The crate was blue once. You can see it under the salt crust, a patch near the bottom where a shoe has rubbed it clean.
I’m in Vila Nova de Milfontes. The harbour wall is where I end up most evenings, feet against the warm stone, watching the river shift with the tide.
There’s a man who sits on the crate every evening. He folds himself onto it with his back to the harbour office and his face toward the river. The crate fits one person, barely. I have never seen him arrive. I’ve never seen him leave.
He is simply there when I come down the path. Gone when I look up and realise the light has shifted. He wears a linen shirt, ironed, with a tear at the collar. His hands rest on his knees, palms up. Sometimes he holds bread, tearing it slow and dropping pieces to the water. The fish come up for it, silver and quick, and he watches them with his head tilted to one side.
I sat three metres from him last night. He didn’t look at me. The tide was going out and the estuary smell was strong, the same mineral sharpness I noticed when I first got here and wrote about the river mouth in August. He tore his bread. The fish came back. A boy on a bicycle rode past and rang his bell twice for nothing. The man smiled at the water.
I forgot to take a photo. My phone stayed in my pocket. The bread was gone by the time I thought about it.
I keep meaning to ask someone about him. The woman with the cooler by the steps would know. She seems to watch the whole wall. But each evening I sit down and the question goes somewhere I can’t reach, and then the water is loud against the stone and it’s too late to ask anything.
I’ll tell you the rest if I remember it.
