The first time I heard it I was still half asleep. A deep tone, then nothing for a few seconds, then another.
I was in Vila Nova de Milfontes by then, nearly a week. The room I rent sits close enough to the church that the sound comes through the shutters like something heavy placed on the floor.
It rings at twenty to twelve. Not noon. Not on the hour. I checked my phone three days running because I thought my watch was wrong. It wasn’t.
By the second week I had started to wait for it. I’d be writing something or hanging laundry on the line across the balcony, and I’d hear that first stroke and my hands would slow down. The dog outside the bakery did the same thing — he lifted his head each time, ears forward, then settled back onto the tiles as if nothing had happened. I wrote about that dog once, in a post I barely remember writing, but I never mentioned the bell.
I asked the woman who runs the fruit stall on the corner. She said it was a call to prayer. I asked the man fixing chairs outside a shuttered shop. He said it marked the lunch break for the fishermen. The third person was a woman sitting on a bench near the river, reading. She said it used to ring at noon but the mechanism broke years ago and nobody fixed it. She didn’t look up from her book.
Three answers. None of them the same.
I stopped asking after that. I sit on the balcony now and just listen for it. The sound arrives and I count the strokes, though I’ve never kept track of whether the number is always the same. I think it is. Or maybe I’ve decided it is. I keep meaning to ask someone.
That’s all I wrote down.
