Spanish steps, p.20
Spanish Steps, page 20
‘He won’t do that, honestly. It says here you have coffee?’
‘Yes. But it is not magic. It is only coffee.’
The refugio was a marvellously idiosyncratic structure, and scrutinising it I was able at least for a moment to view its caretaker’s auspicious behaviour in the same light. The domed interior had been painted as a star-clustered night sky, and each of the half-dozen beds beneath was immaculately topped with a crest-adorned blanket.
‘So – how many pilgrims did you have to stay yesterday?’ I enquired brightly as my host stooped silently over a camping-gas stove. No electricity here; and, as the Confraternity guide had stressed, ‘NB: there are NO sanitation facilities.’
‘One.’ He sounded as if he’d much rather it had been none. My coffee was ghosted on to the low table before me. What a time of it the two of them must have had together, out here in a million acres of inky nothing, either side of this table with a packet of Marie biscuits and a candle.
‘I am here all the summer,’ he said, pacing behind me as I desperately urged my coffee to cool. ‘Every summer.’
For two minutes he paced as I puffed and stirred and sipped. Then he sat down on the floor beside me, cross-legged beneath the dome’s apex. ‘My name is Udo,’ he whispered, and struck a match. He was still watching it burn at the end of an outstretched hand when I upended searing caffeine painfully down my throat, tossed a couple of euros on the table and marched briskly out into the sun.
I was reasonably eager to put some camino between me and Udo, and for once Shinto seemed to pick up on the urgency. On we scuttled, through a silent town wedged in a hole in the plain, along a hillside Monet-spattered with poppies, to a lunch spot beneath a Gothic arch of heart-stopping scale and splendour.
I read as we ate. Around and above us were the ruins of the monastery of San Anton, whose roofless remains somehow expressed the full scale of the medieval pilgrimage infrastructure more vividly than the restored showhouse that was Roncesvalles. Here we were, out in the definitive middle of nowhere, yet by the fourteenth century this hospice monastery had its own mill and orchard and dovecotes, and was merely one of the 369 such establishments the San Anton order controlled along Europe’s pilgrim routes. A lot of hard cash had gone into the construction of this place, but also more than a few pints of the milk of human kindness.
The order’s mission was to tend the many sufferers of St Anthony’s Fire, a disturbing ailment epidemic throughout medieval Europe. What we’d doubtless now call SAF was no less disfiguring than leprosy, but the physical symptoms were typically preceded by paranoid hallucinations; a double whammy that explains why many victims were expelled from their home villages. On the road, as honorary lepers, they were forced to warn others of their approach by ringing a bell or banging two boards together: theirs was a pilgrimage less about reaching heaven in the next life than getting out of hell in this one.
It was a happy surprise to learn that the monks were able to cure many sufferers, and without even knowing why. It’s now widely accepted that the symptoms of SAF (see how easily that slipped out?) are consistent with ergot poisoning caused by the long-term consumption of mouldy barley. In the twelfth century, eight out of ten consumed calories came in the form of bread, most of it at best stale. Because the monks had more money their grain and bread were fresher; stay long enough in a monastery, and a complete recovery was almost guaranteed.
I found myself almost uncomfortably affected as I stood under that great, pointed arch and let the guidebooks direct me to two little niches set into its base. Every night the monks would fill these with loaves of bread, untainted bread, lest any hungry pilgrims arrived after the big doors were heaved shut at dusk. And as I stood there, contemplating all the hideousness and beauty of the medieval pilgrimage, I heard the telltale taps and scrapes that heralded the approach of a serious, pole-pushing walker. Two of them in fact, walking up to and straight beneath that glorious arch without ever once raising their eyes from the tarmac.
Castrojeriz was known to the old pilgrims as ‘long town’, and certainly embraced the tenets of ribbon development more tightly than any town of 1,200 souls should ever dare. It was half four when we ambled past the first church, and half five – sixty whole, hot minutes – before the refugio revealed itself. An airy gymnasium filled with incense and tinkling instrumentals, this was an establishment under the languid stewardship of two terrific middle-aged hippies – brothers, said Evelyn, poofters, said our old friend Total Shithouse. The younger took an instant shine to Shinto, carefully inscribing his name and age in the refugio logbook, and then insisting I accompany him on a quest for suitable donkommodation.
This involved a brief reacquaintance with some of the forgotten pleasures of motorised transport, but also with every one of its obscurer elemental terrors. He piloted his elderly Renault in a manner inconsistent with its braking system, a largely external affair involving piles of sand and pliable roadside vegetation. It was perhaps fortunate that plenty of both edged the driveway to a farm additionally blessed with charitable owners and a surfeit of uncultivated land. There were good people in this town. I returned there with Shinto and shuffled back alone, warmed from without by that ever-blazing sun and from within by the spirit of San Anton.
‘Hey – where’s the donkey?’
I turned to see an American woman, fiftyish, in racing-driver shades and a white beanie hat, and crossed the pan-fried tarmac to join her. A swift résumé of recent travails revealed that she had also taken coffee with Udo, and our walk back to the refugio was accompanied by a breathless account of her experience. ‘Like, it was just so theatrical,’ she said, her pursed and painted lips working furiously, ‘though as an actress, from Hollywood, I really have to say I found the whole experience totally amazing.’ This sentence was delivered in perhaps two seconds, and I was still trying to pick through its many salient features when without warning she grabbed my arm and abruptly adopted a tone of low, urgent confidentiality. ‘But he hated me. That man hated me.’
‘I think he was just generally odd,’ I said when she’d let go. ‘To everyone.’
‘He wouldn’t even let me use his toilet! Can you believe that?’
‘There wasn’t a toilet.’
She fixed me with a cold, suspicious stare; I had the Confraternity book in my hand and read from it: ‘“NB – there are NO sanitation facilities.’” Watching her walk briskly away up the refugio steps I wondered why I’d said those capitals so loudly.
I had dinner in an uplit, dandified cellar with Jean-Michel and a female compatriot of his who spoke Spanish and at my behest wrote down what I felt to be a key phrase on a napkin. I have it before me now, that plump and gracious Continental calligraphy sorrily furrowed and wrinkled: ‘Limpiará la suciedad de mi burro.’ How oddly rewarding it was to pick up the sort of holiday vocabulary that substituted pleas for beer with a pledge to clear up the mess of one’s donkey.
‘I met a very interesting lady from America today,’ whispered Jean-Michel as we picked our way up the dark refugio stairs. He described her and we both nodded in confident recognition.
‘The actress from Hollywood,’ I gently confirmed.
‘Ze children’s book right-air from Philadelphia,’ murmured the Frenchwoman, more slowly.
Jean-Michel eyed us as carefully as the gloom permitted. ‘Ze artiste from Connecticut?’ And that was the story of how Baroness von Munchausen got her name.
The farmers weren’t around to thank again when I released Shinto from the old bedstead I’d tied him up to the afternoon before. As I surveyed his environs in the light of another wide blue morning it was apparent that he’d spent the last fourteen hours up to his hocks in wild alfalfa, and for the first time I had to loosen the saddle straps under his gut by a couple of holes each. Guffing queasily he allowed himself to be led out of town, and even over a long wooden bridge, but came to a bilious halt halfway up the hill that followed – an eminence far more grandiose than that eponymously charged with mule murder. I got him to the top in the end, but as we stood there in the lee of a weathered pilgrim monument, Shinto gazing dolefully down at Castrojeriz and me across at the windfarm on a distantly opposite meseta, I knew it had taken a lot out of him.
Evelyn and Petronella, the former at least unusually late on the road, caught me as we plodded funereally down the gentle descent. Company always shifted Shinto up a gear, but that day he seemed oddly withdrawn, settling immediately into a full run-through of his favourite stalling tactics: the frenzied nibbling of that suddenly unbearable gnat bite on his ankle, the elaborate olfactory encounters with even the most inconsequential dried turd, the abrupt, prick-eared halt which had us all scouring the landscape for a non-existent threat. After an hour I told them to go on ahead. I was beginning to accept this dreadful, torpid sloth, or at least to tolerate it with nothing more than the occasional resigned obscenity, but welcoming as companionship always was I couldn’t expect any other normally fit human to put up with it for long.
The path was undeviating and I watched Evelyn and Petronella pace steadily away for some time. They were halfway to the horizon when I was overtaken by a quietly polite Norwegian lady I’d lent – perhaps even given – some toothpaste to the night before. Then, as the comely silhouette of a compact 800-year-old refugio took shape, and beyond it the rising hump of a 1,000-year-old bridge, the two more distant figures were joined by a third: small, hunched, male.
The three of them walked together awhile, then stopped and seemed to converge. I narrowed my eyes into the heat haze: the man, hatted and of advanced years, had an arm tight round either waist and was hungrily kissing each face in turn. For the first two minutes or so the women seemed to find it very funny, but when the comic appeal waned he was eased aside and walked off to the right with an unreturned wave. Poor Evelyn. It was only a couple of days since she’d shaken off the most unwholesome of her coterie, a Dutchman who, in her memorable description, ‘just sat there rubbing his legs together like a cricket’.
After a while the old feller turned about, and shuffled back to the camino. I had a feeling I knew what was going to happen next, and so did the Norwegian lady, because when he came up to her she said something loud and pushed an outfacing palm hard into his throat. When I passed him a few minutes later he was still standing there, stroking his tender gullet and looking sad and bewildered. I don’t understand it, you could see him thinking. I’ve waited seventy years to be old and shrunken enough to get away with this.
A sign on the other side of the bridge welcomed us to the Tierra de Campos, land of fields. ‘This country abounds in fodder,’ said the Liber Sancti Jacobi, ‘and it has plenty of bread, meat, fish and honey.’ I read it out to Shinto but it didn’t seem to make him any happier. Big flatness he hated, and the gradient profiles of the days ahead were like brain-activity readings from an overweight narcoleptic listening to John Major count in binary.
Somehow the horizon behaved itself, hiding behind a couple of false summits, throwing up a diversionary hillock on the right or a copse on the left. Lunch went fairly well, though after his alfalfa blow-out he didn’t eat much, and at one point caused me a violent stab of panic by lying down in a patch of very tall grass when I wasn’t looking.
Soon after we’d hit the dusty camino once more it speared unwaveringly up an incline substantial enough to be named on the map. Near the top we passed a young girl sitting on her rucksack at the side of path, crying. ‘OK?’ I said, stooping down. She pressed the fat part of a hand against the moister eye and smeared it down her cheek. ‘Please,’ she beseeched, quiet and German, craving only solitude. I was to see her about half a dozen times, in the company of a portly youth I learnt was her new husband. Few ever heard him speak, and that tiny imploration was her solitary reported utterance. The camino is many things: a religious duty, a voyage of personal discovery and shared experience, a test of spiritual and human endurance. Perhaps, in many ways, it is like a marriage. But a honeymoon it is not.
Shinto seemed a little downcast after this encounter: his presence had, perhaps uniquely, failed to cheer a doleful stranger. Then the Otero Largo reached its gentle summit, and there it was. Sky of blue, sea of green – the true meseta alta, a sweeping continent of wheat that has been the bread basket of Iberia since Roman times. Three or four distant towns struggled up out of the haze, each crowned by a shimmering, wobbly church tower. And that was it. I took a picture, but when I look at it now it’s hard to tell what it’s of. That’s no landscape: that’s just a flag, a big, dull flag, top half blue, bottom half green.
‘The grain in Spain grows mainly on this plain,’ I said, flatly, then turned round to Shinto.
Donkeys always look slightly hungover, but this was the first time mine had looked drunk. His head was all over the place, straining back and erratically darting forward, then swaying left to right, then jerking up again. The eyes were in whites-up El Loco mode, lolling back into his big skull. And great God Almighty, that mouth: lips stretched tautly back like a shrivelled Pharaoh’s, yellowed teeth gnashing at the heavens. It was like Mr Ed cursing in tongues.
‘Come on, Shints,’ I said, in a voice very unlike a man’s. I cut him some slack, and with the rope paid out to its limit turned to continue. In a second he’d bounded up, and I looked back just in time to see his teeth clamp around one of the straps of my daypack. ‘Shinto!’ I shrieked, jerking it out. But his eyes were now slits of restless hatred, the ears pinned back with sociopathic intent. He went for me again, gnashing at a bare elbow, and the chase was on.
On and on we ran and scrambled and panted, trailing a column of bad words and dust across that epic panorama. Sometimes he’d slow down, then catch me off guard when I followed suit. Only after an hour, with the sanctuary of Boadilla del Camino approaching at unencountered speed, did I happen upon a strategic solution. Keep the rope taut, and maintain a steady jog keeping it at full length. And when it slackens, young pilgrim, run for your sorry life.
The presence of other human life had a policing effect on Shinto, and he strolled through the scrub-dusted, tractor-jammed streets of Boadilla with his demeanour settling into an approximation of repentance. The uneasy truce was for once accompanied by mutual understanding: we both knew that he hadn’t been himself, that he had in fact just been Berserko, the Mad Donkey.
I could probably call Boadilla horrid, and was certainly in a mood to, but folded up in my back pocket was a little brochure that meant I wouldn’t. I passed the official refugio and was uncharitably relieved to see it comfortably the most wretched yet: a sort of abandoned post office, with broken windows and fluorescent tubes emitting unwanted light and an insistent monotone. There were pilgrims glumly manipulating their laundry in its filthy yard, but I didn’t know any of them. They were out of the loop on this one.
It was Petronella who’d found the brochure, days back somewhere before Burgos, and on many an evening since we’d all gathered round to scrutinise it with hushed reverence. ‘Oasis en el Camino’ was the catchline presiding over images of a pilgrim Shangri-La, lawns like golf greens, parasol-sheltered tables, a wall of bougainvillea, sculptures, fountains. It was a twenty-first-century update of those orchard/dovecote monasteries that must regularly have reduced our medieval forebears to tears of grateful joy. One of the British Columbians had dubbed it Club Med, and the forty-eight-bed bunk-house aside it did indeed seem the sort of place you’d book for a real, normal holiday. So much so that I’d made a real, normal holiday booking, over the phone from Castrojeriz.
The walls of the new pride of Boadilla were square up next to its old one, a magnificent Gothic rollo, a sort of giant and ornate limestone sceptre stood on end. I walked Shinto round it a couple of times, admiring its carved scallop shells, flowers and animals. ‘The Rollo shows with dignity the judicial autonomy the village had in the times of Enrique IV,’ read the brochure, which didn’t quite tell the whole story. Erected by the Boadillans in the fifteenth century, the rollo served both to celebrate and expedite the town’s newly acquired right to hang its own criminals. The deluxe gallows stood at the edge of a doornail-dead plaza, a strangely unpeopled realm dominated by a sombre, foursquare church whose big, cracked bell tolled out as I stood there, a ponderous, hang-’em-high tocsin echoing tonelessly off the shuttered houses.
‘Yes!’ I looked round to see a young man with a huge pony-tail grinning brilliantly in the albergue’s gateway. ‘Here we kill de killers!’
He stood there impressively as I walked Shinto over, fists on hips, black-leathered legs planted distantly apart, perhaps debating whether to do something complicated with a sabre or catch a willowy swooner in the crook of his elbow and press his lips roughly to hers.
Edouardo was his name, but he was more than that. I was looking at the King of Boadilla. He had done everything that I said small-town Spaniards didn’t do, ruthlessly targeting the pilgrim euro with a success whose visible trappings multiplied throughout our short walk to Shinto’s overnight field: the Burberry pullover on the back seat of the big car, the pair of haughty white stallions prancing magnificently about in an adjacent pasture. Shinto surveyed them glumly – in the equine attraction stakes, he was now up against a couple of babe electro-magnets. Edouardo’s farewell to him, a belittling sonny-boy slap on the rump, can’t have helped.
‘It’s a good life,’ breezed Edouardo as we walked back to the albergue. Too right: 14 euros for half board in a bijou country club might seem a ludicrous bargain, and indeed was, but when you multiplied 14 by the forty-eight beds that meant a lot of cash in Edouardo’s manicured hand, seven days a week for seven months a year. Great weather, cheap property and guests you can lock up together in a big room at 10.00: I know I’m tempted.
I hadn’t dared expect the albergue to live up to its promotional billing, but oh, how it did. Within its walled grounds pilgrims were prostrate on the velvety lawn with books over their faces; a woman, who was of course Edouardo’s put-upon mother, walked out from the main house with a tray of beers. When I noted that these were delivered in frosted glasses I could have fallen back into Edouardo’s hairy forearms, but it was just as well I didn’t because they were full already. ‘I had a girlfriend from Canada one time,’ he was crooning, his hand round Evelyn’s shoulder. ‘What happened?’ she asked, gazing at him wondrously. Edouardo shrugged cheesily, a parodic homage of the Fonz. ‘I love de ladies too much.’
