Off the Road (23 page)

In Jerusalem, the true cross
was protected around the clock by a battalion of 385 deacons to prevent
pilgrims from diving at the cross to bite off a few splinters.

Relics were valuable for
many reasons. They attracted throngs of worshipers. They raised funds. They
created prestige and celebrity. They caused miracles. The demand for them grew
so intense that monks took to carrying out raids on each other’s reliquaries.
Some of these operations were as elaborate as anything an author of a cold war
thriller could imagine. The robbery of the body of St. Foy in Agen by the monks
of Conques involved a monk-spy named Arinisdus who spent ten years infiltrating
the monastery before he pulled off the job. The thrilling stories of the
swashbuckling monks on assignment became a literary genre called
furta
sacra,
“holy robbery.”

In the race to outdo one
another in relics, the victor’s laurel probably should go to a cathedral just
off the road to Santiago in the town of Oviedo. The clergy there were long said
to possess an indestructible wooden ark handcrafted by the apostles themselves.
It was built in the Holy Land and smuggled into Africa, then Carthage, then
Sevilla, then Toledo, and in the eighth century it was moved to Oviedo for protection from the Moors. It was said that an early bishop named Ponce had opened the trunk but couldn’t see its contents because of shafts of celestial
light emanating from within. By 1075 it was decided the time was right for an
inventory, and a host of prominent men were assembled. King Alfonso VI was
there, as was Spain’s real-life knight, Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, otherwise known
as el Cid. The surviving diploma recording the opening bears the epic hero’s
actual signature.

The need to discover
achieved its high-water mark in Oviedo. Almost no physical item mentioned or
imagined in the Bible is missing from the ark of Oviedo. A partial inventory
includes

■
bits of the true cross

■
a
vial of milk from the Virgin Mary’s breast

■
part of the handkerchief
laid
on Christ’s face after death

■
eight spines of the crown of thorns

■
several pieces of manna rained down on the Israelites

■
a
large sheet of skin flayed from St. Bartholomew

■
locks of the Virgin Mary’s hair

■
one of the coins, a denarius, given to J
udas in exchange for betraying Christ

■
several locks of Mary Magdalene’s tresses, used to dry Christ’s feet

■
a
portion of the rod Moses used to part the Red Sea

■
a
piece of the grilled fish and a chunk of the honeycomb that Christ ate after
his resurrec
tion
and during his appearance before his apostles

■
one of St. Peter’s sandals

■
one of the jugs from the marriage of Cana, in which Christ miraculously changed
the water to wine

■
bones of St. John the Baptist

■
parts of several of Christ’s apostles

■
bo
nes of St. Stephen, the
first martyr

■
chunks of bread left over from the Last Supper

As I enter Villafranca, an
old stooped man appears from the bushes. He pulls a live brown snake from a
filthy sack. He has the snake gripped just below its head so that its open,
terrified mouth looks like a satanic nosegay sprouting from his fist. The tail
wiggles cantankerously below his outstretched arm.

“Would you like to touch
it?” he asks.

I decline and change the
subject to shelter, and he suggests that I stay at the parador, one of the
special hotels found occasionally throughout Spain. Sometime during the Franco
regime, the generalissimo thought to attract tourists by rehabilitating old
castles, châteaux, or any glorious Spanish edifice of tenuous historical
interest. Paradors are famous for classy pretensions and high prices. Somerset
Maugham is always quoted on the promotional brochures, saying (dubiously), “If
you’re going to stay anywhere in Spain, it should be a parador!”

When I come upon
Villafranca’s parador, I can’t figure out what was preserved unless it was the
first Howard Johnson’s in the country. There is a massive parking lot, American
in scope, and a flat, nondescript, utilitarian building. It doesn’t seem any
better than some of the pilgrims’ inns, and the prices are quite low. So I
engage some cheap quarters.

My room has a comforting
familiarity to it. There are two double beds with linens tucked to military
specs. A quarter would bounce off the spread. A gleaming gold lamp is
permanently fixed on the bedside table. Wickedly, I rev up the
air-conditioning. The television set is mounted on a stand jutting out from the
wall. I tune in a bullfight. A lengthy bathtub dominates a mirror and tile room
charged with the aromas of Crabtree & Evelyn. I fill up the tub, grab
the complimentary hotel magazine, and feed myself slowly into a bubble bath of
soothingly frigid water. I glance around the room and out the door to my
bedroom. I could be in the Kansas City Ramada Inn, but for the enamel
abbreviations
C
and
F
for hot and cold on the tub’s spigots. And
the shrieks of death blasting from my television.

Later that afternoon while
scouring the main plaza to find a restaurant, I spot three bicyclists wearing
shells. They are standing around a phone booth. One boy is slamming the
receiver into the phone box while another boy and a girl curse in Spanish. This
is a relief to see because I thought only spoiled Americans raged at Telefónica,
the country’s communications monopoly. But the boy in the booth, named Miguel,
tells me that the Spaniards call Telefónica by another name: Franco’s revenge.

Bike pilgrims and foot
pilgrims don’t often have a lot to say to one another. Chances are good we will
never see each other again. But these kids are cheerful enough.

“Have you not been to the
tent of Jesus?” asks Miguel.

“The tent of Jesus?”

“All the pilgrims are
there,” the girl says. “He has water and showers, beds and meals.”

“Jesus does?”

“You can’t leave Villafranca
without meeting Jesus.”

Certainly not, so I get
directions and walk off.

I am not sure how I missed
the tent of Jesus since it is just off the path I took into town earlier this
afternoon. The place is bustling with the frontier chaos that I have come to
enjoy. Everyone is here—the cast of the Flemish film, the Welsh Family with the
Mule, Javier the Spanish Banker, Willem the Dutch Air Force Officer, the
Italian Man, the Old Dutch Couple, the German Man, Louis the Frenchman Who’s
Walked the Road Eleven Times, and Paolo the Young Man with Louis. And there are
at least twenty or thirty other pilgrims milling about whom I have yet to meet.

A beaming Claudy calls out
from the bar. He is swinging a snifter of brandy and orders me a beer before I
can decline.

“This is the place,” he
says, beaming, and sweeps me off for a tour. The tent is a two-room Hooverville
hotel built entirely of plastic sheets, used lumber, and bent nails. On one
side are pallets and floorboards with enough double bunks or plain mattresses
on the ground to sleep a hundred people. The other half is a restaurant and
bar. At the juncture of the two main rooms are bathrooms.

Above the slightly raked
incline of plastic canopies are an array of lawn sprinklers—precisely the
suburban models that slowly spray fans of water back and forth. Japanese
pilgrims from last year had something to do with this advance. The continuous
flow of water from above keeps the tent cavernously cool when one of Spain’s dry winds blows in. The off flow of warmed water collects into side tanks, which is
heated by solar panels and is used in the showers.

Jesus is Jesús Jato, a
farmer who has adopted all the pilgrims who come through Villafranca. He is a
tall dark sinewy fellow, with huge fists and fingers liked knotted rope. From
his shorts extend bony, misshapened legs with a baseball of muscle at each
calf. The phone at his chaotic desk in the tent rings, and Jesús negotiates the
rental price of a piece of farm equipment. Afterward he reminds me that he runs
the tent off donations and then stamps and writes in my passport: “May the
stars light your way and may you find the interior road. Forward!”

“My wife will cook you
dinner,” he then says. “Tonight is lamb chops. Fifteen hundred pesetas. Take
any mattress you find. I will be back in an hour. Drinks are extra.”

Jesús jumps into the cab of
an old, beat-up truck, turns the key with an explosion, and disappears in a
cloud of white dust to negotiate another deal.

The tent exudes a cool breeze
and even a slight perfume of shampoos and soaps as miraculous as Ramon’s foyer.
The rugged plainness is inviting—the solar showers, the makeshift bar, the worn
unpainted lumber assembled into long row tables. No two chairs match. All of
them rock gently on three legs. The atmosphere is confusing but as warm as a
big family. The intersecting fans of water on the plastic roof and the sheets
flapping in the dry wind are as soothing as a summer squall. Though it looks
haphazard, there is a stately rustic utilitarianism here, as efficient and
clipped as the double iambs of the name
Jesús Jato.

The layout of the tent’s
dinner tables and benches form an L at the far end from the door. Two long
tables extend down the length of the tent, and another turns the corner.
Benches run along the plastic walls. Scattered chairs and stools fill in the
gaps, creating a stage for the irrepressible Claudy. He is well advanced into a
brandy-inspired nirvana. He dips in and out of private conversations at the
tables with the demeanor of a polyglot host.

Now he is Spanish, prancing
before an audience of bicyclists, trying his hand at sexual innuendo (a
difficult genre for the unnuanced flamenco). Now he is Flemish for Rick and
Karl, rolling his eyes and clutching his heart melodramatically at the
appearance of Willie the Filmmaker. Now he is Esperanto, taunting the oblivious
Italian Man with an imitation of the poor man’s syntax. Now he is British,
entertaining the two Welsh boys, as he often does, with a fresh riddle.

“Three missionaries are
returning from a journey with three cannibals,” he says. “They come to a river
but have only one canoe. The problem is, if the cannibals ever outnumber the
other men on either bank, they will eat them. Flow do the missionaries get the
team across?” Claudy places six coins, three large ones representing the
cannibals and three small ones representing the three missionaries, on either
side of a crack—the river. The boys fall into argument, pushing the coins
backward and forward. Claudy breaks into a Randy Newman number about America dropping nuclear bombs on every other country in the world.

As the food arrives, the
pilgrims set to their plates. Hot lamb chops, bowls of
caldo gallego
(the regional soup), platters of steaming vegetables. Unlabeled bottles of
blood-red wine empty quickly and just as swiftly are refilled. Claudy is losing
his audience as smears of oil grow about the lips of the diners.

“Don’t you look clean?”
Claudy says to me, by way of segueing from his song and dance.

“I took a bath.”

“A bath? Are you not staying
here in the tent?”

Uh-oh.

“Well, actually, I took a
room at the parador.”

“The parador!” Claudy crows
in case anyone had missed my answer. Suddenly I have taken over center stage,
cruising a field of upturned faces. “Parador” is not a word that needs
translation into Flemish, French, English, Italian, or German. The word is part
of a pilgrim’s lingua franca. In Spanish it literally means nothing more than
“inn” or “lodge.” But it is a word that comes fully dressed in connotation:
luxury, indolence, comfort,
baths.

“Yoo air noot uh twoo
peal-gwum,” he pronounces in pseudo-Flemish-accented sarcasm. The bicyclists
laugh at my plight. They understand this taunt even in English.

“The parador pilgrim,” says
Wyn, the Welsh veterinarian, tossing out a phrase that will chase me the rest
of the night. He means it in a playful spirit, like Claudy, but its brevity and
aptness give it a demeaning force.

One of the boys declares
that there is only one way to solve the riddle. “The missionaries must be
eaten,” he says.

Javier is disturbed. He and
I had a rapprochement after Estella and have had an occasional discussion on
the road since then. He looks at me with a countenance of true pain, even
betrayal. “How could you stay in a parador?” he asks me, cutting through the
ridicule with a straight question.

“Javier, it’s just a hotel.
Not even that good a hotel, to be honest.”

“But why are you in a
parador?”

“We’ve all stayed in finer
pilgrim hostels than this place, I can assure you.” This is not exactly true
and not a particularly convincing tack.