Spanish steps, p.16
Spanish Steps, page 16
Domingo dies in 1109, his apposite final act the literal digging of his own grave, and having been canonised is interred in his own church. Life goes on in Santo Domingo – a steady stream of pilgrims, a fire in the church, the series of vicious regional disputes that sees Navarre and Castille swap ownership of the town six times in one twenty-four-year period alone – until some unknown point in the mid-twelfth century, when a family of Germans en route to Santiago stops at a Santo Domingo inn.
The innkeeper has a beautiful daughter and the pilgrims a handsome son. Well, you know the story: boy meets girl, chastely eschews lewd congress, spurned girl frames boy for theft, boy is strung up by furious locals and left to rot. One of the perennial attractions of these tales is the bereaved family’s nonchalant acceptance of tragedy.
‘I don’t know if you’ve looked out the window this morning, Heidi, but there’s a corpse swinging from the gallows that looks an awful lot like our Wolfgang.’
‘Let’s see . . . Honestly, why do they always have to spin about like that? I can’t get a proper look at him.’
‘Next time he’s facing our way try and imagine him without that big purple tongue lolling out.’
‘OK. Here we go . . . Know what? You’re absolutely right: that’s the tabard I had to stitch up after that business with the donkey.’
‘Oh, marvellous. Some bloody pilgrimage this is turning out to be. Anyway, best crack on – you nip down and get his shoes off and I’ll bring the cart round the front.’
They reach Santiago and pass back through Santo Domingo a month later. But when they go to pay their respects to the fly-blown bird table that was once their little boy, instead there he is, waving happily at them from the gibbet. St James has held his weight the whole time, presumably with one hand, leaving the other free to lob earth-bound scraps of sustenance into his mouth. The newly unbereaved couple rush to inform the local town clerk of the miracle. ‘If he’s alive,’ he snorts, ‘then so are these roast chickens I’m eating.’ Cue flying supper.
The enduring upshot is that to this day a coop in the west transept of Santo Domingo’s baroque-towered cathedral houses a pair of noisy white cockerels. The curious pilgrim can still today take a rather high-risk Baguette Challenge: chuck a lump of bread in the cage, and if they eat it, his pilgrimage will reach a successful conclusion. If they don’t, he’ll find progress to Santiago impeded somewhat by his own death.
I don’t know who’d been fattening up their cocks that day, but the Santo Domingans were evidently happy about something. As the street narrowed and the buildings aged and grew, so my fellow pedestrians swelled in numbers and effervescence. There were groups of men in matching neckerchiefs, children in lace caps and harlequin-hued plimsolls. Suited dignitaries with religious medallions covering their tie knots and red-haired wives in tow. An audibly complex commotion echoed towards me off the aged walls and was presently traced to a brass band in polka-dotted boiler-suits, half of them parping enthusiastically into cornets and the rest extracting flamboyant refreshment from those chemistry-lab wine-spout things, arms aloft, stained and gaping mouths to the sky. A gang of teenagers roared and honked past in an elderly Peugeot with its roof sawn off and the rest painted like a Friesian. And after all the checkpoints and separatist graffiti, all the bilingual road-signs and furious defacement of public buildings, it was frankly a relief to see red-and-yellow banners and ensigns draped in merry profusion along the old balconies. After nine days of Zubiris and Utergas, here was a town that didn’t sound like a Bulgarian moped; a town that was Spanish and happy to be so.
But we all know what can happen when you leave a donkey alone in a town full of partying Spaniards. I tightened my grasp round the rope: lose Shinto here and the next time I saw him he’d be cowering under a hail of tomatoes with the fattest trainee priest in Santo Domingo sitting backwards across his withers. It was almost a relief when the slightly harassed hospitalero explained that because the magnificent old refugio’s usual stabling area was currently alive with banqueting revellers, Shinto would have to be locked up in a quiet yard round the back.
I did his feet, then my laundry, and after a particularly important post-camping shower went out to hit the streets. There was a dense throng in the square outside the refugio, gradually organising itself behind half a dozen boys carrying a huge crucifix decorated with crêpe-paper cockerels. A proper religious procession: under the list drawn up by British pilgrim William Wey in 1456, participation was worth forty days off purgatory; two hundred if I could find a mitred bishop somewhere in the ranks.
Well, I haven’t had such fun on a Wednesday afternoon since Margaret Thatcher resigned. In a dilatory conga the parade led me past cartwheel-girthed vats full of garlicky mushrooms simmering outside a bookshop, past fairy-lit silhouettes of Santo Domingo and those two chickens, past a church whose tower was conspicuously home to half a dozen flapping storks. More colour-coded kids in their hilariously illegal gangmobiles: loudness in all its forms. Rainbow dungarees aside, the keynote fashion items – an integral part of some earlier procession and sadly now only on view in photographers’ windows – was the daftest millinery it has ever been my pleasure to hoot at in deranged appreciation: lacy, flowered cylinders the size of Michael Schumacher’s rear wheels, somehow balanced atop the veiled heads of the young flower of Santo Domingan womanhood. Here, at last, were the people who invented the upside-down exclamation mark.
I sidled off the end of the parade along a street between whose pavements a funfair was in the latter process of erection, and sat outside a bar with the first of three coffees, watching the mad, mad world go by. Boys in berets and their grannies’ shawls begged for change: mindful that they were doubtless collecting for unstable pyrotechnics, I gave generously. One talked a little English, and in so many words, and then so many more, explained that each gang represented a suburb of Santo Domingo, often focused round a bar. He jogged over to rejoin his blue-capped companions, and watching them chant away between the bingo booths and airgun galleries, I felt warmly infused with a sense of continuity and community, by this free-spirited display of tribal anarchy. And then, draining my cup for the last time, I thought how sad it was that we’d lost all this, and that any attempt at recreating the spectacle before me in small-town Britain would be sourly compromised by an undercurrent of beery aggression.
The plaza outside the refugio was still alive, pilgrims and locals jiggling about to the brass band’s now rather fibrillated rhythm. ‘Special night tonight!’ shrieked a Frenchman, one whose hysterical girlish giggle had enlivened many a bunk-house on previous evenings. ‘They keep open ze door to ten surty!’ He handed me a plastic beaker of marinaded mushrooms and a brimming wine spout, both of which I tackled with the reckless chutzpah of a man wearing black clothes. ‘Viva España’ segued messily into ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’; a trio of Brazilians mamboed lithely about while along with my fellow North Europeans I jerked to the whim of some inept puppeteer. It was good to be with pilgrims but not talk about clicks and bunks and blisters, not even to have thought or cared whether my laundry would have dried in the lingering misted humidity. But when the curfew drew near, and my fellow travellers trailed back through the mighty refugio doors, I thought of Shinto, a four-footed Cinderella shut up under a carport with a bucket of barley while his ugly master lived it up at the ball. A minute later I was clambering about a building site, uprooting huge armfuls of alfalfa and wedging them into a bin-liner.
Shinto seemed very nearly moved by the unexpected bounty I upended at his loud (or louder) end, settling immediately into its enthusiastic ingestion. For a moment I surveyed his steady jaw work with proprietorial content, the concrete at our feet sporadically illuminated by an aerial pyrotechnic flash whose retort hit us a second later. The trumpets whined and blared distantly, a fading jeer after every off-key parp.
I smiled, happy in at least two different ways. And soon in at least three, because groping my way out through Shinto’s yard and back to the refugio’s rear entrance, I immediately blundered into a wire cage that twittered and gobbled in shrill protest. The occupants, starkly so even in the uncertain half-light, were a dozen or so white chickens, strutting jerkily about in aimless alarm. I stooped to the cage and could just make out ‘CATEDRAL’ Dymo-taped to the top of the frame. The cathedral had naturally been closed, this time at least for festival preparations, but here were its fêted avian inhabitants: evidently the pairs were subject to squad rotation. I nipped quickly back to Shinto’s enclosure, brushed up a handful of spilt barley from around his bowl, then breathlessly emptied it into their cage. ‘Eat,’ I hissed, and in a great chirpy flap they instantly did. The holy roosters had spoken: I would reach Santiago alive.
Evelyn attended the odd mass, the bereaved old Chicagoan did so every day, so too a few of the big snorers and those wide-eyed young Hispanics. That was largely it: in the soundtrack to this pilgrimage, the droning chants of the pious went largely unheard, unless you count all that Enya I had to put up with in the evenings. But though the judge of all men might not have pointed our way to Santiago, someone had. This was still somehow a sacred undertaking: even if you didn’t talk the talk, you had to walk the walk.
The golden rule was this: you got to Santiago under your own steam. ‘Pilgrim’ was derived from the Latin peregrinus, a cross-country walker, a wayfarer. The power ramblers might not have understood much, but they understood that. Yes, many lacked the holiday allowance to do the camino in one go: two weeks’ walking a year for three years was a popular option. But if you said you were going to do it, you did it – all of it.
The road to Santiago was for centuries plagued by what medievalists call ‘false pilgrims’, usually thieves or fraudsters dressed in the requisite hat and cape who’d inveigle themselves into a pilgrim convoy for the purposes of covert or violent plunder. They came from all over Europe, attracted by the compelling opportunities presented by a ceaseless throughput of tourists wandering through lonely woodland. They particularly came, I’m afraid, from Britain: in 1318 ‘John of London’ ransacked pilgrim hospices throughout Navarre, and twelve years later an unnamed Englishman was hanged for drugging and robbing travellers in Estella. Even before William Wey’s ship landed in Spain, a light-fingered fellow pilgrim had snipped purses from at least two belts.
But the modern breed of false pilgrim comes with a more malignant deception in mind. He wears the shell, and bears the pack, and carries within his papers the imprinted cipher of many a humble hospice. But when the human tide sets forth each morn this man tarries. And then when the coast is clear he nips down the taxi rank and bungs his stuff in the boot of a Citroën Xantia.
It takes one to know one, of course, but for me all the short cuts were blocked off well before those ‘Moral Dilemma Ahead’ signs. Even a Spanish bus driver would probably baulk at a donkey, particularly when his owner refused to pay full fare for a nine-year-old. And hitch-hiking was out of the question unless I happened upon a driver with the stunted quadruped-detection faculties of Little Red Riding Hood. I’ll never know if I would have cheated if I could have. But because I couldn’t, I galloped Shinto up to the moral high ground and sat impressively astride him, seething with righteous indignation.
How could you come on a pilgrimage and cheat? And lie about cheating? To do so, I decided, was a symptom of terminal soul cancer, a corrosion of human decency that should by rights be detected by some kind of inner spiritual alarm. And punished by some spectacular psychosomatic malady: spontaneous combustion gets my vote, but syphilis would do for a first offence.
Pilgrims passed me as I led Shinto over the Rio Oja, storks beaking up nest sticks on its flood-rubbled foreshore. They passed as I startled him along the hard shoulder of the N120 with a four-foot length of reflective plastic, salvaged from a shattered marker post and waved semaphore-like through his rearward peripheral vision. And they passed as we plodded out from another wheaten prairie and into the town of Redecilla del Camino, home to an enormous Romanesque font and a euro-in-the-slot weighbridge.
I saw him as I manoeuvred Shinto on to its platform. He was sitting on a shaded bench, shirt aggressively creased, outstretched boots smugly unbesmirched. He’d slept in the bed two away from me at the refugio, and in fact had still been asleep when I left. Because that never happened, I remembered. He hadn’t passed me, yet now here he was, spoiling my silly fun.
‘Hey – does he need to diet?’ He spoke in a complacent, untraceable Eurodrawl. The coin went in and a strip of dot-matrixed ticker-tape spooled out. I have it here now: ’14 MAY 2003. 11:52 PESO: 200 KG.’ Less than a third the telly-captioned weight of a doomed bull.
I appraised him again. The books had talked about a ‘pilgrim look’, and with 200 kilometres under our sweaty belts I knew what they meant: a dusted, windswept ruddiness, like a Midwestern farmer at harvest end. It is fair to say that my friend didn’t have the pilgrim look. With him it was more of the golfer look. A Scottish hospitalero I met later said he’d been given a tip on how to detect a suspected cheat: pat a hand on their back in welcome, and if you don’t hit sweat start asking questions. The figure before me would have failed that one straight off. His pastelly polo shirt was crisp and dry. Simply put, the man was a wrong ’un.
‘Bus or taxi?’ I said, flatly.
He looked at me, and I suddenly noticed his resemblance to the pudge-faced, shiftily insolent mechanic who accompanied Bonnie and Clyde during the best-known celluloid depiction of their criminal rampage. He looked but he didn’t speak. I nodded at him significantly and, with as much portent as you can muster leading a donkey off a weighbridge, walked slowly away.
A merry, lightly bearded Frenchman stopped as I was fending two insistent yappers away from my lunch-time boccadillo under a tree in some shut-up siestaville. ‘You are from . . . ?’ he said, and when I told him he extracted a large and densely annotated ledger and made a note. We walked together that afternoon, across the provincial border into Castille-León, and as Jean-Michel told me of his journey – early retirement, the full-strength pilgrimage from Le Puy in central France – it became gradually apparent that as a metaphorical donkey-prod, conversation was more effective than exhortation. Shinto’s asinine curiosity was aroused by any debate: a comparison of Anglo-French primary education systems, last night’s festivities, the Ford Focus. He’d feign indifference during the opening rhetorical stages, lagging nonchalantly back. But when we got to the crux, even if that meant rear-light clusters, he could bear it no longer and that big head would nuzzle brightly up between our elbows. ‘Chin-chin, chaps, what’s it all about?’
The Dutch kids were all over the grass out the front of the churchside refugio at Belorado, and that meant an albergue up a grubby alley just past the John Lennon bar. Each of the small rooms upstairs was crammed with bunks. The official refugios, particularly the overspill accommodation that was my default experience, were well meant but spartan and vaguely awkward – one might imagine oneself being put up by sandally beardos at a traditional-instrument weekend. But the private albergue, as here and at that place with the Welshwoman’s bunioned feet, was a very different gig. A dark patch of wallpaper where a picture had hung, a child’s plastic boat in the bathroom cabinet, a pair of patent stilettos in the bottom of a wardrobe: everywhere were reminders that off-season this was a family home. And the home owners were largely doing this out of the goodness of their Catholic hearts – I think I paid 3 euros at Belorado. Somehow we were like resistance fighters secretly billeted with a plucky sympathiser.
In the act of unpacking, a ziplock bag of almonds appeared, donated by that American art historian on the first evening (‘Bought more than 5 pounds,’ he’d said, awed by his own folly). I was eating them by a trellis of wet socks in the little garden when a gaunt and lightly bearded German walked briskly up. I’d seen him many times with his wife.
‘Your monkey is maybe a little curious,’ he beamed mysteriously.
‘Oh, yes?’ I replied. The only suitable place I’d been able to park Shinto was by a tree at the edge of the grass outside that first refugio. Perhaps he had eaten a Dutch teenager’s shoe.
‘Oh, yes. I should say that.’ He fingered the bottom half of his face sagely. ‘Yes. But perhaps too curious?’
I sat forward in my plastic chair. Perhaps he had eaten a Dutch teenager. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Soon your monkey is finding his own pilgrimage.’ Another Confucian smile. You don’t find many lapels to grab en route to Santiago, so instead I stood up and addressed him with a crispness that bordered on the forthright.
‘What are you saying? Has the monk— the donkey done something?’
He closed his eyes and nodded, opening them along with his mouth perhaps two seconds before the time came to have almonds crammed up his nose. ‘He is not attached to the tree. I am Tum-Tum the Daddy Groon.’
Actually he might not have said that last bit, because with the word ‘tree’ still hanging in the tepid, socky air I flew out of my chair and charged through the albergue and up the empty alley like Ewan McGregor at the start of Trainspotting, only with sandals on.
It took me less than a minute to get to the church, but that was easily long enough to imagine Shinto legs up in a river, legs off on a hard shoulder, legs akimbo under a lust-blinded stallion. Long enough to imagine walking alone in a donkless world.
A nicotine-tached Frenchman had Shinto by the ring on his head collar, leading him confidently back towards the tree watched by a happy semicircle of Holland’s youth. I placed both my hands on Shinto’s dusted withers. ‘Thank you,’ I gasped, surprisingly close to tears. ‘Um . . . merci beaucoup.’ Squinting through his cig smoke, he said it was nothing, then, in tones of light admonishment, explained that the knot had been inadequate. As he stooped to demonstrate a more secure alternative, the young pilgrims encroached, exchanging muttered gutturalisms. I told you: the donkey man knows nothing. Can’t even tie a knot. The sandaled oaf.
