Letter to a Stranger | BARCELONA, SPAIN
You clung to the cliff above us, your brow darkened by smog and shit-splattered, your feet splayed but sure. I’d seen your face before. The same weary expression hangs on the faces of the mules who stand, shifting from hoof to glittered hoof while they wait for some family to carry down Bourbon Street as you carried this one into Egypt—Joseph’s son at your head, Joseph behind, Mary side-saddle, holding the baby son of God. It’s a jaded look: your ears loosely back with more boredom than ire, an eye anxious only for the chance to rest.
Of course you were tired of us, we sweaty masses, gawping. Over the last century, we’ve proliferated, so that this year my own family were only three of nineteen million tapas-happy pilgrims standing beneath you, robot tour guides in our ears. Those of us prescient enough to buy advance tickets had been allowed onto the basilica grounds in 15-minute batches, corralled through a series of chutes as if we were in a slaughter house tented in white vinyl, except the scary men beyond the barriers were there to take away our knives. My daughter’s rocks—two tumbled bits of tufa she kept in her pockets—were briefly considered for menace, but in the end they let us through.
Our numbers can be explained, in part, by the fact that none of us made this pilgrimage on the back of a donkey. In sixteen hours, my family had slept our way from New Orleans to London, eaten a Heathrow rarebit, and flown on to Barcelona, where, to deliver us at the inn where a room was waiting, our taxi driver had backed a hundred meters down an alley designed not for cars but for you. But a donkey cannot transport a person across an ocean in sixteen hours, and so you are no longer a conveyance. Perhaps you prefer it that way.
As I looked at you, I thought about all this: your sure-footedness, your carbon footprint, the obsolescence you hadn’t planned. How animals like yourself, once essential, were now being called a nuisance on the bridle path in Central Park—all that manure! Travelling at great speed in our metal boxes, we no longer feel your spine move under our seat bones as you carry us down dirt roads, nor do we walk at your head, having burdened you with baggage, leading you to water, urging you on. You are to be looked at now, and looked at only, the subject of TikToks in which, miniaturized, you scamper around inside some trad-wife’s kitchen—all that manure!—or bray on an Australian terrace for the likes. Shorn of your function, you have become abstracted, no longer a known animal—soft-furred and bristle-maned, that dorsal stripe recalling your wildness—but the idea of an animal, an embodied memory of a more pastoral time.
So, looking, I found myself suddenly in tears when the automated voice told me you were a real donkey, once upon a time. Your name was Margarita.
OFF ASSIGNMENT | August 11, 2026