I spotted Romanesque architecture.
“Wait, stop.”
“Bathroom?”
“No, a church.”
Kepa’s look suggests that Spain is full of churches.
My eyes say: ‘Humor me.’
He slaps the turn signal, and we descend the off-ramp.
La Mancha is austere—the grays, browns, and blacks of the painter Goya, plain and humorless. The men in their white shirts buttoned to the top, framed by dusty black suits, peer starkly. Their faces say: You Are Foreign To Us.
We enter the church, where black-veiled women are saying a novena. Their cyclic prayers rise, echoing in and out of phase, like incense.
It awes us.
