Miragaia at six, and the steps are still warm from the day. I sit where the stone has worn smooth from other people doing exactly this. Below me the Douro moves slow and thick, more copper than blue, and the boats stack up against the far bank like they’re waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. That’s the point.
The rabelo boats used to carry port wine down from the valley. Now they carry tourists with better cameras than mine, which makes me oddly loyal to the Nikon in my lap. It clicks once. I don’t check the shot. There’s a rule I keep breaking and keeping anyway: trust the light, deal with the disappointment later, in some darkroom, in some other country.
Someone below is grilling sardines and the smoke drifts up sideways, catching the last sun so it glows instead of just smelling like dinner. A dog barks at the gulls. The gulls ignore it, the way everything here seems to ignore urgency. Porto doesn’t rush toward its sunsets. It just lets them happen, the way you let a friend finish a long story you’ve already heard.
I think about my father, who is from a country of hills and dry heat, and my mother, who is from a country of rivers wider than this one could ever pretend to be. Neither of them has stood on this step. Strange, how a place can feel like the exact midpoint between two people who never met each other’s water.
Wine glass sweating in my hand. Not cold enough anymore. I drink it anyway. Behind me, the alley smells of stone and someone’s laundry drying two floors up, and ahead the whole river is turning the color of the inside of a shell. Saudade is a word people overuse about this city, but sitting here, watching the light do its slow dishonest work on the water, I understand why. It makes you miss something you haven’t lost yet.
The film will need three days to develop. I won’t remember exactly what this looked like by then, not precisely, just the shape of it: gold, river, smoke, a dog that gave up barking. Maybe that’s better. The photograph will lie a little, the way this hour always does. I’ll believe it anyway.
