Spanish steps, p.34
Spanish Steps, page 34
It was an almost Himalayan morning, all spindly trees on misted ridges, and we were out in it before the sun was born. Another scabby, vacant town, another inadequate bar breakfast, and thence off into the corn cribs and dung, the curled cinnamon strips of eucalyptus leaves and bark still jarringly weird under our feet. (We’d read the night before that the fast-growing and ruthlessly invasive trees had been brought in from Australia in the 1860s for construction purposes, and having proved utterly useless for these were now fitfully culled for garden furniture. I expect the whole thing was an Antipodean plot to pay Europe back for the rabbits. If not for the donkeys – introduced in the nineteenth century, the common ass found outback conditions so much to his liking that the Western Australian authorities felt obliged to shoot 1,000,000 wild donkeys in the 1980s alone. ‘Hee-haw, hee-haw BANG!’ laughed a spokesman I just made up.)
With Simon at the rear we were really laying down some fat camino: everyone we knew had stayed in Melide and they hadn’t passed us yet. We were overtaking as often as overtaken, and a man of apparent youth and vigour was visibly extended during a drawn-out pursuit from the rear. ‘Vive Quebec!’ he panted over his shoulder when at breathless length he breasted past me. At the top of the next hill something seemed to occur to him, and after a pause he turned about with his arms spread wide and an exultant bellow already half out of his throat: ‘The queen is a beeetch!’
But I did find a familiar face soon after, and it was looking out of the window of a Bedford camper parked up in the shade. John, St John, in his St John’s Ambulance. Astonished handshakes, a résumé of the 620 kilometres that had elapsed since our previous encounter, coffee for the brothers and a biscuit for their donk. It struck me that here was a true keeper of the Santiagan flame, a spiritual descendant of those bridge builders and leper lovers who had made the medieval pilgrimage what it was. Men have been canonised for less. If it was down to me John would be a saint by now, but then again so would Eddy Merckx and the bloke who invented crisps.
So how much sadder it was to discover that we now lived in an age when even a pilgrim cannot quite summon unquestioning trust in his fellow man. As I kept John up to speed with Shinto’s faltering progress, every other passing walker spurned his charitable entreaties with a nervously polite shimmy of the hand.
My new esteem for camper-van owner-drivers received a further boost a couple of villages down, when we found ourselves invited to dine in the mobile headquarters of a Swiss–Australian family. She walked, he drove and they met up via walkie-talkie every four hours to enable her to breast-feed the younger of their two young sons: a logistical undertaking far more imaginatively ludicrous than anything experienced in the multi-vehicular donk-o-kids phase of my pilgrimage. While their three-year-old rode Shinto round a solar-seared car park we filthied the van’s climate-controlled interior with our dusted buttocks, feasting on chilled dairy products and tales of their pioneering determination. Nine months they’d been on the road; the baby’s first words had been in Spanish. ‘But I mean, you’ve had it really tough,’ said the bearded father, tilting his head in the vicinity of my unseen donkey.
Had I? The clicks were falling away with such bewildering haste – 28 to go, then 24.5, then 19 – that my camino now seemed to be coasting towards the line rather than grinding to an exhausted conclusion. An hour before we’d even managed to get Shinto through a ford with only a little light brutality. When I contemplated the friction scars on my palms these days, it was with something approaching scepticism.
Heat was the only enemy, and it stealthily engaged us as we pressed on through the airless balsam of the eucalyptus groves. When he wasn’t plunging it under fountains, Simon was swaddling his head in a turban of damp fabric. After eschewing a refugio blighted by its proximity to the uncomfortably popular N547, we dragged our gluey limbs back into the woods, then back out, and presently found ourselves gawping soporifically over a fence at the first water-filled swimming pool I had so far encountered. Two fat men were lazily disturbing its shallow end, and I was about to mumble some envious incivility when Simon said, ‘I saw them pass us earlier. They’re pilgrims.’ And with that in mind we appraised the chalets bordering the pool, and having noted their appropriately commercial aspect shortly found ourselves at the reception desk, saddlebags round feet, donkey in car park, twitching in anticipation of the delicious baptism that awaited.
Our welcome was disappointingly equivocal. The receptionist’s bright countenance clouded as she plucked the last key from the rack, before beckoning us unenthusiastically across the rearward lawns to the door it opened. A handsomely appointed living area appeared, low-slung furniture arranged artfully on the cool terracotta tiles, but before we could even think about soiling it all she was coughing us apologetically towards the room’s dim fundament. Another door; a double bed. I looked at Simon and we exchanged shrugs: a bit of inadvertent nocturnal footsie was a small price to pay for the aquatic facilities on offer.
‘Hermanos?’ she enquired, expectantly.
I looked at him again. Did that mean what I think it meant? Simon’s mild alarm told me it did. ‘No!’ I protested stoutly. ‘No, just, you know . . .’ And all I could think to do was place a fraternal arm around Simon’s shoulder and pull him heartily towards me.
Well, that was silly. After she’d left us the key with a look of perfect blankness, I got the dictionary out: Hermano, a [er’mano, a] nm/f brother/sister. He’d show me how, and I’d catch the big one.
Two beers and an immersion later we didn’t care. Our medieval forebears prepared for arrival in Santiago with a ritual cleansing at the springs of Lavacolla, 8 clicks up the road, and we were just a little early. And a little more chaste, despite what they might be muttering about us in the bar: Lavacolla meant ‘wash bollocks’ in the Romance argot of the day. Christians routinely ridiculed Muslims and Jews for their hygienic fastidiousness, and this rare act of personal propriety was only warranted to sluice away the ripe and heady love-smells still clinging from those encounters in the woods after Portomarín.
Replete with a shared bottle of red and a great bucket of stew, I felt as good as I had for some time. Shinto was happily installed in a dark corner of the garden, the last flakings of chaff at his feet, and through the trees above him, veined by branches, a heavy full moon, the moon I had seen wax and wane and wax again in that big Spanish sky. ‘This is just too, too perfect,’ sighed Simon, placing his hand on mine for the benefit of the waitress arriving with our brandies.
Every one of our fellow guests had been a Spanish pilgrim, but the happy glow of confraternity we felt seeing their rucksacks lined up by our breakfast table was upgraded to fierce, rod-backed righteousness when Simon noted (a) that their owners had all already left, and (b) that each rucksack bore an adhesive label specifying a hotel address in Santiago. A pair of taxis arrived to collect the luggage as we walked out to meet Shinto. If you were being charitable you could have claimed that this was no different from the nobles who paid an underling to walk to Santiago and received their indulgence by proxy. If you weren’t you could have switched all the labels round. But I didn’t do that, because as Simon so rightly pointed out with a significant glance at Shinto, at least they had carried some of their own stuff some of the way.
Not for the first time, my donkey had wound the night rope round and round a tree, thereby reeling in his nocturnal grazing diameter from amphitheatre to paddling pool. Immobility had also obliged Shinto to cast a fearful symmetry over his camino by despoiling the children’s play area, and we were dispersing the grim evidence from the sandpit with boot and stick when an aged woman squeaked up pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with freshly cut grass. ‘Por burro,’ she croaked jovially, upending it effortlessly before his eagerly probing snout. Another act of kindness to reward with garbled Spanglish and gestures of gratitude, rendered more inadequate even than usual when we saw her stoop into a barn over the road: these weren’t just lawn clippings, but half a winter week for some poor cow.
With Shinto the fat filling in a Moore sandwich we were soon back in the VapoRub forests, wondering at the origins of a slightly cloying overtone to the usual smell and finding out when Simon read from the guidebook. No matter how accustomed I might be by now to my surroundings, you couldn’t say I ever felt completely at home: ‘an unfortunate local custom’ where I come from usually means solvent abuse or Morris dancing, but the reference here was to animal carcasses hurled into the woods.
The trees let us out, and there – sweet Jim almighty – there was a DHL cargo jet, ripping upwards into the blue heavens right before us. ‘Santiago airport,’ announced Simon automatically when the world came back into focus. It happened again as we walked under the red-and-white landing-light gantry by the end of the perimeter fence, and even as that great, kerosene-streaked belly blotted out the sun above us like the opening credits of a sixties thriller, Shinto barely checked his languid stride.
He was a donk of the world now, I thought with pride, a member of that long-eared elite who knew what went down not just on the other side of the fence, but on the other side of the border and a hundred leagues beyond. This plucky steed had experienced more in six weeks than had his forebears in six generations.
Simon needed to confirm his return flight, and eschewing a wait back at the perimeter fence, I plumped for the more entertaining option of accompanying him up to the terminal building. Walking to an airport, as I’ve discovered whilst mixing it with taxi and minibus in many an underpass, is rarely a straightforward procedure; throw in the donk factor and you’ve got yourself a tragicomic ‘And finally . . .’ news story waiting to happen. Such at least was the theory, but aside from a little excitement at the barrier to the short-term car park and a couple of giggling stewardesses we made it without confronting mishap or bewildered outrage. The city was still 12 clicks off and out of sight, but we were clearly now within the civic radius of seen-it-all pilgrim fatigue. Still, it floated my boat (all aboard the HMS Duncechortle): the burro-to-go snap Simon took of Shints tied up between Fiestas in the Hertz lot remains a cherished favourite.
Back across the dual carriageway we rejoined the parched camino, a meandering conveyor belt through the final examples of what had seemed an endless production line: the last hot and shuttered hamlet, the last chain-straining barker cowed to silence, the last sundried scattering of nasally seductive horse crap. We weren’t sure where Lavacolla was, but Simon found a likely spring and filled our hot hats in it; Shinto sucked up a bowl and a half and I sluiced the remainder over his neck. As we were being watched by an elderly local this wasn’t the moment for a bollock-wash, but I had at least found time to hose down my ass.
Past two TV stations and a big campsite, the odd house with Gaelic fifes and drums filtering out from behind windows curtained with banners decrying the Prestige oil disaster: ‘Nunca Mais’ – Never Again. A large German saloon cruised past, and the ageing hoodlum at the wheel buzzed down his window, showing a hand with rings under every knuckle and emitting a rasp that I could only hope was one of gruff congratulation. Then up a broiled eminence so considerable that I was left without the wherewithal to take in the significance of the single digit on the marker post at its brow.
The road flattened, then gently rose again. We could be in Santiago in three hours, be there tonight. But that wouldn’t happen. That would be like opening my presents on Christmas Eve. A titanic 3,000-bed hillside refugio lay just outside the city limits, and to observe the proper rituals you stayed there, gathered your wits, and set off in the morning unsullied by heat and fatigue, in an attitude of appropriate reflection. Pursued by TV crews, Shirley MacLaine ran the last 15 clicks in darkness, an unhappy, unseemly conclusion that no pilgrim deserved.
There’s one just outside Jerusalem, and seven girdling Rome. Every pilgrimage has its nearly-there-now Mount of Joy, the hill from whose summit the final destination is at last revealed, and Santiago’s is Monte de Gozo. By tradition, pilgrims race each other to the top, with the first to lay eyes on the twin Compostela towers granted the honorary title of king. ‘Le roi’ to the French pilgrim majority, the origin of the name Leroy. If you were on horseback you walked from Monte de Gozo; if you weren’t you took off your ravaged shoes and did the last stretch barefoot, bellowing hymns as the cathedral fuzzed out of focus through a veil of overwhelmed tears. Pilgrims fell to their knees on the hilltop; an eighteenth-century Italian reported those around him kissing the earth a thousand times.
Today Santiago is a city of 95,000, and the literature warned that urban sprawl and an ill-sited copse had combined to obscure the bell towers and so denude Monte de Gozo of its visually dramatic symbolism. By now a link in a strung-out chain of toiling walkers, we topped the hill and found ourselves on the lip of a huge and hazy hollow, filled with rush-hour traffic and vertically conspicuous commercial structures. ‘Well, there it is,’ said Simon, and I sucked in a long, steadying draught of hot air. Then a taxi rounded us with a derisive toot, lurched to a halt by a gate down the road and deposited a fat hot man and his rucksack.
The last time I’d seen those buttocks, they’d sat untrousered upon a tissue-less latrine, and if this had the effect of portent-management, then so did the complex that opened up beyond that gate. Bungalow bunkers as long as streets, dozens and dozens striped up a hefty swathe of hillside, the empty concrete boulevards between them pierced by the vegetation of neglect. At the conclusion of every forlorn vista, lichen-streaked statuary corroded into the undergrowth.
We clopped between two of these pilgrim prison blocks, both clearly empty, and presently found ourselves in a desolate plaza bordered by facing parades of self-service canteens and largely moribund retail units. Unsychronised wisps of Celtic pipery echoed from Tannoy stalks. Here was the dominant legacy of Galicia’s efforts to commemorate and facilitate the 1993 Holy Year, when the Pope visited Santiago, yet it had all the soulful ambience of a holiday camp for low-ranking party officials in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. ‘This is awful,’ I said, hands on hips in front of a whitewash-windowed ex-launderette.
My two companions were wanly scanning the urban horizon in underwhelmed concurrence when the biped froze. ‘There,’ said Simon, simply, quietly, half-raising a finger to a gap in the trees atop a block-studded middle-distance hillock. I narrowed my eyes, scanned the relevant area of smogged horizon, and saw it. Them. Rising gingerly through the sunlit urban fuzz, the tapering baroque rockets of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
Well, I can’t tell you how that helped. One of the few active enterprises around us was a souvenir shop, and suddenly its glib offerings seemed not an insult to our achievement but a celebration. For days now the images of Santiago Peregrino, St James as a pilgrim to his own tomb, had been gathering in profusion: a statue in a church, a sticker on a bumper, and now in this window a keyring, a corkscrew, an ashtray. Scrutinising them I felt a pulse of fraternal affection for this mild apostle of gourd and staff, a perfect study in mournful, pious sincerity: ‘It’s just so tragic,’ he always seemed to sigh. ‘If only I could even begin to find the words to explain what a great, great guy I am.’
And those blue tiles glazed with yellow arrows or stylised scallop shells: we’d been following those for forty days, and I wanted people to know that we had. I’d have one each of those for my garden wall, though not yet. Not just yet. The converging lines on the scallop shell were said to represent the converging pilgrim routes to Santiago, and we weren’t quite at that auspicious confluence. I didn’t get one for the same reason that I hadn’t yet worn my scallop shell, the one Nicky had given me before I’d left. You acquired your shell in Santiago as an indication to medieval contemporaries that you’d been and gone and done it, a medal of achievement, not intent.
Reanimated we went down to check in at hut twenty-one, my fêted jackass entered beneath us in the register by a happy young hospitalero as Shinto Moore, travelling on foot, aged eleven (‘Is minimo here for peregrino ten years old,’ he explained with a tickled wink.) Shinto was led as instructed into an adjacent strip of meadow by the laundry lines, and watching him settle down to his Last Supper we went off for ours. There was only the one option, and this involved celebrating the imminent remission of my sins by pushing a tray along a stainless-steel counter, watching as a succession of blank-faced women filled it with small plates of shrink-wrapped food. It was abysmal, so abysmal as to be excellent. Sucking on Capri-Suns we scanned this strip-lit environment and its scattering of smartly cardiganed Spanish peregrinos, the handbag-carrying hundred-clickers sharing our hallowed penultimate ponderings. And we laughed, and were still laughing when we slid our trays into the rack of empties and retired to our room.
This was an airless, fetid eight-bunker, one of fifteen such in each barrack block, and our six fellow last-nighters were already locked into the gentle, automatic snoring of the hot and weary. Simon tutted quietly, but I felt oddly comforted, almost nostalgic: it had been four days since last I’d shared my sleep with pilgrims. And, I thought, as the mattress planks took my weight with a splintered sigh, at least an earthly lifetime before I ever would again.
Fifteen
Waking in a cell crowded with grubby, mumbling strangers, pulling on underwear foot-laundered in last night’s shower and still perhaps four hours from comfortable dryness, shampooing with household detergent: it seemed that almost everything I was doing I’d never do again, unless I took my trousers down at a North Korean border post.
Or unless this whole business had indeed left me strangely changed beyond repair. Maybe I’d return and decree bedlinen a satanic extravagance. And hot water. Certainly there was a worrying moment when Simon dropped his old socks and pants in the bin – his wife Catherine had dispatched him with a disposable wardrobe – and I restrained only with difficulty an urge to retrieve them.
