Spanish steps, p.23
Spanish Steps, page 23
‘That’s where I stayed last night,’ said Rob by way of greeting as he wobbled alongside, nodding at a field of canvas and caravans. I’d been scraping the marker post behind me through the hard-shoulder gravel, a durable auditory donkey prod, but now raised it as a conversational courtesy. ‘It’s the same place that Charlemagne’s army camped before a big showdown with the Moors.’ It was as if he’d been talking to himself ever since we’d left him. ‘That yours then?’ Belatedly, but with minimal curiosity, he took stock of Shinto’s existence.
‘It is,’ I said. By not asking the usual questions, Rob oddly inspired me for once to consider the answers. Most pressingly, what to do with this great big animal if – or as was beginning to seem possible – when we made it to Santiago.
‘Right. Anyway, the night before the battle they stuck their lances in the ground, and in the morning they’d all sprouted branches. A miracle!’ He raised both palms from the bars and briefly clasped them together in a display of mortal gratitude. ‘Though not a very good one. By the end of the day 40,000 Christians lay dead. That forest is supposedly . . .’ He’d been gradually moving ahead, as even the most lethargic pedestrian did when alongside Shinto, but carried on his soliloquy regardless. ‘Mozarabic’ was the last word I picked up; I called out his name in a querying tone but he didn’t look back. As he moved away I noticed that amongst his modest panniered possessions there was no sign of a tent.
The divide between town and country was marked by a huge motorway and a confusing but critical pilgrim junction. I was very keen to avoid the more authentic path to the right, which as well as being longer, incorporated a 22-kilometre stretch that my red book described thus: ‘No shelter, no shade, no water, no food, nothing.’ Two jolly Dutchwomen took the wrong fork, and when I saw them days later they were jolly no longer; someone said they hadn’t spoken to each other since. So too did a grey-haired little German woman who always wore gloves. She didn’t come out the other side. The word was she’d done her knee in. I hope that’s all it was.
It was hardly a carnival parade the way I went. A chiding side wind whipped across the meseta, carrying low cloud and the drone of toiling goods traffic from the distantly parallel autopista; the few villages were moribund and largely derelict, adobe walls eroded by the elements into termite mounds. (Mains water arrived here in the mid-seventies, and phone lines ten years later.) Everything suddenly seemed rather sinister. Why was a man digging a trench in that copse, and why did he look at me like that when our eyes met? I don’t know what that armless, toga-wrapped shop dummy propped up in the next field did for the crows, but it scared the piss out of me. And just outside the second village there was half a freshly savaged fox in the path. What could do that to a fox? I got one answer when I read a bit of Dominic Laffi, hunched over my boccadillo in the lee of a squat water tower: ‘Past Sahagún we came across a dead pilgrim. Two wolves had begun to eat his body, so we chased them off.’
The long, lonely gaps between settlements had been sporadically endowed with young trees and concrete-benched picnic areas, but the former were shrivelled saplings old before their time, and the moss-stained latter were being steadily reclaimed by nature – inevitably so considering their stubbornly ill-thought locations, clustered just after a town where most pilgrims would have had breakfast, and just before the one they’d be having supper at. This was El Burgo Ranero, and improvidently harried down its main drag by two unhelmeted nine-year-olds on trials bikes, I got there just in time to bag the second-last place on the downstairs floor.
The refugio was an adobe structure of recent construction, and after the modest physical rigours of a short stage its inhabitants were in skittish mood. The wash house was thick with whistling launderers; someone had opened a bottle of wine and at 5.30 it was being passed round. On the inside of the loo door was a cautionary line drawing of two male stick-pilgrims in the act of urination, one standing up and partially obscured by a large red cross, the other happily seated and crowned with a green tick. At some point in the late afternoon this image was effectively adulterated to depict the sedentary fellow energetically soiling the floor with a very different excretion.
For the last few days we’d been working our way through the salad-less bean-and-pulse belt, which didn’t do much for the vitamin and mineral situation but opened up a new world of multilingual menu entertainment, principally because the Spanish for beans was judías. As soon as I spotted ‘Jews With Ham’ on the English bill of fare at the restaurant over the road I knew it had been a mistake to share a table with Total Shithouse. Sure enough, he very nearly swallowed his tongue.
Mrs TS nobly endeavoured to curb her husband’s ribald excesses, but with a bottle of wine a head thrown in as part of the meal-deal it was an uphill battle. ‘I read that El Burgo Ranero was named either after frogs or wheat,’ she said brightly as the flans arrived.
Her husband briefly scanned the frogless world of grain on display beyond the window. ‘Well, that’s bloody stupid,’ he barked in disdain. ‘That’s like saying Melbourne is named either after an old Prime Minister or a . . . cow’s arse!’
There was a brief but profound silence, one interrupted by a defeated voice from Baroness von Munchausen’s distant table: ‘Ja, but that is faster I think than the vurld record.’ It was almost a shame that our paths were never to cross again. The last reported sighting had the Baroness dramatically brandishing a small canister containing her mother’s ashes. In the one before that, she’d been seen putting her earplugs in it.
A dripping shower and a tiled floor were effective discouragements to restful slumber, and the sky was full of constellations when I reluctantly rustled myself upright. But yawning at the window, a new day nudging the next horizon, I saw Shinto as I would like to remember him: nobly silhouetted against an orange dawn, head bent down to the grass. ‘Beautiful,’ whispered a backpacked Frenchman, en route to the exit across a floorful of rustling snufflers. And as we watched together, Shinto raised his tail to the fading stars and flopped out a big wet sack of crap.
It was another day across the void, another day of prairie madness, seeing a town taking shape at the edge of my world, and knowing that in the half a day or more it would be before I walked amongst its spires and telegraph poles and pantiled roofs I would know and loathe them all with a contempt born of familiarity. Here the barley was hip high and its ears crisping gold, but after showing its face at dawn the sun responsible was soon just a light patch above the swift, low clouds, like a torch in fog. Yesterday’s side wind had shifted and now swept snidely into our faces, carrying the smell of farms and flowers and the occasional knockout whiff of fox piss. For the first time since the big rain it was cold, and I found myself warming my hands on a donkey’s hot neck.
It was always good to bolster the perception of Shinto’s utility with an additional function. Whenever we stopped he would rotate his anus to face the prevailing wind: the weathervane feature. If my laundry hadn’t dried and the sun was out, with a string round the panniers and a couple of pegs he was a clothes-horse as literal as any you’ll find. And at Carrión I’d purchased and blended the ingredients of a titanic reserve of vinaigrette dressing, guaranteed to moisten and revitalise even the most wizened boccadillo; this conspicuous addition to Shinto’s burden, along with a burgeoning fruit store, certainly warranted the honorary title of mobile canteen.
Since I’d discarded the Devil’s Barley his behaviour had been no worse than truculent, but weather and outlook were both dispiriting and by mid-morning Shinto’s locomotive rhythm was down from ‘We are the Champions’ to ‘Michelle’. The marker-post dragging had proved only sporadically effective, but was granted a new lease of life when teamed to the 20-foot length of chevroned hazard tape I’d found flapping, uselessly I decided, from a roadside pylon. One end of the tape round a saddle horn, the other distantly anchored to the trailing post, and the whole wildly animated by the elements: the first big gust filled Shinto’s peripheral vision with multicoloured danger and sent him clattering off for a good quarter-click. So too the second, and to an extent the third, but within an hour he was once again demonstrating that any fear created by his master, in contrast to those thrown up by Mother Nature or indeed anyone else, could with time be rationalised and thus conquered. Despite my early start I was soon once more falling back through the field, and tying three plastic bags and a small bush to the tape didn’t help. ‘That’s not a donkey,’ said Evelyn as she passed, ‘that’s a carnival float.’
The meseta had never been a more disheartening treadmill, but if there was one thing this pilgrimage had taught me it was the value of simple pleasures. Ambience and old bread should by rights have made lunch a dire ordeal, but there was salad dressing, and a bench, and the sum of these meagre parts was happiness. A small, bright-eyed woman approached as I agitated my vinaigrette; a hesitant exchange of conspicuously accented ‘buen camino’s revealed our shared nationality. ‘It’s great this, i’n’t it?’ she said, the wind gusting her Lancastrian words away across the drab flatness. Ten minutes earlier I’d have thought she was mad, or from Blackburn, but with smooth concrete under my bottom and the flavour of the Mediterranean in my glistening chops I found myself nodding in hearty assent.
Mansilla de las Mulas was so named for its mule market, and I suppose for that alone I should have stopped there. Certainly everyone else had: walking through its largely intact medieval walls and past a galleried church I spotted the blind Japanese chap following his tiny wife into the refugio, and looked up to see laundry and familiar faces in every window. But even though progress was now down to the agonising end of the sloth scale, and it was gone 4.00, I didn’t. I couldn’t. León, the last city before Santiago, was 19 clicks off and I didn’t want to get there late the following day.
There were two reasons for this. One was that I had a bed waiting in the Parador San Marcos, the palatial former HQ of the Knights of Santiago now transformed into what the Confraternity guide called ‘one of the great hotels of the world’. The meter would be running from noon tomorrow, and I’d clearly need all the hours God gave and I’d paid for to reappraise those simple pleasures before dispatching them one by one down a marble bidet. And the other was that my bed was a double, and next door were three singles, and that these remaining berths would, by late afternoon, be occupied by my wife and children.
Total Shithouse had supplied the inspiration. By walking on to the next town while his incapacitated wife got there by bus, and meeting her with apparent success every night over a long period, he’d shown that a two-speed camino was logistically feasible. It was Birna who’d first raised the possibility of a half-term family pilgrimage, during a phone call from Burgos: I can’t pretend I wasn’t slightly surprised by her enthusiasm, but I did pretend my money was about to run out when she asked how many other paradors she could book us all into along the way. A hire car and ruinous mobile telephony would be required, and the sort of head-melting to and fro associated with that riddle about the farmer crossing a river with a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain. But it could and would be done. This was more than just a slightly odd holiday story to tell in the playground. There were four young souls at stake here. How’s a chap to enjoy a gilded afterlife knowing his wife and kids are down there in the fires of purgatory?
The route out of Mansilla was fairly wretched, sometimes separated from two lanes of baying traffic by a strip of brambles but more usually by nothing but a fading white line. Horn-happy Sunday drivers shot past, almost grazing Shinto’s ears with their wing mirrors. One shrieked to an oblique halt 100 yards down the road and began reversing waywardly towards us; I saw the French plates and was ready with an appropriate gesture before the camera appeared.
The N601 sliced rudely through a town with neither appeal nor accommodation, picked up more traffic from a busy tributary and headed towards Puente de Villarente. Just before the twenty-arch bridge that introduced the town, I was joined on the hard shoulder by a little old man in his Sunday best. ‘Hotel?’ I asked, and promptly found myself being chivvied up to a decaying façade embellished with topless neon cowgirls. It was twenty minutes before he’d tottered out of sight, and so twenty minutes of foolish loitering before I could politely begin my search for more acceptable accommodation.
An hour later, having passed the bridge and a hotel with a pool full of yesterday’s guacamole, I was wondering if I ought to turn back to the fly-blown bordello. I was still wondering when I peered through the window of the Hostal Montana, finding myself presented by another of those oppressive bars full of droopy-lidded card players flicking nutshells on to the floor and drinking hard spirits at inappropriate times of an inappropriate day. But I didn’t, because by now I knew better.
I knew that the passage to my room would involve the ascent of a grubby and windowless stairwell, its navigation dependent on a big round switch which when depressed procured a brief period of illumination: just enough, in this case, to leave me fumblingly marooned on a half-landing with a donkey saddle over my shoulder. I knew that resolving this situation would involve fear, pain and a fight with a pot plant. I knew that logic demanded that when at length I shouldered open the door to my room I would find the bed filled by a squat and sprawling hairy-back in a string vest, who would slowly roll his red eyes and budge grudgingly up to one side. But I knew also that logic has no place in a Spanish hotelier’s lexicon, and that instead I would find myself strutting regally through an air-conditioned realm of gleaming mahogany and vitreous enamel.
It was a rear-facing room, which gave me peace from the traffic and a view of Shinto, who I’d smuggled round the back and tied up by the kitchen door. I looked down as I was stringing my laundered socks out the window: there he was, gazing wistfully across a broad field of fallowed something or other. I turned the telly on as I wrung out my underwear in the bidet – that election had finally happened and the votes been counted, but I couldn’t make any sense of the pie-chart analysis. It was odd to feel so completely out of the geo-political loop. Huge and important things were happening – lawlessness and violence in Iraq, Britain scoring no points in the Eurovision – but somehow I seemed to have dropped out of the world they were happening in. This was what my life had become: a donkey in the yard and a sink full of pants.
When I returned carrying a wet T-shirt, the sun had made a belated appearance and Shinto was rolling in the dust with unbridled abandon, raising a cloud that showed up the low-angled rays. I guess it would have been about this time that I noted the large green dome to which I had attached my donkey, evidently with impaired vigilance, was a bottle bank. Had we been in almost any other European country I might not have found myself hammering erratically down the stairs and outside, but Spain, like Britain, is still at that stage of environmental awareness where citizens patronise such facilities to recycle old bottles not into new bottles, but into violent noise. The detritus associated with this pastime is predictable, and Shinto was now energetically working it into his flesh.
He cumbersomely righted himself at my loudly vocal approach, and though agleam with diamante shards, emeralds in the dust, his hide appeared miraculously unpunctured. I brushed Shinto down and led him to the nearest alternative tether point, miles off in the field but otherwise safe. Regardless of their age and experience, my family’s impending arrival could only dilute the witless incompetence that still threatened my pilgrimage with a premature and tragic end.
You don’t want to linger in a refugio, and indeed can’t even if you did, but because this was a hotel, with a telly you could watch from the bath, I didn’t get off until well after nine. It was only a dozen clicks to León, but my self-styled ‘short day’ was off to a poor start.
The usual suspects who’d stayed in Mansilla were already striding past when the path veered away from the road, and did so in steady profusion as Shinto stopped in his tracks by a large earthen yard enclosed by a tall chain-link fence. Ears at 12 o’clock, head and body taut and immobile: I knew that expression by now, and I knew that it meant we had entered enemy territory.
I scanned the rising, convex enclosure for some time until I spotted a small head approaching from behind the brow. The head was followed by a long neck, a really very long neck, and then a disproportionately hefty torso. It was an ostrich. Most birds are a little stupid and ostriches famously so, and I was not surprised to see this example strut about randomly, bobbing and stretching at nothing and no one. Shinto obviously felt he knew better, though, and tracked his opponent in unblinking earnest.
And how right he was to do so, because as I idly surveyed the map the ostrich abruptly charged us, pistoning those spindly legs to dramatic effect, wing stumps fluffily outstretched. Shinto had seen enough, and with the now enormous freak-beast ten yards from the fence he legged it. Happily in the right direction, but once we were over the next hilltop his head dropped and he slowed almost to idling speed. Beaten again, boy; beaten by a bird.
That wasn’t nearly as bad, however, as the truly awful stuff that happened an hour up the road, at the top of a hill with León happening right down there before my eyes. The yellow arrows had been letting me down all morning, ordering us right across a huge highway and then back across it 50 yards later, and I scrutinised with a degree of scepticism the one that pointed pilgrims straight over a four-laner. The brow of a hill and no green men or zebras: it was like a circle-all-the-dangers illustration in a road-safety leaflet, particularly as the furious traffic throughput provided the answer to where everybody in this part of Spain had got to. There was, however, a police car on the opposite hard shoulder, and seeing both front seats occupied I waved and yoo-hooed above the whooshing flow of fast metal.
The window was lowered, exposing a pair of aviator shades and a big, lazy smile. A smile that didn’t say, Stay there and remain calm, sir, while my colleague halts the traffic, so much as, Ready with the shovel and bin-liners, Luis – and if they make it over, the flans are on me. I waved again, motioning at the vehicular onslaught in helpless imploration. The smile became a laugh; the window smoothly closed. Proffering gestures that in Spain’s less enlightened recent past would have had them truncheoning the soles of my feet for a week, I set off down the hard shoulder in search of an alternative crossing.
