Sintra at midday moves slow, then not at all. I find a table under a striped awning, close enough to the National Palace that its twin chimneys, those two white cones like witches’ hats, sit heavy in my periphery the whole meal. Nobody around me seems to be looking at them anymore. That’s the thing about living next to something famous. Eventually it’s just the view from your kitchen window.
The waiter brings sparkling water without asking, condensation already running down the glass before he sets it down. Somewhere behind me a group of tourists argues gently about which bus goes to Pena Palace, and a scooter whines up the hill and doesn’t come back down for a long time. The air smells like garlic and cut grass and, underneath that, something mineral, stone that’s been rained on for six hundred years and dried in the sun a thousand times since. My salad arrives too big for the mood I’m in. I eat around the edges of it and call that lunch.
I think about my father, who used to say Sintra reminded him of the hill towns outside Turin, minus the fog, plus the ocean smell that somehow finds its way up even here. He was wrong about the fog. There’s plenty, it just comes late, rolling in around four to swallow the towers whole. For now, though, everything is sharp-edged. The stone is warm under my palm when I rest it on the low wall beside the table. My camera sits on the chair across from me like it’s waiting to be introduced to someone.
I don’t take the picture right away. There’s a version of this trip where I photograph everything on arrival, palace first, salad second, and move on. Instead I let the moment get slightly bored of me before I lift the camera. That’s when it usually gives something back. The light comes in low under the awning, catching the rim of the glass, and for one frame the whole table looks like a still life someone forgot to clear.
Que preguiça, my mother would say, watching me sit here doing nothing useful with an entire Tuesday. She wouldn’t mean it as an insult. Below the palace, unbothered by centuries, I let the food go lukewarm and the fizz go flat, and consider that this, doing absolutely nothing on purpose, might be the only souvenir worth carrying out of here.
