Spanish steps, p.32
Spanish Steps, page 32
That night I checked through the shots she’d have scrolled through to reach that one. There were three, and two depicted Shinto’s anus at full and monstrous dilation during an epic act of voidance. The third was of a poster advertising some forthcoming night of modest parochial revelry, or at least a close-up of the incorporated legend ‘Océano e Cunters’.
Sarria was built up a hill, and with the shadows at their shortest Shinto downshifted in treacled reluctance. We lurched unsteadily up the precipitous main street, beneath pilgrim washing lines strung from the refugio’s upper windows, and though her rhapsodic camino persona proscribed displays of frustration, I could see a little enthusiasm trickle from Letje’s open features. This trickle became an unstaunchable flood when, having very nearly failed to cross a railway line half an hour outside town, Shinto eased to a halt, with an air of up-to-the-buffers finality, before a broad and lazy stream traversed by a rude wooden bridge.
‘He will not cross this?’ she asked, frankly incredulous, as I paid out the long rope and walked across to the opposite bank. There was a sudden aquatic commotion, and we looked back to see Sativa hanging by her jaws from the rope, hind legs thrashing the water in search of purchase. Shinto surveyed the scene with an air of disappointment, flinching in distaste more than fear as the dog relinquished its quarry and churned hysterically across to us. ‘Certainly not now,’ I said.
To her credit Letje refused to accept this verdict. Determined not to give up that Timotei dream without a fight she beckoned Shinto with encouraging clucks, then tugged tentatively on the rope, and finally let the mask slip with a red-faced, double-fisted yank that left her panting, furious and prostrate. ‘Your animal has a personality defect,’ she rasped, spanking dust off her canvas pedal pushers and glowering over at Shinto, his eyes half-closed like a contented cat by the fire. ‘He is . . . autistic!’ I knew exactly what Letje was going through, but having gone through it so many times now found myself infused with an almost saintly calm.
With tree-filtered sun speckled across the path and bejewelling the gentle water that traversed it this was a capital spot; I went over to extract a carton of rosé acquired during that ill-fated dash round the Spar in Triacastela. Settling myself down on a smooth rock I tore the carton open and offered it to Letje, who with brittle thanks declined. After an extended, throat-bobbing swig I wiped my mouth and announced I didn’t really care what happened, that I’d camp here if it came to that. ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay’ came to my lips and stayed there in a nonchalant and, in hindsight, infuriating hum, and presently Letje blurted a curt farewell and marched off up the stream’s impressively severe valley with Sativa in noisy tow.
For a peaceful hour we rested, the two of us flat-lining either side of the bridge. At 6.00 the mosquitoes started to bite, and feeling that perhaps I ought to do something I sluiced the remaining wine into the stream, ambled over the bridge and led Shinto back up across the train tracks. There was an alternative path of sorts, running parallel to the railway’s lofty embankment in vaguely the right direction, but it proved no beaten track. Within 50 yards the undergrowth was overgrowth: I looked behind and only Shinto’s ears were visible. Wrestling through the shrubs and saplings we presently arrived at the same stream, here swollen to twice its previous girth. It was a merrily hopeless scenario.
‘OK, Shints, we’re just going to walk across this now,’ I announced, in a voice stoutly purged of defeat or desperation. As the water topped my right boot, some gifted clairvoyant behind the controls of a distant locomotive applied his shrillest klaxon, and a busy moment later I was on the other side, drenched and laughing and leading a newly alert Shinto towards an arch cut through the embankment.
I met Donald a click and a bit up the road: roused by Letje’s desperate prognosis he’d been dispatched from the refugio on a salvage mission. He placed a beer in my hand and a hand on my shoulder – tea and sympathy à la Scotsman. ‘Post-traumatic distress counselling,’ he smiled, and though by standards of certain early evenings I in fact felt jauntily chipper, this was another humbling moment. Twice in two days the milkman of human kindness had left me an extra pint.
Donald led us up to Barbadelo, a trim but ancient hilltop hamlet now dominated by one of those nineties refugios, its whitewashed concrete already mossed by the Galician elements to a simulacrum of some wartime military installation. Both floors were loudly replete with the energetic young Spaniards whose presence would from hereon be a bracing ubiquity, but somehow Petronella had fended them off to save me a bunk by the window. I went to hug her and . . . there they went, a tear down each crimson cheek.
Letje was laying her stuff out under a lean-to by the municipal football pitch that fronted the refugio: as so often, Sativa’s presence excluded her from an indoor berth. We exchanged conciliatory smiles as I led Shinto to the distant tangle of wild peas and clover that would be his campsite, but this was to be our final encounter.
Sucking up peasant broth with Donald and Petronella at the village’s solitary commercial establishment I began to curse myself for the gratuitous folly that had effectively spurned the first and only offer to address the post-Santiagan Shinto situation. Why had I done this? In terms of that awful dog Shinto could have looked after himself: one well-timed kick and she’d be canine history. Perhaps, after all, it was envy – if Letje had welcomed the camino into her soul, then I remained a spiritual pygmy, scrabbling foolishly through the transcendental low-ground as all the Big Answers passed overhead.
We were halfway through our digestifs, this time, at Donald’s insistence, a fearsome local distillation known as aruxo, when Ramon strode sternly in. I gulped reflexively, never a good idea with a throatful of over-proof lava, and expectorating alcohol into my cupped hands wondered if this would end in awkwardness, humiliation or both and a good shoeing. Ramon stopped at the head of our table and closed his eyes. ‘De beauty is seemple of trust and pain,’ he intoned, palms held up as if weighing each word individually. And when he opened his eyes again with a smile of apologetic glee, I wasn’t the only one choking.
Fourteen
It had been a moist night, and as I re-pegged my still-damp laundry to Shinto’s saddle an ancient rustic ambled by with a scythe over his shoulder; another in a wide-brimmed felt hat sat against the base of a garlanded stone crucifix up the road. The yellow arrows around here were occasionally supplanted by a red cross of Santiago, but daubed on boarded-up hovels these succeeded only in casting a bring-out-your-dead contagion on the more conspicuously abandoned hamlets.
This was perhaps the most impoverished area we’d yet traversed, and it was ever thus. The ground floors of most of the older farmhouses were illuminated feebly by slitted openings in the stonework – not, as I’d first thought, for shooting arrows through but keeping burglars out. Even the little corn cribs outside every farm, so like oriental shrines with their stilts and narrow pitched roofs, were treble padlocked.
Yet this was already becoming one of my favourite days. I’d long since given up trying to walk behind Shinto, like a true drover, and so was astounded when I went back to retrieve a wet sock that had snagged in a pathside vegetative tangle and saw that for once he hadn’t stopped to wait. I retrieved the rope and held my station at his rump; he ambled forth. After more than a month of palm-flaying yanks and hauls, this was very heaven, this donk-cam view of bucolic vitality, the Thomas Hardy meadows bordered with dry-stone walls and foxgloves, the sturdy trees bursting into the flawless sky like mushroom clouds. The fat of the land had never been more chubbily larded.
Another smart local entrepreneur had opened up a little bar just past the 100-kilometres-to-go post – its digits almost illegible beneath marker-penned autographs – and there were two separate parties in permanent, rolling progress. One for the arriviste young Spaniards, and the other for the weathered long-haulers, respectively commiserating over their huge outstanding task or toasting each other in mute, rapt disbelief that so little remained. A hundred clicks was the papally authenticated minimum tariff to procure a compostela; from hereon in the camino could seem a parade more than a pilgrimage, with a knock-on effect upon room-at-the-inn ratios.
Counting down into double figures also had the effect of concentrating my attention on the pressing issue of Shinto’s fate: I could be in Santiago in five days. Tragedy in the form of disease, theft or accident had for weeks seemed the likeliest settler of his destiny; in recent days, as our safe arrival became a realistic possibility, I’d been hitherto reluctant to tempt fate via any contemplations that would constitute taking it for granted. Only now that I’d palmed away a solution did I find myself considering the problem in sobering earnest. Throughout my rural peregrinations I had encountered fewer than half a dozen rival donks; the probability of finding Shinto a home in Santiago or indeed anywhere in Spain had never seemed more hopelessly remote.
On I strode, back-seat droving up gentle hill and down modest dale, viewing a happy world past a chaos of straps and panniers and laundry, that half-baguette sticking out of a plastic bag and neatly bisecting the gap between Shinto’s pricked ears. Life at the back end had its downside: now handed executive control for route planning, Shinto displayed an infallible sense for the absurdly wrong-headed. Follow that army of walkers up the straight, broad path ahead or veer purposefully into a foot-wide gap in the hedgerow? Left fork, or right fork, or – hang on – how about between those two tractors, round the corn crib and into that tiny dark barn? For Shinto there was only ever one option. Once he even tried to climb in through the open rear doors of a Transit van.
If that was a blow to this bold new initiative, then the death knell was struck in a cloud of dust and hoofs as the path narrowed into an oak-shadowed corridor between pastures. A leathery cowman was ululating his herd from field to camino just ahead, and clapping Shinto into a burst of speed I just managed to get past the gate before the lead cow blocked our way. Or so I thought until we meandered round the next dappled bend, and there, spanning the camino broadside on and scrutinising us with clueless intensity, was the true front runner: a bull-horned, tan-hided colossus, half a ton of milk monster.
Neck bells and the cowman’s guttural encouragement were gaining from behind; stuck fast at a cock-eyed twenty to two, Shinto’s ears elucidated his mounting concern. I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t a little worried myself. In fact, I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t very close to tears. The cow ahead turned to face us head on and rasped out a noise that explored the overlap between moo and roar, a noise whose galvanising effect was instantly translated into the more urgent hammering of rearward hoofs. With the beef sandwich about to spread itself in pilgrim chutney, Shinto abruptly charged forwards into a gap that wasn’t there. But somehow he made one, and with my left-hand daypack strap swishing against a horn tip and the right snagging a tangle of hedgerow, somehow I followed him through. I re-established contact with Shinto half a breathless click up the road, and once I had it was clear that from now on I’d be back up the front.
The first of the day’s two auspicious phone calls was taken in our lunch-time field, as I crouched camera-faced by Shinto’s raised tail, poised to capture the anus-domed breaking of wind that would complete my excretory trilogy. It was from my brother Simon, at a loose end and a low ebb after a brutal cull at his place of employment, stating that he fancied popping out for a bit of a walk; quite soon, perhaps; in fact why not tomorrow. That was good news, and the second brought more of the same, received just after a rather stilted wave at the straight-faced farmer who had clearly been contemplating my photographic performance over the gate for some time.
‘Tim? It is Hanno.’
He was answering a text message I’d sent him the night before, desperate for guidance with my impending donkey surplus. But there was a lot more to say; too much, indeed, particularly at £900 a syllable. Hanno was reasonably dumbfounded to hear that my partnership with Shinto had somehow survived nearly six weeks of cack-handed, cack-hoofed fear and ineptitude, and having heard coughed out a query.
‘Uh, alors, you have ideas how to do with Shinto in Santiago?’
This was the very question I had texted him, but having fielded it myself at least five times a day I allowed the default response to trip thoughtlessly off my tongue. ‘I’m going to beat him to death with a chair on the cathedral steps.’
‘Comment?’
‘No, well, there was some Dutch girl with a fat dog, but she had a blue light in her heart.’
‘Ah . . . Tim?’
‘I’ve really no idea, Hanno. Sorry. I was hoping you might have some suggestions.’ I remembered him mentioning a livestock market in Santiago, but now a familiar image crystallised in my head, of Shinto gambolling in slow motion through a Pyrenean pasture towards a whinnying throng of eager donkeys. Hanno butted in before I got to the bit where they shoved him up against the caravan.
‘It has been sad for my family without Shinto,’ he began, causing me to recall those farewell tears, ‘and for the other donkays also.’ I heard him suck in and exhale. ‘Tim.’ A new and forthright tone. ‘I ask to take Shinto back.’
Never have six words that didn’t include ‘explicit’, ‘chilli’ or ‘free’ made me so happy. So happy, indeed, that after a rather one-sided bout of donk-trading I found I had agreed to compensate Hanno fully for the 2,300-kilometre, five-day round trip required. Instead of trading Shinto in for a profit, I’d just committed myself to the lavish funding of his joyous return from Santiago. And I had done so because he had earned a reward, and not one that saw him ending his days in seedy-toed solitude, lashed to the shafts of a Galician scrap merchant’s wagon with a nosebag full of slops and sawdust. I had done so because I wanted to see him happy. Because . . . because, heck, I loved that great big fool.
I was gaining a brother, and losing a donkey. It was big news, which I vainly endeavoured to process as the camino plunged down to the banks of a mighty, dammed river. The town at the distant end of an interminable bridge handled by Shinto with brittle composure was Portomarín, built in 1962 to replace its ancient forebear, lost beneath the waters when the valley was flooded for hydroelectric purposes. That four-square Romanesque fortress of a church was moved up the gorge to the site of the new town block by shed-sized block; in 1998, when the reservoir was briefly drained, the church peeked down at the slathered ruins of its former home, Roman bridge, water mills and all.
For a town forty years old Portomarín had not aged well, cement barns shoulder to shoulder with homes and knackered warehouses up the main street. The whitewash was flaking and lichened, gutters ran up the middle of the road and the municipal pool was streaked and empty; Franco’s civic ambience has much in common with Castro’s. The generalísimo was a Galician. So was Fidel’s granddad.
A round of sardonic British laughter diverted me towards a party of part-time pilgrims, halfway through an attractive two-week programme of guided rambling and bacchanalian indulgence, the fun run to our marathon. They offered me a glass from the one full bottle of white on a parasoled table of empties, and in return I offered them exclusive, first-rights news on Shinto’s fate. Then Donald, Petronella and Evelyn wandered across from the adjacent refugio – walk a donkey into town and you might just as well have been preceded by trumpeting heralds – and I told them too. ‘Well, you’ve got to get the animal there first,’ said Donald, though I barely heard him above Petronella’s sobbing. All three had scouted out a spot for Shinto round the back of a school, and as we led him there Evelyn removed her sunglasses to reveal a colossal aubergined bruise. ‘Face down on the road to Samos,’ she explained with a crooked smile.
The Portomarín refugio wasn’t quite to the standard Galician design, but had certainly captured the spirit. Central to this was an enthusiastic embrace of the diminished expectations of personal privacy that had been part of pilgrim life since around the halfway stage. For weeks now we had lived with the lockless toilet and shower cubicle: some saw this as part of the shedding of physical insecurities in preparation for the looming spiritual rebirth, others as the gradual erosion of the norms of civilised human behaviour, depending on which side of the North Sea they lived. But in Galicia it all went a little fundamentalist. The curtainless, unisex showers of Barbadelo were perhaps the apotheosis of this trend, but it was at Portomarín, buttock to lathered buttock with Donald and a hairless Dane in the open bathing trough, sudded clothes underfoot, that I experienced its repulsive nadir. The loo door opposite us eased ajar, and there, huge pants billowed round swollen hairy ankles, sat the camino’s fattest man; a young Spaniard who after the blind Japanese was only the second pilgrim I had beaten for pace over the course of a day. ‘Please,’ he quailed, his bristled moon of a face generously puckered in desperation, ‘you find paper please?’
The curfew was half an hour later than usual, which at least afforded us a rare opportunity to experience dining amidst the crockeried babel of locals. We were joined by a French Canadian woman with her son, who had only started in Astorga and so found themselves vulnerable to our wined-up, road-weary condescension. Raising glass and voice above the clamour I held forth with alcoholic obstinacy on Flans I Have Known; Donald delivered a more thoughtful but no more concise address on the epic landscapes of the meseta.
It was only as we were into the brandies that the mother quietly revealed her walk as a spiritual gesture for a dying friend. That was sobering, and it needed to be. Once we’d bid them farewell with muted contrition it all went rather maudlin. Bracing himself with the dregs of his snifter, Donald told us of the Spanish pilgrim who had arrived at Rabanal one evening during his tenure as hospitalero. ‘I can keep that in the office if you like,’ he’d offered, spotting a torch-sized silver phial in the man’s hand as he filled in the register. Translations from a bilingual pilgrim in the queue and a quietly polite refusal; the man’s ten-day-old son had died after a sudden seizure three weeks previously, and the phial contained his ashes.
