Bahia Palace at seven in the morning. Nobody here yet except a man sweeping orange blossoms off the tiles with a broom made of what looks like straw and patience. The sound of it, soft scratching, is the only thing louder than my own footsteps.
I sit in the courtyard and let the light find me. It comes through the carved cedar screens in long diagonal cuts, landing on the zellige in pieces, like someone upstairs is still deciding how to arrange it. The tilework is green and white and a blue that does not exist anywhere else I have photographed. Every panel repeats, but not quite. A craftsman’s small refusal to be a machine, maybe. Saudade for a person I never met, whoever carved the first star into the plaster and got it slightly wrong on purpose.
My camera stays on my knee for a long while before I lift it. There is a rule I keep, mostly for myself: watch first, shoot second. The Leica does not care about my rules. It just waits, the way it always does, patient as the sweeping man. When I finally bring it up, the light has already shifted an inch to the left. That is the thing about this kind of light. It reads you a sentence once and does not repeat itself.
Somewhere behind a wall a radio plays something in Arabic, low, half static. A cat crosses the courtyard without hurrying, sits in a patch of sun like it has a reservation. The air smells like orange blossom and something mineral underneath, old stone that has been wet and dried a thousand times. I think of my grandmother’s kitchen tiles in Sao Paulo, cracked in the same geometric confidence, and wonder if patterns travel through blood the way recipes do.
By eight the first tour group arrives, phones up before their eyes adjust. I do not judge them. I have done worse for a photograph. But I pack up anyway, duffel over one shoulder, camera against my hip like it is used to the walk by now. Outside, the medina is waking up in stages, a shutter here, a kettle there. Marrakech does not perform for you. It just happens, and you are lucky if you are standing still enough to notice.
