Spanish steps, p.13
Spanish Steps, page 13
Not the medieval pilgrims, at least not openly. Keen to bolster the sin-list, and so maintain a healthy stock of penitent potential pilgrims, throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Church authorities made it more and more difficult to avoid carnal wrongdoing. Sex was proscribed for forty days before a major religious festival, and for five before communion. Ditto on Thursdays (the day Jesus was taken prisoner), and obviously Fridays (when he was crucified). Sunday was clearly right out, and in fact why not Saturday (out of respect for the Virgin) and Monday (in honour of the dead). But hold on to your codpiece, Mr Tuesday Casanova: no unseemliness in the dark, certainly no nudity and none of that foreplay filth. And now I’d like you to stand up, hand on heart and before God, and repeat after me: ‘I pledge to douse lustful feelings by practising conjugal relations only whilst extremely tired and ideally half-asleep.’
Yet it could have been worse. The Cathars were a twelfth-century French sect who concluded that Satan, not God, had created the world, and thus reviled procreation with an unusually righteous passion. Forget actually having sex; they couldn’t bring themselves even to eat anything created by it, directly or indirectly. No meat, no eggs, no milk. Oddly enough, they didn’t last long.
With the sun setting off across a pure blue sky, the second week of my pilgrimage began as had the first. May was bursting out all over: here was a vision of natural fecundity to make a Cathar weep. On the path out of Villatuerte poppies blurted en masse from the well-watered hedgerows, though I could never get Shinto to pose fetchingly before them. He hated pandering to the picturesque, another dogged trait which like his dining habits I had to admire him for. Every time I tried to line him up for a photo by a sun-stippled old horse trough or a walnut-faced widow on her doorstep he’d just saunter onwards and out of shot. If he couldn’t he’d very subtly cock his ears and limbs, somehow approximating the symptoms of rickets and abused dementia so effectively that almost every photograph came out like one of the Donkey Sanctuary’s ‘before’ shots.
Welsh Julie walked with me to Estella, and I forgave that appetite-shrivelling dinner-table performance just outside the town, where with her energetic vocal assistance I somehow persuaded Shinto to clatter across a bridge that seemed the very encapsulation of his phobia: a long and steeply pitched arch of wooden slats. I assumed he was off his head on a fearless baguette high, but a couple of days later I read in the Liber Sancti Jacobi that this very crossing was notorious for brigands pulling the old poisoned-river horse-flaying scam: ‘We watered our mounts in the stream, and had no sooner done so than two of them died; these the Navarrese bandits skinned on the spot.’
We fairly trotted into Estella, laboriously reining Shinto in to stop for a jolly chat with the little and large Dutch couple, rebuttoning each other’s epaulettes outside a church containing St Andrew’s shoulder blade. The town is known for its ecclesiastical structures, and all adhered to the regional stereotype: Romanesque and closed. ‘I went to a wedding in Holland once,’ Julie said after we’d left the Netherlanders to their mutual grooming. ‘At the reception they played this video showing off the new matrimonial home, and in the bathroom there’s the bride and groom, having it off on the toilet.’
Julie was staying on, waiting for at least one church to open, but Shinto was on a roll, a bread roll, and the two of us headed off through the uphill outskirts alone. Though not for long, as a couple of clicks further on the camino passed a monastery, and attached to this monastery was a bodega, and outside the bodega was a little stainless-steel tap, and when you turned that tap red wine came out of it. Free red wine, La Fuente del Vino; the pilgrim’s wine fountain. ‘Wow!’ said the normally restrained Confraternity guide.
On the one hand it was only 11.30 a.m., but on the other, the wine was free. It was already very hot, but the wine was free. Ahead lay a steady 7-kilometre climb (free wine), with another 13 beyond that to the next refugio (wine: free). Oh, well. I only had two cupfuls. There. An hour later I washed down my boccadillo with the half-litre I’d hosed into a water bottle.
Setting forth into the after-lunch world was a weirdly dislocating experience, a little like coming out of the cinema into bright sunshine. To take wine on a hot morning is to get messed up on drugs; I had changed my brain at the wrong time of day.
Yesterday’s mud was already cracking the path into ochred hexagons like the receding foreshore of Lake Chad, and in the wine haze beyond it farmers tended distant vines or bounced towards the horizon on big tractors. A sun-burnished hermitage on a hilltop, the hidebound skeleton of a dog, a peculiar Moorish well. But no pilgrims, and soon no nobody.
It was between the hours of 3 and 7 p.m. that I first properly contemplated the full scale of what I had undertaken: trying to walk all the way across a very large country, with a very large animal who didn’t really want to. Shinto rarely went well after lunch, and when the vista ahead opened into a windless, gently sloped enormity of russet earth, he lowered his gaze and his pace until I was barely shuffling along. Geographically accurate as it was to describe Los Arcos, my destination, as the next town up the road, angling my glassy gaze at the fearsome void ahead this statement seemed a graduate of the same school of geographical accuracy as Krakatoa – East of Brentford. The heat was cowing, and I was low on water. In all my drinking years I don’t think I’ve ever progressed quite so seamlessly from fuddled vitality to skull-slurried crapulence.
Shinto bore the brunt, of course. He was now stopping for long minutes, and with the little hand nudging 5.00 and Los Arcos still nowhere in sight, I’m afraid I lost my rag. What was this animal’s problem? He’d drunk his fill at that Moorish fountain and gorged lavishly on thigh-high greenery at lunch. Come on! Move! Eeeeeuuuwwww! I clapped, I swore, I yanked the rope. I drummed and then clobbered the drinking bowl, the dull, mustardy one that Hanno had selected in preference to the hell-red example I’d taken off the hypermarket shelf. ‘A bowl not in a strong colour, or he see it behind and he panic. Panic is the enemy.’
Wrong. Panic was my enemy, but his master. I wanted him to panic. If the only way to get this animal moving at all was to nurture a low level of constant fear, then the only way to get him moving fast was to ramp that up to blind, mortal terror. Forget a strong colour – I wanted a bowl decorated with flames, skulls, images of slavering wolves with fetlocks sticking out of their jaws. For the first time I thought: I’ll thrash him. I’ll snap a branch off that dead olive tree and give the stubborn sod a bloody good hiding.
Within an hour I was dragging Shinto along with the rope in both hands and over my shoulder, leaning forward, my face a mask of fatigued fury, soured wine-sweat bursting out everywhere. A low hill took gradual shape before me, and if Los Arcos wasn’t behind it I feared I might not be responsible for my actions.
It wasn’t. Instead, trailing a plume of dust as it motored unsteadily towards me over the ruts and crevasses, was what gradually assumed the shape of a camper van. ‘I think that’s a Bedford,’ I rasped to myself, to that pilgrim’s bootprint, to that thunderstruck tree stump, to anything but that bastard donkey.
A Bedford it was, an old one, and it pulled up before me with a dusted creak. The door opened; a nut-brown fellow in a yachting cap bounded out. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said, and not in a way that implied an afternoon spent grim faced before the monitors at RSPCA satellite-surveillance headquarters. ‘I’m John. Would he like a carrot?’
It was beyond odd. This wasn’t a road; it was two hours since I’d seen even a tractor. ‘How . . .’ I began, but John waved his big brown hands about to shut me up. ‘I just drive up and down the camino, looking for people in trouble, helping them.’ He opened up the side door of his Bedford and emerged a second later with a bottle of cold water. ‘Here you go. I was up the top of the Alto del Perdon waiting for you a few days back.’
‘Uh . . . ?’
‘That wind farm just past Pamplona.’
I nodded vacantly. ‘Yeah . . . but who . . .’
‘Waited until four. I heard you went over a little later. Biscuit?’
Water bottle pressed to my lips I slowly shook my head, but Shinto had crunched down his carrot and had it instead.
‘Now. You’re heading for Los Arcos, right?’ I cautiously inclined my head. ‘OK. It’s over the next hill.’
‘How far?’ I asked, thinly, handing back the empty bottle with a small belch.
He ran his tongue along the underside of a grey moustache. ‘About 4 kilometres?’
I’d thought it couldn’t be possibly more than 2, and so I’m afraid I said, ‘Nunflaps.’
John didn’t care. As a possibly non-existent angelic entity he must surely have heard it all before. ‘Right, there’s nowhere to graze your donkey in Los Arcos, so you’ll need some grain. Does he like barley?’
‘Does a bear shit on the Pope?’
From a side hatch in his van’s red-dusted exterior John procured a large empty fertiliser sack. ‘Take this. OK, when you get into Los Arcos there are three large granaries, and if you turn left behind the second . . . ’
This was already beyond my current powers of recall, but he went on anyway for perhaps another seven minutes. When he’d finished he patted Shinto’s cheek, then took one of my hands in both of his. ‘It’s gone six. You’d better get going.’ And he got back in, fired up the reluctant Bedford and with a wheezy toot bucked noisily away towards the unpeopled horizon.
Nearly two hours later, the pair of us were shambling waywardly down the crippled main drag of Los Arcos, an endless, lopsided parade of grubby whitewash and cracked plaster, big slabs of old wood wedged up against every front door to keep something unwelcome out: dust, mud, rats. It was like the approach to some outsized, downbeat Central American pueblo, which in the circumstances seemed distantly appropriate. I had been across the desert on a horse with no name, or anyway no polite name.
The albergue was barely identified, just a dark door next to a bakery, and I’m still not quite sure how I found it. The door opened and I stood there swaying in a coma of fatigue, trying to get a blurred face into focus. The face turned to Shinto and fuzzed out a nod. Soon afterwards he was being tied up to an old bread oven in a shed floored with diesel mud. There was a tiny glassless window high up on one side; a dog shoved his snout through it and barked, and barked, and barked. I could still hear him at it as I blankly retraced my steps towards the granaries.
Improbable as the albergue’s discovery had been, it was naught beside the random and empty-headed meanderings that somehow led me to a concrete hangar fadingly emblazoned with agro-commercialisms. No less startling, at 8 p.m. its big sliding door was still open. I went in; it was dim and cool and huge, and smelt like the underneath of a lawnmower. A young woman with dyed maroon hair approached, her expression blending curiosity and wary amusement. John had told me exactly what to say – I think he’d even made me repeat it – but all I could recall was the word for barley. ‘Cebada,’ I croaked, proffering my wrinkled sack, happily the one with ‘nitrate’ printed on the side. ‘Cebada. Burro. Peregrino.’
A querying masculine babble echoed around, and a full-shouldered man appeared out of the shadows. They talked briefly, then she said ‘Inglés?’
‘Si. Yes,’ I replied, trying to remember how to smile.
‘You av burro? He like cebada? You go Santiago?’ I kept nodding, and they both broke into beams. The man took my bag and strode over to a conical mound of grain, and began transferring the latter to former with a big steel scoop.
‘Is . . . for sheeps,’ elaborated the woman, ‘but OK I think for burro. Is cebada wis . . . soya?’ Her accomplice dragged the half-filled sack over and heaved it into my arms: this product of peasant industry was the weight of a fat four-year-old. Again the awkward attempts to offer payment, again the ostentatious refusals. When my brain was better I pictured a Spaniard with a big bag walking into a barn in Suffolk, and when I pictured him waddling raggedly back out with it stretched tightly over his head and torso I realised how very wonderful these people were.
The tape-loop barks were now counterpointed by a mournful braying that reached me as I laboured the sack into the relevant backstreet. Shinto threw himself towards the shed door as I unbolted it, and looking at him straining on the rope, the air full of hydrocarbons and dog noise, I knew that I couldn’t make him stay in there. Thieving gitanos or no, he’d be snuffling up his sheep swill in the open alley.
As I manhandled my possessions to the end of the dim, brownish hall, the albergue abruptly opened up into a huge and agreeably rambling edifice, corridors floored with age-worn planks arranged around an enormous central staircase. Everyone was filing to and from bathrooms in preparation for bed: the good news was that I’d somehow once again bagged my own room, a strange trapezoid with over-varnished panelling; the bad news was that I hadn’t eaten.
Never judge a Spanish house by its cover, nor a Spanish town by its outskirts. Unshowered I fumbled down into the street, and very soon found myself in an arcaded plaza of confounding beauty. In gathering gloom I squinted about, trying to square this arched and towered Renaissance majesty with what had gone before. And look: there were people, an unpilgrimmed multitude, laughing, smoking, pushing prams. Old men sitting outside bars gamely tapped their feet along to the techno leaking from within, peered down on by nosy old dears perched on precarious second-floor balconies. Friday night it may have been, but this was the first time a small town had been willing to demonstrate evidence of significant inhabitation.
A church filled one side of the square, and I found myself drawn towards its buffed colonnades. The towering doors of the Iglesia de Santa Maria de la Asunción were slightly ajar – an unencountered astonishment that demanded entrance.
Inside was a single worshipper, a bandanna-headed young Spanish pilgrim I remembered exchanging road lore with somewhere near Pamplona. He was genuflecting at the back of the aisle, head almost touching his knee, lips working soundlessly. In other circumstances, ones that would have involved the prior ingestion of equilibrium-restoring calories, I’d have found this spectacle faintly embarrassing. Instead, I looked beyond him to the distant altar, and found myself impressed, transfixed and at length swooningly overwhelmed by a great wall of gold, a Baroque retablo sumptuously alive with a profusion of gilded cherubs and virgins and Christ in all his forms. The apostles – could this be right? – returned my stare with eyes of crystal; I lowered myself ashenly into the rearmost pew.
With unblinking eyes I slowly scanned the walls: shoals of scallop shells, gourd-toting Santiagos and a tight mass of screaming, golden souls in purgatory; I turned behind and at the back beheld a glass coffin enclosing a serene saviour. The bandanna pilgrim rose, and crossed himself, and as he passed I felt his zealous, knowing gaze upon me. I thought again of the people who had walked here from all over Europe, stoked by the belief that in doing so they would earn their place in heaven. And just for a moment I thought they might have been right.
Another windless scorcher was well under way by the time I left Los Arcos behind, poppies and cornflowers bright but limp by an undulating camino. The desperate slips and slides of mud-struggling pilgrims were kiln hardened in its surface, like the tracks of a long-extinct species fleeing some now incomprehensible climactic extremity. Revved up by a cebada power breakfast, Shinto made good speed through more bark-echo ghost towns, better speed almost than me: my drawn-out spiritual awakening had meant a Mars-bar supper uncomfortably dispatched during yet another Cinderella dash back to the albergue.
The camino plaited restlessly about the N111, meaning exposure to more weekend club cyclists – hot and hilly it might be, but there was always breath to spare for a gasped hee-haw – and detours round a couple of poignant Friday-night wipe-outs, roof down in the verge. Boccadillos in an almond orchard and an invigorating hatful of fountain presaged what would become the default afternoon pastime: the drawn-out reeling in of one’s intended destination beneath a merciless sun. Topping the day’s final hill the town of Viana seemed so close that with an effort I might have reached out and tickled its belfries, yet it was three long hours before I could slump messily against a wall in the refugio’s panoramic garden.
Beside me the beanpole Australian worked his slow and sinuous way through a t’ai chi routine, cool in the cragged shadows of an ensuite Gothic ruin. In the flat green distance barber-striped factory chimneys announced the presence of Logroño, tomorrow’s urban assault course. Somewhere before it Navarra became Rioja – cheers! – and somewhere before that, in fact at the foot of the plain-presiding precipice on which Viana is built, was Shinto, tied to a hunk of reinforced concrete in an acre of wasteland claustrophobically dense with triffidy weeds. My jungly nightmare was his smorgasbord, but it seemed terribly lonely down there. He deserved better: today he’d done well, today he’d been Shints, or Shin Splints, or Shindig, or Shizza, with the more pungent nicknames left in the Los Arcos locker. Still, there was nothing to be done – he’d been dispatched there not by me but by robust decree of the guardia civil, whose on-call donk squad had arrived with alarming alacrity at the refugio receptionist’s telephonic behest.
Viana was an appealing little town, built on the usual model: unhealthy and decrepit tenement outskirts giving way almost without warning to aged, cobbled comeliness. Showered and rehydrated I set off to explore it, sipping ruminatively from what may have been Europe’s cheapest can of beer. It was a weekend, but after seven days of tumble-weeded main squares it still seemed odd how much more exuberantly alive were the town dwellers in this part of Navarre. There must be something in the water. Probably gin.
