inside a covered mercado, corrugated metal roof low overhead, a zinc-topped bar counter running the length of one wall, crates of wet vegetables stacked behind it, a single strip of fluorescent light buzzing above the bottles — Rain hammering corrugated metal overhead — she has just set down her coffee cup and lifted her face slightly, not toward anything, listening
The rain came without announcement. One moment the street was dry and the next it wasn't, and I was standing outside the cemetery gate with no useful decision available to me.
Small white ceramic cup of café solo on a zinc counter, saucer with a single sugar packet, rain noise implied by the corrugated metal roof overhead
I went left. There was a covered mercado I'd half-noticed on the walk down — the kind with a corrugated roof and a smell that tells you it's been selling wet things for decades. I sat at the only bar inside it and ordered coffee because there was nothing else to order. The rain on the metal roof was total. Conversation at the other end of the counter stopped, then resumed at a different register.
It passed in forty minutes. I went back.
at the threshold of the cemetery's interior — a low arched gate within a taller outer wall, both archways visible simultaneously, a doorway within a doorway, orange tree branches coming through the inner arch from the other side — She has passed through the outer arch and paused inside the cavity between the two gates — not yet through, not still outside — her head turned back toward the street she came from
The Cementerio de San Fernando was letting in the overcast light the way old places do — evenly, without preference. The orange trees inside had been left alone long enough to become themselves. Too much shade, branches crossing into each other's space. No one was tending to that.
The Feria noise from Los Remedios came across the river as something almost subaudible. A low register I had to listen for to find.
in a cemetery's older rear section, low whitewashed walls between burial niches, oval ceramic portraits inset into stone at irregular intervals, orange trees unpruned enough that branches cross and close out most of the flat overcast sky — She has stopped moving — hand raised but not yet touching an oval ceramic portrait, a woman in a dark dress, 1940s, fired into the stone
I had not expected the ceramic portraits. An older section, toward the back — oval photographs fired onto stone, faces from the 1940s and 50s mostly, the same families returning plot after plot. A woman in a dark dress. A man in a hat. Small children who grew up and came back here to be buried with their parents.
Oval ceramic portrait medallion fired onto a stone grave marker — a woman in a dark dress, 1950s, Spanish script below her name, orange tree branches crossing behind the stone
I stood there longer than I planned to.
The linen trousers were damp at the hem from the rain. I noticed that and then stopped noticing it.
A small plate of unnamed fried things — golden, irregular, resting on a square of paper — on a narrow counter ledge at a Nervión café at dusk
In Nervión at dusk I found a café and ate something fried at the counter without asking what it was. The kitchen was just behind a gap in the wall. The frying sound and the Feria sounds outside competed for the same frequency, and neither won.
On the walk back, a bird was sitting very still on the arm of a wet iron bench.
What she wore
day3-scene1
I wore the linen trousers because it was early and I didn't want to think about it, and then I spent the whole morning thinking about other things, which was the point.
day3-scene2
The blazer felt right for a place where people had dressed for things that mattered — I didn't want to show up in nothing.
day3-scene3
I switched into the skirt when the evening started because Nervión at dusk is a different city and I wanted to dress for the one that was actually there.