Five weeks in one town instead of five

The scrap of paper had been torn from something. Maybe a receipt, maybe a note left by someone before me. The first date was written in blue pen. Below it, the same date crossed out and a new one underneath, in the same hand.

I have been in Vila Nova de Milfontes since the end of July. That was supposed to be a stop of six or seven days, a place to rest between buses. I stayed longer than planned.

The room is on the second floor of a house that smells of detergent and fried onions. The bed takes up most of the space. There is a window that opens onto a narrow street. Across the street a white wall with a cat who sits on it every morning. I started counting days, then stopped.

The first extension happened in the hallway. I asked the landlady, a woman in her sixties who wears her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead, if I could stay another week. She wrote a date on the paper and pinned it to a corkboard near the front door. That was it. No form, no deposit, no discussion about the rate.

The second time she did not even take the paper down. She unpinned it, crossed out the old date with a single line, wrote the new one below it, and pinned it back. The pin was the same one. She did not say much. I did not say much either.

She kept the hallway dark. The corkboard had other scraps on it, names and dates in different hands, some of them curled at the edges from the humidity. Mine was the only one with a correction.

Once she brought me a plate of boiled potatoes with parsley. She knocked, set the plate on the desk, and left. I did not speak. The potatoes were still warm. I ate them standing up.

I think the thing that kept me here was not the town itself but the absence of a reason to leave. I had thought about going south. Everyone said the buses were easier from there. But the buses ran from here too, just less often, and I had already learned the schedule. The woman at the café downstairs knew my order. The figs at the fruit stall near the church were still coming in, and I had already written about them once, when everything here still felt temporary.

I walked a lot. Not far. The town is small enough to cross in twenty minutes without stopping. I stopped often. There was a bench near the old fort where I sat and watched the river. The water was never the same colour twice.

After a while the days stopped having edges. I walked the same route to the harbour in the morning. Sat on a low wall. Watched a fishing boat come in or not come in. I ate at one place twice a day, a small restaurant with plastic chairs and a man who grilled sardines on a metal stand out front. The sardines were better than anything I had eaten in weeks, and I kept ordering them without thinking about it.

Most evenings I went back to the room and sat by the window. The street below filled with people walking to dinner, their voices carrying up in Portuguese and French and sometimes English. The cat across the street watched them with an unchanged expression. I read on my phone until the battery died. Then I sat in the dark. I fell asleep.

A German woman at the next table asked me one evening if I was on holiday. I said I wasn’t sure. She looked at me as if I had answered in the wrong language. Maybe I had.

There is a word in German, Sitzfleisch, which means the ability to sit still and endure something. I thought about it that night. It was not quite right. I was not enduring anything. I was just here.

I don’t have a good reason for this. The room is not special. The town is not special, or it is, but in a way I cannot separate from the fact that I stayed. Five weeks is not a long time. It is long enough to stop being a guest. The landlady stopped knocking before she came in to change the towels. The cat on the wall across the street did not run when I opened the window. None of this means anything. I keep thinking it might.

If you’re thinking about it

• September is when Portuguese families leave and foreign tourists thin out, but mornings are still cool enough for a walk before nine
• Buses from here run less often than from Lagos or Evora, so check the schedule before committing to a stay
• Rooms in the residential streets behind the main square cost less than anything near the riverfront
• Skip the restaurants with menus in four languages and walk two streets back
• Bring a light jacket, the Atlantic wind picks up after sunset even in late summer

Next place, probably. I haven’t decided.