What a spare room in Alfama taught me about trust

Sofia asked me to help with her Instagram for six days in exchange for a room in Alfama. What she actually gave me was a crash course in what it means to share a life, even briefly, with a stranger.

The apartment is on the third floor of a building that has been there since before the earthquake. The tiles in the kitchen are original. The windows look onto a narrow street where cats sleep on the ledges. You wake up to the sound of trams.

I am a writer, not a social media person. But writing captions for a photographer who actually takes good photographs turns out to be interesting work. Sofia’s photos are quiet and observational — the kind that require a caption that doesn’t explain too much. We spent the first evening going through her archive, me asking why she had taken each one, her answering, me making notes. By the end I understood her voice well enough to write in it.

The arrangement was simple: she gave me the room, I helped with her feed. No contract. No invoice. No platform taking a cut of an arrangement that happened entirely between two people.

On the fourth day she introduced me to three other people she knew in Lisbon — a filmmaker, a developer working on a startup, and a woman who ran a ceramics studio out of her apartment. We had dinner in her kitchen. The conversation was the kind you have when everyone is doing something they actually care about and nobody is performing.

I’ve stayed in hotels and hostels and Airbnbs. None of them have ever introduced me to people worth knowing. That is the one thing accommodation has never offered, until it started being offered by actual human beings with actual spare rooms and the disposition to share them.

The couch exists. The people who have one are worth finding.