Spanish steps, p.28
Spanish Steps, page 28
When the Saracens drove the Christians from the Holy Land in 1291, the Templars found their offensive role abruptly reduced, a situation compounded by their own efficiency in helping to drive the Moors from northern Spain. Having largely done their job, the Templars were now a threat – responsible only to the Pope and in charge of a titanic financial empire that was by now lending money to the very kings who’d once sponsored them so generously.
The end was swift and – yes! – brutal. The castle in Ponferrada, a gift from Fernando II of León, was finished in 1282, but the Knights had only been strutting up and down its great halls for twenty-five years when Philip ‘the Fair’ of France leant on the Pope to authorise the arrest of the Templars, all of them, on grounds of heresy. And, sure enough, with the application of a little medieval persuasion, apprehended warrior monks found themselves reminiscing on long evenings of lavish bum-sex, often whilst flicking the Vs at the Virgin – what with all that and the image of a giant cat to worship, it was no wonder a few horses got lost. One Templar, his memory jogged with particular firmness, recalled having made sweet love to his exhumed girlfriend’s corpse; and in fact, now that he thought of it, returning to the grave nine months later to find a chirpy little skeleton son awaiting him like some sort of calcium Pinocchio. The last Grand Master of the order, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake in 1314; before the year was up, both King Phil and the Pope had fulfilled de Molay’s fireside curse by dropping dead.
I still don’t know where any of this leaves Tomas. Though by the looks of his wardrobe he’d thrown a lot more than his coat to the ground in anger.
The extraordinary rise and fall of the Knights Templar has encouraged all manner of historical speculation, very little of it properly academic, linking the order with the Turin Shroud, Freemasonry and inevitably the Holy Grail. Not surprising, therefore, that Ponferrada, the Templars’ camino HQ, exerts a mystical lure that a certain sort of pilgrim is powerless to resist. Paulo Coelho chose the castle as the setting for his pilgrimage’s initiatory denouement: ‘I took all of my clothes off,’ I read, without appropriate fascination, ‘and Petrus handed me a perfumed black tunic.’ And Shirley lost it big time in Ponferrada, falling over what she calls the edge of reason – a metaphorical precipice, be assured, that is in her case rather more distantly located than might be considered usual. During a sixty-page account of a vision experienced in a Ponferrada hotel room she describes her personal responsibility for founding the human race, budding a male Shirley in that tank of golden liquid whilst alien beings ferry crystal across the skies. Of Atlantis. ‘I was completely depleted of potassium,’ she explains afterwards.
Drizzled and industrial, Ponferrada was hardly straining to exude a sense of esoteric mystery, but we liked it anyway. As well as the castle there was the bridge, albeit a disappointingly bland contemporary replacement for the one that gave the town its name: a mighty structure reinforced with iron, no inconspicuous achievement in 1082.
We crossed the river en route to the Hotel Madrid, whose dapper, elderly proprietor had, earlier that day, apologetically drawn Birna’s attention to the ‘COMPLETO’ notice on the reception desk. She was preparing to leave when Valdis had abruptly vomited all over his switchboard; because this was Spain he suddenly found two rooms and insisted on personally cutting up the children’s veal escalopes at dinner. The largest bath I’d encountered since leaving the realm of normally proportioned Europeans, waitresses in starched and monogrammed tunics serving bread with tongs in a dining room where genteel old dears fanned themselves before a sea of glassware and linen, what may be Spain’s only potable white wine, and all this for less than 30 quid a double: anyone curious enough to understand why leaving a tip can be fun should visit the Hotel Madrid. Anyone not in charge of a 200-kilo quadruped.
Whilst Birna and the children were discovering the aforementioned attractions, I was standing between Shinto and a bellboy at the top of fifteen outdoor steps. At their conclusion lay the strip of yard that had been his intended night realm, and though I knew it was pointless, through courtesy and a lack of Spanish I allowed this enthusiastically persistent youth to try his luck. And I’m glad I did, because that first tentative rump-nudge initiated a merry sequence of events that culminated in Shinto being blindfolded by a chef whilst a chambermaid backed down the stairs holding a carrot to those mobile nostrils. Looking at the treasured photograph I don’t see a stupid, stubborn jackass; I see a noble martyr proudly eschewing the firing-squad sergeant’s offer of a last root vegetable.
With the kitchen staff still filling the Sunday air with loud mirth, the bellboy led Shints and I all the way back up to the castle, down a couple of obscure alleys and at length round the side of a school and into another of those lock-up plots of wasteland. It started raining on the way back, but even though he was only wearing a shirt, and even though the whole operation had detained him for well over an hour, he proudly spurned the note I proffered upon our return. ‘Peregrino,’ he said, but these days I wasn’t even that.
It was the family’s final day together on the road, and walking Shinto through the taunting schoolboy smokers gathered outside his gate I found myself beset by a tangled skein of emotions – impending solitude and rediscovered freedom; economy regained versus luxury lost. From father back to pilgrim. It would certainly be tough for both of us without the family: Shinto would lose his little friends and their daily grooming programme, and regain his full complement of car-borne baggage; I would miss Lilja’s quasi-mystical powers of equine persuasion and her mother’s and siblings’ donk-cheering enthusiasm. Perhaps most tragically, never more would a charmed stranger pick up my dinner tab.
By being ugly and rather dangerous, the route out of Ponferrada helped douse these bitter-sweet ruminations. With Valdis up in the saddle and Lilja clutching the back of my shirt we gingerly traversed huge roundabouts, slip roads and a memorable contraflow assault course, variously harried by impatient motorists and fêted by women of many years, running up their garden paths with bowls of cherries and pre-puckered lips. Only in the afternoon, with the family back up to full strength, did the town begrudgingly peter out into vineyards and poppies.
As we ambled across a gently undulating landscape I at last realised the sunlit, bucolic reality of the strange but appealing familial interlude I’d had in my mind’s eye trooping towards León. In a week we’d gone through the whole Goldilocks routine: the meseta had been too flat and hot, the Montes de León generally too extreme, but these, the plump and temperate hills of Bierzo, were just right. Arm in arm with my pilgrim wife, our flaxen-haired youngest riding high and happy at our side, a keenly prick-eared donkey under her rump and somewhere back down the dusty path a couple of somebody else’s kids trying to trip each other up: this was as good as it got, and it was ending just as they’d all grown accustomed to fatigue, chorizo and the stop-and-drop approach to public urination.
Cacabelos was another are-we-nearly-there-yet extruded strip town, with the pertinent buildings right out the far end. The hotel Birna had found was a new one, run by a family who’d clearly been anticipating Shinto’s arrival all day: the eldest daughter spoke French and as Shints and I accompanied her through the streets she explained that her father kept three horses in a farm just outside town. We arrived at a house with a large and messy front yard, and a shrunken figure she identified as her grandmother tottered eagerly out to meet us, gumming her false teeth into place. Everyone smiled and nodded a lot; I did so with such consuming enthusiasm that Shinto was rather negligently attached to a large and oily piece of mechanical jetsam, which left his snout blackened for days afterwards.
Perhaps because my most fearsome donkey-maintenance concern related to the intimate application of unguents, I had successfully forgotten that Shinto’s anti-tick treatment had long since passed its expiry date. This took my neglect to a whole new level: the danger wasn’t any uncomfortable irritation caused by the ticks themselves, but a reliably fatal blood disease they carried. I remembered as I was getting into bed, and before getting out again I had naturally pre-dreamt the entire procedure. For once fantasy was kinder: instead of having a spike plunged through his ribcage as Hanno had warned me he’d have to, the Shinto of my nocturnal reverie was a huge, prone stallion who obediently rolled over as I anointed each vast, glistening flank in turn with a sort of insecticidal lacquer.
I had Kristjan ball-pen a reminder on my hand – a many-legged blob-monster that was less a tick than one of the Pacman baddies – during our final breakfast together. Looking from face to road-tanned face and suppressing a desire to clasp each to a chest moist with tears of pride and sorrow, I catalogued my children’s achievements. Lilja, never previously associated with any act of stamina not involving tiny plastic beads, had defied the critics with an 80-kilometre on-foot total that left her just 20 clicks short of the papal qualification for a certificated pilgrimage. In the pantheon of crowd-pleasing equine/girl combos, Valdis had earned a place on the podium alongside Lady Godiva and the Banbury Cross bint. Cursed with a Y chromosome and bereft of a solar-powered Game Boy Kristjan had found himself frankly bored for long periods, but had tackled this wholly rational condition with doughty endurance. And considered as a three-headed entity, their traditional holiday litany of demands for complicated treats and favours had been eerily muted – evidently some asceticism had rubbed off. They hadn’t even been more than briefly insufferable after we’d explained that those people had bought us supper because they liked them. Never walk with children and animals, the maxim nearly went, and I had proven whoever nearly coined it wrong.
Birna bequeathed me a mobile phone and a new shirt as we transferred luggage from foot wells back to saddle. Despite the looming attractions of a daily routine shorn of lomo, dung and melted tarmac she was sad to leave: the camino’s epic history and all-pervading human warmth had affected her with something approaching profundity. And for my part, a meandering personal pilgrimage had been set back on the straight and narrow: bullfighting, witnessed by the distraught children in a bar a few days back, was to be instinctively reviled rather than studied with growing interest as a fascinating cultural anachronism. By the same token, the girls’ instinctive affection for Shinto and its girding influence on him had obliged me to appreciate the value of sweet-natured good humour and encouragement, and indeed its productive efficacy, with donkey as in life. It was the power of love, and my daughters had helped me find the switch. Let’s just hope they hadn’t taken the batteries with them.
With a child at his side or on his back, Shinto’s eager ears had stood like furry exclamation marks; watching the Toyota toot away up the tight street they slowly drooped from rabbit mode to spaniel. The hotelier’s daughter, who’d escorted me back to her grandmother’s yard to retrieve Shinto, clapped a sympathetic hand on his back, then heaved aloft a welcome gift: a 5-kilo sack of wheat fluff and husks that may easily have been chaff.
Good news for both of us, and just as well, because if any pill needed sugaring it was the one I found myself being prescribed at the vet’s ten minutes later. ‘No, no!’ quailed a horrified white-coat as I pointed first at the Pacman monster, then at the donkey tied up outside to her oversized fibreglass Alsatian, and last, more forcibly, at my own chest in brutal interpretation of hypodermic hara-kiri. ‘No, no, no!’ she continued, rummaging noisily about in a cabinet before seizing exultantly on a hefty bottle of trigger spray. She held it up to me: the label was dominated by a large blue cat, a small gallery of insect silhouettes with red crosses through them and an absurd price tag. ‘Fifty euros?’ I yelped, suddenly remembering why I don’t have pets any more.
The back end of Cacabelos was well-to-do but rustic: two flour-faced ladies plaiting 3-yard lengths of dough on a bakery trestle, a carpenter knocking up a hefty kitchen dresser in his garage, and yes – a donkey hauling an overloaded hay wain across the bridge heading out of town. ‘¡Hola!’ I called out companionably, then felt my features crumple as the leathery, flat-capped drover curled his lip with almost parodic relish and spat out a furious burst of vitriol. Pilgrim, schmilgrim, appeared to be the crux of his argument: what the fuck did I think I was doing, wasting a perfectly good beast of rural burden on this stupid, bogus promenade?
The road began to roll: the mountains that shored up Galicia, the camino’s final province, were massing on a grey horizon. I knew from the electoral prominence of the Galician Nationalist Party to expect a new glut of separatist sloganeering when we got up there, but even down here the independence issue was a live one. The proprietor of the Hotel Madrid had been keen, using the modest overlap in our vocabularies, to highlight the distinction between the pen-pushing leeches of León and the honest-toiling, horny-handed sons of Bierzo. It all seemed rather feudal: his two favourite words were ‘land’ and ‘property’, and whenever he said either he pressed a fist to his heart. I blame the language: Birna had explained that there are two Spanish verbs for ‘to be’, one expressing a state seen as ‘temporary or reversible’, as might be ‘I am lonely’, but the second a chest-prodding, emotive iteration of ‘a permanent or inherent quality’: ‘I am Catalan!’ And that’s it for generations.
As if to highlight the hotelier’s sentiments, the road out of Cacabelos seemed to radiate civic pride and stolid rural affluence in a way that I’d forgotten was possible. Window boxes and roses; a slate-roofed dog kennel. The only constant was the penchant for building things in the wrong order: I passed huge new chalets with satellite dishes and carriage lights bolted to bare breeze-blocks.
Villafranca del Bierzo was rewardingly like nothing else that had come before, its regal but slightly careworn housing stock scrambling recklessly up the sides of two steep and converging valleys. The stout eminence stacked up behind it made Villafranca the last staging post before the rigours of Galicia, a strategic significance which cemented its role as a bulwark against the Moors during the reconquista. Villafranca means ‘Foreigners’ town’, and by 1250 half the residents were expat pilgrims who’d been persuaded to settle there: Dutch, English, German and even the odd Scandinavian. Most, though, were from just north of the Pyrenees – it’s said that French was Villafranca’s lingua franca until the sixteenth century. Coincidence, perhaps, but following weeks of blithering non-communication with the populace, since Ponferrada it had become weirdly commonplace to find myself exchanging ‘bonjour’s with a local.
We passed the prim and comfy official refugio and shortly after arrived beneath the wrought-iron chalices screening the windows of my intended stopover: the famously eccentric albergue run by Jesus Jato. A predictably under-groomed old chap with a charismatic twinkle in his smut-rimmed eyes, Jesus was healing a Brazilian woman’s foot, rather lasciviously I felt, when we arrived. With cheery nonchalance and a lapful of toes he thumbed us towards a barn lined with old mattresses, and as soon as I led Shinto in the poor animal flung himself at the dusty floor. I jumped swiftly to unburden him – it was wretched when he tried to roll with the saddle on, and not just because of the resultant compression of my belongings: this seemed the closest he’d get to sexual pleasure, or so I hoped, and that was like doing it with a condom. Made out of egg boxes.
The albergue shared a familial ambience with Tomas’s place up on the mountain, a quirky Scout-hut shambles of plastic sheeting, recycled pallets and eccentric announcements. Two doors off the main dormitory were labelled for the use of the over fifties and ‘professional snorers’; plastic flowers coiled up the corners of every treble bunk. ‘It was like the Garden of Eden,’ said a German girl, reminiscing with Total Shithouse a few days later about their stay the night before mine.
‘Yeah,’ he retorted, ‘if you just trod on the rake.’
It wasn’t yet 2.00, and with Shinto sneezing into a basin of chaff I set out to explore Villafranca. That stoutly towered fortress told of an eventful past – I’m ashamed to reveal that the town was most recently despoiled by British troops in pursuit of a retreating Napoleon – and the plunge into a disorientating vortex of narrow alleys certainly made for an exciting present. One was Calle Sucubo: who’d live in a street honouring a female demon who rapes men in their sleep? It was with a heightened sense of relief that I emerged into a broad and beautiful square, its grand ecclesiastical structures arranged around an immaculate rose garden.
On each of the many benches within sat a pair of pensioners, tackling foil-wrapped sandwiches and chugging beer straight from the bottle. I watched them all nodding slowly at the flawless blooms as I worked through a calamari roll in a bar opposite, an establishment empty but for the memorable presence of a hairy-legged transvestite. What must life be for an exotic deviant in a small and remote Spanish town with a throughput of earnest pilgrims? No wonder he’d drunk himself to sleep.
The man I would know as Donald was en route to a similar state when I returned to the albergue. A second-time pilgrim, Scottish Donald had just finished his two-week tour of duty as a hospitalero at the Confraternity’s refugio at Rabanal. ‘Here,’ he said, emptying the dregs of a bottle of red into a plastic cup, topping it up with bitter lemon and pressing the luridly mauve consequence at my chest. ‘I’ve just invented a new drink.’ His Borders slur was barely intelligible even to a fellow Briton, but retired teacher Donald’s most tragic vocal handicap was to sound majestically drunk when he wasn’t. Though in fact by the time I turned up at a refugio he usually was: his routine was to leave early, arrive early, and spend a long afternoon touring the bars. Four others had helped Donald out with that bottle, but later on a dozen of us had to do our bit to save him from an earthenware vat of fortified monk-brew he’d somehow sourced in town.
