Off the Road (22 page)

“Is this part of an American
spy ring?” the Spaniard wants to know. He rattles his glass of whiskey
menacingly. The German nods, a jerk of the head that places him squarely
against the Americans. But my mind is filled with secret passageways, cryptic
messages, long-lost treasures. I am in a Hardy Boy mood, and these men want to
discuss international politics.

“I don’t know. I haven’t had
my CIA briefing this week.” I wander over to another table.

I take cover in a group of
nearby pilgrims who are lamenting the absence of some of the Rabanal gang who
didn’t make it this far. The Welsh family and the Flemish group seem to have
been waylaid in Molinaseca—literally “Dry Hill” yet famous for its flat
terrain, crashing river, and giant swimming hole.

At a nearby table some other
pilgrims are speaking with a red-haired man. I grab a beer and step over. He is
not a Spaniard, although as the walk moves farther west, red hair is common
among the locals. His brogue is Irish. His name is James, and he is a stumpy
but well-fed man, distinguished by his powerful arms and buttery hands. I pick
up from the conversation that he used to be a priest. The glassy look in his
eye, either from alcohol or insanity, is offputting. When I walk up I hear him
discussing the Antichrist.

The mystery of god that
passeth all understanding is quite comprehensible to James. From his chatter I
sense that he is a demented soul who wandered into the orbit of the Templar
mystery in Ponferrada and has never managed to escape. As I listen, he explains
one of his theories.

The current pope is the
Antichrist. James has the proof. Our age is drowning in a decadence not matched
since Noah, he says. Everyone nods in agreement. The first pope of this era,
Pope John Paul I, was legitimate. But the time for the forces of evil had
arrived, so he was killed off and replaced by Satan’s proxy, Pope John Paul II.
This truth is revealed in an ancient formula. James scratches onto a waxy scrap
of bar napkin the words
Vicarivs Filii Dei.

“This is the pope’s title in
Latin,” he says. “It means ‘vicar of the Son of God.’ It is three words, and
this pope is the first one to take a three-word name, Pope John Paul.” James
looks around, knowing that this is scant evidence to a group of road-hardened
pilgrims and longtime locals. He readies his pencil for some of the requisite
math.

The formula works like this.
Hidden in the pope’s Latin title are Roman numbers. He rewrites the title using
only the numerical letters, so that it looks like this:

Which translate into Arabic
numbers:

Add up the columns:

And then add up those three
numbers:

666

He circles the digits many
times in bold strokes of his pencil: “666.” Cocked eyebrows all around.

I mention—sarcastically, I
thought—that Ronald Wilson Reagan was the first president in American history
to have three names of six letters each. James reaches out to shake my hand. I
speak his language.

When I spot Louis across the
room, I drift away from James for a while. I want to explain to the Frenchman
the marvelous Templar theory I picked up in the bookstore. Everyone in town has
one, and now I do too.

Later I amble back to the
mystic corner, and James is deep into Templar lore. He has his rap down
beautifully and can segue effortlessly from secret numerical codes to eerie
modern coincidences. He has an American dollar on the table and is pointing to
some of the symbols. And there is a piece of German currency, along with some
other documents. A bar napkin is now crowded with algebra. I regret missing the
setup. James is explaining that there are modern Templar organizations such as
the Freemasons that still transmit the secrets. And I am left to wonder if the
mystery of the universe might not have been passed onto the Charleston, South Carolina, chapter of the Shriners. For all I know, those old men in fezzes who drove
crazy-eights in go-carts during the local parades of my youth were trying to
tell me something.

What was the mystery of the
Templars? James asks. Well, it’s not what people think it is. It’s not the Holy
Grail, or the true cross, or the Ark of the Covenant. Oh, no, he says, the
mystery is not an object. That is the
diversion.
The mystery dates way
back. The gnostics knew it. The desert dwellers of the Holy Land knew it (they
told the Templars, in fact). Christ knew it, but there were those before him
who knew it. The mystery precedes the builders of the Pyramids of Egypt (how else
could they have pulled off such an impossible feat of engineering?). Noah knew
it, and so did others before him, because the mystery of the Templars is the
knowledge that Adam learned when he bit into the apple.

“Good and evil,” says a
member of the little audience.

“The Bible is full of
clues,” James says, clearing another napkin.

I have had enough beers to
contemplate telling James that after well over a month on the road, I have my
own theory about what Adam learned when he bit the apple. It was the most
perverse revelation in history. He learned that the apple was just an apple.
Adam
wished
he had learned some secret knowledge. What he learned was
far more brutal—whatever he believed about the apple was his own making.
According to Genesis, Adam’s first postbite revelation occurred when he “opened
his eyes and saw that he was naked,” both literally and metaphorically. The
apple was just an apple. And for learning this, he was punished, cursed to
labor and to roam out of Paradise through the fields to re-create the original
mystery of the apple. Adam was the first postmodern pilgrim.

But I keep quiet. How could
I possibly compete with James, whose patter barely pauses for air? He has the
numbers, the specifics, the code. He turns to his napkin, scribbling madly at
his figures. He is adding and subtracting, working out algorithms, performing
translations; his audience is rapt with attention and appears comforted as he
turns words into calculus and back into meaning.

T
he morning out of Ponferrada
begins with so many good omens; I should know by now that the road signals its
pilgrims in perverse ways. I sleep late, so I am alone when I leave for this
morning’s leg to Villafranca. As I walk, a synopsis of Spanish history unfolds
before me. The pilgrim sets off from the me
dieval center of town
and winds through blocks of the Renaissance until the alleys widen into the
Victorian er
a. Now the balconies are elegant and suspended by wrought iron.
These are the homes of characters from the naturalistic novels of Galdos—Spain’s Zola or Dreiser.

At the edge of town, the
postwar public works of Generalissimo Franco wrench Ponferrada into the
twentieth century. Towers of colorless concrete with blocky balconies soar at
the edges of four-lane frontage roads, the domain of trucks and buses. The
yellow arrows are neat swatches of paint, tucked low to the ground in an
unsuccessful attempt at being inconspicuous. From the inside of curbs, wrapped
around the cylinder of a light post or coyly turning at the corner of a
building, they scream out amid the simple fascist gray of this exurb.

The arrows direct me into
the rusting industry of the 1940s and 1950s. Moments later I slip into the
commerce zones funded by the new money of King Juan Carlos I and his Common
Market investors. The arrows thread among newer plants, windowless factories,
toy makers, and furniture builders—neat, clean facilities. Eventually homes
reappear, and soon enough the streets lose their names and the sidewalks
disappear. Yards expand beyond fences into pastures. They are bounded by trees
or ditches, holding not only clotheslines and scattered toys, but small apple
groves or victory gardens. The paved road breaks up into rubble, then becomes a
familiar path of hard-packed dirt and, finally, the comforting view of a
pilgrim’s day—a ribbon of road traversing fields of peppers and miles of corn,
patches of cabbage and melon, then stands of grapes, apricots, and figs, and
orchards of cherries, oranges, apples, and pears.

It is late in the afternoon
when I enter the town of Cacabelos and I stop for lunch at Prada a Tope, a
restaurant suggested by some farmers I passed this morning.

I order a modest meal, yet
inexplicably out comes heaped plates of vegetables, mashed green items, a
casserolelike substance, and a salad. I start to protest, but the waiter
shrugs. A few minutes later he returns with a cutting board piled high with
meats—a plump turkey leg, joints of lamb, and thin slices of pork, veal, and a
boned chicken breast.

I eat, of course, because
“no” is just not a word you want to introduce into a conversation with a
Spaniard. After the waiter removes my plates, he replaces them with a bowl of
quivering flan. No sooner do I push aside the half-eaten dessert than he
appears again with a cigar the length of my forearm, flown in from the Canary Islands. He removes from his pocket a cigarette lighter, sets the dial to blow
torch, and puts the flame before my face. I light up. Then a different man
arrives with a decanter of twelve-year-old sherry and pours two glasses. He is
the owner of the place, and he pulls up a chair. He proclaims his love of
pilgrims and tells me my entire meal is on the house. He pours me another glass
of thick sherry before sending me back to the scorching dust and the walk to
Villafranca. Andrew Boorde, a British traveler who preceded me by four
centuries, said of good Spanish sherry that it makes “the brain apprehensive,
quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes.”

At day’s end, when I catch
up with the others, I will tell my story of lunch, probably topping it off with
a joke about walking into the hot sun of León province with a mind sautéed in
aged sherry. Every night at the shelter is story time for pilgrims. In these
stories I am beginning to discern different pilgrim narratives. The first group
is the smallest and the least significant. They adhere fiercely to the ancient
vocabulary of pilgrims. These few would have no problem describing my free
lunch as a miracle. They are an intense lot. One of them saw a statue move.
They avoid the rest of us, as we do them.

The most populous school of
pilgrim thinking interprets the day’s actions through tradition. They insert
themselves into the anecdotal customs of the road or make an effort to learn
the history of each place. They measure their own actions by what others did
and knit the past into their experience. For example, in the mountains between
Rabanal and Ponferrada is a place called Foncebadón. Roman soldiers stationed
in these parts knew it as the Mountain of Mercury. Pagan tradition encouraged
wayfarers to pick up a rock in the valley, carry it to the peak, and toss it
onto a pile. Today, a skinny shorn pole topped by an iron cross is embedded into
this magnificent heap. Pilgrims adapted this tradition a thousand years ago and
made it their own.

For several days Foncebadón
was the talk of the shelter. Did you throw your rock? Did you know it was a
pagan custom? Did you know the mountain was once protected by the Roman god
Mercury, a kind of pilgrim in his own right? How many rocks do you think are up
there?

Accounts of these activities
fill the tables at supper and become the basis for the ongoing story of our
pilgrimage. For the traditionalists, my serendipitous lunch happily confirms
the great tradition of unimaginable charity on the road.

Then there is the rest of
us, a pilgrim miscellany. We constitute not a school of thought, but a
condition. We’re anxious, mainly. We’re too cautious to discover a deliberate
pattern in our luck. We’re hesitant about forcing our experiences into a
coherent tale. So we end up telling jokes, or sitting quietly, or, like Claudy,
drinking heavily throughout the day.

I suspect that these varying
approaches to pilgrimage have always existed on the road. I began my walk
clinging desperately to history and tradition and never managed to get very
comfortable with either of them. When it comes to matters of (pick any of the
following) clothes, church architecture, miracles, attitude, mysticism, local
customs, I’ve tried them all on. And I’ve been shucking tradition, in one form
or another, since the Pyrenees. What I’m left with is a kind of pilgrim
neurosis.

While I become less and less
confident about being here, the others grow increasingly assured of their
enterprise. Arrival in any town means locating the rituals, the traditions, the
history. This often means going to the church to see the pilgrim sculpture or
painting. In another place it might mean finding some site of historical
interest or looking at some town’s rendition of the ubiquitous statue of James
himself. In and around each of these items one finds the stories and
traditions, which then become the topics at dinner. So each day and each night
provides the pilgrim with fresh but strangely familiar material, which he can
comfortably work into the story of his modern pilgrimage.

But there is one aspect of
the past that doesn’t make it into anyone’s conversation: relics. By relics, I
mean the bones and objects associated with saints and regarded as sources of
divine magic. In the Cliffs Notes version of the Middle Ages, relics have come
down to us as one of the great carnival schemes of organized religion. The
story of relics is now seen as little more than a centuries-long infomercial in
which huckster clergy ripped off a continent of frightened serfs.

I have been avoiding relics
the entire trip, as has everyone else. They are, let’s face it, embarrassing
for any contemporary pilgrim. It’s easy to fit much of the ancient pilgrimage
into a modern story, but Saint Theresa’s index finger—well, gross.

Relics constitute part of
that old vocabulary of pilgrimage that is out-of-date. But somewhere back
there—possibly around the time I became aware of the other pilgrims’ certainty
with their traditions—I became hooked. What interests me now is that relics
have become relics of themselves. Instead of being transistors of divine power
and wisdom, they are proof of man’s foolishness and impotence. Even the clergy
is embarrassed today, and they only keep the relics out on display for
uneducated peasants and those ubiquitous widows.

During my walk, I have seen,
without much effort, the ulnas and radii, the tibias and femurs, and the
metacarpals and metatarsals of probably every well-known saint, and I’ve
examined flecks or dust from hundreds of others less acquainted with fame.
Historically, it would make sense that relics would flourish on the road; it
was an avenue of trade. But relics were also the most concrete manifestation of
the need to discover. A pilgrim set out to
find
something on the road,
and it’s no coincidence that many of the most fantastical relics of the Middle
Ages were found on or near the road to Santiago. When I left America, the perennial question was, “What do you expect to find?”

The story of relics is a
cautionary tale about the ideology of discovery, something that’s on my
sherry-soaked mind as I lumber toward Villafranca. Search hard enough for what
you are certain is there, and you will find it.

Originally, relics were not
body parts, but items, such as the filings of the shackles that once bound a
martyr’s legs or, say, his handkerchief. Early relics were talismans, called
brandea,
no different in their mass appeal from the bedsheets of the Beatles or the coat
of Elvis today. They were items that conjured up the memory and the power of a
great person, an impulse still with us, even among the educated classes. Not
long before I left America, Sotheby’s auctioned off the ashtrays and piggy
banks and Tupperware of Andy Warhol for millions of dollars.

The
brandea
were
souvenirs of sorts; the shell of Santiago was one. Visitors to Mont St. Michel still leave with a pebble from the base of the island. In the days of
martyrs, tombs had hatches so that the faithful could insert their heads to
breathe the rarefied dust of a saint’s remains.

At first the authorities
tried to deter people from infatuation with dead bodies, but this served only
to acknowledge the corpses’ power, undermining any effort at restraint and investing
them with great value. In 1047 Fernando, the count of Carrion, informed his
debtor, the emir of Córdoba, not to send him precious metals: “Of gold and
silver I have enough already; give me the body of St. Zoyl.” Most relics were
the entire body of a saint, usually with accompanying documentation.

Nobles began collecting
relics, according to historian Patrick Geary, the way the rich today collect
art. It was a way to distill wealth into a single physical and portable item.
Complete bodily relics were often little more than a few bones and some dust in
a sack. But to describe relics so is like saying van Gogh’s
Starry Night
is a sheet of linen with smears of oil. The bones were direct physical contact
points between the wretched and the divine. Relics translated the confounding
abstractions of Christianity into something penitents could hold in their hand.
Over time relics became a kind of currency, a substantial part of the economy,
a hot commodity.

In 1204 there was a major
shift in the commerce of relics when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople. In Eastern Christendom, the collectors were not so picky about a relic
being a whole body. They dealt openly in body
parts.
When the crusaders
overwhelmed the town, these parts coursed through Europe, flooding the market.
The sudden surge of supply forced up demand in the short run and then created
all the problems common to inflation.

As long as relics had meant
entire bodies, value and supply could be somewhat regulated. Now the
possibilities for fraud and forgery were out of control. Relicmongers didn’t
need to bother themselves with a bag of bones and dust and the semblance of
documentation. A simple knuckle would do.

The market boomed since
nothing could stanch the growth, not even common sense. When confronted by
reports of two monasteries claiming to have the head of John the Baptist, the
master logicians of the day concluded that one was his head as a youth and the
other his head as a mature adult.

St. Hugh of Lincoln was a zealous relics collector. He wore a finger ring set with St. Benedict’s
tooth. When St. Hugh was visiting the Abbey of Fécamp, he asked to see the arm
of Mary Magdalene. The abbey monks were horrified when St. Hugh ripped into the
cloth wrapping with a knife and struggled to snap off one of the lady’s
fingers. After that failed, St. Hugh sucked one of her fingers into his mouth
and chewed vigorously, “first with his incisors and finally with his molars.”
When asked to explain his behavior, St. Hugh responded logically. Hadn’t he just
eaten the body and blood of Christ during mass? “Why should I not treat the
bones of the saint in the same way,” he said, “and without profanity acquire
them whenever I can?”