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A double on the stairs. A message she never wrote. |
According to her notes, a week went by after the Roman Theater.
She writes about tests, work, anxious students. And about herself, going through the motions on autopilot. But the pull hadn’t stopped. In the middle of all that noise, one thing kept surfacing: Panorâmico de Monsanto.
She says it came from a guide’s whisper. But also that it was already there, echoing before she even heard it aloud.
The dreams started getting worse around the same time. Repeating symbols: spiral staircases, a formless sky, windows that seemed to breathe. She climbs and climbs. And then hears her own voice — but not quite her own — asking:
“Quantas vezes já?”
How many times now?
She always wakes up exhausted.
As if her body stayed behind…
…but she didn’t.
She thought about telling someone.
A friend, Margarida. Someone who always listened.
But how do you explain this?
That the camera is speaking. That it's leaving messages. That it’s leading her somewhere.
She imagined how it would sound.
Burnout. Delirium. Drugs, maybe. Or just too much time alone.
She wrote: Maybe they’re right. Maybe it’s all just in my head.
In the end, she didn’t tell anyone.
"Not yet," she wrote.
Instead, she stayed with the notebook. "It can hold everything, even the things you can’t say out loud."
Red ink in the margin, like a warning:
"Nem tudo que responde deve ser ouvido."
Not everything that answers should be heard.
And then… something changed.
She made a plan.
Wrote everything down. Created a document. Drafted an email.
If she went missing, if something happened, someone had to know.
She addressed it to Margarida.
No explanation. Just… proof. A breadcrumb. A final signal.
The message would be sent after a few days of silence.
At the end of the entry, she circled back to her friend’s name.
She believed Margarida would understand.
That she’d know this wasn’t madness.
Just belief, carried too far.
And at the bottom of the page, she drew something.
An eye, more detailed than the others.
It closely resembles the one she drew on the Moleskine’s first page.
The iris, the shading… it watches something just outside the frame.
Beneath it, one last line in red:
"Um dos olhos vê. O outro lembra."
One of the eyes sees. The other remembers.
It took her a while to go.
She admits it, says she was tired. Afraid.
But she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
And over time, Lisbon itself began to feel like it was pushing her there.
The city, she wrote, was guiding her, like the path had already been drawn before she ever stepped into it.
“Estou aqui ainda?”
“Am I still here?”
The question appears like a crack in her own thoughts.
The Panorâmico was just as she imagined: abandoned, immense, filled with echoes that didn’t seem to come from any specific direction.
Graffiti covered every surface.
The floor cracked beneath her steps.
Light leaked through broken windows in strange, impossible angles.
But the worst part was something else.
She writes about the silence, or the lack of sound.
Only wind. Birds in the distance. Her footsteps.
Even her breath felt out of place inside that building.
Then she saw it: the stained-glass mural.
She says it was impossible to ignore — massive, luminous, vibrating with color.
The figures seemed suspended in time, their arms open, trying to grasp something that wasn’t there.
She stood there for a long time. Just observing.
Then she took a photo.
And waited.
That’s when she heard footsteps on the stairs.
She turned.
And saw herself.
Or thought she did.
The figure was moving slowly. Head lowered. Same coat. Same camera in hand.
But the eyes…
The eyes weren’t hers.
She says the figure looked at her briefly. A blank, neutral gaze.
Then continued climbing, disappearing behind the curve of the staircase.
She ran after it, but when she reached the corner…
Nothing. Empty.
Like no one had ever been there.
She returned to the stained glass.
The Polaroid was ready.
The image showed the mural. The violet-red background. The figure with outstretched limbs, like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
And in the foreground, spiraling across the photo’s border in her own handwriting:
“Quantas vezes já?”
How many times now?
She says she stood frozen, unable to breathe.
There’s no memory of writing those words.
And she didn’t have a pen.
Still, there it was: her script, her pressure on the page.
But it wasn’t her.
“Era a minha letra. Mas não era eu.”
It was my handwriting. But it wasn’t me.
She starts to spiral, not in fear, but in questioning.
Is all of this repeating?
Is she being led… or overwritten?
She wonders if the camera isn’t showing her what’s there, but what’s beneath it.
Or what was left behind.
“E se há camadas por onde eu já andei sem saber?”
What if there are layers I’ve already walked through without knowing?
Her final pages fracture.
Red ink takes over. The handwriting loosens. The structure dissolves.
“Talvez eu tenha estado aqui antes.”
Maybe I’ve been here before.
“Talvez ainda vá estar.”
Maybe I still will be.
Around those words, other fragments swirl, written like thoughts she didn’t want to finish:
sou eu?
já fui?
quem sou?
quantas vezes já?
She doesn’t sign it.
She doesn’t close the thought.
It just ends, like she stepped out mid-sentence.
Leaving behind only the spiral.
Her Moleskine pages, her notes in the margins of books, fragments of sentences, torn images — all of it.
If there’s a map to follow, it’s there.
Here is the door to Isabel S.’s soul.
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