Sintra at eight in the morning, and the fog has decided to stay. It sits low in the pines, thick enough that the road disappears twenty meters ahead. Somewhere up there is a palace, yellow and red, the kind of thing that photographs itself. I can’t see it. I’m not sure I mind.
The eucalyptus is doing something to the air. Sharp, green, a little medicinal. My father used to boil the leaves when we had colds, the whole kitchen in Milan smelling like this exact fog. Funny how a smell can move you three thousand kilometers without asking permission. I load the last roll of Portra I’m carrying and don’t rush it. The light meter is useless in this. I guess instead.
A dog barks somewhere below, then stops, like even the dog agreed it wasn’t worth the effort. Water drips off the branches in a rhythm that isn’t quite a rhythm. My boots are wet through. There’s a bench here, damp, and I sit anyway because some mornings ask you to be uncomfortable a little longer than usual. Que saudade, my mother would say, for a place she hadn’t even left yet. I understand her better with every year I don’t have an address.
The shutter clicks once. Just the trees, the white nothing behind them, a shape that might be a wall or might be more fog. I won’t know until it’s developed, weeks from now, in some other country, some other light. That’s the deal with film. You make peace with delay. You make peace with not knowing what you actually caught.
People ask why I don’t just wait for the fog to clear, walk up, get the postcard shot of the palace with its towers cutting into blue sky. I could. It’ll still be there tomorrow, probably better lit, definitely more crowded. But this, the wet stone smell, the eucalyptus doing its quiet work, the palace reduced to a rumor, this is the version of Sintra nobody sends home. Maybe that’s why I like it.
The fog hasn’t lifted. I’ve stopped checking. Somewhere behind it a nineteenth-century king built himself a fairytale, and it’s patient, it can wait for me. I finish the coffee, cold now, and let the morning stay exactly as unfinished as it wants to be.
