The stairs in Alfama start narrow and get narrower, like the building is deciding halfway through whether it wants you in or not. Tiles the color of old teeth, cracked in a pattern that took two centuries to design and nobody actually designed. I sit two steps up from the bottom, camera on my knee, and wait for the light to do the thing it does around seven in the morning here, low and a little embarrassed, like it’s arriving late to something.
A woman above me shakes a rug off her balcony. Dust catches the light before it catches me, and I sneeze, and she laughs, not unkindly. Somewhere a moka pot is doing its business, that metallic gurgle, and under it the smell of last night’s rain still sitting in the stone. Lisbon holds water like a memory it doesn’t want to let go of. Saudade, someone told me once, isn’t sadness, it’s missing something while you’re still standing in it. I think about that on these stairs more than anywhere else.
The tiles have seen more mornings than I will ever have. That’s the arithmetic that gets me, sitting here. Two hundred years of feet, spilled coffee, wine, footsteps of people who never once thought about being photographed. I load the film slow, on purpose, because the sound of it is the only sound I add to the street. Everything else was already here before me and will keep going after I’m gone, the cat that crosses without checking for anyone, the laundry line overhead that never seems to move even in wind.
I don’t ask the light to cooperate. It just does, that morning, for about four minutes, sliding down the risers like it’s testing the temperature. I shoot two frames and stop. Second-guessing a moment like this feels rude, somehow, to the stairs, to the two hundred years, to whoever laid that first tile without knowing I’d be sitting on it with a camera someday, useless with gratitude and trying not to show it.
Someone passes and asks if I’m lost. I say no, just early. She nods like that’s a normal answer, which in this city, it is. I stay until the light moves off the tiles entirely and lands somewhere higher, on a window shutter, uninterested in me now. That’s fine. I got what I came for. The stairs didn’t need me to notice them, but I think they didn’t mind it either.
