at the far end of the morning flea market on a long flat promenade, a postcard stall half-assembled, rubber-banded stacks arranged on a folding trestle table, the grey flat morning light giving the scene no shadows at all — she has walked past the stall and stopped at its far edge, not looking at it directly, her body stilled as if she is listening to the system she cannot read
The man with the postcards had a system I couldn't read from the outside.
A rubber-banded stack of postcards fanned slightly open — Barcelona skyline visible on the top card, Spanish handwritten city labels on a paper slip tucked beneath the band
He was sorting by city, I could see that much — Barcelona in one rubber-banded stack, somewhere coastal in another — but the principle beneath that was his alone. He was not ready for customers. He was still becoming the stall. I watched him from the far end of the Alameda for a while before walking toward him, and then past him, and then back again from the other end. He didn't notice. Or he did and chose not to.
By then it was barely nine and the market was still assembling itself. Vendors unfolding trestle legs, a woman in house slippers arranging ceramics on a cloth she'd smoothed three times. The grey light made everything the same temperature. Nothing was competing. The olive linen wasn't asking anything of the morning either, so that was right.
I bought nothing. I wanted to. The postcards specifically — not for the images but for the system I couldn't understand.
inside a nameless bakery on a narrow whitewashed street, at a bare counter of worn zinc, behind which a glass case holds fried pastries, the back wall tiled in white ceramic brick to shoulder height — honey has run down the inside of her wrist; she holds it raised, forearm at forty-five degrees, not yet dealing with it, watching it
Calle Feria was narrower than I expected, or the tote made it feel that way. The bakery had no chairs and no name I could read from the door. I ate something fried and soaked in honey standing at the counter, bag against my hip, watching the woman behind the glass case do the same thing she'd been doing before I arrived and would do after. The honey went down the inside of my wrist. I dealt with it.
A pestiño or tejeringos soaked in honey on a small paper sheet, honey trailing off one edge onto the counter
The two Roman columns of the Alameda lit from below at dusk, lamplight pooling at their bases against a deepening blue-grey sky
The Feria is over. The city is not performing that anymore. In the afternoon the streets had a different quality — not empty, just unpressured. By evening, back on the Alameda, the vendors were gone and the columns at the top were lit from below. Two men were talking under one of them, leaning into it the way people lean into things they've been leaning into for years.
at the upper end of a long promenade lined with tall Roman-style stone columns on low plinths, the columns lit from ground-level tungsten spots, their forms doubled imprecisely in wet grey stone pavement still holding last night's rain — she has stopped walking and turned back to look at two men leaning against the nearest column, her body mid-pivot, weight not yet settled
The pavement was still wet from earlier, and the columns were reflected in it, imprecisely.
What she wore
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I wore the olive trousers because the market light at 9am doesn't ask anything of you, and I wanted to be dressed accordingly.
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The silk was practical — I was warm by ten — and the tote was against my hip the whole time because the street gets narrow fast.
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I came back to the Alameda in the evening because it made a different kind of sense with fewer people in it, and the cardigan was enough for the temperature change.