The café in Bonfim has no name I can find, just azulejos climbing the walls in blue and white, chipped at the corners like someone’s been picking at them for a century. Which someone probably has. I take the corner table, the one under the tile of a ship that’s lost most of its sail to time and whatever solvent they used to clean this place in 1970. My camera sits on the chair beside me. It doesn’t need Portugal explained to it.
The francesinha arrives looking like a dare. Bread, ham, sausage, cheese melting over the top like it’s trying to escape, all of it drowning in a sauce the color of rust and beer. I take three bites and then I stop. Not because it’s bad. Because the light through the window has just hit the tiles at an angle that makes the whole wall glow, and there’s a woman at the counter arguing with the owner about the price of something, and neither of them seem angry, just committed. This is the show. The sandwich can wait.
Someone’s grandmother voice is coming from the kitchen, calling out orders in a Porto accent that swallows half its syllables. Coffee machine hisses. A spoon against porcelain, somewhere behind me, keeping its own private rhythm. I open the notebook instead of finishing breakfast, because some mornings the page asks louder than the plate does. Saudade is a word I only half understand even though I grew up hearing it, but I think this room has some. Old tile does that. It’s seen more mornings than you have.
I think about a breakfast in Sao Paulo once, my mother slicing papaya at six a.m., radio turned low, the city already loud outside the window. Different tiles. Same stillness before the day gets its hands on you. Funny how a plate going cold in one country can drag up a kitchen in another.
The francesinha is properly cold now. The sauce has gone thick and stubborn. I don’t call the waiter. Somewhere outside a tram groans up the hill, metal complaining the way it always does in this city. I could move. I could eat, pack up, chase the next thing on the list. Instead I stay, notebook open, coffee down to the last bitter inch, and let Bonfim decide when the morning ends. It hasn’t yet.
