I was invited by the Portuguese Embassy in South Korea to a concert as part of the celebrations of the 10th of June. I had never visited Korea before and, being a great lover of Asia, I received the invitation with great enthusiasm.

I’m not going to report my days wandering around Seoul because, in addition to being able to see them on my Instagram, they very quickly boil down to: eat, eat, eat, walk, eat.
The concert was quite intimate, for a mostly Korean audience, with the exception of some representatives from other countries.

In the end, the Portuguese ambassador introduced me to the South African ambassador, who according to my age calculator, usually quite accurate, should be around 60 years old.

We started talking about Boston. We had both studied there but at different times and different universities. And that’s when it happened. That brief moment of silence that anticipates a long moment of the same kind, those seconds that are either filled immediately, or the much feared, at least by me, embarrassing silence happens. I flee from the embarrassing silence like the pig on a spit. The other day when talking to a friend who had just taken an enneagram course, I learned that I am not alone, that this behavior is typical of type 6 personalities. Or would it be 7? I don’t remember. But I retained the idea that there are more people like me. It is due to this condition of mine that my husband and I are always placed at the tables of the individual guests, those who do not belong to a group, “I hope you don’t mind, you talk to everyone”. But that’s a subject for another text. Let’s go back to Korea and the ambassador of South Africa. Now, those who like to read know that books are a great subject for when we find ourselves without a subject. That’s what I did. I pulled Trevor Noah out of his hat and his book “Born a crime” (“I’m a crime” in Portuguese). That’s how I started a monologue about everything I learned about apartheid from that book. “Then he didn’t read it, he should. It’s very good”, “Mulattoes were expelled from the neighborhoods of blacks and whites”, “Trevor Noah’s grandmother didn’t beat him, as she did the other grandchildren, because he was whiter”, “bla, bla, bla, bla”, I continued in my monologue. She smiled with an affectionate look. Maybe there was some feather in the mix, but I didn’t notice it at the time.

We say goodbye. Another embarrassing silence successfully overcome! The lady said goodbye and left. The Portuguese ambassador asks us to end the night with a photograph with all the people in the embassy, but before she says to me “Oh Luísa, I ended up not explaining to you who that lady from South Africa was. She is Nelson Mandela’s daughter.”

In the photograph I am very smiling, minutes before I get ready and make a hole in the floor of the ambassador’s office. On my right side is Zenani, who is not only Nelson Mandela’s daughter, having lived all her childhood and adolescence with a father imprisoned because of apartheid, but also became the first lady of South Africa.
I know I’ll continue to use books to escape the noisy silences, but next time maybe I’ll choose something simpler. “The words I will never tell you”, this would have been the perfect book.