The climb to the Spanish Mosque takes twenty minutes, maybe thirty if you stop the way I do, for a cat sleeping on a wall, for a doorway painted a blue that doesn’t exist anywhere else. By the time I reach the top, my legs are done arguing with me and the town spreads out below like something spilled, blue on blue on blue, walls and stairs and window frames, all of it fading toward the same color as the hills.
The muezzin’s call drifts up from somewhere in the medina, thin with distance. A dog barks twice and gives up. Someone below is grilling something with cumin in it, and the smell climbs the hill faster than I did. I sit on a rock still warm from the afternoon and I do the thing I always do here: nothing. Chefchaouen doesn’t need you to do anything. It just asks you to watch.
The sun goes down slow, the way it does in the mountains, taking its time about it, and the town doesn’t lose its color when the light leaves. That’s the strange part. Most places go grey at dusk. This one deepens. The blue gets thicker, like it’s been waiting all day for the sun to get out of the way so it can finally be itself.
My camera sits in my lap for a long time before I touch it. Ne serve? I ask it, half joking. It doesn’t answer, obviously. It never does. But there’s a moment, and anyone who’s carried a camera long enough knows this moment, when taking the photo feels like it would cost you the thing you’re trying to keep. So I wait. I let the light finish what it’s doing.
A boy passes behind me with a stack of bread balanced on his head, doesn’t even look at the view. Home is like that. You stop seeing the blue after a while, I imagine. I think of Sao Paulo, all that grey concrete, and how a friend once told me she couldn’t imagine wanting anything so plain as one color for an entire town. I didn’t have an answer for her then. I still don’t, except that some towns hold their breath and you just happen to be there when they let it out.
Eventually I lift the camera. One frame. Maybe it comes out wrong, too dark, the blue gone to black. Doesn’t matter much. The one I’ll keep is already developed, somewhere behind my eyes.
