“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

So now I had to convert all that Spanish into Portuguese! I found a Portuguese graduate student at Cornell, and twice a week he gave me lessons, so I was able to alter what I had learned. On the plane to Brazil I started out sitting next to a guy from Colombia who spoke only Spanish: so I wouldn’t talk to him because I didn’t want to get confused again. But sitting in front of me were two guys who were talking Portuguese. I had never heard real Portuguese; I had only had this teacher who had talked very slowly and clearly. So here are these two guys talking a blue streak, brrrrrrr-a-ta brrrrrrr-a-ta, and I can’t even hear the word for “I,” or the word for “the,” or anything.

Finally, when we made a refueling stop in Trinidad, I went up to the two fellas and said very slowly in Portuguese, or what I thought was Portuguese, “Excuse me … can you understand … what I am saying to you now?”

“Pues nгo, porque nгo? ”—” Sure, why not?” they replied.

So I explained as best I could that I had been learning Portuguese for some months now, but I had never heard it spoken in conversation, and I was listening to them on the airplane, but couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

“Oh,” they said with a laugh, “Nao e Portugues! E Ladдo! Judeo!” What they were speaking was to Portuguese as Yiddish is to German, so you can imagine a guy who’s been studying German sitting behind two guys talking Yiddish, trying to figure out what’s the matter. It’s obviously German, but it doesn’t work. He must not have learned German very well.

When we got back on the plane, they pointed out another man who did speak Portuguese, so I sat next to him. He had been studying neurosurgery in Maryland, so it was very easy to talk with him—as long as it was about cirugia neural, o cerebreu, and other such “complicated” things. The long words are actually quite easy to translate into Portuguese because the only difference is their endings: “-tion” in English is “-зao” in Portuguese; “-ly” is “-mente,” and so on. But when he looked out the window and said something simple, I was lost: I couldn’t decipher “the sky is blue.”

I got off the plane in Recife (the Brazilian government was going to pay the part from Recife to Rio) and was met by the father-in-law of Cesar Lattes, who was the director of the Center for Physical Research in Rio, his wife, and another man. As the men were off getting my luggage, the lady started talking to me in Portuguese: “You speak Portuguese? How nice! How was it that you learned Portuguese?”

I replied slowly, with great effort. “First, I started to learn Spanish… then I discovered I was going to Brazil.

Now I wanted to say, “So, I learned Portuguese,” but I couldn’t think of the word for “so.” I knew how to make BIG words, though, so I finished the sentence like this: “CONSEQUENTEMENTE, apprendiPortugues!”

When the two men came back with the baggage, she said, “Oh, he speaks Portuguese! And with such wonderful words: CONSEQUENTEMENTE!”

Then an announcement came over the loudspeaker. The flight to Rio was canceled, and there wouldn’t be another one till next Tuesday—and I had to be in Rio on Monday, at the latest.

I got all upset. “Maybe there’s a cargo plane. I’ll travel in a cargo plane,” I said.

“Professor!” they said, “It’s really quite nice here in Recife. We’ll show you around. Why don’t you relax—you’re in Brazil.”

That evening I went for a walk in town, and came upon a small crowd of people standing around a great big rectangular hole in the road—it had been dug for sewer pipes, or something—and there, sitting exactly in the hole, was a car. It was marvelous: it fitted absolutely perfectly, with its roof level with the road. The workmen hadn’t bothered to put up any signs at the end of the day, and the guy had simply driven into it. I noticed a difference: When we’d dig a hole, there’d be all kinds of detour signs and flashing lights to protect us. There, they dig the hole, and when they’re finished for the day, they just leave.

Anyway, Recife was a nice town, and I did wait until next Tuesday to fly to Rio.

When I got to Rio I met Cesar Lattes. The national TV network wanted to make some pictures of our meeting, so they started filming, but without any sound. The cameramen said, “Act as if you’re talking. Say something—anything.”

So Lattes asked me, “Have you found a sleeping dictionary yet?”

That night, Brazilian TV audiences saw the director of the Center for Physical Research welcome the Visiting Professor from the United States, but little did they know that the subject of their conversation was finding a girl to spend the night with!

When I got to the center, we had to decide when I would give my lectures—in the morning, or afternoon.

Lattes said, “The students prefer the afternoon.”

“So let’s have them in the afternoon.”