Majestic Café

This guide to the Majestic Café in Porto traces the room from its glittering opening in 1922 through decades of decline, to an anonymous regular in the early 1990s: a broke young English teacher who spent her afternoons at a corner table, ordering the cheapest coffee she could, and filling a notebook with the opening chapters of a story about an orphan and a school of wizards. Look up at the statues of Diana and Bacchus that watched over her scribbling.