Spanish steps, p.25
Spanish Steps, page 25
If Shinto awakened memories of their bucolic, carefree youth, then two young children were a poignant reminder of a time when towns like this resounded not with the dismal roar of heavy traffic but the shrieks and yelps of gambolling playmates. Nationally the Spanish birth rate is amongst Europe’s lowest, and in these no-hope, hard-luck nothingsvilles, kids were almost as rare as donkeys. Valdis came out the other side of Villadangos with a Chupa Chup and a balloon; Lilja with an apple, heavily ruffled hair and a furious blush.
An hour along the road we were met by the taxi carrying Birna and Kristjan, and after a brochure-worthy under-tree picnic beside a chuckling irrigation stream, set off en famille into an afternoon that was an effective bullet-point summary of my recent experiences. A big horizon bisected by a tapering orange path, a heartless sun, a huge stork homing lazily in on a church tower like a bleached pterodactyl. The sole discrepancy was Shinto’s keen zest for the road and faultless behaviour; I was almost relieved when I scooped Valdis off his back as we crossed a small ditch, and looked back a second later to see him galloping tangentially away through the ploughed field we’d just skirted. ‘There was a man on a bike with a plastic bag,’ shrugged Lilja.
Twelve clicks was barely half a day for Shints, but in this heat I could only admire my children’s resilience as we set foot on the Puente del Paso Honroso, at the other end of which lay our hotel. Eight hundred years old, with twenty arches and a total length of over 200 metres, the bridge is astonishing in most ways, not least because eighteen of those arches now span cultivated or developed land, and the town it finally opens into, Hospital de Órbigo, is a bypassed settlement of negligible contemporary scale and importance. As oversized and incongruously sited river crossings go, it’s right up there with London Bridge, Arizona. And like that structure, the Puente del Paso Honroso has enjoyed an improbably colourful history, which I related to my dehydrated offspring as we crossed it.
It’s 1434, and you’re a knight from León who finds himself hopelessly infatuated with an unusually inexcitable damsel. What to do? Well, if your name is Don Suero de Quiñones, every Thursday you wear an iron fetter round your neck. ‘This signifies my binding love,’ you wheeze painfully, as the fair lady sneers past in the gilded horse-drawn divan of Don Mueble. No matter – it is the age of chivalry, which means you have nothing better to do, and so with the King’s permission you organise a jousting tournament with the intention of demonstrating your worth in the grandest manner imaginable: personally offering out every noble horseman in Europe. ‘I’ll do them all, and I’ll do the bastards right here!’ you shout, stamping a cleated shoon upon the bridge’s central span, before a page whispers in your ear that it’s hardly wide enough for one horse to pass, let alone two, so you cough a bit and quietly order the construction of seven jousting arcades in the next-door field. The tents and canopies go up; the word is passed through royal courts across the known world. A life-size mannequin is dressed as a herald and stuck in a hedgerow alongside the nearby camino, and because this is a holy year, no one draws a cock on his tabard.
Noblemen arrive in their hundreds; the stands fill with under-toothed locals and curious pilgrims; feasts are prepared. And then, on 11 July, your first challenger hoists his lance at the distant end of the palisade – a Catalan knight encumbered in a double thickness of steel armour. In a display of quixotic derision you strip off your own light armour and don a flouncy woman’s camisole. The crowd cheers drunkenly, and they barely stop for twenty-eight days, at the end of which you hold aloft, in weary triumph, the last splintered stump of 300 rival lances. One knight lies dead, and some leather-aproned inebriate with a rusty saw is looming over a dozen groaning others.
The last true medieval tournament is at an end, and in fitting conclusion you lead a glorious procession to Santiago, hanging a gold band round St James in holy emulation of your own iron fetter, now discarded. ‘Pray, good sire, whither the fair lady?’ enquires a manservant, and you tell him that was never really the point, and hold forth at great length about the chivalric ethos, and then he asks again and you start crying and tell him to shut up.
Twenty-four years later, an armoured horseman approaches as you’re riding across a field. He raises his visor curiously. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ he asks, and you clear your throat and for the thousandth time begin to tell your tale, except when you get to the bit about the camisole he kills you.
It looks to have been pretty much downhill for Hospital de Órbigo ever since, though the children enjoyed some medieval high jinks in the dangerously ill-maintained municipal playground, and so did I in seeing off a posse of spirited youngsters who clustered aggressively round Shinto after I’d tied him up in a grove of trees by the bridge. Poor Shints. No sooner had his tormentors slunk away than nature turned on him again: a gathering wind loosened a blizzard of seed-fluff from the boughs above and carpeted his dinner in cotton wool.
We could hear his sneezing brays from the tiny room all five of us were wedged in, and so of course could all the other guests from theirs. In contrast with the night before, plenty of pilgrims stayed here – that much was plain from the ‘NO HANG OUT THE WASHING IN THE WINDOW’ notice Sellotaped to the splashback – and an unfamiliar group of elderly Dutch ones occupied the bar as we walked out to find food. By now I was familiar with the word ‘donkey’ in most European tongues, and hearing dark mutters about ‘de ezel’ I knew they feared for their sleep. And rightly so: the next morning Shinto bugled the whole town out of bed at 5 a.m.
Because we didn’t know that then, we lingered over our meal. The restaurant I found down a careworn backstreet offered simple fare, but we had an outside table under a bamboo canopy, a decent bottle of rosé and crayons with which the children were able ruminatively to deface the paper tablecloth. The brandy arrived, and was at length drained; an authentic conclusion to my family’s first full day on the way of St James. ‘El . . . um . . . bill,’ I called across to the padrone, autographing air in the universally accepted fashion.
His response was a far more complex gesture, one we were still trying to decode when he appeared beside us bearing a little tumbler of golden liquor. This was laid before me with elaborate ceremony and a hushed flood of reverential words. ‘Sorry, but I didn’t . . .’ I began, but he waved me quiet and backed away pointing at the distant table accommodating our sole fellow diners, an elderly couple. ‘Fine,’ I muttered, ‘go and see to them first, but if this turns up on the bill I’m not paying for it.’
‘He says it’s fifty years old,’ whispered Birna, who’d done Spanish at school. I took a sip. Brandy – very good brandy. I’d downed half when the oldsters stooped towards us. ‘Good evening,’ said the husband, while his wife gazed at the children in happy reverie. ‘Excuse me but it is so that your children are . . . quite angels, as our grandchildren,’ he faltered graciously.
‘Well . . . that’s very kind,’ said Birna. ‘Thank you.’ And in truth they had displayed unusual quiescence, as I believe is common with heatstroke and exhaustion. That said, some of the on-table artwork was a little pungent, and a large text box above my dessert spoon proclaimed in an infant hand that Daddy smelt of donkey bottoms.
We talked for a while: they were pilgrims, and astoundingly had walked all the way from their home in Zurich. ‘It’s maybe four zouzand kilometres,’ said the wife, modestly. I scanned each kind, old face in turn and with all that brandy in me it was impossible not to gawp – neither could possibly have been under seventy.
‘So . . . thank you,’ said the husband, straightening his back and searching for an appropriate valediction. ‘Tonight you are our friends . . . our guests.’ I hoisted my ancient cognac. ‘And so are you,’ I reciprocated chirpily, before brazenly tipping the remainder down my gullet.
When they’d gone I waved an impatient finger-pen at the padrone. He glided up with a questioning look. ‘La cuenta, por favor,’ said Birna. His brow furrowed further, and with shaking head he held an explanatory hand to the recently vacated table behind us. For a brief but vivid moment everything in my body stopped working. Then I pressed my palms to my face and stared at Birna through two small gaps in my fingers. They had paid it. They had paid our bill, Fanta and food and vintage brandy and all. They’d tried to tell us and we hadn’t even thanked them. I threw back my chair and ran out into the street, but it was dark and empty both ways.
When the children were asleep Birna and I stood at our window, and through the neon glare of the hotel sign above noticed activity on the edge of Shinto’s forest, right beside the bridge. A recorded fanfare blared out, then gave way to a thumpingly medieval cacophony of pipes and tabors. ‘They’re dancing,’ said Birna. ‘Loads of them.’ And peering carefully I could see dozens and dozens of extravagantly mobile bodies, cavorting in flailed unison by those hallowed arches.
‘There’s a festival every July to celebrate that joust,’ I mumbled. ‘Must be practising.’ It was all rather wonderful, possibly even enchanting, yet I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm. The more I thought about what had just happened the more it seemed a test of a pilgrim’s good grace, a test I had not passed. When I replayed the scene again there was a horrible new detail: after draining that aged liquor I had failed to suppress a belch.
There was a moral, and this was it: Treat all strangers as if they have just paid for your dinner. Actually, there was another. Don’t have that second brandy if you’re sleeping within half a mile of a donkey.
The new day brought pain and noise, but it also brought hope. Today we would reach Astorga, finish line of the meseta, the end of my symbolic death, from whence the camino jumped off its symbolic deathbed and climbed steadily up and over the Montes de León. The only slight worry, having consulted the literature, was that the ensuing spiritual resurrection wasn’t slated to kick off until the Cruz de Ferro, highest point of those mountains, leaving me 28 kilometres of soulless limbo after Astorga. But as long as the road went up, or down, or did anything even vaguely three-dimensional, you wouldn’t find me complaining.
It would just be Lilja and me with Shinto that morning, and after a slap-up breakfast – or rather the meagre juice-and-croissant pat-up that is the best you’ll ever get in Spain – we blinked out into the over-zealous sun. At the end of the road Hospital de Órbigo died around us, and the camino veered back to the N120. Before it got there, however, there was a bridge over an irrigation culvert, a sheet of galvanised metal which sang like a saw when I planted a boot on it. This sensory experience had a predictable effect on Shinto, and with a sag of the shoulders I turned round.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Lilja.
‘We’re going back to find another way,’ I said, lightly massaging a tender spot on my right temple. My brain seemed suddenly full of curdled brandy, and at this stage of the day I had no wish to expose my daughter to scenes incorporating adult language and strong graphic horror.
As I’d seen so many others do, she grimaced sceptically at first donkey, then bridge. ‘But it’s really small.’ I nodded vacantly, then set about wheeling Shinto round. ‘Have you tried holding out some of his favourite stuff from the other side?’
‘I’ve tried everything.’
She twisted out a frond of alfalfa from the pathside. ‘Can I try again?’
I suppressed a sigh. ‘Quickly, then.’
Lilja looked at Shinto in mock reproach, one hand on hip and the other proffering the vegetable lure. Then she leant forward, and whispered, ‘Now, Shinty, it’s only a little bridge.’ His ears shot up and without hesitation or deviation he clanged straight over.
Five clicks up the road we met the back-up crew, clambering out of a taxi on to the hot earth with water, bread and bad news: every hotel in Astorga was full, and Birna had been obliged to book an unseen out-of-town alternative by phone. We’d started late, and now faced an additional 6 kilometres in heat that at 11 a.m. was already almost absurd.
Astorga showed itself as we picnicked atop the most considerable hill in recent memory. It wasn’t difficult to see why the Romans had established the town they named Asturica Augusta where they had: a sudden blip in the flat foreground, crying out for a fortress. Beyond, somewhere in that distantly brooding bank of peaks, were some of the empire’s richest gold mines, and Asturica stood guard over the road that brought the ingots back to Rome.
When the pilgrims began to arrive, this was an obvious place to recuperate before the vertical rigours ahead; boosted by the additional influx of holy walkers on the Vía de la Plata, the north–south pilgrim route that merged here with mine, Astorga was home to twenty-one hospices – only Burgos boasted more. Where once stood the fort now soared the cathedral tower, still guiding and beckoning pilgrims, still the dominant man-made structure in a generous swathe of landscape. Rewinding through the last month – the last 500 kilometres, thank you very much – I couldn’t recall a town, even a city, where any building had stood taller than the tallest church.
The children stopped to roll boulders down a gully, a pastime hypocrisy forbade me to discourage, and filthied themselves further after imaginatively combining a fountain with three sun-hatsful of field. The heat was making everyone clumsy: Birna tripped up as she returned a farmer’s wave, I refreshed myself with a swig of vinaigrette, and every ten minutes a bleat of alarm warned me that Shinto had once again tried to roll in the dust, forgetting Valdis was up on his back. For maybe two hours we weren’t on holiday, shuffling silently through the acrid backyard of some sinister industrial complex, watching in drained and lip-blistered impotence as Shinto stooped to sniff the rails whilst we crossed the main line to Madrid.
Between Astorga’s peripheral allotments, a splat of tended green in the clods and rubble, and then up the merciless, spiralled ascent to the old town. Birna had parked the car in a torpid, ochre square; there was a ticket on the windscreen but neither of us could summon the energy for an inquest. Lilja had earlier insisted she’d walk on with me, but as Birna soporifically marshalled the others towards the car’s smelted interior she shuffled along behind, mumbling incoherently like Little Nell in her final moments. No need now for a saddle; I unstrapped it from Shinto’s hot back and somehow wedged it and the fetid blanket on the parcel shelf. A retarded exchange of heavy-lidded farewells, and they were off.
If Shinto looked nude without his saddle, leading him through the streets I looked mad. As Spain’s rural populace had discovered in recent decades, deprived of work the donkey has no purpose: with bags and tackle his function was unequivocal, but what was that now at the end of my rope? I caught our reflection in a shoe-shop window and saw what the few locals not dozing behind their shutters saw – some sun-slackened loon taking his daft pet for a walk.
I hadn’t seen a familiar pilgrim since León, but there were half a dozen or so on the shadowed benches around the square at the edge of which, soaring improbably above the sunless back ways of the old Jewish quarter, stood the baroque bookend that was the cathedral’s façade. A few token hands were raised in greeting: they were too hot to ask where all my stuff had gone, and I was too hot to tell them. ‘ ’S’closed,’ one slurred thickly as I headed to the cathedral gates.
So too was the adjacent bishop’s palace, one of Antonio Gaudí’s slightly melted Sleeping Beauty castles. It’s hard to look at a Gaudí building with a straight face, but because of the conditions my wry smile somehow came out as an awful, drunken bark. Shinto looked at me sharply: Really, said his eyes, people will start to talk. With his African genes he was never unhinged by the heat.
Dead straight, dead calm, slightly downhill: the road out of Astorga was tailor-made for round-shouldered, jelly-spined stumbling. With the sun sitting on my face I couldn’t see or breathe properly, and soon my powers of perception were boiling away. That emerging structure over the road was a new shopping centre, right? A health centre? I stood opposite the entrance sign, wiped a hot, donkeyed hand across my slick face and tried to clear a mind now dangerously befogged by heat and fatigue. Yabba di flabba da monasterio da flabba di yabba. Monasterio? I lurched back to the west and started putting my feet in front of each other again. A monastery – a spanking new monastery. Only in Spain, where the churches still looked down on everything and everyone, where boys were called Jesus and girls Camino, where the consecrated host is wheeled through the streets on the Thursday that follows the eighth Sunday after Easter.
That these conditions were punishing even by Spanish standards became clear when we awkwardly skirted a big set of roadworks and had a close call with a JCB driven by a man in Y-fronts. Up there in that little cab in his sweaty red jockeys, look. And check them out, Shints, those two playing that funny game on that big green roofless squash-court thing. Just over there. Pelota, that’s it. Pelota in your big fat pants, Shiz, that’s what we’re dealing with here. What’s that? Oh yeah – you’re a donkey. You don’t do that mouth stuff with the words. Right, OK, uphill here, look, uphill for 30 clicks now. Come on, mother. David! Da-vid! I never saw that, sir. Colette choisi le sac. Elle choisi aussi le panier bleu. Ooop! Here we go, get the old head in that fountain, ready, here we go and a . . . whoooffffthhhh. Pttthhh. Christ al-bloody-Jesus. God. Christ. God.
I slapped my face, filled my hat with more water and put it on. Better. Right – Spain, donkey, walking, family. Good. I’d just walked through a village, but it didn’t seem to be the right one. Castrillo, I wanted. ‘Castrillo?’ Suddenly there was a little old lady with a dog at my side, pointing me back and left. It was very good of her to help, rather than say have me exorcised or burnt. Particularly because if she hadn’t been there, as I realised checking the maps that evening, I’d have presently found myself back in Astorga.
Castrillo was only a click and a bit up the road, but it was no place for a man in my condition. Birna had warned me by phone that it was pretty, if a little quiet. Pretty it was. Shinto’s hoofs clacked impressively down a cobbled street overseen by slate-built houses with covered balconies: scores of sympathetic restorations and not a stoved-in hovel in sight. In this wall a weathered ceramic medallion, in that some doughty familial crest. The obligatory stork’s nest on the church roof. And mercy me: the door beneath was slightly ajar. I stuck my head into the cold dark. Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the door, and here are the people. Except they weren’t. There were no people, not here, not elsewhere in this whole town. No cars, even. A little quiet? Those stout and rough-hewn doors had for centuries watched the world go by, but now the world had gone. Walking back round the church I felt like the night-watchman in a model village. The contrived architectural perfection made it all the more creepy: here was a set from The Prisoner, only with El Cid instead of Patrick McGoohan. When my phone rang I almost reabsorbed my spleen.
