Six thirty alarm. Nobody’s idea of a holiday, but the ticket said dawn entry and I take instructions literally when they involve empty palaces.
The gate opens and the guard nods like this is nothing, like he hasn’t just let me into the most photographed room in Andalusia with no one in it. My boots are loud on the stone. That’s the first thing, how sound behaves differently when a place is empty, how it holds onto footsteps longer than it should.
Patio de los Leones. The fountain is still, water held in twelve stone backs that have been carrying it for a thousand years without complaint. I sit on the edge, which I’m probably not supposed to do, and wait. The light comes low through the horseshoe arches, catches the muqarnas ceiling and breaks into pieces on the floor, and for a moment the whole courtyard looks like it’s underwater. Somewhere behind me a bird I can’t name starts up, stops, thinks better of it.
The air smells of cold stone and something green, orange blossom maybe, faint, from a garden I can’t see. I load the Leica slow, the way my hands remember to when the light is doing something worth keeping. Click. The lattice throws its pattern across my forearm, moving as a cloud passes, and I think of my nonna’s kitchen shutters in Milan doing exactly this at eleven in the morning, the same lace of shadow, different continent, same trick of the sun.
There’s a woman, restoration staff maybe, unlocking a side door with a set of keys that could open anything. She doesn’t look at me. I don’t look at her either. We are both just people who got here before the schedule started, doing our separate small jobs in the same borrowed light.
By eight the first tour group’s voice carries in from the entrance, that particular pitch of forty people trying to whisper at once. I take one more frame before it breaks the spell, the fountain, the arches, my own shadow cut clean across the tiles like I was always meant to be standing there.
Was I? *Quem sabe.* The Nasrid kings built this for exactly this hour, I think, before anyone else was awake to argue with the light. Worth the alarm. Worth the noisy boots. The lions don’t say much, but they’ve clearly seen worse company than mine.
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