Off the Road (17 page)

“All the bunks are taken,”
says the German. “You will have to sleep on the floor.” His statement is not
meant to be threatening, just informative, just so I will know where things
stand. I say that I will be happy to sleep on the floor. The whole room seems
to be put at ease by this statement.

The German stretches out on
his bed and swishes his legs back and forth. Mine, this is mine.

Amid these group politics, I
am being vetted, so I try to put forth my most gregarious self. But it is clear
that a lot of vetting has preceded my arrival. Most of the people here already
know their place and the place of others. As in the first grade, the group has
already determined, with the same brutish nastiness common among children, that
one among them is universally despised and openly mocked.

His name is Giuseppe, but he
is known as the Italian Man. When he enters the shelter he says nothing but
sits on his bunk, removes his shoes, and puts a tennis shoe on his left foot
and a climber’s boot on his right. He gets up and leaves. Willem says out loud,
“That is the Italian Man. He is most strange.”

I wince at his loud candor.

“Do not worry. He cannot
speak a word of English, or any other language.” A few people snicker.

The Italian Man looks like a
CIA agent on vacation. He dresses in green shorts and flak jacket lined with
numerous pockets of varying sizes. His teeth are black, and he smokes
incessantly, although he never inhales. He clamps down hard on each filter of
his Marlboros, soaking the end, and sucks noisily until a cloud of fresh gray
smoke flows from his lips into the air. Perhaps what marks him as the class
wanker is his pack. It is a cloth box fastened to a steel frame with big
wheels. He pulls it behind him. He looks like an old lady on a shopping spree.
The pack is covered with decals from cities all over Europe, the kind one can
see plastered all over the rear bumper of Airstream Trailers. His flak jacket is
covered with pins proclaiming the European unity of 1992., buttons with photos
of Pope John Paul II, and souvenir pins from the countries that once made up
the Soviet Union.

When he returns, he goes
into the bathroom, closes the door, quickly flushes the toilet, and immediately
steps out again. Everyone looks at one another, and childlike grins flash from
some of the bunks. What the hell was that about?

The Italian Man sits on his
bed, removes his shoes, and then puts on bedroom slippers and shuffles about
the hostel. He enters the bathroom, repeats his flushing ritual, and finally
sits at the table.

“Aufiedsein.”
he says to me.

“I am not German, I am an
American,” I say in English.

“Buona ventura, ist ein
Americanishe.”

“I am American.” This time I
try Spanish.

“Buena fortuna, pelegrino.
Comme si, comme ça. La peregrinación es muy difícil,
yes?”

After the Italian Man
leaves, Willem explains, “Giuseppe imagines he can speak every European
language. I am not even certain how good his Italian is.” Willem, for all his London erudition, is something of a bitch.

When the Italian Man returns
a short while later, I listen carefully. He mangles his native Italian into a
Spanish-sounding accent and throws in a few words of the language he is trying
to speak, French, German, English—a pilgrim’s Mr. Malaprop. What I might find
charming, though, the others loathe. The Italian Man can’t advance any
conversation past the weather or merry howdy-dos. Like the social misfits I
remember from my youth, he is despised by others not for his iconoclastic
clothes or peculiar behavior, but for his stunning lack of self-awareness. On
some level he is wholly innocent of just how much fun is being made of him, the
classic butthead.

“See the tree how big it’s
grown,

But friend it hasn’t been
too long.

It wah—zint big.”

The Flemish troublemaker
Claudy storms into the shelter, singing in the unctuous baritone vibrato of a
lounge lizard.

“You are an American.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Word gets around. I know
all the American hits.”

A pilgrim with a taste for
Bobby Goldsboro. I am speechless.

“Moon river, you heart
shaker, wherever you’re knowing, I’m blowing your way.”

“The words are ‘heart
breaker, wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.’ ”

“Oh, I know all the words. I
am just testing you, American. What’s your name?”

“Jack.”

“Claudy.” He shakes my hand
vigorously. I can see in Willem’s face a look of disdain. “I am Flemish.”

“I know. Word gets around.”

“All the pilgrims will be
eating dinner tonight at the finest restaurant. You must come eat with us.”

Willem makes one of his
faces. I see it. Willem sees that I see it. Claudy sees it, and sees that
Willem sees me seeing it.

“Oh, everybody but Willem.
He has to call his wife! He does not eat in restaurants! He goes to bed so
early! You must come.... Great. Then you will come. We will all be eating at
eight.”

Dinner is a mad debauchery,
emceed by our own Claudy. Like Willem, he is fluent in several languages, but
his vocabularies are vulgar and colloquial. His English has the singsong
quality of an American doing a bad imitation of a Liverpudlian accent. He opens
the evening with several horrible jokes that provoke nothing but groans of
pain.

But it is impossible to
condemn Claudy if only because no one can get a word in. His performance is
improvisational and takes its source material at random—someone’s shirt, the
food, a picture on the wall—but always winds back around to his own biography,
which he serves up in comic dollops. He has sung in major nightclubs throughout
the United States and England. He is a genius computer programmer and knows the
president of Hewlett-Packard on a first-name basis. “I could call him right
now, and he would beg me to work for him.”

The subject of gambling
comes up. Claudy brags that he holds the Las Vegas record for playing blackjack
continuously— ninety-six hours—and is listed in
The Guinness Book of World
Records.
The secret: cold showers during the fifteen-minute breaks. He has
slept with women on all continents. The best are American. He winks at me for
confirmation. But nothing beats the seduction of a good Spanish Catholic girl.

Claudy speaks the worst
Spanish, the only continental language he has yet to master. But somehow he has
the waiter so tangled in laughter that free wine and brandy flow all night
long.

When the Italian Man (who
was not invited) becomes the topic of conversation, a married British couple
named Roderick and Jerri attempt an explanation but are cut off by Claudy.

“Oh, he’s a bloody weird
one. He smokes all day. And he takes a one-second leak in the bathroom like a
dog and then flushes. At night he falls asleep in two seconds. Rick, do your
imitation.”

Rick makes loud snorting
noises. Everyone at the table seems to know what these unpleasant sounds refer
to, and they all participate. DRDRDRDR. AGAGAGAG. BTHBTHBTHBTH.

“He snores like a fart,”
Rick ventures in his first bit of English. The table erupts with laughter, and
the waiter pours another round of Spanish brandy.

The pilgrim shelter locks
its gate at eleven
p.m.
Just
before then, we pay up and decamp. Our little room is full. Other latecomers
are laying out rolls on the floor. Willem is in his bed, reading by flashlight.
I avoid his look. As I prepare to unroll my pack on the floor, Claudy whispers
from a bunk to come over. He removes his walking stick and boots from one
claimed bed.

“You can have this one,” he
says conspiratorially. I demur, insisting that I don’t want him to sleep on the
floor.

“I won’t,” he says. “I
always claim two bunks so I can give one to a friend.”

Willem is looking up from
his pool of light, and his face speaks of betrayal. I am casting my lot here.
Willem or Claudy, the follower of rules or the breaker of rules. Retired air
force captain or Dionysus. Hobbes never said it would be easy.

I unroll my bag on the
mattress. Willem returns to his book unhappily. Claudy is already on the other
side of the room, alternately cracking jokes in Flemish with Rick and Karl and
cutting some kind of deal with the elderly Dutch couple. Bedrolls are shifted,
and now Claudy is sleeping in the top bunk next to mine. I cringe at what
Willem is making of all this sudden intimacy.

Lights are out and the room
is dark. I hear the rattling of the gate, and at last the Italian Man enters
through a doorway of moonlight. He undresses by flashlight. His unzippings and
zippings are loud and interminable. At last he flops on the bunk with an odd
grunt.

DRDRDRDR, the Italian Man
says. I hear Claudy holding back a cackle. In the distance I can make out the
muffled giggles of Rick and then Karl.

AGAGAGAG. The old Dutch
couple make suffocating noises. I am holding back a big one myself.

BTHBTHBTHBTH. The ticklish
Rick isn’t holding up well; some puffs of authentic hilarity are popping out.
The room is quivering with contained laughter. The contagion builds and
approaches instability. Rick explodes. Claudy’s out of the bag. I lose it.
Oblivious, the Italian Man falls into a loud, ragged snore uncommonly like
flatulence. Right on cue. The room vibrates with the laughter of an unmonitored
homeroom. In the cacophony, I can pick out each of them. I know these people
now. I can hear them all, except Willem, silent in the dark.

The life of the pilgrim is
always advertised in the grandest terms. There is talk of stripping life to its
barest essentials, paring away to the tabula rasa of one’s soul. The rigors of
the road scale life down to this level almost immediately. But when one is
walking in a group, what gets built up again, almost before one knows it’s
happening, are these crude alliances, borne on puerile jokes, mean pranks, and
small favors. Acquaintances are made and destroyed in juvenile terms, employing
tactics I vaguely remember from the playground at recess. All our actions—the
gift of a peach, the indulgence of a bed—mean to say what was said so frankly as
children: Be my friend. And if these offerings fail, then: You are not my
friend. I hate you.

The next morning, I lose
Willem. Around six
a.m.
everyone
gets up at the same time. It’s unavoidable with that many people in a room.
Willem wants me to leave with him at once. He flatters me. I am a serious
pilgrim, not like them, he tells me. But I linger at the table and drink my
coffee with the others. When I look around again, he’s gone. Later that day, on
the road, I walk with the Flemish. At a bar where we take a break, I have a
beer. Willem, by perverse coincidence, walks in for a glass of water. I invite
him to join us. “I do not drink alcohol before sundown,” he announces. Hoots of
grade school disdain from the Flemish. I have my first enemy.

And by early afternoon I
have a second one. Willie, the filmmaker, has made it clear to Rick and Karl
that my presence is fouling his movie. Willie pulls up alongside us in his
caravan from time to time to shoot some pictures and to entice Rick and Karl
with drinks and food. On the one hand, Willie is simply bribing them. They are
old men and can’t resist the occasional cold drink and sandwich, especially
when we are walking in the heat. But this particular entanglement, I quickly
learn, is perverse and political. When the two Flemish aldermen left Belgium, Willie was an unemployed teacher who showed up to videotape their departure on his
home camera. A local television station bought a piece of it for the news. And
since then, Willie has assumed the tyrannical impatience of a studio director.
“He thinks he’s fucking Ingmar Bergman,” Claudy tells me.

Moreover, Rick and Karl are
boxed in. Willie’s film will chronicle their trip. They can’t insult him or
even question him. They are politicians, and Willie is, strangely, the media.
So they treat him as gingerly as the White House coddles the Washington press
corps. Willie despises Claudy, who tagged along after meeting them in France, but on this account, Willie is also boxed in. Claudy doesn’t take guff from anyone;
he is simply too loud, overbearing, and rude to be humiliated into going away.
Besides, Rick likes Claudy’s bacchanal performances at every watering hole. So
whatever keeps Rick happy, Willie must endure.

But the image of a
red-haired American who speaks no Flemish is bollixing his film. Like so many
of us, Willie has come to the road with a load of preconceptions and resists
adjusting them. He wants images of intense suffering and a crew of pilgrims who
look the part. Both Rick and Karl are Central Casting pictures of the
traditional pilgrim: beards, long hair, leather faces. My presence confuses
Willie’s outline. Claudy confides to me that this morning the discussion inside
the van, where I am not allowed, has turned on the delicate matter of getting
rid of me. Claudy warns me that Willie is going to try to talk to me.

In the small town of La
Virgen del Camino (the Virgin of the Road) outside of León, the van parks
alongside a large empty field fenced in by wrought iron. Willie steps outside
to offer me a cup of coffee, which I accept, and then cozies up for a little
chat. He can understand English if it is spoken very slowly.