Sunday Mass in Toledo

“No other story of mine troubled me and hurt me so much while I wrote it—based on my trip with Boris to Spain. So close to the story of my kind, to persecution and inquisitorial bonfires, were the most innocent ‘tourist impressions’ that we usually encounter when following well-trodden routes from guidebooks and travel websites. How strange: for the first time, being in a country, I don’t feel like a tourist at all, and I passionately absorb signs of life as if from a completely foreign country—kindred features in the faces of random people, inhaling the longing of long-since weathered fates of my people.
Five hundred years of exile… A long history of return. A long road of no return.”

Most Spanish women have magnificent, well-shaped hips. A Spaniard may have elegant feet and hands, a slender waist, fragile shoulders, unassuming breasts—but hips are surely present and, be sure of it, hips with excellent fullness. It’s not the sort of poles that models move on in podium shows—this is real female flesh. Look at Velázquez.

For two weeks we wandered through the provinces of Spain—Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Castile and Catalonia—and all this time, on the streets, in taverns and bars, at bus stations and train stations, in hotel corridors—before our eyes paraded, floated, and pranced various-sized but unmistakably built cattle of purebred Andalusian mares.

There’s nothing insulting in this definition. I even have such a build myself, since my ancestors came from Spain, and I myself resemble, taken together, all Spanish women.

For example, on a recent trip to America, everyone took me for their own—"all the Latinos." A taxi driver in Dallas, hearing that I don’t speak English (I immediately tell every American taxi driver that I don’t speak English so they won’t start chatting), nodded and—like a relative—switched to Spanish.

— I don’t speak Spanish, — I awkwardly added.

He looked at me carefully in the mirror.

— Does the señora not speak Spanish?! — he asked. — Then what language does the señora speak?

— Russian, — I replied, feeling like a fraud. He looked at me in the mirror even more distrustfully. He fell silent.

— It’s the first time I’ve seen a Spanish señora who doesn’t speak Spanish, — he finally said, resolutely.