The rooftop table wobbles when I lean on it. Below, the square fills like a lung. Snake charmers, orange juice carts stacked into pyramids, a man selling watches out of a suitcase that never quite opens all the way. I ordered mint tea an hour ago and forgot to drink it. There is too much to look at, and then, right on time, the call to prayer starts.
It comes from everywhere and nowhere. Five minarets, maybe more, layering over each other until you stop trying to find the source. My chest catches it before my ears do. Below, nothing stops. The juice sellers keep pouring. A boy chases a football through a gap between two tourists taking the same photo. The smoke from the food stalls goes up in a slow column, cumin and charcoal and something sweet underneath, and it all just folds into the sound like it was always part of it.
I think of my avó, who used to say prayer is just noise until you need it, then it’s the only sound left. She would have liked this square. She would have hated the tea, too sweet, she’d say, like everything in the north. I smile at nobody. The camera is on the table, loaded, half a roll left, and I don’t touch it.
Some things you photograph. Some things you just stand inside. This is the second kind. The light is doing that Marrakech thing, orange going to rust going to the blue that isn’t quite night yet, and every rooftop around me has someone doing exactly what I’m doing: watching, not filming, phone face down for once. Small miracle, that.
A waiter refills a glass I didn’t ask for. Down in the square, a storyteller has a circle around him, maybe twenty people, none of them understanding a word probably, and none of them leaving either. That’s Djemaa el-Fna for you. Doesn’t need translation. Just needs a body to stand still long enough to catch it.
By the time the tea is cold I’ve stopped keeping track of the sounds separately. The prayer, the drums starting up near the snake charmers, the hiss of a tagine somewhere close. One voice now. I sit inside it a while longer. The camera can wait for tomorrow. Tonight I just want to be here, badly lit, slightly lost, exactly on time for nothing in particular.
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