The first time, everything is new, and newness fills the whole eye. One sees the beach, the stone, the river, the colour of the water. One takes a great many pictures. One carries away an image of the place, sharp and incomplete, like the portrait of someone met only once.
The second time, newness gives way. One notices what haste had hidden: at what hour the boat leaves, from which side the wind arrives in the afternoon, where the shade appears first. The place stops being scenery and begins to have habits. Those who return begin to have their own as well: a stretch of sand, a stone to sit on, a path they prefer.
There is a difference between visiting a place and frequenting it, and it does not lie in the number of days. It lies in what one expects. The visitor wants the place to surprise him. The one who keeps coming wants the place to stay as it was, and is glad when it does. It is one thing to look for what one has never seen; another, to check that what one loves is still there.
Portuguese has a good word for this: costume, the habit of something. One has the habit of a place as one has the habit of a person. One knows its ways, its bad hours, the days when it would rather not talk. At Piçarras, the habit is that of the sheltered sea in the cove. At Milagres, of the reef that shows and vanishes. At Maraú, of the crossing. At Piraputanga, of the stone that changes colour.
Returning also changes the one who returns. Each year one arrives a little different, and the place, which has not changed, serves as a measure. One remembers what one was thinking there the year before, what was worrying and no longer worries. Few things offer that yardstick. A childhood garden does. So does a place one returns to.
And then there are the others. Those who always return end up crossing paths with those who always return. First a nod, then a name, then a whole afternoon that nobody arranged. One does not choose this company; it forms, with the slowness of things that last. One day one realises that the journey is no longer only to the place: it is also to these people.
The question that matters is not where to go. It is where to return.
None of this can be hurried. There is no short cut to the third time, nor to the tenth. What one can do is begin, and begin early: the years a place asks for can only be paid in years.
So the question that matters is not where to go. It is where to return. The first is answered with a map. The second takes time, and each of us answers it once, perhaps twice, in a lifetime.
Other Notes
The crossing
The Maraú Peninsula is reached by water. The journey begins on the quay.
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What the cove has kept
Before the summer visitors there was a chapel, a whaling station and the first farmed mussels in the state.
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The red stone
At Piraputanga, the ridge, the river and the railway run side by side.
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