Before the first stall opened, the square sounded like a box of cutlery being shaken. Metal legs clattered against paving stones; voices crossed and collided. I stood by the noticeboard with my notebook and a map of the stalls, trying to make a list of what was happening. The volunteers seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. One dragged a table through a gap too narrow for it; another was already carrying it back. I wrote: disorganised.

Then Ines, whose sleeves were rolled to the elbow, stopped beside me. “You’re holding that upside down,” she said, and turned the map in my hands. She did not smile, exactly, but the crease beside her mouth softened. Around us, the square kept shifting. A gust lifted a canvas corner; two people caught it without a word. Someone moved a stack of crates out of the way. Nobody called this a plan. They simply made room for the next thing that needed doing.

I tried to help with a folding table. It buckled at the middle and caught my coat. Ines steadied one end while a man I had not noticed held the other. “On three,” she said. The table opened with a sharp click. I had been looking for a person in charge, someone to impose order on the noise. Instead, the work passed from hand to hand, and the noise began to sound less like confusion than conversation.

By the time the first customers arrived, the square had become a row of bright awnings and carefully spaced tables. The volunteers stood behind them, not as a line of organisers but as people still watching for what might need moving. I crossed out disorganised. In its place I wrote: ready. The word looked neat on the page. The square, I realised, had never needed to.