Page 33 of Cava with My Colleague

I’ve had it for twelve years, bought from a vintage shop in Nashville on a work trip where I had a free afternoon and nowhere specific to be. It came with half a cartridge of film already loaded. The first picture I took on it was of myself, in the shop mirror, squinting slightly into the flash. I still have it somewhere in the collection.

The collection moves with me everywhere. Two shoeboxes now, taped shut and bubble-wrapped, in whatever city I’m calling home. Twelve years of Polaroids: myself in front of things, mostly, sometimes my friends, and occasionally a person I met along the way who agreed to be documented. A woman in Kyoto who shared her umbrella. A retired fisherman in Lisbon who wanted to know where I was from and then told me I was very far from home, like this was news. A family in Budapest who invited me to sit with them at a festival and spent the evening teaching me words I have since forgotten.

I take the tourist pictures with my phone. I save the Polaroid for things I want to keep.

The fried dough smell demands my attention, so I follow it for four more blocks before I find the source: a woman at a folding table, frying something on a portable burner, selling portions wrapped in paper to a small queue of locals. I join the queue. I don’t know what it is. That’s fine. I pay two euros and eat one standing on the pavement—doughy, hot, a little crispy at the edges—and it’s exactly right. When I ask the woman what it is, she smiles and tells me “buñuelos.”

“Delicious,” I say in Spanish and the corner of her eyes wrinkle in pleasure.

This. This is why I travel.

I’m reading a street sign when someone falls into step beside me.

“You’re going the wrong way,” Carlos says.

I turn around. He’s holding a coffee, dressed for the June heat in dark trousers and a white linen shirt with the sleeves already rolled up. He looks like he’s been up for hours.

“Are you following me?”

He points just up the road that I came down. “I was in that cafe. The market is that way,” he says, nodding in the opposite direction.

“Who says I’m going to the market?”

“Maybe you weren’t. But you should.”

He’s right about the market, which I refuse to acknowledge out loud but which is evident from the moment we walk in. The Mercado Central is vast and domed and completely overwhelming in the best possible way—a mosaic ceiling over a thousand stalls, the morning rush in full swing, the air thick with the smell of fish and citrus and the specific richness of good jamón.

I take phone pictures. The pyramids of tomatoes. The fish laid out on ice. The olive stall where Carlos makes me try three different varieties before he’ll let me buy any.

“This one,” I say, pointing.

“That one is fine.” He picks up a different container. “This one is better.”

“You haven’t let me taste that one.”

“You don’t need to. Trust me.”

“I am going to keep a running tally,” I tell him, “of every time you say trust me.”

The corners of his mouth do the thing they do when he’s suppressing a smile. I’m getting good at spotting it, which is its own problem—the fact that I’ve been watching his mouth closely enough to catalog its habits. I file this away next to the cologne and the rolled sleeves and the way he says trust me like it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of me. I suppose that, whatever our differences, trusting a Spaniard with food choices isn’t too much of a stretch.

We leave the market with olives, a paper cone of almonds, and an argument about paella. Carlos has opinions and is really mad when I say I’ve made it before with chorizo. He tilts his head toward the plaza. “La Basílica de la Virgen de los Desamparados is just here, if you want to see it.”

I go still for a moment. Then: “Sure.”

It takes us a few minutes to walk over. I study him as he leads.

I finally get the nerve to ask. “Are you religious?”

Carlos grunts. “No.” Then he looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “Are you?”

“Definitely not.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“My parents were really religious. Like—really. When things went wrong they prayed. Me and my sisters were raised to be obedient wives and bear children, which is not me.”

My parents’ faith was so strong that they often ignored what was right in front of them—their ill daughter, for example.