Porto at eight in the morning, before the doors officially open. I know the guide who does the early unlock. He lets me stand inside for ten minutes before the crowds arrive with their phones and their ticket stubs. The lights are still off. Only the ceiling glass, letting in that soft gray Atlantic light that hasn’t decided yet if it will rain.
The staircase curves red and gold like something poured rather than built. Wood polished by a century of hands and feet, worn smooth in the places where everyone naturally reaches. It creaks once when I put my weight on the second step. Somewhere behind the shelves a radiator ticks as it warms. That’s the only sound. No tour groups yet, no one asking where Harry Potter sat, though he never did, this isn’t that story, people just want it to be.
The air smells of paper going soft with age and something underneath it, wax maybe, or the floor polish they use before opening. I load a new roll into the camera, the click of it loud in the empty room. Thirty six frames and I know I’ll waste half of them on the same staircase from angles that all say the same thing: look how the light lands here and nowhere else.
I think of my father’s apartment in Milan, the one shelf of books he never finished, the smell close to this one. Funny how a bookshop in Porto can drag you back to a hallway in another country entirely. Saudade, my mother would say, and she’d know, she taught me the word before I understood what it does to a person, how it can ache for something while you’re still inside it, still touching it, still allowed to stay a little longer.
By nine the doors open properly and the quiet breaks. Voices in four languages, a stroller wheel catching on the threshold, someone’s perfume arriving before they do. I step outside before the room fills, camera strap looped twice around my wrist out of habit. Rain has started, thin and undecided, the kind Porto seems to specialize in. I stand under the awning across the street and look back at the yellow facade.
Some rooms you don’t want photographs of. You want to have stood in them once, quietly, before anyone else was awake enough to want the same thing.
