Spanish steps, p.24
Spanish Steps, page 24
The traffic intensified and our tarmac safety margin narrowed into a merging sliver of dirty chevrons, off-white streaked with the cataclysmic skid marks of someone’s last moment on earth. There were hoots and snatches of bellowed Hispanic reproof; the four lanes became six and now there were slip roads and ramps and those big blue signs that say ‘No pedestrians’, ‘No mopeds’, ‘No tractors’, and ‘Get that fucking donkey out of here NOW’. Yet Shinto always gave of his best in heavy traffic, cheerfully incapable of acknowledging a clear and present danger to his continued existence when, who knows, there might be a puddle or a flamingo or something round the corner.
When after perhaps half an hour the hard shoulder finally disappeared we scrambled down an embankment, to be met by a series of crash-barrier hurdles and an underpass. Cars and huge trucks were now roaring past above and below: I could hardly hear myself swear. It was a bad place, a place where no man had stood in this highway’s active lifetime, and here I was, standing in it with a donkey. We would have to go back.
Six legs make a lot of footsteps to retrace, and I was almost in tears by the time we were looking at the empty space where those evil policemen had been parked. Shinto had blithely jaywalked all the way back up the motorway, and having utterly exhausted my nervous and physical resources in laborious restraint, I blindly shuffled alongside as he sauntered across those four lanes. In a cacophony of horns we made it. Quite why my donkey opted to cross the 100-foot wooden bridge we encountered almost immediately after I will never know, but if he hadn’t it would have meant a hearse or a horsebox. A truly Bunyan-esque ordeal was at an end.
Shinto continued to excel himself as León gradually took shape around us. The schedule was all shot to hell, meaning his lunch was half a loaf and a packet of biscuits eaten from my hand in a car park, but snorting the crumbs off the long, rogue hairs on his old lady’s chin he ploughed doughtily onwards. He paused by a gate and let the immaculately presented kindergarten inmates on the other side force their little hands through the bars to pet and tickle. He waited patiently at zebras between the executives and shoppers, kept his nerve as the arrows led us down sour-smelling alleys I could touch both sides of, and haughtily ignored the jeers of students vocalising what I now accepted as the last dregs of an age-worn cultural reflex to taunt any passing jackass. And when we found ourselves in the square before the great Gothic cliff of León cathedral, he allowed himself to be rather aggressively appropriated as a photographic prop by the many tourists waiting for its towering doors to open.
I wasn’t about to join the queue, but the cathedral’s exterior featured all I desired in such an edifice: a huge rose window and flying buttresses. For no good reason that I can think of, flying buttresses have ended up lodged in the sieve-mesh of my mind, along with other random reminders that I once went to school. An ox-bow lake, the vas deferens and Venn diagrams: it’s an elite club, and a sighting of any member in print or in life always raises an inner cheer.
A Pacman route through more tight alleys, a few more high-profile road crossings and finally across the manicured plaza gardens – sorry about those petunias – to the frankly astounding Parador San Marcos, a great block of gilded history crowned by a proudly regal St Jim. Here was the longest Renaissance façade in Spain, and certainly the most richly embellished, and tonight, a small part of it was to be León’s Moore-ish quarter.
I walked Shinto up to the soaring arched entrance; linen-suited men and their copper-faced, lavishly coiffed consorts strolled ostentatiously out, memorably contorting their nonchalant features when presented by a donkey who’d apparently just run through a dirty campsite covered in glue.
With my animal attached to the nearest available item of street furniture I jogged into the echoingly vast reception hall and up to the desk. The bald incumbent didn’t blink at my rather disappointing presentation – it’s by no means unusual for pilgrims to spend a night or two here to reacquaint themselves with civilisation – but his rear-facing assistant’s shoulders shook with some violence when I mentioned my travelling companion. But when you’re paying – oh, filthy nude goblins – that for a room, and that for the one next door, you don’t expect too many questions. Salvador Dalí once took a sheep up to his room in a grand Parisian hotel. And shot it.
Sure enough, when I went back out the bellboys and porters were fighting over Shinto, each of them loudly eager to assume responsibility for valet-parking him round the side. Watching the most senior blue-jacket lead my donkey off along the longest Renaissance façade in Spain and through an arch at its distant conclusion, I understood that despite the umpteen trials of that day and every other, the way of the ass was the right way, the true way, perhaps the only way. Though obviously this was before I’d followed the pair of them into the car park and found the poor, wet-faced porter distantly pursuing Shinto in and out of the Mercs and Audis.
León was the most Roman town on the route, a military stronghold whose name itself is a contraction of ‘legion’. For 350 years the city was the capital of this entire quarter of Iberia, and after the last centurion popped his sandals the Dark Ages hardly had a chance to get going. Despite regularly changing hands in the usual manner it remained a city of prosperity and vigour: whilst London remained a benighted outpost of Wessex whose grunting citizenry cowered from Viking raiders in wooden hovels, tenth-century León was a thriving metropolis, the capital of Christian Spain, its grand market squares thronged with international wool dealers and flanked by monasteries and palaces. Its Jewish population was one of the largest in Spain – we have a resident of León to thank for kabbalah, the mystical offshoot of Judaism now so popular with many of our most dreadful celebrities. Madonna based her silly children’s book on its central tenets, which I’m afraid means I never want to know what they are.
León got knocked down – all of it – but it got up again. There was so much money in early thirteenth-century León, from both trade tariffs and protection money extorted from the now cowed Moors, that the cathedral still standing was built in less than a century – a blur by the standards of large-scale medieval construction. It was drunk cycling Rob who’d revealed León cathedral as a 2/3 scale model of the one in Reims, which seemed a splendid encapsulation of what the pilgrimage achieved. It was a theme, like so many others, upon which Rob had expanded: as a museum designer with an enhanced appreciation of ecclesiastical architecture he’d described how in any Gothic church along the camino he’d find a ceiling boss or some other modest decorative feature that precisely replicated one in a slightly newer structure back in Britain. In florid terms he imagined the scene, a pilgrim from Leicester staring slack jawed at a cathedral ceiling and returning home with a sheaf of sketches for his local stonemason.
Whilst the mason was drafting up an inflated quote for the bishop, back in León the good times were almost over: like so many along the route, the town was a victim of the pilgrimage’s success. Pilgrims brought the wealth and weaponry that by 1350 had driven the Moors almost out of Spain; there was no longer a reason to squash all the markets and monasteries up in the north-west. And they also brought the Black Death.
So at least I learnt, lying there up to my ears in bubbles with a book in one hand, a cold beer in the other and a jar of green olives wedged in the soap dish. Shinto, I’m afraid, was lashed to the air-conditioning plant at the back of the car park, albeit engulfed by bamboo bushes upon whose succulent upper leaves he was noisily feasting when I arrived to fill the bowl at his feet with supermarket porridge oats and French toast.
Many of the San Marcos rooms, I had noted, languished in a contemporary annexe tacked on to the back, but not mine. It wasn’t huge, or in fact spectacularly well appointed, but it overlooked the river – a broad stretch of sandbanks and shingle sparsely plaited with streamlets – and was handily proximate to the hotel’s most impressive feature: the upper storey of a two-floor cloistered courtyard. I could have propped an elbow on that shady balustrade for hours, a thin-stemmed schooner of amontillado in my rose-watered fingers, gazing across at the scallop-shell medallions on the facing walls. And, most deliciously of all, soaking up the embittered skyward glances of visitors to the adjoining museum of antiquities as they patrolled the formal gardens below. If they could see me now, those pilgrim friends of mine.
My family’s route to León required them to fly to Santiago and drive back east, covering in three hours what at current rates of progress would take me nearly three weeks. It was a slightly deflating calculation: I felt as if I’d spent an agonising age acquiring some skill now rendered embarrassingly redundant, like a farm labourer coming back from sickle school to see the bloke in the next field fire up his combine harvester. Everything was about to change, and as I lost myself in a vast towel I realised how far I’d moved away from any sensible definition of domestic normality.
Most of the pilgrims I’d talked to couldn’t understand why I was looking forward to my family’s arrival. Using language familiar to any woman who’s ever proposed attending a poker night, and any man who’s offered to carry the bags around Harvey Nichols, they muttered ominously about boredom, filth and danger, when what they actually meant was, This is my outing, and I don’t want you spoiling it. Directly or not, partners and children represented what many had come to escape from. ‘You are with people on the camino, but you are selfish,’ said Jean-Michel. ‘I am doing this for myself, and by myself.’
The bedside phone warbled as I was buttoning up the least ravaged of my two remaining shirts. It was Birna. Two minutes later three young faces were carefully surveying me across the threshold of room 454, wondering what this flash-fried, straw-haired castaway had done with their daddy.
Eleven
‘You are ze man viss ze monkey?’
I looked up from the breakfast table to see the Swiss pilgrims who’d passed me just outside Sahagún. ‘No,’ I said, extracting a small thumb from my left nostril and elbowing off an incoming salvo from the muffin cannon. ‘I am the man with four monkeys.’
Happy as they were to meet their Pilgrim Father, at least once he’d attended to himself with his new birthday razor and tired of affecting solemn conversion to Mormonism, Shinto was the main draw. It was unfortunate in this light that he’d given a very poor account of himself when I’d taken them to meet him the evening before: there was crap in his food bowl, and endeavouring to discard it I was snarled at and butted. If mine was the unacceptable face of family tourism, then here was its unacceptable ass. Nine-year-old Kristjan hardly noticed, but it was clear from the crestfallen alarm on his sisters’ faces that their hard-wired affection for the equine race would be tested to its tail-brushing, mane-plaiting limit.
Happily, a new day brought a new donkey, biddable and benign, calmly wrapping his prehensile lips round the bread rolls we’d trousered from the breakfast buffet. The girls were entranced, and launched enthusiastically into the grooming process, but to me there seemed something oddly lobotomised in his demeanour. I found out why as I untied him: beside that restless compressor sat a gigantic floodlight, and the poor sod had spent the hours of darkness in a soul-numbing halogen supernova.
With the children in convalescence from the combined rigours of a long journey and a night largely occupied puréeing fixtures and fittings into a kind of room soup, Birna and I agreed that it would be best to leave most of the donkey work to me that day. She handed me one of the two mobiles she’d come equipped with, then crammed our offspring into a tiny Toyota amongst all the stuff I’d not be needing during the day. Stripped of everything but his bowl and a pannier half full of food and sun-cream, Shinto was down to his fighting weight, and after I’d waved the family off he set forth across the sun-polished flagstones with spring-heeled gusto.
More wide eyes in rear-view mirrors, more pavement conversations cut off mid-syllable: Shinto chewed up León’s guidebook reputation for haughty implacability and left it steaming behind him in a gutter. A filthy face shot through the fly curtains of a sunless bar and smiled in childish wonder; I smiled back. In the end I just smiled all the time, and began firing out a ‘buenas dias’ to anyone who passed. I was a better citizen, and the pilgrimage and my donkey had made me so.
The shops gave way to half-built high-rises, a kitchen sink agleam in the rubble, a tiled splashback on an unrendered wall. And so León said its muted farewells, outside a desolate industrial estate whose nocturnal ambience was neatly encapsulated in the generous sprinkling of lipsticked cig butts at the foot of each streetlight.
Next up the road was Virgen del Camino, which sounded beguiling but wasn’t, the first of a succession of small towns angrily split in two by the N120, its traffic-soiled pavements stalked by Don Mueble and his warehouse brethren. Here the camino forked, offering pilgrims a choice between cowering all day in a cloud of diesel, noise and mortal danger, or tripping gaily along quiet tracks through an unspoilt rural landscape. The first was 3 clicks shorter; I hung a right and cowered.
In half an hour we were deep in many-laned madness, not quite as desperate as the approach to León but not far off. It was hot and I was scared, but Shinto was only hungry. The bamboo evidently hadn’t sated his need for living matter: even as a sweep of lorries bore down on us up the slip road we were preparing to cross, he was trying to wedge his snout under the guard rail to get at the crisped-up, peed-on, hard-shoulder brownery. A fraught minute later, for the first and only time, I saw him snap the head off a thistle and effect its weary ingestion. Shinto never spat anything out – it was as if doing so would involve an unacceptable loss of face. Once I saw a thick reflective wedge of a shattered CD smuggle itself into his gob with a fat mouthful of roadside barley; he registered its discovery with a look of embarrassment, then defiantly prepared it for his oesophagus with half a dozen ice-cube crunch-squeaks.
The only hill of the day lay just beyond a church crowned with a precarious profusion of haywired stork’s nests. If you had a recently fed donkey you pulled, and if you had a bike you pushed. Six Dutchmen doing just that caught me near the top. ‘Oh, but he is ill,’ said their leader, assessing Shinto’s hung head. ‘You must let him rest.’ I was wondering whether to go for words or upgrade straight to the sticks and stones when a clang followed by three ghastly wet chokes had us looking back down the road, where his most elderly colleague had dropped his bike and was vomiting copiously into the desiccated vegetation.
My phone warbled into life soon afterwards, and within the hour Birna was ferrying children across the siesta-quiet tarmac. With the car empty she U-turned bumpily through the undergrowth and headed back to the hotel she’d booked us into, 5 kilometres up the road, and then walked back to meet us. It was perhaps a little ludicrous, and would be superseded in subsequent days by a marginally more practical but distressingly more expensive taxi-based scheme, but that afternoon I couldn’t have cared less.
When the path eased slightly away from the road, seven-year-old Lilja took charge of Shinto’s rope; four-year-old Valdis was gently bobbing about up there on his back, hands on the saddle horns, an incredulous beam on the small bit of face visible beneath her sun-hat; Kristjan, being nine, and a boy, was somewhere behind us dribbling Fanta on an ant’s nest. I was happy; we were all happy.
Within a click it was apparent that Shinto appreciated the children’s presence as much as I did: Valdis weighed rather more than the panniers ever had, but when I briefly removed her he slowed to a sulky shuffle and up she went again. For the first time in days, in fact weeks, his ears stood proudly aloft to reflect eager contentment rather than panic. There was no getting away from the adjectives flat and hot, but nobody seemed to notice. Birna joined us for the last hour, and breezed up to our lonely roadside hotel murmuring that if it was this easy we could try doing 30 kilometres the next day.
The Urbanización Santiago was as beguilingly atmospheric as one might have anticipated, a spanking new but creepily deserted structure with an adjoining restaurant, dropped in the litter-strewn no man’s land – sorry, landscaped overnight donkey park – between the N120 and another deserted motorway. The beds in our pitch-roofed attic all incorporated thick rubber undersheets – I could have depilated a bathed and excitable donkey in there and the mattress at least would have been none the wiser – and were situated tight up against the ceiling’s lowest point, guaranteeing nocturnal pain and alarm for any father stupid enough to put his pillow at the wrong end.
Our sole fellow guests were a business traveller I’d seen arranging fabric samples in the boot of his Opel, and a rather furtive couple in the room below who occupied the night with glumly metronomic acts of love. But no other pilgrims. In fact no pilgrims at all, because as far as most of the service-industry personnel we encountered hereon were concerned, I was now just part of a complicated, indulgent and perhaps rather culturally patronising family holiday. As a pilgrim I’d led an almost Amish existence, but here I was, turning up at big hotels with a Nokia pressed to my head and a support vehicle parked round the back. I’d never paid more than €1.50 for a beer; that night they charged me €3.00.
It was swings and roundabouts, though, and the next morning those surcharging waiters were joined in that metaphorical playground by twinkly-eyed old ladies. I’d already been severally impressed with the nostalgic burromania exhibited by Spain’s elderly females, but with Valdis in the saddle and Lilja threading a daisy chain through Shinto’s tail the overall package proved almost fatally winsome for women of a certain age. As our convoy idled through the first road-dusted strip town of another hot day, its black-clad, waddling citizenry accrued about us, hands clasped to beam-wrinkled cheeks or gladdened hearts.
