The café in Bonfim has no name I can pronounce right, so I just point. The owner nods like this happens daily. It probably does.
Blue tiles cover every wall, floor to ceiling, the kind that have watched a hundred years of breakfasts go cold. Some are cracked. One, near the door, is missing entirely, a small gap like a tooth knocked out. I keep looking at that gap. There’s a whole history in it, and no one to tell me what it is.
The francesinha arrives too hot to touch and I don’t touch it. I open the notebook instead. This is the trade I make most mornings: the meal for the page, whichever wins. Today the page wins. Outside, a delivery man argues with a parked car that isn’t his to argue with. Someone’s radio leaks fado through a window two floors up, thin and warped, like it’s coming through water. The coffee is black and small and exactly enough.
I think about my father’s coffee, the way he’d drink it standing, always standing, like sitting down for it was a kind of defeat. Here, everyone sits. No one is going anywhere, or if they are, they’ve decided the going can wait. Tudo bem. The waiter refills my cup without asking, which I’ve decided is the highest form of hospitality: being understood without needing to explain yourself.
The camera sits on the table, untouched, lens cap on. Some mornings it just watches. I like these mornings best, when the light through the window is doing something quiet and specific to the tiles, blue going to gray going to a color I don’t have a word for in any of my languages, and I choose the pen over the shutter. The photograph would be fine. It would also be a lie, a version of stillness that took effort to capture. The notebook doesn’t pretend.
The sauce on the francesinha has gone thick and cool, a small skin forming on top. I still don’t care. Somewhere behind me two old men are having the same argument they’ve probably had for thirty years, about football or politics or a woman named Rosa, I can’t tell which. It doesn’t matter. The sound of it is enough, that particular music of two people who know exactly how the disagreement ends.
I’ll pay, eventually. I’ll leave, eventually. For now there’s the tile, the cold sandwich, the gap where a piece is missing, and nowhere, blessedly, urgently, nowhere at all to be.
