The floor was warm before I opened my eyes. Not the air, not the walls. Just the tiles, when I swung my feet off the mattress and reached for a light I never turned on.
I have been in Vila Nova de Milfontes since late July. The room sits above a bakery on a narrow street that smells of yeast and diesel in equal parts. I booked it for ten days. It is now the third week of August.
The ovens start before four. I know this because the floor tells me. A slow heat that rises through the tiles into the soles of my feet, and by the time I register it the smell of bread has filled the stairwell. The room itself stays cool until nearly five. Then it flips. By six it is the hottest place in the building.
The room has a single window that faces the street and a bed that takes up most of the floor. There is a chair in the corner with my backpack on it and a shelf above the sink with three cups, though I only use one. The walls are thin. I can hear the couple next door when they come home late, their keys in the lock, the way the door sticks before it opens. They are quiet after that.
I stopped setting an alarm in the second week. There was no point. The heat on the floor did the work, and I would lie there listening to the sounds below. Trays hitting a metal rack. A radio playing something I could not place. The woman who runs the bakery moving between oven and counter with a rhythm that sounded like it had been the same for years.
She has never asked me anything except once. I came down the stairs at half five and she was standing at the counter with a tray of broa still too hot to touch. She said something and I said sim. She looked at me for a moment. Then she laughed, not unkindly, and went back to work. I still do not know what she asked. I think it might have been whether I wanted coffee, because she set a small cup on the counter a few minutes later without asking again. Or maybe that was separate. I never worked out which part was the question and which part was the answer.
The bread here is dense and slightly sour. I buy a loaf every second day from the counter, and she wraps it in paper without looking up. She has a way of folding the paper that takes three movements. I have watched her do it perhaps fifteen times and I could not replicate any of them. I walked to Almograve last week along the coast, and the whole way there I kept thinking about the floor. About how I would be standing on it again by morning. I came back on the morning bus from Odemira and the driver let me off at the corner without me asking. He just nodded at the street. He knew which one.
I think about the rhythm of it. Seven years of night shifts in the ICU, and then this. A different kind of waking. The heat in the floor is the same every morning, and I have stopped being surprised by it. I do not miss the alarms. I do not miss what I left behind. I miss the certainty of knowing what each hour was for, and I am not sure the floor has replaced that, or whether it needs to.
If you’re thinking about it
- Ask for a room above a bakery only if you sleep deep and wake early.
- The coast path to Almograve is flat and well-marked but bring more water than you think you need.
- Buses to and from Odemira run on weekdays but not on Sundays.
- Skip the restaurants on the riverfront at dinner and eat at the tasca one street back.
- Bring earplugs for the first week only. After that you stop needing them.
Anyway. The coffee here is good.
