Spanish steps, p.30
Spanish Steps, page 30
We passed a couple of pallozas, circular, shaggily thatched Asterix homes of Celtic design, and continued up the margin of a glorious overview of blue-misted, fat-treed valleyhood. Then the farm-fresh Alpine air carried across a thin suggestion of bagpipes and in a moment there we were by O Cebreiro’s church, looking across at ‘a tiny village of nine houses and another step back in time’ or ‘a camera-necked mass of coach-bound Austrian rent-a-pilgrims’, depending whether you trusted the Confraternity guide or your own eyes.
It was a surprise more than a pity to find this fabled, almost mystical hamlet host to at least half a dozen inns and lodges of over-elaborately authentic construction. An eccentric priest had once serenaded his cattle with Bach blasting out of a huge PA speaker secreted in the church tower, but now the piped music of O Cebreiro is of the fluting, droning variety, and its audience the tourists wooed by taverners and the vendors of ethnic ceramics. Like the pallozas, Galicia’s music – they call bagpipes gaita – is another link with the Celts who settled here in the fifth and sixth centuries after being harried from Britain by the Picts and Saxons. As indeed was Donald, waving happily through the window of what didn’t look like his first bar of the day.
I left Shinto to his publicity commitments in the churchyard and wandered in through the porch, happy at least that a village that had prospered from the old pilgrimage was doing so once again. And happy, like my medieval forebears, to have made it to this auspicious beginning-of-the-end, to an eminence imbued with such symbolism that it has attracted legends like Brits to brandy.
None more so than those witnessed in this church, for the chalice that lay somewhere at its dim, grey-washed fundament has been touted as the Holy Grail from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. During a communion at some inevitably unknown date in the fourteenth century, the fêted receptacle cemented its claim with some hard-core transubstantiation: as the priest made with the wine and wafers they morphed into real blood and hunks of raw flesh. Even the statue of the Virgin leant over for a better look: ‘What you done to my boy?’ she should by rights have shrieked hysterically, but because this was medieval Spain she didn’t. (Later, King Ferdinand and his Queen Isabella demanded to have the relics removed to a more impressive location, but – splendidly – the mule hired to handle the transport refused to budge, and they stayed put.)
I was shuffling along up the aisle towards these enchanted icons behind a hushed and dutiful tourist procession when a considerable commotion broke out to our rear. Shouts, laughs, and a stroboscopic frenzy of camera flash; I pushed through a few shell-suited bodies and outflanked a few more, and then, peering over the heads of the most diligent paparazzi, found my eyes blankly met by Shinto’s. He had walked straight in through the tall, green church doors and now stood by the rearmost pew in mild perplexity, blinking as another delighted compact-zoomer snapped an album highlight. Inveigling myself to his side, I caught the rope and led Shinto outside through a corridor of Germanic enchantment, as proud and embarrassed as a father helping his infant tap-dancing prodigy down from a restaurant table. It was a moment of mane-ruffling incorrigibility, as oddly stirring in its way as that excretory trespass atop the Cruz de Ferro.
A delighted codger trotted forth from his grocery with an armful of old bread and a bulging carrier bag of grain; as Shinto ate from his hand and posed fetchingly for the redoubtable Austrians, the Dutch girl wandered ethereally up the roughly paved street behind a restless, zigzagging Sativa. In passing she whispered the conclusion that the portentous climb to O Cebreiro had offered her: ‘The camino is about temptation and sadness.’ I nodded as sagely as I felt able, then, watching the grocer ease another baton into Shinto’s crumb-haired food-hole, felt myself succumb to O Cebreiro’s mood of contemplative stocktaking.
Probing the dynamics of our relationship, I arrived at an arresting conclusion: Shinto’s ingrained sloth was nothing more than the by-product of genius. Laziness is a luxury few animals have known and fewer still learnt to enjoy. That dog for one certainly hadn’t – all that wasted energy, all that blind obedience. In the wild, of course, sloth usually meant death; for a domesticated animal the trade-off was a little more complicated. A beast of burden had to do his job or face being that dog’s dinner, but there was nothing in the small print that said he had to do it with a smile or turn up for unpaid overtime.
I looked again at Sativa, scampering but ultimately subservient, and realised how much happier I felt with Shinto’s free-spirited work-to-rule. His only duty was to himself, to do just enough to stop me throwing good barley after bad and abandoning him by the road. My gnawing fears that one day he would simply refuse to walk were misplaced: he knew exactly where that line was, and had been walking along it now for – ooooh – 620 kilometres.
On we went, out past the refugio, following a line of huge pylons up and over a forested escarpment. Everyone, it seemed, had encountered a camino Doppelgänger: only the day before Petronella and her dog-following compatriot had both unsettled locals with ashen double takes, and a week earlier Birna palely recounted exchanging mute waves with a good friend of ours as she drove past a bus; a phone call which can only have compromised this friendship confirmed that he had not left Ireland in months. It seemed appropriate that I had my close encounter with this phenomenon near O Cebreiro: topping a gentle false summit and glancing into a pine copse I found myself face to haunted face with the living image, the very spit of Kurt, who had died ten years before almost to the day, and was a cat.
After all that two-dimensional trudge, there was now much too much landscape. Epic prospects opened up on all sides, undulating, rain-fed fertility receding into a distant distance. It was like Wales with lizards; How Green Was My Valley isn’t a question, but if it had been, then the answer here was Really Very. A monumental contemporary bronze of Santiago stood guard over a swooping descent through pimpernels and hazelnut trees: a gleeful swish of metal and Lycra on the neighbouring tarmac reminded me that it was here my friend Nicky’s cycling companion had vaulted the handlebars and wound up in a ward. And because this was A Significant Place, she’d blamed divine retribution for their skimping at a refugio honesty box.
Gravity placed its firm hand on the Shinto arse, but though from hereon in the camino was helpfully marked with countdown-to-Santiago posts every half-click, he seemed to have an uncanny awareness of when I was trying for an official speed record. ‘I don’t know what to say, coach, it was all coming together, I felt good, I’m coming into the last 50 and then there’s like this big load of dried cow shit at the side . . .’ At the next village, another Hospital, the road bounced back upwards, and with unexpected violence: after 3 unholy kilometres we stood on frail and shaking legs at Alto de Poio, almost 100 metres above O Cebreiro.
This wasn’t a town so much as a couple of head-of-the-pass bars either side of another quiet strip of the N6, but one of them had rooms and Petronella was sitting outside it in a receding triangle of late-afternoon sun. ‘Looking good, Shinto,’ she said, rising to manipulate the more tactile parts of his face. ‘That spray for the little bugs must have helped.’
Cock, piss and tits. How had I forgotten? And so, watched by Petronella, another of her many middle-aged pilgrim compatriots and, less intently, a trio of professionally bored Frenchmen, I lashed the unburdened Shinto to an adjacent garage door and swaddled his eyes with the strip of tablecloth that chef had used on him at Ponferrada. It was sad before I’d even started: hearing me prime and agitate that big blue bottle of badness, he flinched and ducked like a hapless POW at a mock execution.
Here was a scenario beyond any bestial rationalisation: Shinto might feasibly have been equipped to connect most of my previous maltreatments with his own cowardice or reluctance, but what had any donkey ever done to deserve this cold-hearted, systematic torture? I swallowed hard, shook again, and holding the trigger at arm’s length let him have it square on the forelock. Shinto backed blindly away and flailed so violently that he head-butted the up-and-over garage door, a great basso profundo gonging that boomed out sickeningly and raised faces from many a beer at the windows of the bar opposite. All that to treat an area equivalent to half a cat’s nose. By the time I’d finished, a huge toxic cloud hung over our corner of Galicia and Shinto, poor Shinto, was leaking mucus from all the many holes in his poison-plastered head.
The great thing about animals, though, other than the shortfall in intelligence and dexterity that enables us to rule the world, is their capacity to forgive and forget. (Realistically, it’s probably just forget.) Less than half a minute later he was browsing blithely through the weeds, with only that discharge to remind me and the harrowed Dutchwomen of his recent passage through a blinded, nightmare realm of choking awfulness.
I checked in and hauled my stuff up another three flights of unlit stairs, then returned to ask the rather surly girl at the desk, or rather bar, if she could suggest a suitable overnight grazing area. ‘Tengo un burro,’ I heard myself say once more, ‘I have a donkey.’ Her expression clouded, and after repetition did not clear. Following my third attempt she nodded, though with a lack of conviction that was justified when her hand stretched under the counter and emerged with a box of huge cigars. This was Galicia, I reminded myself, where they had their own language, and so it was mime time again, a small treat for the three aged locals hunched over small glasses of luminous alcohol at a table behind. ‘Ah, un burro!’ she said, before immediately morphing her happy enlightenment into a giant, sulky so-what.
Her face was promptly replaced by her back, and as she sauntered away down the bar I felt my pilgrim soul sullied by a grim lust for immediate revenge. But discretion proved the better part of valour, and it was only once she’d slopped us out a four-course pilgrim menu in a record thirty-five minutes – gruesome in most ways though at least devoid of tit-for-tat scabs and phlegm – that I crept outside and tied Shinto up at the distant end of her back yard. Just by the vegetable patch.
I’d been looking forward to the next day since the first big climb out of Villafranca. From Alto de Poio to Triacastela the camino dropped 700 metres in 12 kilometres: during that debilitating scramble at the end of the previous afternoon I had pictured Shinto trotting gleefully downhill at mane-fluttering velocity, building up an easy momentum that by rational calculation would set us up for the easiest 24-click day to date.
Conditions looked good, too, with our long, hard shadows spanning the quiet 8 a.m. tarmac and just a bracing hint of Alpine dew in the delicately herbal air. I walked briefly alongside a tiny Englishwoman on her second pilgrimage: ‘As a C of E heathen I wasn’t having their blasted compostela,’ she announced scathingly, the first time in an age that I’d heard organised religion mentioned with any sense of pertinence.
It was as she walked off ahead down the open road, apologising at her need to press on, that I first accepted we weren’t quite hitting our targets. My legs ached to bound down that invitingly sinuous descent with elastic, whistle-accompanied strides, but instead we were steadily slipping to a stiff-limbed, cortège shuffle. All that painfully acquired altitude was proving just as painful to offload. And the choral prod didn’t work, not even when wielded with iron-throated abandon, not even when sharpened with the lyrical adulteration of Madonna’s ‘Like A Brayer’, or ‘Burn Donkey Burn’ (‘Shinto Inferno’), or ‘Just Get A Sodding Move On’ (‘You Shiftless Wazzock’) (trad). Shinto didn’t even bother counterfeiting hunger or the usual crap-sniffing displacements: this was pure, stubborn inertia, and all those ruminations in praise of his finely calculated indolence were slowly returning to taunt me.
By the time the path left the road at Biduedo, I was hauling him along with glowering, manic resolve, the rope over my shoulder for extra leverage. Pilgrims squeezed past in pairs and trios, their bright and voluble expressions withering into baffled concern as they took in my toiling, hunchbacked stance. Sweat embittered with the essence of pure frustration sequinned my brow and coursed into the eyeholes below, smearing out a gorse-thicketed hillscape: I’d hoped to be in Triacastela for lunch, and at 12.00 we weren’t yet halfway.
When the descent tilted recklessly into a dappled corridor of ash and holly I went round the back and pushed, a hot hand on each recalcitrant, grizzled buttock. The path re-crossed the N6, and as I laboured him over the dotted white line Shinto dug in for a last stand. A rare vehicle was gunning down towards us in low gear, maybe three bends up; that nearest corner was blind, and as I’d been severally reminded nothing dispatched more pilgrims to premature paradise than road traffic. I leant and shoved and bellowed, but the considerable pride he had invested in this show of resistance proved greater than my diminished physical reserves. With the still unseen motorist almost upon us I turned uphill, preparing to halt him with a frail and desperate Railway Children entreaty; as I did so, a hefty brown hand appeared on my shoulder.
‘Tranquilo, tranquilo,’ breathed its large, vested owner; I surrendered, silently anticipating a demonstration of donk-lore distilled through many rural generations, and being therefore rather taken aback when my Samaritan snatched up the rope in both hands and yanked with such explosive, roaring gusto that I cringed my eyes shut, expecting when I opened them again to see Shinto’s tattily severed head flying over the treetops, trailing its rope like a field event at the Mafia Olympics. Instead, just as the car shot past in a cloud of horn noise, I beheld those huge yellow eyes, suddenly limpid and conciliatory, looking back at me across the tarmac.
The outskirt villas of Triacastela were now watching us through the hefty oaks, but it was clear that we’d not be going much further that day. I could usually depend on a road gang for some spirited taunting, but when the four blokes peering out of a pathside trench took in Shinto’s laboured stumbling they issued only a muted round of sombre applause, as if watching the last finisher in a marathon stagger drunkenly up to the line. A concentration of sun-hatted loungers by a whitewashed building in a field up ahead alerted me to the refugio’s proximity, and we were perhaps 15 yards from the indicated turn-off when the camino was traversed by a grate-covered drain. I planted a foot on it and Shinto froze at my side, like a cartoon pointer dog. Only once, on the first day, had he expressed serious concern at such an entity; and this, with a span of perhaps 6 inches, was handsomely the poxiest non-obstacle he had yet refused.
After all the day’s travails we’d both had enough of physical force. I sat down against a dusty, lizarded wall on the other side of the grate, pulled my hat down over my face, and waited. And ate, and waited, and slept.
‘Perhaps it looks like a cattle-grid to him,’ said the voice that roused me. I jerked my head straight, stoutly smiting the wall behind, and found myself blearily contemplating the Englishwoman, heading a small crowd that had apparently wandered up from the refugio and now formed a semicircle around Shinto. Heavy lids, lowered head – he seemed to have downshifted into stand-by mode, like an unattended laptop. Arching my back and smothering an epic yawn, I critically surveyed those modest galvanised louvres at his feet. ‘Perhaps,’ I conceded at length, ‘but what we’ve got here is more of a gerbil-grid.’
I creaked upright and took stock of what, before a North European audience, had just become a rather diminished pool of options. The Lilja Method was by far the most humane, but when my proffered handful of wild barley earned only blank rejection and the bursting snort of poorly stifled sniggers, I strode purposefully through the pilgrims – largely French, as that sibilant muttering made plain – and bid them stand aside. Once Shinto’s stolid hindquarters lay at the end of a cleared corridor I inhaled prodigiously, and before I could change my mind charged through the sunburn and sandals, shrieking and clapping like an ergot-addled peasant. The corridor widened dramatically, a flock of birds took panicked flight, and, waiting until I was almost upon him, Shinto took the solitary lethargic step that was all I required.
‘Blimey,’ breathed the Englishwoman as I picked up the rope and prepared to lead Shinto away with what little dignity could be rationally justified.
‘Mais . . . ça va pas!’ came a shriller voice, a voice which swiftly rose in timbre and volume to a piping blast of accusatory outrage. Affreux . . . anglais . . . agressif: I didn’t catch much, but what I did was more than enough. The phrase ‘living-room tou-tou’ marched impressively into my hot head, and I swiftly formulated a furious bilingual riposte about this theme with which to wheel round and counter-attack my accuser. I never did, though. Partly because nobody would have understood, not even me, and partly because I had suddenly and alarmingly pictured Shinto as my child, and considered in this light what I had just done represented an act of cruel and certainly unusual punishment. That was rubbish too, of course – what was I going to do, shoulder all his bags and give him a piggyback? – but it still seemed a tough brief, defending myself against a charge of screaming at a laden animal.
Clearly the refugio was no longer an option, and tying a slouched Shinto to a tree on the verge by a town-centre supermarket I cobbled together an alternative: stock up here with overnight supplies, and strike camp in that field over the road. That would do. Or rather it wouldn’t, because when I came out with my arms stretched taut by carrier bags of tinned fish and ale, he was down. On his side, not this time in luxuriating repose but enfeebled collapse, one set of panniers pinned beneath him and the other rising and falling to quick and shallow breaths. Dragging my provisions I rushed over like Groucho Marx, yanked out the underside saddlebags and managed, with some effort, to heave that huge head off the grass and into my lap. He wheezed out a soul-rending gurgle, an awful, obstructed sniff through some matter-clotted life-pipe, and as I looked into his glassy, dimming eyes I felt my own sting and leak. Oh, Shinto, not like this, not here, half on the pavement outside a Super Spar.
