Spanish steps, p.19
Spanish Steps, page 19
The hospitalero took no prisoners, other than the ninety-six of us. At 10.00 on the nose he clicked off the light and slammed the door shut: in the morning we’d find almost a dozen haggard, bleary stop-outs who’d turned up a little late and been obliged to bed down on the picnic tables. I found myself recalling the fourteenth-century Burgos assistant abbot who, infuriated by perpetual overcrowding in his monastery’s pilgrim wing, poisoned the soup and so granted one hundred guests a short cut to paradise.
Mutiny was inevitable, and almost instantly a pilgrim clicked the light back on to a round of defiant cheers. But an outside force would destroy this hard-won solidarity, and the rebellion had long since been superseded by darkness and slumber when it attacked.
In the bottom bunk nearest to the window, I bore the brunt. An extraordinary noise blared in through the earplugs and seemed to come out of my eye sockets, blasted open by a decibel grenade. Groans and lethargic confusion, ninety-six unhappy mumbles. Then another huge if somehow quavering retort, hard by my head. Every window was open in a wooden bunk-house still torpidly haunted by the day’s accumulated heat, and if I looked out of mine I would see an enthusiastic but helplessly drunken novice huffing into a didgeridoo. Before I could do that something butted through the net curtain. ‘It’s you he wants!’ I very nearly shrieked, preparing to fling myself door-side of the little Spaniard top-to-toe in the conjoining bunk. I didn’t, though, because the something was Shinto. Or at least the tips of his flared and trumpeting nostrils.
A minute later, the most hated man in Burgos stood outside the fire-escape door in his pants. ‘What are you why is it how time?’ I said, slurring out the gaps between words as I blundered sockless through predictable donkey awfulness. In the urban moonlight I could see those nose holes dilate and quiver, as sure an indicator of loud and imminent drama as a wobbling infant lip. But when this came it came in fearful harmony, the desperate, toneless orchestra of dreadnoughts lost in fog. I saw a mobile shadow at the other end of the corral. It was another donkey; a bigger, darker donkey, a donkey that even in this light I could see bore a chilling resemblance to our fiendish pursuer. ‘Shite,’ I probably said. At least he was tied up, though I wasn’t at all happy about the let-me-at-him strain being applied to the rope.
‘Out in the woods, Shints,’ I said, fumbling at the knot, or rather the macramé football it had been ever since his Belorado break-out. But then I stood up. The woods; the gitanos. I’d dismissed the warnings, but how to explain the sudden appearance of old El Ned here? There was a thick-skinned, long-eared Romany if ever I saw one, a graduate from the school of hard donks. There was only one thing to do: leave absolutely everything exactly as it was, then get up at 4.30 a.m. and hit the road before my under-slept pilgrim peers could mete out any properly coordinated punishment. It wasn’t a bad plan, and I managed half of it.
‘Is your donkay?’
There was a man at my bed, but he didn’t sound as though he was about to smother me. I opened my eyes: once more, almost everyone had left. The man had kind but terribly furnaced features, the face of an amiable wino. ‘I have also a donkay outside. If you come to the garden we can be talking.’
Twenty minutes later we were, across one of the pub-garden trestle tables out the front. Another ass-hauling pilgrim! This was an auspicious encounter: Donkey Livingstone, I presume?
Jean was from Belgium, and in the early stages of an extraordinary undertaking: from his home near Brussels he would lead Pilou to Santiago, then to Rome, and finally to Jerusalem. The pilgrim hat-trick – I was dumbfounded, and utterly humbled; in that moment I confess to coveting my neighbour’s ass. ‘Yes,’ he coughed, rolling up what even at 7.30 was evidently not his first cig of the day. ‘But I have five years.’ He lit it, sucked in, blew out. ‘This is the best thing I can do. That anyone can do.’
It wasn’t a good time to expect positive reciprocation of this statement. The nocturnal goings-on had merely supplemented the groaning catalogue of bad things that were still better than what I was doing, a catalogue which when Shinto had started up again at about 2.30 was updated to include borstal and getting your face stuck in a badger set. Instead, I said, ‘How do you get him over bridges?’
Jean smiled, deepening a dozen already deep creases. ‘It’s not so much a problem. I attache the long corde, and I walk to the other side, and I wait.’
‘Wait?’
‘For fifteen minutes.’
‘Right, and then you pull like buggery.’
Jean might have been Belgian, but he had a Frenchman’s flair for facial outrage. ‘No! He come across after five minutes.’ He straightened his back, intimidating me just as Pilou had intimidated Shinto. ‘Never pull a donkay.’
There was an awkward silence here, but I’d learnt by now not to fill it with a blurted enquiry into what had inspired this epic mission. It was bad form to ask someone what their pilgrimage was about, on a first date at least. Particularly so in Jean’s case: I found out later that the year before his wife had died. He’d had Pilou ever since, and despite knowing nothing about donkeys had trained him up himself.
It was odd the way information passed along the line, a Chaucerian chain of news, tittle-tattle and, yes, slanderous, unfounded rumour. But at my speed you never heard who or what lay up ahead, only what was coming from behind, Chinese-whispered on by passing pilgrims. In the previous week I’d seen rival donkey crap on the camino and Shinto had certainly smelt it: the reason I hadn’t heard about Jean and Pilou was that until the day before he’d been ahead.
‘You’re saying I’m faster than you?’
‘Of course,’ said Jean. ‘I have five years. But also I don’t walk on Saturday so much, and today, on Sunday, never.’
More than that, we weren’t alone. There was a German woman, said Jean, who he’d seen a few times. She had two donkeys and two young daughters. ‘You think it is sympathique, yes?’ he said, before elaborating in ostentatious detail exactly why it wasn’t. The mother believed in eating only what she could find in the fields, which at this time of year meant living on grass. ‘And also for her children! Grass!’ Jean extinguished his tiny dog end with an angry boot. ‘I see her some days before. She is looking like this at a wall in the refugio.’ He held a horny-handed palm to his nose and fixed it with moronic intensity. ‘For three hours!’ That grizzled, ruddy head shook with bewildered rage. ‘The teeth of the children . . . ’
It all sounded horrific, but at the same time I really hoped he wasn’t exaggerating. Because if he was, what might he say about me? Especially now he knew I was a donk-puller.
Pilou tried to get at Shinto one last time, but the knot held and after a very self-conscious loading procedure – ‘Oh, he has not so much: Pilou is with 40 kilo’ – we said our farewells. I picked up the rope and clicked my tongue, endeavouring both to affect easy professionalism and encourage Shinto out of the blocks at a healthy, face-saving pace.
‘Oh, but he is slow,’ said Jean, because I failed.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But then he has hunger!’
‘Yes?’ I said.
For fifteen minutes we watched Shinto browse the high grass, which at least allowed Jean the opportunity to inspect his hoofs. ‘It’s enough food,’ said Jean, once he’d pronounced all four fully roadworthy. ‘Now you see.’
I led Shinto back out to the path. After fewer than a dozen despondent paces I was ahead of him and the rope was taut. Jean surveyed Shinto evenly, then did the whole pah, bof, sacré bleu thing with his hands. But it was important that as the sole bearers of the donkey flame – sole sane bearers, anyway – we parted friends, and so we did. ‘Eh bien, all donkays are different. I know only Pilou.’ We shook hands – ow – and with a heartfelt ‘bonne chance’ I turned to the west and left him.
We passed through the brief western outskirts of Burgos at a crawl, Shinto’s ears splayed flat in the ‘fuck you all’ handlebar position. A dead mole on the path, a French motorist whose photographic eagerness almost drove us into a river, a huge motorway viaduct over our heads. Abandoned factories; a distant, watch-towered prison. Sunday cyclists.
Then an hour of torpid nothing until I stopped to eat a tin of pimientos by a bus shelter, whereupon an old man in a flat cap came up and called me a fascist.
It’s funny, or rather grimly shaming, to think of the blithe holiday larks many of us enjoyed in Spain during Franco’s long tenure. Thirty-six years he ruled: I still can’t quite believe Western Europe had a fascist dictator in 1975. How could Abba and General Franco have overlapped?
‘Falangista, Falangista!’ the man croaked animatedly, poking a vague and shaky forefinger at Shinto’s head. There was no audience, but I can’t pretend not to have been a little alarmed. He stooped effortfully to pick up Shinto’s rope, then held it up to me defiantly. ‘Falangista!’ he cried again, before casting it haughtily into the dust and heading across the road towards a bar. For a brief but vivid moment I imagined him re-emerging through its dangling fly curtain at the head of a heavily armed death squad masked in the long-eared balaclavas of the Donkey Liberation Front. But then I looked again at the rope, which was striped red and green, and realised the green was very dark, dark enough for a man of many years with short sight and a long memory to have thought he was looking at the red and black of Franco’s army.
If feelings run a little strong in this part of the world – I’d certainly advise Dennis the Menace to think long and hard before agreeing to that tour of the region’s old people’s homes – it’s perhaps not surprising. Franco swore in his first fascist government at a monastery in Burgos, and that prison I’d passed had incarcerated many of his political enemies. Crossing the Montes de Oca I’d seen a memorial for the unknown thousands of Burgos republicans abducted, murdered and buried in lonely mass graves that are still being discovered. But, and there’s no way of saying this without causing grievous offence, I still can’t understand how the people of Spain never rose up and overthrew Franco. They waited until he got really old and died, buried him with due pomp, then quietly adopted parliamentary democracy. I mean, I could understand their trepidations in the unstable post-war climate, but – well, he was eighty when ‘Waterloo’ came out. An eighty-year-old dictator with no credible possibility of being survived by his odious regime. It’s not great, is it?
Pensively I trudged forth, pondering that even in Franco’s absence Spain still seems oddly rooted in the fifties: the shameless love of private transport, the heavy industry nudging right into town, those blaring election tannoys. And all this rural poverty – I was now passing through towns that seemed to be shedding wealth and sophistication in layers, each scrappier and more rustic than the last. There were new cars, then old cars, then no cars. We turned an uphill corner out of a farm and there, mercifully in the distance, was the first working donkey I’d seen: incredibly, taking on the collie role at the rear end of a column of sheep, nudging the slackers into place with his snout. Donkeys, I now saw, were neither lazy nor agelessly stupid. Some donkeys. Over a distance Shinto’s ears were a lot more use than his eyes, but he still did a double take.
The sheep donk was a clear indication that we were entering the parochial periphery of the great meseta, but not as clear perhaps as a rather bleak ascent through an unremitting expanse of corn, and the epic covering of the same that filled the prospect from atop the climb’s conclusion. But wasn’t the chalky descent from here unusually severe for what was supposed to be a prairie? It certainly looked so: halfway down I could see a dismounted cyclist scrabbling perilously for purchase as the path split into a dozen pebbled gullies.
‘Moment please!’ It was another cyclist, a German, approaching from behind and holding up a wiggling forefinger in what I could now spot at 100 paces as the universal sign for ‘I would like to photograph your monkey.’ Shinto was already nose down in the corn; I shrugged in assent. As he extracted his camera from the bag on his handlebars, I saw inside it an unfamiliar guidebook, long and thin and English. ‘Could I have a quick . . . ?’ I asked, as Shinto pushed out his fifth leg into a pose that perhaps at this very moment is bringing a Bavarian slide show to an early and ignoble conclusion. ‘For sure. It’s most useful. I believe from Canada.’
I skimmed through the relevant paragraph with what began as mild curiosity. Rural road . . . uphill through cornfields . . . Ah. Here we are. ‘On reaching the highest point of the plain, continue for a short distance, before beginning the sharp descent down the “Cuesta Matamulos” (the “Mulekiller Hill”).’ Not since that terrible business with the encyclopedia shelf have a pair of brackets been asked to bear such a burden. How many good animals had met their ends on this crumbling escarpment? Breathing loudly through my nose I let the cyclist through, and allowed Shinto a . . . a last meal. Then I eased him back to the path, patted his neck rather too hard and took the first auspicious downwards step.
Well, butter my donkey’s arse. You know what? We beat that cyclist. We caught him halfway down as he stopped to negotiate a gravel-filled scoop in the limestone, skipped neatly by and beat him down to the bottom and all the way to the door of the refugio in Hornillos del Camino.
I liked any village whose name officially declared allegiance to the pilgrimage, and after that triumph I especially liked Hornillos. It was a tiny, rather neglected settlement, all rough stone and dusty wood beneath a rolling sea of cracked pantiles, but the bar was open, the refugio was new and most of my friends were in one or the other. ‘Hail the conqueror of Mulekiller Hill!’ called Evelyn through the fly screens, bookended by the jolly faces of Anna and Janina, two Dutch ladies who’d cycled from Holland to St Jean, and been on foot since then. ‘Yeah, well . . .’ I sighed airily, tying Shinto up to the churchyard gate. It would have been about this time that I accepted the escarpment’s nickname was of course derived from the debilitating efforts required to ascend it.
The bar did us the full salad-to-flan-via-lomo deal, and when I was done the quietly welcoming proprietor arrived with a snifter, a small alcoholic balloon, bearing an imprudent volume of Veterano brandy. I’m not sure why I asked for this, but when the bill came I was sorry I had. I was sorry because this treble-measured troublemaker cost but a single euro, and that meant it would be very difficult from now on to end a day without one. So difficult, in fact, as to prove impossible.
We took our digestifs outside, and dispatched them on the church steps in a diminishing triangle of low sun. A distorted and amplified voice approached, and we turned to see an electioneer pulling up outside the bar: all this way for half a dozen votes. Two widows of great age sat on doorsteps knitting (it was startling how many of their populous ilk actually did this), oblivious to both the hectoring entreaties of the Castilian Nationalists and our presence.
I’d often been struck by the benign indifference with which most of these places regarded pilgrims, even here where the twenty-eight of us might easily have outnumbered the villagers. In some ways the lack of interaction was a matter of timekeeping: we walked while they worked, and ate while they slept, and slept while they played. But in socio-economic terms ours was a strange symbiosis, and I suppose an ancient one. They fed us, and we brought some much-needed money into a deprived community.
But time and again we were all struck by how rarely any locals seemed willing to offer any lucrative extras: an à-la-carte menu, a nice private room, a kid selling sun cream and lemonade on a table in the shade. There seemed to be an unwritten code of honour – it was a religious and civic duty to see a pilgrim through your town amply catered for, but no more. You gave him some hearty walking fuel but never thought about ripping him off – even if he was a middle-aged North European with the economic wherewithal to take a great long slab of holiday and spend it on some self-indulgent quest for his inner student. I suppose it’s what you expect in a country where the Miss June on garage calendars is typically depicted in oils, swathed in a blue kirtle and cradling a haloed baby.
I’d bagged a bottom bunk, beneath an ominously big-nosed Dutchman. Soon the latticed mattress springs were bowing towards me, each creak giving way to a steady, contented and in fact not disagreeable low wheeze. Outside, no doubt silhouetted against the moon, Shinto issued what was now his standard midnight reveille: five doughty, reverberating foghorn blasts fading into a weary, piteous snuffle, like some aged farmhand concluding a belaboured act of love. It was a fitting end, somehow, to what I realised eighteen hours later had been my birthday.
Ten
The clouds were still wisping past the moon as I buckled the saddle, frogmarched from slumber by swishes and shuffles and the slam of the big front door. When at length the sun nosed above the horizon it was the first time we’d cast long shadows up the camino, into the wheaten wilderness ahead, instead of back down it.
There was sun and wind and photosynthesis, and the haunted song of unseen, cowering birds, but there was nothing else. No sane soul would have located a refugio out here, so it wasn’t an especial turn-up to find the inverted eggcup of Arroyo de San Bol under the management of a scarily blank-faced young German. He was standing solemnly at the doorway when I arrived, lured by the promise of elevenses and a bathe in a spring that my Confraternity book credited with healing powers.
‘You English expect magic water,’ he said slowly, addressing himself to the little red book in my hand. ‘But it is not magic. It is only water.’ His gaze moved sluggishly towards Shinto. ‘Last year one monkey like this ate here a young tree.’
