Terezinha looked, as she usually did, at the wooden carving of Jesus on the cross, beside which sat a statue of Mary holding a child whose eyes had not been painted in. Then she returned home to remove the sheets from her mother’s bed and air them in the small backyard. By then, the guava trees had been heavy with green globes of fruit she decided she would not harvest on her own. 

She brought in a lodger three months later without plans to reveal what had happened before he arrived. It was the kind of news unbefitting a guest who was so far from home, she thought, and the least she owed him was her hospitality.

“Samuel, o futebol?” she now said, when the boy didn’t respond. “Você tem um compromisso hoje?”

“Não,” the boy smiled, shaking his head. “I wanted to call home, but the signal wasn’t working. And now I might have to wait for the rain to stop.”

“E o hostel?” Terezinha suggested. There was a small bed-and-breakfast near the cathedral where tourists stayed briefly before they journeyed elsewhere. “Try after dinner. The Wi-Fi is good there.” When the coconut milk began to bubble, Terezinha added a spoonful of red dendê and watched as the red-orange spilled into white, releasing a sharp whiff of spice in the air.

“What are you making?”

“Moqueca de camarão.” She stirred the oil into the milk, breaking apart the dark and deep circles into dozens of smaller oil-spots.

“It smells like jjigae.”Samuel stood up to take a closer look at the pot on the stove. When he saw Terezinha’s quizzical expression, he explained, “it’s like a Korean soup. You can put anything into jjigae, like kimchi, tofu, pork…” He returned to his seat and ruffled through his notebook. “But never shrimp. Or at least my mom would never. She’s allergic to most fish.”

Mom, short for mother.Monosyllabic like mãe. One afternoon, while sweeping the floors of her home, Terezinha had seen a picture of Samuel’s mother on his desk. She was beautiful,coreana like Samuel, with bangs that reached the upper contours of her eyes. On her face was a beatific smile made brighter by the oversaturated lighting in the photograph, and it made Terezinha think that whoever had taken the picture must have been someone very special.

Samuel’s mother, like Terezinha’s, was a devout woman: she had slipped a Korean copy of the Bible into her son’s large, seventy-liter backpack, which the boy hardly touched. His mother believed in the thin places where heaven and earth collided, and she thought that Brazil — a country she had never been — had the potential to reveal something to her son. But he was less convinced. For him, he told Terezinha, the distance between earth and heaven lay less in belief and more in events he could see. Like the way millennia-old formations layered years of history between them, or how words from different languages could sound alike but open multiple worlds of meaning in their disjunctions. False friends, beholden to distinct intentions yet close enough to meet at a happy middle. A thin place. Um compromisso.

Prior to Samuel’s arrival, Terezinha had taken down the framed family pictures propped along the length of her mother’s old bed, the cabinets filled with loose, rayon dresses now cold to the touch, the agricultural calendar on the wall with illustrations of corn husks and peanuts from the June Festival. One by one she had picked these objects, talismans of a dead woman, from the wall, from the dresser, and from the room’s many ledges, gathering them into a pile before slipping them into a large plastic bag. But contrary to what her neighbors suggested, she could not bear to burn these items. Instead, she slipped the bag in its entirety under her bed before greeting her new guest, whose only knowledge of the old woman sat in the form of a portrait by the living room sofa. In it, Terezinha’s mother held a basket of freshly picked guava from the backyard with an unusually stern expression on her face, as if the cameraman were about to reach through the frame and wrest from her the fruits she had spent a season nurturing. When Samuel asked about the picture, Terezinha simply said it was a distant aunt who lived in São Paulo, that she sometimes came to Palmeiras for the guava-picking season, and what about Samuel? Had he been to Brazil’s largest city?

When the moqueca was finally ready, Terezinha turned off the gas stove and moved to place two porcelain plates on the dining room table. Samuel folded an embroidered tea towel to place below the scalding pot, and soon they were ladling moqueca and rice onto their plates, taking care to avoid the smoke. Yet Samuel refused to close his notebook. Before taking his first bite, he took another look at the yellowing pages to ask Terezinha how she would define the word solidão.

“Does solidãomean solid?” Samuel asked, “like this—” and he rapped his knuckle against the table.

“No, no, no,” Terezinha replied, shaking her head. She opened a metal container of farinha and scattered a spoonful of cassava flour over her meal. “It means…” And for a moment she paused, tapping flour off her spoon as she thought. “It means being one person in a very big world. Tipo…” Then, placing her hand upon her heart as if making an oath, “a feeling here. Strong like love or sadness, but in only one person.”

“Loneliness,” Samuel said. “It means the feeling of being sad because there is no one to keep you company. Is that right?” He mixed the moqueca into the rice and took a bite.

“Pode ser.” Terezinha crossed and uncrossed her ankles under her dress, where the boy wouldn’t see. From where was he getting his words this week? Was he lonely in this country? Rarely did she see him with other people. When she came home from errands, she would find him sitting on the living room sofa, reading a book or writing in his little notebook. After she had introduced him to Marcelo, he had begun playing football on Thursday evenings in the town plaza with a group of teenage boys. Once, when she walked by the field on an evening stroll, she noticed that Samuel was sitting out of the game, observing the footballers with his notebook open on a fresh page. What was he trying to learn? And why did it matter more than what he could learn in this country by simply living in it? Samuel confounded her, as he usually did, but when he looked up and saw her crossing the square, the way he waved — unabashedly, without pity in the way her neighbors looked at her after her mother’s death — thawed whatever coldness lay in the curiosity that had engulfed her.

Do you like living with the boy? Claudia had asked at the supermarket. Or is it hard to live with someone who is so different?

Lining the three tins of coconut milk along the inside of her plastic bag, Terezinha had given the thought several moments before responding. Well, she answered, looping her hands into the bag’s handles, it’s harder to live with someone who expects you to be the same as them.

When Samuel began to eat, he ate ravenously, and Terezinha watched as he helped himself to multiple servings of the moqueca. Backlit by the kitchen light, the wisps of hair hanging straight above his head shone like branches covered lightly in rain. With Samuel, life could be easy. Her compromisso was simply a matter of getting up on time to heat the cuscuszeirain the mornings, to break two eggs and make sure that the yellow yolks did not dissolve into their whites. It meant she could teach him that balcãodid not mean balcony, but a counter, as in a kitchen or a diner; it meant learning about the greasy hamburgers you could order at an American diner, where the seats were shiny and squeaked. It meant they could spend half a long hour discussing the word costume, which was spelled the same in both languages but pronounced in different ways. Cos-too-me, Terezinha said; cos-tume, Samuel replied. It meant habit in one language and a special kind of clothing in another. Over and over, they repeated their false friends, surprised and delighted by what they found. But at the end of each evening, when Terezinha returned to her bedroom for the night, she would miss the feeling of knowing exactly what her interlocutor meant. Of speaking in the language closest to her heart, and, to some extent, with the woman who had taught her how to speak it.

As Samuel got up to collect their plates before leaving for the hostel, he motioned for Terezinha to sit and rest. “Tere, you’ve done enough work for the evening,” he said, bringing the utensils back to the sink. “But there’s one last thing I wanted to ask. Can you explain the word saudade?”

When he returned, he held up his notebook and pointed to a word Terezinha noticed, with a sudden tenderness in her heart, that he had misspelled. Saudajee, it read. She took his pen and wrote, beside Samuel’s thin letters, saudadein her looping, generous script. 

Most people believed the word was untranslatable. Everybody, even the neighborhood children running about the street in their bare feet, would have something distinct to say about the word saudade.They may not be able to define it, Terezinha thought, but each would have their own example to explain what the word meant to them. 

“It means happiness and sadness together,” she finally replied.

“Like ambivalence?” Samuel asked. Then he waved his hands as if attempting to erase the word from the air it had just entered. “Sorry. Ambivalence means not knowing how you feel about something, which is what I thought you meant.”

Ambivalence.The word sounded smooth, like the surface of a stone. “When you have saudade,you know how you feel,” Terezinha said. “Tipo…you are happy to have something, and sad to know it will not be the same way again.”

“So would that word only apply for an experience?”  

“No. You can have saudade for an experience, a place, a thing…” She paused. “Most often, a person.”

“Okay,” Samuel said. “Then what about saúde?Is that a shorter way of saying the same thing?” 

Saúde.Health. “No,” Terezinha said, laughing. “Saúdemeans health. If you have problemas de saúde, then your health is bad. At the posto de saúde,you can see the doctor.”

“I see.” Samuel wrote something in his notebook before shutting it.

Then, as if he were observing the night for the first time, he remarked that he had better be going. Outside, the rain had stopped. Terezinha focused on the way the music of the crickets and the frogs bellowed and mixed in the air, joyful and sorrowful that the rain had come, that it was now gone.

“Obrigada, Terezinha,” her lodger said. “Your moqueca was delicious. My mom would like it, I think. I’ll make it for her when I go home.” 

“Que bom,”she replied, thinking of Samuel’s mother. She would teach the boy how to make moqueca without the fish. Asshe got up from the table and stretched into a fully upright position, her bones complained in a series of sharp cracks, which made her bend forward immediately to let out a small laugh. It reminded her of the mornings she would wake up in her mother’s bed, decades ago, and how the older woman would taunt Terezinha playfully, calling her uma velha whenever she cracked her bones.

As if mirroring Terezinha, Samuel, too, stretched his fingers far into the air. If he were any taller, she thought, his hands would touch the ceiling, or break through, even, as if he were a tree, an American tree planted afresh in Brazil where conditions were ripe for its growth. Eventually the tree would grow so tall as to stretch its shadow across its old country, bearing fruit yearning to be picked and taken home. This, too, was saudade.   

“I won’t be too late,” Samuel said, as he walked towards the living room door. On his way, he passed the portrait of Terezinha’s mother. Her memory of the older woman as a young mãe, her hair long and tangled in the branches of a guava tree as she laughed, was saudade.

“Besides, my mom won’t keep me for too long. She used to tell me off because she thought I didn’t sleep enough.”

Terezinha could hear Samuel’s voice as it wafted down the corridor and into the kitchen, where she was scraping the remainder of the moqueca into a plastic box. “She used to say,” he continued, “that the last thing any mom would want of their child was to develop problemas de saudade.Did I say that right?” 

Time, like the rain and everything else, stopped briefly as Terezinha mulled over her lodger’s words. Had she heard him correctly?

Or had it been an innocent mistake, a wonderful clerical error, that there was such thing as a stranger who had somehow understood her without asking?

“Yes,” Terezinha eventually said, as she scooped the last of the shrimp into the container. “You learn quickly, Samuel. Your mom must be proud.”

Glancing back at the portrait of Yemanjá above the sink, she decided that heaven could be sea and sky both. That her mother would be somewhere in between.

Um compromisso, the last she owed.

About the Author:

Jimin Kang is a Korea-born, Hong Kong-raised, and England-based writer. Her fiction can be found in Joyland, The London Magazine, The Kenyon Review and Wasafiri, where she was shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in fiction. As a freelance journalist, she has worked with various outlets including Reuters in Brazil, and as an editor she curates the ‘To Write Hong Kong’ column in The Oxonian Review. Find her on X at @jiminkanggg and www.jimin-kang.com.

*Feature image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash