Six a.m. and the metal shutters are still coming up, one by one, like the market is stretching before it agrees to open its eyes. I get there before the tour groups, before the guides with their little flags, before anyone is selling anything to anyone. This is the hour La Boqueria belongs to the people who work here. Everyone else is just borrowing it.
The ice arrives first. Great blocks of it, dragged across wet stone, and the fish stalls go quiet and glittering under it, eyes still bright, gills still red. Somewhere behind me a man is shouting a price at no one in particular, just to hear his own voice wake up. Coffee and diesel and brine, that’s the smell of Barcelona before eight. Not what the postcards tell you.
Then the cherries. A whole crate of them, so dark they’ve gone past red into something private. I stand there longer than I mean to. The vendor doesn’t rush me, just watches, arms crossed, like she’s seen this before, tourists falling in love with fruit. Maybe she has. I lift the Leica and it almost goes, slips half an inch in my palm before I catch it. Forty years old, this camera, still doesn’t trust me completely. Fair.
There’s an old man two stalls down eating an egg sandwich standing up, newspaper folded under his arm, not looking at any of it. He’s not here for the light. He’s here because it’s Tuesday and he’s always here on Tuesday. I think about how a place can be someone’s miracle and someone else’s Tuesday at the same time. Neither of them is wrong.
By eight the noise starts to build, and the market stops being a private thing and turns into a performance again, stalls dressed up, prices climbing, everyone smiling for the cameras that aren’t mine. I’ve already got what I came for. A crate of secrets, an old man with his egg, ice melting into the drain in the corner. *Bom dia*, Barcelona. You didn’t even have to try this hard.
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