Eight fifty-five. The gate has just opened and I am the third person through it, which feels like a small victory nobody else will understand. The guard nods like he’s seen this before. He has. I nod back like I haven’t. I have.
The tiles are still cool to the touch. I know because I keep touching them, palm flat against the azulejos, tracing the blue and gold until a woman behind me clears her throat. Sorry. Old habit. My camera hangs against my hip and I haven’t even lifted it yet. Some places you have to earn the first photo. You walk them first. You let them tell you where to stand.
The fountain in the Patio de las Doncellas doesn’t perform for anyone. No music, no rehearsed spray toward the sky. It just runs, low and steady, the same sound it probably made for Pedro the Cruel, back when this palace still had teeth. There’s a kind of arrogance in that, isn’t there? A fountain that doesn’t need an audience. I sit on the edge of the shade, where the stone hasn’t caught the sun yet, and I listen. Water on water. A bird somewhere in the orange trees, invisible, unbothered.
By nine thirty the coaches will start arriving. I know this because the guard told me, almost as a warning, almost as a gift. So I move quickly through the Salón de Embajadores, head tilted back at the dome until my neck complains. Gold everywhere, arranged in patterns that took someone’s whole life to carve. *Meraviglioso*, I say, to no one, and my voice comes back to me off the plasterwork, small and strange.
There’s a smell here I didn’t expect: wet stone, jasmine, and underneath it something mineral, something old. Not incense, not quite dust. Just time, maybe, if time had a smell. My grandmother’s church in Milan had something close to it. Different god, same silence.
I take four photographs. Four, in an hour. The film doesn’t care how many places I’ve been or how far I’ve come to stand here touching walls like a child. It only cares about the light, and the light in the Patio del Yeso is doing something quietly spectacular against the arches, so I give it what it’s asking for and nothing more.
By ten the courtyards fill. Voices stack on voices. I’m already gone, sitting outside with a coffee, watching the line form for a palace that, an hour ago, belonged only to a fountain and me.
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