El Born at night moves slow, then not at all. I find a table outside a bar barely wider than my duffel, order a vermouth because the man next to me has one and it looks like the right decision. Ice cracking. Orange peel curled on the rim like it’s trying to escape. Santa Maria del Mar sits behind me, lit gold, patient, like it’s seen every version of this scene before and isn’t impressed by mine.
The stone underfoot is worn smooth in the middle of the street, centuries of feet doing what feet do. Someone’s playing guitar two corners away, not well, but the mistakes carry just as far as the good parts. A woman laughs too loud at something and nobody minds. The air smells like fried something, jasmine from a balcony box, and the particular dust of old cities that have stopped apologizing for their age.
My camera sits on the table, untouched for a while. Some scenes don’t need the shutter. I think of Milan for no reason, a church near my father’s apartment that also lit up gold at night, how I used to sit on the steps eating gelato too fast so it wouldn’t melt on my hand. Funny how one gold church calls up another. *Saudade* doesn’t quite cover it, but it’s close.
The vermouth goes down slower than I mean it to. That’s the point of vermouth, I think, it refuses to be rushed, like this whole neighborhood refuses. Waiters here don’t hover. Nobody’s clearing my glass before I’ve decided I’m finished with it. Back home, or whatever passes for home these days, this would be considered bad service. Here it’s just Tuesday.
Eventually I do lift the camera, one frame, the church through the wine glass, warped gold and green. It won’t come out the way I see it now. It never does. But that’s not really why I take it.
A couple walks by arguing softly in Catalan about directions, then stops arguing to admire the same facade I’ve been staring at for twenty minutes. They forget the argument. I forget what I was writing in my head before they walked past.
El Born doesn’t perform for you. It just continues, the way it has for eight hundred years, and asks if you’d like to sit for a while. I do. I always do.
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