Spanish steps, p.35
Spanish Steps, page 35
Bright eyed and, yes, bushy tailed, there was the large grey animal who had earlier conducted another of these last rites, for the final time drawing his master from unconsciousness with that klaxon reveille.
Shinto fixed me with a look hungry for adventure, eager, almost intelligent. Bareback in the hock-high meadow grass, he called to mind a gold-rimmed, hand-retouched collector’s plate in a colour-supplement advert: ‘Alert to the Call: a fresh spring morn, and this lively little Pyrenean jack has been exploring. (Penis not to scale.)’ Scrutinising him with a sense of potent déjà vu I suddenly recalled the dream his braying had cut short: Shinto had been awarded a prize for special achievement at some sort of pet pageant, but as I led him through the crowd with applause in my ears and a Tobleroned lump of pride in my throat, there between us and the podium stood a taunting trio of stairs . . .
For the last time I squatted down by his side, upturned hoof in lap and scraper in hand, the submerged percolations of that huge, warm stomach bubbling in through my ear. I might not quite have fulfilled Hanno’s prediction by eating from the same bowl as my donkey, but for a week now his chaff and my crusts had shared the same sack. Sighing and puffing I packed and repacked the bags, and brushed and rebrushed Shinto, trying not to think that this was The End, the final instalment of a forty-one-day life within my life, but at the same time unavoidably aware that it was and willing myself into a suitable climactic frame of mind.
At the mouth of every hut behind us were groups of pilgrims facing the same inner turmoil, grooming themselves for an appointment with eternity like corpses in a coffin. An ironed shirt kept flat-packed at a rucksack’s fundament now retrieved for the benefit of St Jim, a comb pulled through sun-mangled hair. Simon nudged me and inclined his head, and through a bathroom window I saw two faces pressed close to a mirror: an elderly man shaving his middle-aged Down’s Syndrome son.
It wasn’t until 9.00 that we left, exchanging knowing, bracing nods and half-smiles with those around us, like students massing outside the hall of their final examination. It was a steep descent round the perimeter of the Monte de Gozo complex, and as our strides lengthened with the gradient so the skies above suddenly darkened. No sooner had we broached the outskirts of Santiago proper than those guiding towers were smeared out by a flash downpour, one so violent that by the time I’d extracted and unfurled my poncho Shinto had slammed in the anchors. ‘Um,’ I said, through a curtain of hood drips; then there was a creak and a crank and a big up-and-over garage door beside us pivoted aloft.
Inside the dim void thus revealed stood a blasé, full-faced mechanic, who thumbed us in whilst critically assessing the tiny cigarette stub pinched between his thumb and forefinger. In a minute there were half a dozen of us in there, and in another the one with four legs had somehow sniffed out a sack of grain. Still addressing himself to his dwindling fag end the mechanic palmed out a scoop and let Shinto snuffle it up from his hand. Then a young chap in a red cagoule held a tentative hand out into the open, morphed it into a thumbs-up and in a moment we were all waving our gruff protector farewell.
The pocket storm was merely the first of a sequence that in three swift stages formed a perfect microcosm of every alarum of the previous six weeks, every phobia nurtured by Shinto in those 770 clicks gone slowly by. We’d been on the wet pavement less than a minute when it fell away down a hefty flight of stairs. The backtracking detour was moderate by the standards of many endured, but at its conclusion lay a busy, narrow road bridge whose bolt-on pedestrian portion was assembled from wooden planks. For the last time I saw Shinto assess the middle distance with that look of mildly perplexed helplessness, as if a direct causal link existed between this obstacle and the sudden inactivity of his limbs, as if it wasn’t a bridge but a force field. Look, said his eyes, I can assure you that this is just as frustrating for me as it is for you.
These days I almost agreed. As our marriage had matured so those stand-up rows had mellowed into gentle bickering, and I squeezed the three of us on to the tarmac, between guard rail and elbow-flicking wing mirrors, with an air of fond indulgence. My affection for Shinto had now reached a level where it seemed a poignant tragedy that those splendid genes lay nowhere but his own ageing body (though given a good innings, that body had every chance of outlasting mine). He was Shinto the First, and Shinto the Last. My passage through the pilgrimage literature had been regularly enlivened by the descriptive appellations of medieval monarchs: Sancho the Fat, ‘the hunchbacked Orduno IV the Evil’. It was all a question of spin: with bad PR you were Henry the Impotent, with good PR Alfonso the Chaste. So here, before me, was King Shinto the . . . Beige.
The bridge proved the last of the morning’s To-be-a-Pilgrim trinity of trials, and our approach thereafter was not one designed to nurture tearful portent. A construction site half-staffed with idle donk-baiters, receding batteries of slightly scabby housing estates, waiting for the little green man with my little grey donkey: had it not been for the tiny and diminishing digits on those camino marker posts and an unusually jaded citizenry, this could just have been another of those surreal and stressful trans-metropolitan experiences.
We drew breath for the final assault with just one more of those inadequate bar breakfasts of cake and café con leche, then headed across our last dual carriageway and into the cloistered alleys of the old town. Walls narrowed and houses rose, shielding the cathedral towers from view and making every rounded corner a mouth-drying, spine-fizzing anticlimax: this was surely it, and if not then this, and if not then this. The last yellow arrow led us down a flagstoned hill, and sensing that this really was it Simon respectfully melted forward into the morning shoppers. I contemplated the rope in my calloused hands and what it led to, and in doing so felt pride abruptly tempered by a gauche self-consciousness, like a boy wearing school uniform for the first time, a reprise of the sensation that had for so long dominated my every moment at Shinto’s side.
Tightening my grip on the rope and breathing hard I felt rather than saw a moss-stoned ecclesiastical structure looming up to our left; but as the street ahead passed down towards it and beneath a grand archway so it devolved into a stairway. A final, numb-limbed diversion round a circling, anti-clockwise road to the right, a road which a minute later ejected me into the bottom right-hand corner of a belittling cobbled sea, a great, broad square sparsely populated by tiny mortals and imperiously dominated by the lichened, mildewed, florid might of my destination.
With my overborne faculties condensed into a reedy, whistling tinnitus and the sensation of wet heat on my cheeks I apparently continued walking, distantly aware of the swelling crowd I was dragging across the grey stones. At any rate there I soon found myself, in the shadow of that swoon-inducing façade, at the foot of the weighty double staircase that accessed its lofty entrance. ‘Photo, photo!’ piped a shrill voice in my ear, not caring that the head to which it belonged now lay buried in a warm, soft neck, not knowing that through that head spooled a messily spliced loop tape of mud and sun and barley, of treble bunks and double brandies, of flan and friend and midnight bray, of trial and tribulation. ‘Photo, photo, photo!’
My brother was watching from the Plaza del Obradoiro’s distant opposite bank, and later reported that my tourist entourage had all exchanged shrugs – and, in one case, swivelled-fingers-in-temples – before clicking away regardless. When I raised my head and blinked out the last tear one snapper came up and pressed a euro in my hand; I contemplated it blankly, too fraught and drained to protest. I’d had this down as a humble alms offering until an unkempt man in a brown felt cape and scallop-brimmed hat shuffled into shot for a piece of the action – his outfit was set off with a staff and gourd in one hand and a cig and a multilingual note in the other: ‘Foto with me €2’. Simon had crept up unseen with my camera and captured the scene as my rent-a-pilgrim struck a photogenic pose with his head arched down to Shinto’s, and looking at the result now I’m rewarded to note those long ears flattened back in sour hostility.
I walked on before I began to feel like the false medievalist, or that caped and gourded dog with the same notice over there, or those Pentax-toters sticking their head through the comedy pilgrim cut-outs over there. Still the crowd surged and eddied around, shouting out all the old questions in French, in English, in Spanish, but always now in retrospect: what did he eat, where did he sleep. I again had the certain feeling that Shinto knew this was an important, defining moment in his life both as ass and pilgrim, and again I was right. The oohs and aahs morphed into ohs and urghs, and sure enough when I looked back he’d laid down a dozen hot markers on those holy cobbles.
Simon jogged up just before a pair of finger-raised policemen, and together we crinklingly dispatched the unwanted souvenirs with plastic-bag mittens. Returned to earth more literally than ever before we stood, sagging crap bags in hands, and embraced carefully. ‘I’ll stay with him,’ said Simon when we’d finished, ‘and you go off for your certificate.’ The compostela – my Get Out of Hell Free card, and I’d forgotten all about it.
Obtaining this might have held more significance had the process felt a little less like renewing a TV licence during a water shortage. Queuing in the strip-lit Pilgrim Office at the end of a long line of unwashed, unfamiliar arrivals – snorers to a fat-bellied, big-nosed man – I felt a suggestion of the anticlimax that many pilgrims had written about. Half an hour later I was dictating my name to a bored official, who after a little scribbling handed me a small scroll. Topped by a sepia depiction of Santiago Peregrino and fulsomely bordered with scallop shells, in a Latin rubric unchanged from the fourteenth century this detailed the devoted ambulatory achievements of Dnum Timoteum Moore. ‘Compostela por mi burro?’ I asked, in an unexpectant tone that perhaps made the ensuing refusal too easy.
Jubilation was what I’d wanted, and happily it had taken hold in the streets by the time I bounded outside. Simon and Shinto were already beleaguered by familiar and now ecstatic faces: English Sara, Jean-Michel, the Scottish couple who had rescued my donkey from suicidal garrotting at Ribadiso. Our hugs were cut short by the dull gonging of huge bells; midday, and the daily Pilgrims’ Mass. Leaving Shinto in Simon’s care once more, outside a bar with the singing gay Italians, I trotted up the double staircase and into the cathedral’s dim but thronged interior, a majestic Romanesque cavern encased beneath that baroque icing.
In that buffeting crush of rucksacks and day-trippers, it was never going to be easy to work myself up to the spiritual orgasm this moment seemed to demand. Too restless and hassled for insight or manifestation; no statues here you could imagine sweating blood. Perhaps the closest I came was while pressing my hand into the column supporting the welcoming image of Santiago, into five finger holes worn deep in the marble by the grateful, weary touch of pilgrim digits over 900 years. Yes, that was a moment.
More of a moment, certainly, than my contact with the brashly gilded representation of St James that loomed up behind the altar. Only after twenty minutes in a significance-sapping queue, jostled throughout by nattering, nonchalant tourists, was I granted my swift embrace, clasping those giant golden shoulders from behind as if trying to blag a saintly piggyback. Two impatient schoolkids nudged me onwards, down through the crypt for a quickstep shuffle past the silver casket, inside it the bones that had brought so many millions all this way.
But then they hadn’t really brought me, or in fact more than a handful of us. In the literature, medieval relic worship was consistently paralleled with today’s veneration of celebrity memorabilia, and if so then St James wasn’t shifting many albums. Shuffling back down the teeming aisle in search of an empty pew I saw occasional religiously overwhelmed pilgrims genuflecting or crossing their chests: they were Jim fans, and in the final analysis, we weren’t. All this was certainly spectacular, but wedging myself between two gossiping Hispanics near the back I felt slightly removed, as if watching a grand sporting finale in whose outcome I had no particular interest.
A squad of sombrely resplendent clerics took their positions in front of the apostle, and when the first took his place at the mike and spoke it all got better immediately. In a Eurovision-judge drone he began to recite the nationalities and their point of pilgrim departure, and when the words ‘Valcarlos, Inglaterra’ echoed out of the Tannoy I felt my features tighten. At length a tiny nun took his place, and when she unexpectedly filled the world with soaring, mellifluous hosannas I couldn’t restrain a wet blink. Looking ahead I noted the backs of two familiar heads three rows up: Evelyn and Petronella, the latter once more twitching with fluid-faced emotion, but this time by no means alone.
Incoming tourists squeezed into my pew as the mass trundled on, as we stood, and sat, and kneeled, and stood and sat. The collection plate came round and I clanged down the euro I’d been given in the square outside; a queue began to form for the bread and wine. A sudden exhaustion had pinned me to my seat, and I’m glad it did because as I belatedly sidled towards the exit my attention was drawn to a conspicuous phalanx of robed curates. They staggered to the altar bearing upon their shoulders an arresting burden: an enormous and elaborate silver receptacle, an FA Cup the size of a dustbin. Everyone rushed to the front: this was the botafumeiro, Catholicism’s largest dispenser of holy incense, only brought out on days of especial religious import.
Its contents ignited, this glinting quarter-tonner was laboriously lashed to a rope and hoisted high into the vaulted darkness; then, yanking the cord like tattooed bosuns, the clergymen began a process originally intended to neutralise the stench of a thousand filthy, footsore walkers. Twenty fat-armed heave-hos had the smoke-belching colossus swinging from one side of the distant, vaulted roof to the other, whooshing between the aisles with dreadful momentum: one degree either side and we’d have had a messy strike of pilgrim ninepins. It later transpired that the bishop had authorised this astounding spectacle at the financial behest of a party of visiting Germans; some were outraged, but I figured that the hard-nosed mercenaries who ran the medieval Church could only have approved.
I emerged overwhelmed and smelling of holy mothballs, exhausted at this unseemly rush of events and experience after all those long weeks of measured toil. It was worse for my poor donkey: back at our table outside the bar I found him enduring the worst excesses of Shintomania, patted and petted by a three-deep throng. Evelyn and Petronella arrived, then Sara, and Barbara and Walther, and Janina and Anna, then Donald, who’d somehow got lost on the run-in and spent half a day circumnavigating the ring road. Simon shooed away the more persistent paparazzi, and as the fearsome clamour subsided we all slumped wordlessly round a big tin table.
Beers arrived and our weathered, rural faces crumpled in silent joy and wet-faced disbelief: we had made it. We had all done what at various times we all thought we never would. In the eyes of pilgrim history, we had lived through what so many did not. Glasses were raised in triumphant toast, but before mine reached my mouth I rushed inside the bar with Shinto’s bowl. ‘Tengo un burro,’ I rasped emotionally at the barman, wondering if I’d ever hear these words pass my lips again. I realised I would, and quite soon, when the barman pushed the bowl slightly further down his counter and carefully placed a large cigar beside it.
Simon was gathering up his belongings when I at last emerged with Shinto’s aquatic reward. I looked at my watch: he had less than an hour to get to the airport.
‘A million steps,’ he said, shouldering that vast rucksack.
‘Sorry?’
‘I worked it out last night. That’s what you’ve done. A man’s pace is around 75 centimetres, and you’ve done just over 750 kilometres.’ I tried to look intelligent. ‘So that’s a million.’
‘If they told you that at the start,’ piped up Donald, already on beer two, ‘you’d turn round and go straight home.’ I just nodded blankly, then looked down at Shinto, hosing up the last dregs by my feet. A million for me, and double for him. One small step for a man was two for his donkey. In fact more like eight, the way mine had been going.
I found a room for myself, overlooking an alley filled by day with the entreating cries of souvenir hawkers and by night with the unhinged revelry of exam-ending students. With rather more difficulty I found a field for Shinto, up in a covert corner of the Monte de Gozo grounds. Back over that bridge, back round those stairs.
If the sun was up I was generally to be found walking from my place to his, or vice versa, a two-hour round trip I did twice a day. When the moon took its place I met my pilgrim friends and we ate octopus and drank brandy and blurted the odd belated confession: you might as well know now that my wife’s left me; I probably never mentioned before that I was a Buddhist; did anyone see me catching that bus from Ponferrada? Then I went back to my bed, kept awake not by phlegm-throated bed noises but book-hurling bacchanalia. And when that finally subsided, by the hollowing contemplation that for the first time since we’d met, I was out of audible reach of even his most desperately plaintive bray.
On the third morning, along with nine fellow compostela-brandishers, I went for my free meal, ushered briskly through the quadrangled magnificence of the Hostal de Los Reyes Católicos and into the staff canteen. Sitting there in a prim whitewashed cell, trays of breakfast leftovers on our knees and a mighty magnum of local red passing from hand to hand, we seemed appropriate keepers of the pilgrim flame. Two hours and nine farewells later, on schedule with the last of many telephonic arrangements, I was hugging a bearded Belgian on a hot hillside.
‘Ah, Tim?’ began Hanno, extricating himself from my embrace. ‘I cannot find him. Shinto.’
A slight hesitancy in his manner echoed the poorly veiled astonishment with which Hanno, three days earlier, had greeted news of my safe arrival. Don’t tell me, said those furrows on that great long face, please don’t tell me that this Anglo-buffoon is mad as well as silly, that he’s mislaid a large animal weeks ago and can’t admit it even to himself.
Shinto fixed me with a look hungry for adventure, eager, almost intelligent. Bareback in the hock-high meadow grass, he called to mind a gold-rimmed, hand-retouched collector’s plate in a colour-supplement advert: ‘Alert to the Call: a fresh spring morn, and this lively little Pyrenean jack has been exploring. (Penis not to scale.)’ Scrutinising him with a sense of potent déjà vu I suddenly recalled the dream his braying had cut short: Shinto had been awarded a prize for special achievement at some sort of pet pageant, but as I led him through the crowd with applause in my ears and a Tobleroned lump of pride in my throat, there between us and the podium stood a taunting trio of stairs . . .
For the last time I squatted down by his side, upturned hoof in lap and scraper in hand, the submerged percolations of that huge, warm stomach bubbling in through my ear. I might not quite have fulfilled Hanno’s prediction by eating from the same bowl as my donkey, but for a week now his chaff and my crusts had shared the same sack. Sighing and puffing I packed and repacked the bags, and brushed and rebrushed Shinto, trying not to think that this was The End, the final instalment of a forty-one-day life within my life, but at the same time unavoidably aware that it was and willing myself into a suitable climactic frame of mind.
At the mouth of every hut behind us were groups of pilgrims facing the same inner turmoil, grooming themselves for an appointment with eternity like corpses in a coffin. An ironed shirt kept flat-packed at a rucksack’s fundament now retrieved for the benefit of St Jim, a comb pulled through sun-mangled hair. Simon nudged me and inclined his head, and through a bathroom window I saw two faces pressed close to a mirror: an elderly man shaving his middle-aged Down’s Syndrome son.
It wasn’t until 9.00 that we left, exchanging knowing, bracing nods and half-smiles with those around us, like students massing outside the hall of their final examination. It was a steep descent round the perimeter of the Monte de Gozo complex, and as our strides lengthened with the gradient so the skies above suddenly darkened. No sooner had we broached the outskirts of Santiago proper than those guiding towers were smeared out by a flash downpour, one so violent that by the time I’d extracted and unfurled my poncho Shinto had slammed in the anchors. ‘Um,’ I said, through a curtain of hood drips; then there was a creak and a crank and a big up-and-over garage door beside us pivoted aloft.
Inside the dim void thus revealed stood a blasé, full-faced mechanic, who thumbed us in whilst critically assessing the tiny cigarette stub pinched between his thumb and forefinger. In a minute there were half a dozen of us in there, and in another the one with four legs had somehow sniffed out a sack of grain. Still addressing himself to his dwindling fag end the mechanic palmed out a scoop and let Shinto snuffle it up from his hand. Then a young chap in a red cagoule held a tentative hand out into the open, morphed it into a thumbs-up and in a moment we were all waving our gruff protector farewell.
The pocket storm was merely the first of a sequence that in three swift stages formed a perfect microcosm of every alarum of the previous six weeks, every phobia nurtured by Shinto in those 770 clicks gone slowly by. We’d been on the wet pavement less than a minute when it fell away down a hefty flight of stairs. The backtracking detour was moderate by the standards of many endured, but at its conclusion lay a busy, narrow road bridge whose bolt-on pedestrian portion was assembled from wooden planks. For the last time I saw Shinto assess the middle distance with that look of mildly perplexed helplessness, as if a direct causal link existed between this obstacle and the sudden inactivity of his limbs, as if it wasn’t a bridge but a force field. Look, said his eyes, I can assure you that this is just as frustrating for me as it is for you.
These days I almost agreed. As our marriage had matured so those stand-up rows had mellowed into gentle bickering, and I squeezed the three of us on to the tarmac, between guard rail and elbow-flicking wing mirrors, with an air of fond indulgence. My affection for Shinto had now reached a level where it seemed a poignant tragedy that those splendid genes lay nowhere but his own ageing body (though given a good innings, that body had every chance of outlasting mine). He was Shinto the First, and Shinto the Last. My passage through the pilgrimage literature had been regularly enlivened by the descriptive appellations of medieval monarchs: Sancho the Fat, ‘the hunchbacked Orduno IV the Evil’. It was all a question of spin: with bad PR you were Henry the Impotent, with good PR Alfonso the Chaste. So here, before me, was King Shinto the . . . Beige.
The bridge proved the last of the morning’s To-be-a-Pilgrim trinity of trials, and our approach thereafter was not one designed to nurture tearful portent. A construction site half-staffed with idle donk-baiters, receding batteries of slightly scabby housing estates, waiting for the little green man with my little grey donkey: had it not been for the tiny and diminishing digits on those camino marker posts and an unusually jaded citizenry, this could just have been another of those surreal and stressful trans-metropolitan experiences.
We drew breath for the final assault with just one more of those inadequate bar breakfasts of cake and café con leche, then headed across our last dual carriageway and into the cloistered alleys of the old town. Walls narrowed and houses rose, shielding the cathedral towers from view and making every rounded corner a mouth-drying, spine-fizzing anticlimax: this was surely it, and if not then this, and if not then this. The last yellow arrow led us down a flagstoned hill, and sensing that this really was it Simon respectfully melted forward into the morning shoppers. I contemplated the rope in my calloused hands and what it led to, and in doing so felt pride abruptly tempered by a gauche self-consciousness, like a boy wearing school uniform for the first time, a reprise of the sensation that had for so long dominated my every moment at Shinto’s side.
Tightening my grip on the rope and breathing hard I felt rather than saw a moss-stoned ecclesiastical structure looming up to our left; but as the street ahead passed down towards it and beneath a grand archway so it devolved into a stairway. A final, numb-limbed diversion round a circling, anti-clockwise road to the right, a road which a minute later ejected me into the bottom right-hand corner of a belittling cobbled sea, a great, broad square sparsely populated by tiny mortals and imperiously dominated by the lichened, mildewed, florid might of my destination.
With my overborne faculties condensed into a reedy, whistling tinnitus and the sensation of wet heat on my cheeks I apparently continued walking, distantly aware of the swelling crowd I was dragging across the grey stones. At any rate there I soon found myself, in the shadow of that swoon-inducing façade, at the foot of the weighty double staircase that accessed its lofty entrance. ‘Photo, photo!’ piped a shrill voice in my ear, not caring that the head to which it belonged now lay buried in a warm, soft neck, not knowing that through that head spooled a messily spliced loop tape of mud and sun and barley, of treble bunks and double brandies, of flan and friend and midnight bray, of trial and tribulation. ‘Photo, photo, photo!’
My brother was watching from the Plaza del Obradoiro’s distant opposite bank, and later reported that my tourist entourage had all exchanged shrugs – and, in one case, swivelled-fingers-in-temples – before clicking away regardless. When I raised my head and blinked out the last tear one snapper came up and pressed a euro in my hand; I contemplated it blankly, too fraught and drained to protest. I’d had this down as a humble alms offering until an unkempt man in a brown felt cape and scallop-brimmed hat shuffled into shot for a piece of the action – his outfit was set off with a staff and gourd in one hand and a cig and a multilingual note in the other: ‘Foto with me €2’. Simon had crept up unseen with my camera and captured the scene as my rent-a-pilgrim struck a photogenic pose with his head arched down to Shinto’s, and looking at the result now I’m rewarded to note those long ears flattened back in sour hostility.
I walked on before I began to feel like the false medievalist, or that caped and gourded dog with the same notice over there, or those Pentax-toters sticking their head through the comedy pilgrim cut-outs over there. Still the crowd surged and eddied around, shouting out all the old questions in French, in English, in Spanish, but always now in retrospect: what did he eat, where did he sleep. I again had the certain feeling that Shinto knew this was an important, defining moment in his life both as ass and pilgrim, and again I was right. The oohs and aahs morphed into ohs and urghs, and sure enough when I looked back he’d laid down a dozen hot markers on those holy cobbles.
Simon jogged up just before a pair of finger-raised policemen, and together we crinklingly dispatched the unwanted souvenirs with plastic-bag mittens. Returned to earth more literally than ever before we stood, sagging crap bags in hands, and embraced carefully. ‘I’ll stay with him,’ said Simon when we’d finished, ‘and you go off for your certificate.’ The compostela – my Get Out of Hell Free card, and I’d forgotten all about it.
Obtaining this might have held more significance had the process felt a little less like renewing a TV licence during a water shortage. Queuing in the strip-lit Pilgrim Office at the end of a long line of unwashed, unfamiliar arrivals – snorers to a fat-bellied, big-nosed man – I felt a suggestion of the anticlimax that many pilgrims had written about. Half an hour later I was dictating my name to a bored official, who after a little scribbling handed me a small scroll. Topped by a sepia depiction of Santiago Peregrino and fulsomely bordered with scallop shells, in a Latin rubric unchanged from the fourteenth century this detailed the devoted ambulatory achievements of Dnum Timoteum Moore. ‘Compostela por mi burro?’ I asked, in an unexpectant tone that perhaps made the ensuing refusal too easy.
Jubilation was what I’d wanted, and happily it had taken hold in the streets by the time I bounded outside. Simon and Shinto were already beleaguered by familiar and now ecstatic faces: English Sara, Jean-Michel, the Scottish couple who had rescued my donkey from suicidal garrotting at Ribadiso. Our hugs were cut short by the dull gonging of huge bells; midday, and the daily Pilgrims’ Mass. Leaving Shinto in Simon’s care once more, outside a bar with the singing gay Italians, I trotted up the double staircase and into the cathedral’s dim but thronged interior, a majestic Romanesque cavern encased beneath that baroque icing.
In that buffeting crush of rucksacks and day-trippers, it was never going to be easy to work myself up to the spiritual orgasm this moment seemed to demand. Too restless and hassled for insight or manifestation; no statues here you could imagine sweating blood. Perhaps the closest I came was while pressing my hand into the column supporting the welcoming image of Santiago, into five finger holes worn deep in the marble by the grateful, weary touch of pilgrim digits over 900 years. Yes, that was a moment.
More of a moment, certainly, than my contact with the brashly gilded representation of St James that loomed up behind the altar. Only after twenty minutes in a significance-sapping queue, jostled throughout by nattering, nonchalant tourists, was I granted my swift embrace, clasping those giant golden shoulders from behind as if trying to blag a saintly piggyback. Two impatient schoolkids nudged me onwards, down through the crypt for a quickstep shuffle past the silver casket, inside it the bones that had brought so many millions all this way.
But then they hadn’t really brought me, or in fact more than a handful of us. In the literature, medieval relic worship was consistently paralleled with today’s veneration of celebrity memorabilia, and if so then St James wasn’t shifting many albums. Shuffling back down the teeming aisle in search of an empty pew I saw occasional religiously overwhelmed pilgrims genuflecting or crossing their chests: they were Jim fans, and in the final analysis, we weren’t. All this was certainly spectacular, but wedging myself between two gossiping Hispanics near the back I felt slightly removed, as if watching a grand sporting finale in whose outcome I had no particular interest.
A squad of sombrely resplendent clerics took their positions in front of the apostle, and when the first took his place at the mike and spoke it all got better immediately. In a Eurovision-judge drone he began to recite the nationalities and their point of pilgrim departure, and when the words ‘Valcarlos, Inglaterra’ echoed out of the Tannoy I felt my features tighten. At length a tiny nun took his place, and when she unexpectedly filled the world with soaring, mellifluous hosannas I couldn’t restrain a wet blink. Looking ahead I noted the backs of two familiar heads three rows up: Evelyn and Petronella, the latter once more twitching with fluid-faced emotion, but this time by no means alone.
Incoming tourists squeezed into my pew as the mass trundled on, as we stood, and sat, and kneeled, and stood and sat. The collection plate came round and I clanged down the euro I’d been given in the square outside; a queue began to form for the bread and wine. A sudden exhaustion had pinned me to my seat, and I’m glad it did because as I belatedly sidled towards the exit my attention was drawn to a conspicuous phalanx of robed curates. They staggered to the altar bearing upon their shoulders an arresting burden: an enormous and elaborate silver receptacle, an FA Cup the size of a dustbin. Everyone rushed to the front: this was the botafumeiro, Catholicism’s largest dispenser of holy incense, only brought out on days of especial religious import.
Its contents ignited, this glinting quarter-tonner was laboriously lashed to a rope and hoisted high into the vaulted darkness; then, yanking the cord like tattooed bosuns, the clergymen began a process originally intended to neutralise the stench of a thousand filthy, footsore walkers. Twenty fat-armed heave-hos had the smoke-belching colossus swinging from one side of the distant, vaulted roof to the other, whooshing between the aisles with dreadful momentum: one degree either side and we’d have had a messy strike of pilgrim ninepins. It later transpired that the bishop had authorised this astounding spectacle at the financial behest of a party of visiting Germans; some were outraged, but I figured that the hard-nosed mercenaries who ran the medieval Church could only have approved.
I emerged overwhelmed and smelling of holy mothballs, exhausted at this unseemly rush of events and experience after all those long weeks of measured toil. It was worse for my poor donkey: back at our table outside the bar I found him enduring the worst excesses of Shintomania, patted and petted by a three-deep throng. Evelyn and Petronella arrived, then Sara, and Barbara and Walther, and Janina and Anna, then Donald, who’d somehow got lost on the run-in and spent half a day circumnavigating the ring road. Simon shooed away the more persistent paparazzi, and as the fearsome clamour subsided we all slumped wordlessly round a big tin table.
Beers arrived and our weathered, rural faces crumpled in silent joy and wet-faced disbelief: we had made it. We had all done what at various times we all thought we never would. In the eyes of pilgrim history, we had lived through what so many did not. Glasses were raised in triumphant toast, but before mine reached my mouth I rushed inside the bar with Shinto’s bowl. ‘Tengo un burro,’ I rasped emotionally at the barman, wondering if I’d ever hear these words pass my lips again. I realised I would, and quite soon, when the barman pushed the bowl slightly further down his counter and carefully placed a large cigar beside it.
Simon was gathering up his belongings when I at last emerged with Shinto’s aquatic reward. I looked at my watch: he had less than an hour to get to the airport.
‘A million steps,’ he said, shouldering that vast rucksack.
‘Sorry?’
‘I worked it out last night. That’s what you’ve done. A man’s pace is around 75 centimetres, and you’ve done just over 750 kilometres.’ I tried to look intelligent. ‘So that’s a million.’
‘If they told you that at the start,’ piped up Donald, already on beer two, ‘you’d turn round and go straight home.’ I just nodded blankly, then looked down at Shinto, hosing up the last dregs by my feet. A million for me, and double for him. One small step for a man was two for his donkey. In fact more like eight, the way mine had been going.
I found a room for myself, overlooking an alley filled by day with the entreating cries of souvenir hawkers and by night with the unhinged revelry of exam-ending students. With rather more difficulty I found a field for Shinto, up in a covert corner of the Monte de Gozo grounds. Back over that bridge, back round those stairs.
If the sun was up I was generally to be found walking from my place to his, or vice versa, a two-hour round trip I did twice a day. When the moon took its place I met my pilgrim friends and we ate octopus and drank brandy and blurted the odd belated confession: you might as well know now that my wife’s left me; I probably never mentioned before that I was a Buddhist; did anyone see me catching that bus from Ponferrada? Then I went back to my bed, kept awake not by phlegm-throated bed noises but book-hurling bacchanalia. And when that finally subsided, by the hollowing contemplation that for the first time since we’d met, I was out of audible reach of even his most desperately plaintive bray.
On the third morning, along with nine fellow compostela-brandishers, I went for my free meal, ushered briskly through the quadrangled magnificence of the Hostal de Los Reyes Católicos and into the staff canteen. Sitting there in a prim whitewashed cell, trays of breakfast leftovers on our knees and a mighty magnum of local red passing from hand to hand, we seemed appropriate keepers of the pilgrim flame. Two hours and nine farewells later, on schedule with the last of many telephonic arrangements, I was hugging a bearded Belgian on a hot hillside.
‘Ah, Tim?’ began Hanno, extricating himself from my embrace. ‘I cannot find him. Shinto.’
A slight hesitancy in his manner echoed the poorly veiled astonishment with which Hanno, three days earlier, had greeted news of my safe arrival. Don’t tell me, said those furrows on that great long face, please don’t tell me that this Anglo-buffoon is mad as well as silly, that he’s mislaid a large animal weeks ago and can’t admit it even to himself.
