Spanish steps, p.31
Spanish Steps, page 31
And what could I do? I had a phone, but taking my previous donkey-related exchanges with the people of Galicia as a guide, any SOS call would result in a visit from a twenty-four-hour mobile tobacconist. Two elderly ladies walked up, arm in arm, but allowed us a generous berth, flicking a rather-you-than-me look as if I was helping a stricken tramp to vomit. A bus driver slowed to allow his fare-paying vultures an enthralled gloat, and the supermarket manager stood in his threshold wearing an expression of commercial concern. ‘Burro doctor?’ I called out pleadingly, causing Shinto to lever himself effortfully erect. The manager’s eyes dilated, and looking up I saw why: Shinto’s entire flank was afoam with bubbling death-sweat, a thick, slick slather of heavy froth. ‘Burro doctor!’ A more urgent yelp, but the glass door was already swinging closed behind him. With a geriatric, grunting huff Shinto laid himself down beside me once more; my lap hurt, and so I inveigled his granite skull on to my shins. And as I did a burst of familiar yapping broke out, and there was Sativa, and her owner, and a lanky fellow of Mediterranean appearance.
‘My friend Ramon has a telephone,’ said the woman I now knew to be Letje, appraising the situation succinctly. Ten minutes later a chubby, smoking vet pulled his Citroën up on to the grass, and by the time he’d trotted over, additional vehicles were disgorging supplementary vets on both sides of the street. The final tally was four.
Like a child at the doctor’s Shinto perked up immediately, jumping to his feet and rediscovering an interest in the newly turfed grass around. The terminal froth-bubbles were the only obvious symptom of his malaise; a svelte young lady vet palmed off a sample and rubbed it dubiously between her thumb and forefingers. A sniff, and a smile: it was my multi-purpose washing-up liquid, fractured in Shinto’s collapse. Her colleagues fussed about his head, and the one who spoke English asked a few questions before delivering a prognosis I had myself begun to suspect: that tick spray was completely inappropriate for equine use, and Shinto had in consequence suffered an asthmatic reaction.
That beastly, chiding Frenchwoman had been more right than I’d wanted to think: like a cold-souled guard on the Burma railway, I had force-marched the sick to work. ‘Just some little rest, maybe he is OK tomorrow,’ he reassured me as his co-vets began to depart the scene with good-luck waves and toots. I held my money belt out helplessly, and he waved a mockingly reproachful finger at it. ‘No, no. You come . . . I show you place to rest.’ Ramon had gone, and as I led Shinto into line behind the Citroën pootling back up the hill I thanked Letje and asked her to thank him. ‘He is on the path to wisdom,’ she called out over her shoulder, ideally meaning ‘Righty-ho’, before ineffectively calling Sativa to heel.
Fifteen minutes later we followed my lovely vet up a brief drive, and promptly found ourselves in the grassy forecourt of a modest but attractive detached home. He swung open the car door and slipped chirpily out. ‘Here?’ I said, uncertainly contemplating the fruit trees and garden furniture and imagining them respectively stripped bare and hosed in allergenic slurry. ‘Sure, of course,’ he said, stroking that shirt-stretching stomach with proprietorial satisfaction. ‘Burro here, you there.’ He inclined his head at the front door. ‘Is my house.’
Mario was his name, and no sooner had he deposited my stuff in the guest room than the phone rang, heralding much manipulation of that iron-filing stubble, his fifth cig of the hour and, with the receiver down, a faltering explanation of pressing cow matters. ‘My girlfriend Maria here soon,’ he fumbled, scribbling something on a drug-company note pad and instructing me to pass it on to her. And with a wink, a toothy Latin smile and a genial slap on the back he was off, leaving me alone with his Led Zep and ‘Legalise Pot’ posters, an enormous library of DVDs and a menagerie whose Ark-like abundance would become shortly apparent.
Mario and Maria? It all seemed a little unlikely. Such trusting good nature was so alien to a suspicious urbanite that I felt almost bemused: if not a miracle, this was at least a bona fide parable. I’d read some Englishman’s contention that ‘luck on the camino is 2 to 3 per cent greater than it should be’, and here was the tangible evidence to verify that apparently ridiculous statistic. From the kitchen I watched Mario drive back out and off up the road, then looked down at Shinto, now happily embarked once more on his mission in life, the processing of lawn into crap.
Imagine for a moment that your partner is a veterinarian of unusual enthusiasm, and that you are not. Your homes are separated by a three-hour drive, and conflicting patterns of work restrict your time together to a single weekend a month. After two years you have perhaps become accustomed to the reality that this weekend will be regularly interrupted by bovine miscarriage and bastard strangles, and that when it is you will be left alone in a small house with six relentlessly voluble canaries, a tiny dog of similar persuasion, two tanks of fish, four mewling newborn kittens and a shelf replete with jars containing the pickled embryos of memorably deformed cattle. But now imagine that you arrive at the Friday afternoon commencement of one of these rare weekends to find your partner absent, that offbeat petting zoo supplemented by a foaming donkey and his master, and the unkempt, foreign latter bearing a foolish smile and a note ordering you to feed and entertain him.
And yet having read this, Maria – auburn and petite with a smile as ready as her cheerful beau’s – elected not to slop me out a bucket of twin-headed-calf tripe on the doorstep, but instead sat me down at a little round table which she began to fill with the fruit of Galicia’s arable cornucopia. Dark, cured chorizo that cast my daily sarnie-filler in the most unflattering epicurean light, a decayed pastille of greying dairy matter that offended every sense but taste, a winning marriage of rich cream cheese and honey, and all this washed down with crisp local beer that demanded the back of a hand to be drawn across a grateful mouth.
We talked as we ate. I learnt of Galicia’s difficult history, a poverty so endemic that – another link with the Scots and Irish – economic migration has been a way of life for 500 years. I learnt that jobs are still hard to come by in Galicia, explaining that ludicrous monthly commute from her IT post in the coastal city of Ferrol, and I learnt that ten in the native dialect was pronounced ‘death’. ‘Mario, his shoes are always with the shit of the cows,’ said Maria in a mock moan, and yet her man plainly adored the animals in whose company he spent the vast bulk of his professional hours. As well as that distressing homage to foetal mutation, there were cow posters on the walls, cow milk jugs in the kitchen, and even, on a shelf by the huge flat-screen telly that was his extracurricular existence in the pre-Maria period, the scale representation of a Friesian pelvis.
Overwhelmed with calories and kindness, I dearly hoped Maria would now allow me to wash up, or perhaps even deworm a couple of budgies. Instead I was led outside. ‘We go to Samos,’ she said, opening the passenger door of her Renault Clio and ushering me in. ‘Is old monasterio of six century.’ But I wasn’t listening. Gingerly lowering myself to the velour I felt a rush of primal vitality spark through every neurone in my body, a rush that came out of my mouth as an ineffectively smothered whoop of exultation when she fired up the engine and reversed slowly away from a suddenly curious Shinto. I was in a car, and it was moving.
We rolled on to the tarmac, she engaged first and soon we were travelling at a velocity that was literally superhuman, and for the first time in my life actually felt like it. If speed was indeed a drug then I’d been cold turkey for five weeks, surely the longest since my father had driven his wife and last-born child away from the maternity hospital in a Ford Zephyr. I gathered from Maria’s commentary that we were passing through a valley of big beauty and histories, but all I cared about was sensing it swish by. I felt my scalp shrink as the kilometre posts thwicked past, my brain unwilling to accept what my eyes were telling it, that what had been taking twenty weary minutes or more was now, as we hit mean Spanish cruising speed, a matter of thirty carefree seconds. It was too fast, but then it wasn’t fast enough, and as we pulled up outside a large institution of ecclesiastical aspect I was rocking forward and back in my seat, a child coaxing the last vestiges of momentum from his go-kart.
Maria did her best to enthuse me at Samos, pointing out the monks tending its garden, the scallop shells on its railings, its general ancient vastness. I tried, I really did: slowly pacing the perimeter with my hands linked behind my back in academic rumination, gamely nodding – the works. ‘Is one of most old and most big in Spain,’ she said, and I raised a dutiful eyebrow. Samos was off the route but a popular option with the sort of pilgrim who didn’t mind an additional 9 clicks; why, look – there’s Donald, hoisting a beer at us from that bar. Regrettably, though, the monastery’s sombre façade arrestingly incorporated a petrol station: one look at the pumps and I felt an itching desire to reprise my performance as an unsophisticated Victorian ruralite on his first train ride. ‘Listen, this is all great, Maria,’ I said as we walked past the forecourt, ‘but I feel we ought to be heading back.’ At immense and glorious speed.
Mario was slumped in front of that huge telly when we got back, showered and happily knackered, another notch on his calving forearm. We shared more beers, and talked merry garbage to the accompaniment of flamenco and progressive rock, and posed for a self-timer shot I have before me now: the three of us huddled together, four tanned hands on neighbouring shoulders and a small pet in the spare two, fag smoke rising from a table full of bovine-themed crockery and empty bottles. The frame before depicts Shinto’s dead-eyed head on my lap, taken for the reference of veterinarian or coroner, and as I rapped my donkey goodnight on the window and drooped towards that lovely guest bed, what had seemed the worst day of my pilgrimage was ending as one of its very best.
I was up with the lark, or rather the skull-shuddering bray, and leaving a fond note of thanks against a ceramic udder by the phone dragged my bags out into the chilled half-light. And there was Shinto, contemptuously staring out a plump brown dog as its owner slowly brushed his mane. ‘It’s quarter to seven,’ I said, in a tone better suited to a slightly smaller hour. Letje looked up with a distant, Mona Lisa smile. ‘Ramon found this address for me. I have met so many people who live in a completely different dimension.’
As Mario had predicted, Shinto was a different animal after his lay-up. And just as well, as the camino’s last great climb began just outside Triacastela, a sunless slog up through chestnuts and crippled hamlets that Sativa’s darting, barking underfoot presence and Letje’s gnomic pronouncements didn’t make any easier. ‘I feel a strong light in my heart,’ she panted dramatically as the track tilted upwards, ‘and the light is blue.’ Then the chestnuts eased back and we were up on the brow, stout, fat-headed oaks straight from Hampshire theatrically sidelit by a low sun that cast long shadows across copper-misted pastures.
The camino broadened into a fat swathe of fire-break, and as the Triacastela overnighters caught us we gradually found ourselves part of a pilgrim army, three or four abreast, marching to folk songs bellowed magnificently by a pair of hugely gay Italians. ‘A true spirit sings in their sleep,’ opined Letje, moving ever closer to a conversation composed entirely of slogans culled from Japanese sportswear.
A scowl, a tut and a Shinto-directed ‘Oh, mon brave’ heralded the passing of that Frenchwoman, and then there was Ramon, balefully hungover. His presence procured a brief respite from the one-sided exchange of obscurely epic platitudes and those manic convulsions of baseless laughter. ‘Ramon’s aura was not so good last night,’ Letje murmured after he’d stumbled fiercely by, ‘and I think he is now a little angry that I don’t walk with him.’
‘He is?’ Ramon was young, wiry and by Spanish standards a freakish giant.
‘Yes, and when he is angry . . .’ She shook her head in harrowed recollection of some Ramonian act of malevolence.
‘Ramon is your . . . boyfriend, then,’ I said, my voice tinged with concern.
Letje emitted a grandiose snort of derision. ‘This is maybe his belief.’
Now near the back of the column we began to descend through a landscape of lurid, rustic abundance, the greenometer turned up to eleven. Fields divided not with fences but palaeolithic slabs of slate, a woman chasing a horse round her farmyard, an old Escort with a hay-bale wedged in its boot, a proud family in their Saturday best off to market in the back of a tractor trailer. This land was rich but its people clearly were not: the camino pulled a little train of foreign wealth through the poorest parts of a poor region, and in contrast to their neighbours the Galicians were keen to nurture and harvest this in a regulated manner.
The pilgrimage infrastructure had been lavishly overhauled for the 1993 Holy Year – fountains like the splendid scallop-shell grotto we passed that morning, all those marker posts and a network of staffed refugios constructed to a standard design. And the locals had warmed to the task, sticking Coke machines in their farmyards and opening up craftily sited cafés at likely break stops, such as the place everybody piled dustily into for elevenses. ‘She didn’t spill that on you,’ intoned Letje as an errant French elbow knocked steaming chocolate into my lap, ‘but on the world that she hated.’
The heat that Mario had declared almost unheard of for this time of year got going as we emerged. Farmyard filth should have held no olfactory terrors for me by now, but the sun-ripened slurry and silage were so cloyingly over-fermented that I began to dry retch. And retch and retch and retch, as Shinto pressed his snout to the pat-splattered path and progressed with savouring sloth.
During that coffee break I’d mentioned to Letje that I still had no idea what to do with Shinto when we reached Santiago, and she’d instantly thrown her hat into the empty ring. ‘As a little girl I had a pony,’ she blurted, in her excitement absent-mindedly casting a small shaft of light into the otherwise pitch-black cupboard of her life history, ‘and I am walking back to Holland.’ Her eyes began to shine. ‘Now I could be the girl with the dog and the donkey.’ She had expanded on this theme over lunch, and after it I could see her casting covetous, dreamy glances at Shinto, already imagining the airy romance of a Vaseline-lensed return journey as she led her winsome menagerie through the wild-flowered meadows with an enigmatic half-smile. It would be like a three-month shampoo advert.
This should have been a special moment for me, too: I’d proved extremely adept at blanking out Shinto’s post-pilgrimage fate, even as the issue grew into a colossal, long-eared silhouette on a steadily advancing horizon, and now a solution had dropped into my chocolate-stained lap. Yet all I felt was an odd but powerful resistance. Though it apparently hadn’t troubled me as I’d barged him wheezing into Triacastela, the concern was Shinto’s welfare. With an equine heritage Letje would be kind and probably responsible, but it didn’t take an animal psychologist – though by Christ what I’d have done for one – to deduce that Shinto really, really hated that hyperactive, barrel-bellied yapper.
What made this especially entertaining was Letje’s conviction that the two of them had struck up a quirky inter-species friendship, like one of those ‘Just Fancy That’ pictures of a fox touching noses with a rabbit or something. ‘See this – they are playing!’ she’d exclaim, and I’d turn to see Sativa barking frenziedly up at Shinto from close range, while he gazed down his long nose with a look that neatly blended scorn with pity. At lunch Sativa had leapt up and nipped Shinto on the back of the knee as he grazed; with faultless technique he’d cast a lazy glance at Letje, and satisfied to see her scanning the rearward heavens with an air of poetic auspice had flicked out a robust rear-hoofed punt that filled the hot afternoon with whining yelps. ‘Oh, you missed it,’ I sighed, as Letje swivelled about in concern. ‘They just did this really sweet thing with their . . . their legs.’
In a very real way, it had brought my donkey and me closer: we had this thing together, that we both despised that dog. The two of us had been bound by a common love for my family, but the emotional adhesive here was somehow stronger. I’m sorry, modern Christianity, but nothing unites like a hatred shared.
‘You have some water for me,’ ordered Letje when we shuffled into Sarria, up a pavement laid from the dismantled ruins of its castle. It was perhaps the fifteenth time I’d thus supplied her that day, and the lunch she’d eaten had also come straight from the canteen on Shinto’s back. Exploiting his capacity to provide for others always gave me a small thrill of logistical fulfilment, the same thrill that I feel when the rear-facing seats in my Volvo estate are pressed into service, but after the next cadged swig I felt obliged to enquire as to the contents of her own modest pack. ‘Just some clothes and toothbrush,’ she said, unhappy to find herself in a conversation debased by such trivial drudgeries. ‘Ramon had many bottles. I don’t find it important to carry food and water.’
‘No, you don’t,’ I said with perfect neutrality.
Were Shinto and I merely the latest stooges to accept gullibly a baton most recently dropped by Ramon? Or – dread alternative – one he believed I had snatched from his angry Latin hands? Either way I was eyeing Letje rather more carefully. And for her part, she had grown palpably disillusioned with my cosmic inadequacy: in essence, I was just far too silly an arse.
Digital photography has much to commend it, but in puerile hands that profligate immediacy can become a curse. Panic fluttered my innards as I returned from a behind-bush comfort stop to see Letje idly beeping through the day’s images.
‘What is this?’
I looked over her shoulder: it was a snap I’d taken in the bar where we’d had our morning coffee. ‘Um . . . well, that’s a bottle of gin, I believe.’
‘Yes – this we have at home. Fockink Dry Gin.’
I didn’t quite know what to do with my face, though when she repeated the phrase with quizzical deliberation it began to crease and pucker compromisingly. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, nodding scientifically. ‘You laugh because the sound is a little like another word.’ I shrugged feebly. ‘The word of fucking.’
