Spanish steps, p.6
Spanish Steps, page 6
What they needed was a travel guide, and in 1137 they got one – no less than the world’s first. ‘Thanking you, sire,’ breathed a humbly awed pilgrim as he weighed the Liber Sancti Jacobi in his filthy hands. ‘Um, now can you read it out for us please?’
Also known as the Codex Calixtinus in honour of the Pope to whom it was dedicated, the LSJ – or at least its pertinent practical chapters – is widely supposed the work of a French monk, Aimery Picaud. As a good holiday-brochure copywriter, Picaud’s aim would have been to maximise interest in his destination by talking up its positives and glossing over any downsides. Regrettably for his readers, but rewardingly for us, Picaud was not a good holiday-brochure copywriter. After the magnificent deceits of a first paragraph in which he confidently decrees the 500-mile, trans-Iberian trek to Santiago as a thirteen-day walk, Picaud allows his quill to scratch and twitch to the darkest whim of xenophobic scaremongering.
Having saluted at onerous length the qualities of his regional brethren – ‘handsome, brave . . . vital and giving . . . these are the people of Poitou’ – he vaults the Pyrenees with racial malice aforethought. You know what they say about Spanish food: eat beef, pork or even a tiny fish and ‘you will no doubt die shortly after’. Most rivers were poisoned, their inviting waters instantly fatal to horses. And then there were the natives. Ferrymen invariably pushed their passengers out mid-stream; ‘having laid their hands upon the spoils of the dead, they wickedly rejoice’. Crossing from France you’d meet the Basques, who ‘dress poorly and eat disgustingly, from a single bowl’, spoke in a language like ‘the barking of dogs’, and were ‘ugly, corrupt, drunken, savage, impious and uncouth’.
A Basque ‘would kill a Frenchman for no more than a coin’, perhaps a fate to be preferred to that awaiting any survivor encountering the residents of Navarre: ‘Here they not merely rob pilgrims going to St James, but ride them as if they were asses.’ Doubts as to the implications of this statement are laid to rest two pages on. ‘It is told that the Navarrese affixes a lock to the behind of his mule or horse, so that no one else but he may have access to them. He also kisses lasciviously the vulva of mules.’ One imagines St Francis of Assisi, who walked to Santiago in 1214, entering a darkened Navarrese barn with a rueful cough and a raised finger: ‘Um . . . Listen, chaps, that isn’t quite what I had in mind.’ (The translator of my edition of the LSJ, a Professor of Medieval Studies at Syracuse, adds in a startling footnote: ‘Mutually gratifying erotic liaison between master and his or her pets or domestic animals is widely practiced to our own day.’ Put those burning torches down, common-human-decency fans – he died in 1995. ‘Cock-a-doodle-don’t!’ quipped the coroner at an inquest I just made up.)
Too late now to have Shinto measured for a chastity belt.
The night before, sitting round the map with Hanno, I’d been faced with the full scale of my geographical ignorance: mountain ranges were long as well as high, and St Jean Pied-de-Port was right down the other end of the Pyrenees. A good 250 kilometres away, indeed, which at horsebox speeds warranted setting off at dawn, or rather 9.30 a.m. once the three of us had wrestled a furiously unyielding Shinto into the back. Poor little sod, I thought, watching his ears swivel about in trepidation above the trailer’s side walls. Was this sympathy? Well, it was a start.
Marie-Christine and her daughter wept to see their four-legged friend thus dispatched, which didn’t do much for my confidence, and may explain why my normally competent map reading badly let us down. So badly that by the time St Jean’s stout city walls rose up before us, we’d already contravened EU regulations on the movement of animals. Six hours Shinto had been in the back, seven by the time we’d eaten a very late lunch. Eight when we’d stocked up at a hypermarket with coat brushes, donkey salt and a washing-up-cum-drinking bowl, and a round ten when, having failed to find field or stabling in St Jean, we finally unloaded our – my – blinking, sweaty donkey outside a hillside guesthouse in Valcarlos, 10 kilometres up the road on the Spanish side of the border.
Not starting in France comprised a reasonably profound fuck-up, but even as I dusted myself down on the wrong side of this metaphorical first fence I found I didn’t care. Yes, yes, so I wouldn’t quite be doing the full 774 kilometres. And yes, unless I got really badly lost I’d never now experience the rare thrill of walking a donkey across an international frontier. But these were of little import beside the imminent apocalyptic awfulness.
‘So,’ said Hanno, tying Shinto’s 12-foot ‘night rope’ to a tree in the corner of the guest house’s front garden, a steeply pitched realm rich in mint and thistles and soilable playground equipment. We’d run through all we could think of. Which saddle straps to adjust and attach, and which to leave well alone. A trial run with the packing procedure, looping and lashing panniers and waterproof bags through brass rings and round plastic saddle horns until the two sides hung in balanced harmony. Last-minute supply essentials: a tube of stinking multi-purpose donk-ointment, a kind of stout screwdriver for scraping out Shinto’s feet, and Hanno’s own chunkily ethnic pullover for conditions I’d forgotten to prepare for. I’d had him do his ‘Eeeuuuwwww’ into the Dictaphone so I could practise at nights – one way of emptying the bunk above, if nothing else. And again and again and again that sodding knot. He eventually distilled those whorls and twists into terms a drugged Cub Scout could have grasped: the snake comes up through the well, round the tree, and back down the well.
‘So,’ he repeated. This was it: the hot, hard slap to the face that said I was about to be left alone, in sole charge of a sizeable farmyard being, with a trans-Iberian journey of nearly 500 miles – a journey indeed of biblical proportions – ahead of me.
‘Just a minute,’ I blurted, stalling desperately. ‘We haven’t talked about the punishment beatings.’
‘Beatings?’
‘Yes – I mean I’m not going to hit him, but how hard should I if I was going to?’
‘No,’ said Hanno, with a look bravely purged of despair. ‘Not to punish. Just to make some autorité. And not in fact hitting.’
He opened the Landcruiser’s heavy, battered driver’s door and planted a filthy boot on the sill. ‘No!’ I squeaked. Then, in a slightly better voice: ‘The crap. Do I have to pick up his crap? I really don’t want to.’
Hanno nodded as kindly as he felt able to. ‘By the finish you won’t care to hold donkay shit in your fingers. By the finish you will be eating together from this.’ He rapped a large knuckle against the washing-up bowl in my hands and jumped into the cab.
‘By the finish?’ I quavered, my pale face angled up at him.
‘You will arrive in Santiago,’ he said, but the pause before he said it was rather longer than I’d have preferred. And with that, and a many-pointed U-turn, this lovely big man was gone from my life.
It was all so desperate that I hardly even noticed that the room was 50 euros, a sum that I’d been told would keep a Confraternity hard-noser fed and bedded for a week. And that didn’t even bag me a telly, obliging me to make my own fun by impregnating the room with the stench of sweat and crap, a stench supplied for the moment by Shinto’s saddle and the thick blanket that protected him from its more chafesome straps.
I bundled both into a wardrobe, then laid all the maps and guidebooks out on the bed. Tomorrow – wince, swallow – was a non-negotiable 22 kilometres, a Grand Old Duke of York job that began with a 2,000-foot climb to the lonely pass of Ibaneta and ended with a swoop to Roncesvalles and its sprawling monastery complex. My test drove with Hanno had suggested I’d experience the starkest difficulties on the more challenging inclines and descents, and on this basis it was a shame that my first task was to get Shinto up the Pyrenees and the second to take him straight back down again. ‘A tough stage of great beauty,’ was one verdict. Tough indeed: every year at least a couple of pilgrims messed it up fatally, losing their way in the mountain mist and meeting a forsaken, hypothermic end, or over-winding their tickers by pushing too hard on the first day.
The tanks of fatalism were on my lawn; I tried to will them away with mechanical positive thought. This was not a bad idea. Not at all. In fact, there was no way this was not a good idea. Not quite ready to start praying, instead I practised that knot. Interestingly, every time I wrapped the rope round the bedpost and started twisting and threading, the end result deteriorated. First I couldn’t find the snake, and then he turned up with a mate. They had a fight up the tree; the tree fell down the well.
After an hour I gave up, but getting to sleep was no easier. My, Spanish people are loud. There were kids still running about at 11.30, which by forthcoming standards qualified as the middle of the night. So relentlessly animated was their parents’ corridor banter, and so prolonged, that I feared finding Shinto conversationally relieved of his hind legs. And then he wouldn’t be able to walk, and this whole thing would be off, and obviously that would be just awful.
Five
Of the 61,000 pilgrims who completed the camino in 2001, just over a third were non-Spaniards: Americans, Canadians, Germans, French, Brits, Brazilians. Most walked, a fifth did it on bikes; 170 arrived in Santiago astride or beside some sort of equine beast. Almost two-thirds of those who set off gave their faith as Roman Catholic, but fewer than half claimed ‘religious motives’; the majority talked of ‘cultural’ inspiration, though this box could have been ticked by anyone from art historians to those emotionally on the run – jilted lovers, burnt-out executives, white-collar criminals. The tradition of medieval pilgrims sentenced to walk to Santiago in lieu of time behind bars lives on, in a scheme that offers Belgian delinquents the choice between pilgrimage and prison (in 1999, twenty-eight of them opted for the big walk over the big house). An extreme journey, appropriately inspired by extreme circumstances.
Propped up in bed as my fellow guests exchanged decibels, I’d read of big Spaniards bursting into unexplained tears in their sleeping bags, of ‘serial pilgrims’ who did the camino again and again, of esoteric initiation and abrupt conversions to Catholicism. ‘I realised that what I had unleashed within myself while walking could no longer be contained by what had been a stable relationship,’ soliloquised an American pilgrim. ‘To the shock of all who knew me, I ended my marriage.’ All this was hardly helping, and not just because of a donkey-owner’s phobic response to the phrase ‘stable relationship’.
‘Don’t come back all funny,’ Birna had said, seeing me off at the airport. ‘You know: saying grace at dinner and stuff.’ I’d laughed then, but who knew what life-messing insights this mobile therapist’s couch might extract from me? Even the enduro freaks elevated what I’d thought of as a no-nonsense power walk to ‘an odyssey fuelled by pride, guts and stubbornness’.
With saddle and belongings piled up around me and the smell of breakfast coming under the door, I opened a random book in search of final inspiration. ‘Their faces registered a combination of joy, tears, disappointment and fatigue,’ wrote that aforementioned Californian anthropologist on page one of Pilgrim Stories, describing arrival in Santiago in words I could only ever imagine applying to an epic penalty shoot-out or premature ejaculation. In very many more ways than one, I had a long way to go.
‘Santiago good!’ said the hotelier, slapping me on the back rather too hard as he poured out my third coffee. ‘And children happy!’ He beckoned me to the window, and we watched the kids who’d been making all the nocturnal racket prancing gleefully around a snout-down, grazing Shinto. What a lovely place for a one-donk sanctuary, I thought: how much better for both of us that he stay right here. But then the owner raised his eyebrows, apologetically moulding the features beneath as he morphed into the reluctant harbinger of bad news. ‘Ah . . .’ he murmured hesitantly, pointing at the field and then pinching his wrinkled nose. I nodded, drained my coffee and set off outside. It was all over the sandpit. A minute later, as the Internet translation of French donkey hygiene tips had advised, there I was, using two cardboards by way of spoons.
The children gathered to watch as I flicked crap into the nettles with procrastinatory thoroughness. The hotelier had primed them, and I smiled bravely as they fired out the nouns I would soon become accustomed to hearing muttered around me: inglés, burro, peregrino. English, donkey, pilgrim. ‘¿A Santiago?’ enquired a pigtailed ten-year-old, who after my wan nod of confirmation followed up with ‘¡Que sacrificio!’ Fearsomely ominous words, the valediction to a suicide bomber, but uttered in a tone that suggested ‘sacrificio’ might be Basque for ‘twat’.
With an extended internal sigh I laid out saddle and luggage in the dewy grass. Shinto grazed on. He hadn’t even acknowledged me yet. How desperate, how ludicrous this all was, like being pushed behind the wheel of a double-decker after half a lesson in a Nissan Micra. Wondering why I had to have an audience on the first morning, I filled the palm of my hand with supermarket rock-salt and lowered it to Shinto’s head. ‘Look, I know this is the hand that feeds you,’ I began, but then he jerked up, snorted half the contents into the grass, then licked the rest from my flesh in three fat-tongued rasps.
Well! The children aahed, and I nearly joined them. And it got better. I saddled and bagged him in ten minutes, and managed to clean out his hoofs, crap flakes and all, almost as if I knew what I was doing. I untied and coiled the night rope and clipped on the dog-chain attachment that fastened the walking lead to his head collar. I couldn’t understand it: nothing bad was happening. The patron rushed out and gave me a tin of pâté. The children patted Shinto’s flanks farewell. There was a pitch-roofed chalet just above us and from each of its open windows waved at least one pair of hands. Returning the gesture to all I launched into a stride and Shinto clattered obediently on to the concrete path. Make way for the assmeister! Let the pilgrimage commence!
We wound down the curves to the main road: Saturday morning, and almost no traffic. I took my place at Shinto’s shoulder – correct positioning for road travel – and with something approaching aplomb off we marched, one man and his donk. With my senses emerging from panic stations to resume their normal duties, I could now appreciate the chilled and dewy morning’s development into a fully-fledged azure-heavened Pyrenean scorcher. Valcarlos was where Charlemagne’s rearguard had been ambushed and slaughtered by Moors (or in fact the first of what’s clearly been a long line of Basque guerrillas) in 778, but despite this and the ongoing pilgrim fatalities it was difficult now to imagine it a Valley of Death. Above us on either side soared sheer cliffs and waterfalls, with farms perched impossibly in lofty iridescent pastures. The roadside verge was speckled with yellow alpine poppies. I filled my lungs and stripped down to my T-shirt. Shinto, I thought, looked terrific. The sun glossed and sleeked his mousy coat, his crested mohican of a mane seemed almost lacquered in its upright brilliance. The baggage – red panniers, purple waterproof duffel bags, turquoise tent-bag – lent a vibrant contemporary edge to this warmly nostalgic scene.
An Italian motor home passed with a cheery if alarming toot; Shinto held his ground benignly. And I saw my first pilgrims: three male cyclists, all in late middle years, each sporting a pannier-mounted scallop shell so large and prominent that it might have been crowbarred off the sign outside a red-and-yellow petrol station. The first two waved as they overtook, and the third pedalled by with a gutturally North European cry of ‘buen camino’. We are family, I thought, then sang. I got all my pilgrims with me.
My guidebooks had told me the camino branched off the road after 4 kilometres, and I reached the junction in just under an hour: a speed in generous excess of all professional predictions. How was this happening? If I walked through the nights I could be at Santiago in a week. Perhaps with Hanno out of the picture Shinto was a different beast: less jumpy, more consistent. Perhaps the spiritual adrenalin exuded by pilgrims past was seeping up through his hoofs. Perhaps – a theory that gained weight and credence the more I contemplated it – I was just generally very good.
The path was more authentic than the road. It followed a chuckling brook and meandered through an ancient village, where I tilted my triumphant countenance in greeting at a gold-toothed old man wearing a beret the size of a bin lid. At this settlement’s conclusion stood a barn with a yellow arrow daubed on its side, pointing right. I wheeled Shinto as directed, and heading into the densely wooded valley felt myself being forged as the newest link in that 1,000-year pilgrim chain.
If I haven’t mentioned Shinto’s slight hesitation at a drain cover just outside that village, it’s because it didn’t seem important at the time. In fact I only appreciated its significance, through a brain clotted with ugly, red ganglions of pure rage, when I passed back over it. Three hours later.
There was a bridge, see. Was it a large bridge? Well, no, it wasn’t. This was a little wee feller, six foot of slats spanning that same humble brook. When Shinto stopped with his front feet two inches from the first slat, I imagined he wanted to crap or pee or eat or something. Nothing about this bridge warranted distress, and nothing about his manner expressed it; that long face and those unblinking eyes with their coin-slot pupils remained purged of detectable emotion. For perhaps five minutes I waited for him to fulfil any of the aforementioned physical needs, and for five minutes he stood in mute, empty-headed inactivity.
