Off the Road (27 page)

Meanwhile Rick has stumbled
onto some nuns somewhere who have sold him an ancient cape and floppy hat and
dozens of shells. With his long gray beard and skinny frame, he now looks like
a textbook medieval pilgrim. Despite my best efforts, we retreat into cliché.

At Sanfiz de Seo, we
untether
our
mule, who spent the night there. The morning walk is
tedious and slow. Claudy has named the mule Ultreya, an ancient pilgrim cry
that means “Go West,” or “Westward-ho.” And that’s the last attention Ultreya
gets from its new owner, who gambols ahead, singing “Love Is in the Air.” The
noble Karl takes the reins since he speaks mule.

In Greek mythology, all the
stories of Dionysus take place at night, where the riotous drinking hellacious
fun-loving deity parties with his frenzied maenads and rutting satyrs.
Curiously, there is no body of lore concerning Dionysus during normal working
hours. I know why. By day Dionysus is a pain in the neck.

In early afternoon, about an
hour past the last village, Villasinde, the arrows and markers die out just
under the communications tower. O Cebreiro is still a valley and a mountain
away. But there is no road. Claudy and I set off on a reconnaissance. The bald
mountain’s slope is deceptive. Claudy can walk twenty feet ahead and disappear
from view and out of shouting range. I look back and cannot see Rick or Karl.
When I try to approach the tower, it gets farther away. Voices float in the
breeze. We are lost on a bare hilltop.

When at last I find Rick and
Karl, we triangulate our location using the tower, the interstate far below,
and the distant peak of O Cebreiro. According to my calculations, if we just
keep descending this magical hill toward the northwest, we will come to the
town of Herrerías, which will put us back on a marked route to O Cebreiro.
Claudy materializes among some shrubs. He has a complicated plan but is voted
down.

The knee-high shrubs scrape
at our legs. The bristles are tough and vicious. Soon the shrubs rise to chest
level, and we raise our arms in the air to accommodate locomotion. The hill
pitches down, down, sharply. Rick has lit out ahead, blasting through the brush
and crying out in anguish. Somehow I have Ultreya’s tether. The shrubs give way
to some bamboolike plant, lined with spikes and monstrous puff balls. Every
step blows open a suffocating cloud of green dust. I open my knife and hack my
way forward.

We also have to contend with
big condo-size anthills. Since none of us can see through the thicket and spore
clouds, one step sends ants into pandemonium. They crawl up my legs and feed at
the thread lines of blood coursing down into my socks. But I can’t care. I am
trying desperately to stay with the others. Five feet in this stuff and
visibility ends. I hear Claudy scampering by and yell at him to help me with
the mule.

“You fucking brought us this
way,” he explains.

Tempers are short.

A sheer four-foot drop-off
sends me collapsing into more thicket, twisting and falling until my pack hits
the ground. I am turtled, unable to maneuver my carapace.

“Claudy, you motherfucker,
come back here and help me.”

“You’re the fucker.”

Rick calls out, “Fuck you
both, eh?”

That hurts. Et tu, Rick.

Ultreya is stuck. As I lie
on my back, the mule stares down at me from the ledge. Its dull, weary eyes and
baggy lips compose themselves into an expression of idiotic superiority.

Karl, then Rick, appears to
help me. The mule, in keeping with its internationally notorious reputation,
will not budge down the four-foot steep. I cut some sticks, squash some brush
by sitting on it, and fashion a makeshift plankway. The mule is not impressed
by my ingenuity. So we are reduced to cartoon tactics. Karl and I pull the
rope, while Rick pushes the hindquarters.

“Brrrrrrr-eeeepppp,” says
Karl. I, on the other hand, speak to the mule in Anglo-Saxon. Ultreya brays
fiercely, which I understand as a translation of my own words. At last the mule
stumbles forward, hee-hawing menacingly. The beast falls and then scrambles to
stand. Karl trills sweet intimacies.

Claudy has worked his way
back, offering his late hand. The four of us chop and hack for twenty more
minutes. There are curses, and Rick suffers another attack of claustrophobia
and dashes off yelling. Claudy shouts curses at him and damns me for this
route. When a chestnut tree appears, the area beneath is clear and open. As I
walk in, Claudy calls me a son of a bitch. He says we’ll never find Herrerías,
and he shoves me in the chest. I stumble back in an explosion of curses. He
rushes me, his invective reduced to pure syntax—“Fuck ya fucker, ya fucking
fucked up.” We shove and shout, never exchanging true blows. Rick steps over
and Claudy pushes him. The bearish Karl intervenes. I swing at him in rage,
inexplicably, since Karl could put his thumb on my head and handily force me to
take a seat.

After Karl has restored the
peace, Claudy collapses to the ground and plunges both his hands onto piles of
unshelled chestnuts, which resemble spiked golfballs. Claudy bolts up, bleeding
and crying, flashing his stigmata at me since obviously I am to blame. Rick
laughs, but it’s a bit premature. This sets Claudy off on a new round of
colorful Flemish curses.

When Karl finds a small path
leading away from the tree, we set off in a sullen silence. A half hour later
we walk straight into the backyard of a house. Uneasily we slip around the
side, click open the front-yard gate, and step into the street. A car zooms up
and screeches to a halt. A man stops and says in Spanish, “Are you pilgrims?”

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Herrerías.” And
he drives off.

According to the maps, O
Cebreiro is a three-hour climb from Herrerías, straight up. But it seems like
nothing. The road is wide and treeless, filled with big stones mortared with
the morning’s manure, dried by the afternoon sun and good for uphill traction.

As the road ascends, the
temperature drops, and soon it’s almost freezing. The church of O Cebreiro is Roman and dates from the 900s. The local architecture still favors the Celtic
stone quarters that predate the Romans. Here, centuries ago, a fallen priest
celebrated mass and watched the bread turn to quivering, bleeding flesh and saw
the wine thicken into hot blood. The chalice and paten of this miracle are
enshrined in a high-tech bulletproof glass vault outfitted with special gas
sprays and monitors to track the silver’s fragility. Apparently the miracle is
decaying.

After dinner the priest
invites us to sleep in one of the authentic Celtic
pallozas.
They are
perfectly circular stone buildings roofed by a cone of straw woven tight enough
to keep out the rain, which falls night and day this high up. Our
palloza,
home to barnyard animals when pilgrims aren’t around, has no fire or heat.

“O Cebreiro is where the
Holy Grail is buried,” says the priest, trying to engage us with some local
color and another anecdote from the annals of pilgrim tradition. “O Cebreiro
was the origin of the Parzival story. Many pilgrims come here to look for the
Holy Grail.”

“You’ll have to find someone
else to do the work for you,” says Rick in an unusual burst of sacrilege.
“We’re too tired to go looking now.” As we all laugh, the priest leaves in a
scowling funk. We each immediately stake out a bit of stone arc and scramble
into our sleeping bags on the straw floor. I smell shit nearby, extremely
nearby. It’s old shit, that’s certain. And if my new powers of discernment are
not mistaken (and I would bet money on them now), it is pig shit and of pretty
good quality.

“A hard day,” Rick says into
the inky darkness.

“Yes,” says Karl,
surprisingly.

“I am glad you are here,” Rick
says to no one in particular.

“We have a long way to go
still,” someone says. The silence is filled with unspoken thoughts—a moment
quiet as prayer— and then broken by sighs, grunts, and snores.

T
he following morning, the
path down from O Cebreiro warms with each kilometer, and that’s about all that
can be said for it. The landscape is tedious. The Flemish and I climb quietly
up rounded hills amid rocky soil covered in a morning mist, unchanged since
creation. The towns here are as useless as they were when eighth-century Moors
took one look and turned back. In the t
welfth century, the
powerful archbishop of Santiago Diego Gelmirez bestowed a few benefits on the
valley west
of O Cebreiro because of its location on the final leg of the
journey. That was the last time the distant power brokers of Spain paid attention to these parts.

By midday the tiny villages
of Alto de San Roque, Hospital de Condesa, and Padornelo slip by as quickly as
they might in a car. Old men guide their ox-powered carts down the street to
the fields. No EEC tractors here. All the young people have moved out. The
buildings are wired for electricity. But the presence of technology is mockery.
Except for lighting, no one can afford appliances. These little towns are
dying, but they’ve been fading for so long that they no longer notice the
passing centuries. As they did in the Middle Ages, the old women gather at the
town fountain to wash clothes in the early warmth of the sun.

Alto del Poio can only boast
of a ruined pilgrim establishment. Otherwise, the guidebook says,
“Hoy
existen cuatro casas, modernas”
(“Today there are four houses, modern
ones”).

Fonfría del Camino still can
claim the attraction found in its name—a cold-water fountain. The literature
speaks of a time when the Hospital de Santa Catalina here greeted every pilgrim
with “fire, salt, and water.” The days of such largesse are gone, as is every
stone of the hospital, carried off a few centuries ago to make sheep pens.

The open-ended plot line of
the soap opera of Willie the Filmmaker takes a worthy twist this afternoon. We
climb a steep short hill, and the ridge above is crowded with activity. Tripods
are set. People are milling about, careful at the crumbling edge to catch a
peek. Cameras roll as we labor up the twisting path. At the top we discover
that Willie the Filmmaker has been joined by another Flemish man, obese, jolly,
and rich. He drives an enormous mobile home with sitting room, bedroom, and
kitchen. It is far superior to Willie’s. And he has come with very
sophisticated video equipment. So a dash of free-market competition has been
introduced into the play for our pilgrim affections. The result is satisfying.
The Fat Man has a grill fired up and is roasting sausages. Cold drinks are
packed in ice. Lawn chairs are set around the smorgasbord for our comfort.

Claudy giddily tells me that
Willie is in a state of panic. He is broke (and miserly anyway). He has already
had a fight with the Fat Man and is now fretting that this guy is stealing his
idea. This fresh intelligence restoreth our pilgrim souls.

A nearby bar, named Refuge
of the Pilgrim, is just across the field. In fact, we are picnicking in its
parking lot. I retreat for a coffee. Inside are dozens of motley pilgrims, all
awkwardly dressed, shells at the neck, yet small identical packs strapped to
their backs. Obviously, all are worn out from the day’s walk. On half of them
baggy lips dangle; their faces are blank with fatigue. A dozen weird stares
follow me to the bar.

Pilgrims are a breed of
loners, afflicted by a set of problems unknown to outsiders. Like southpaws or
fly fishermen or Roosevelt Democrats, pilgrims feel an uncommon glee at a
chance encounter with others of their oppressed group—people who can empathize
with the difficulty of membership.

I nod and grin as I move
among them, touching my shell as if I were communicating the special code, our
secret handshake. I say hello to a young man, but he makes a strange face. A
grin broadens unnaturally wide, and his eyes well up with tears. When I step up
to the bar, another young fellow extends his head like a turtle and makes a
gawking expression. He withdraws suddenly, and several others shuffle away with
him.

Pilgrim fatigue, I know, can
lead to truly strange behavior—a half hour of catatonic abstraction, sleeping
standing up at a bar, weeping after a single beer. I forgive them their
peculiarities. Some days the secret code just doesn’t work. Again, I say hello
to a young girl at the end of the bar. She sticks out her tongue, laughs, and
runs off to her friends. From the bathroom, a tall blond man emerges, checking
the last inch of his fly. When he detects my presence, he bolts straight for
the bar.

“Are you a pilgrim to Santiago?’’ he asks in Spanish.

“I am.”

“How long have you been
here?”

“Uh, just a minute. Are you
with these pilgrims?”

“I am their guide.”

“I can see from their faces
that it’s been a hard day of walking. You all look insane with fatigue.”

“They are not tired or
crazy, señor,” he says sharply. “They are retarded.” It is an indictment that
comes off practiced, even enjoyed for its easy righteousness. “They are good
walkers and can put up with anything you can.”

Apologies and explanations
rush so quickly to my lips that not a sound escapes. My mouth hangs open,
unable to clear the congested traffic of regrets.

He gathers his troupe and
heads out the door. A few untamed smiles flash back at me. The girl sticks her
tongue out again and waves her hand furiously in the air.

As I say, the tug of human
companionship begins to pull fiercely at a pilgrim after nearly months of
blissful solitude. The events at Jesús’s tent clarified the formation of two
camps. And the friends and acquaintances that have been made try to stay in
contact. For example, the Welsh family had rested at Jesús’s tent for a day and
then planned to follow our yellow plastic strips into the Galician mountains.
Poor fools. They might be dead now.

We left a note at the hostel
in O Cebreiro for a later rendezvous down the road in Triacastela. But once
there, I find no pilgrims, although I did stumble upon a representative of the
august councils of European unity in a cafe on the edge of town. The man’s name
is Dirk or Derek or Dreek or some variation. He has the bespectacled look of a
promising functionary, broad square-frame glasses that say “I am open to new
ideas.” He carries a sheaf of papers and resolutions, reports and
recommendations.

Dreek is part of the team
from Brussels behind the future promotion of the road as a continuing symbol of
European unity. He speaks English, but it is the narrow dialect of
transnational bureaucrats. It is a language, taught by Berlitz, which favors a
thesaurus of buzzwords and phrases sadly familiar: incentive, supply, demand,
motivation, genuine excitement, bottom line, broad-based plan, publicity
campaign.

When I tell him that it
might be difficult to convince modern tourists of the joy of walking a thousand
kilometers through rough territory that lacks amusements, at times even
electricity and food, he is untroubled.

“Hey, I hear what you are
saying. We have a plan here for promotion.”

He spreads his papers and
shows me the plan. I recognize part of it. Along the road, I have seen modern
billboards that simplify the complexity of the road into digestible
journeyettes. Their insignia is the shell, turned on its side and streamlined
into a fan of lines intersecting at the left. The lines are the roads of Europe
symbolically joined in Santiago with the idea of continental unity. He lets me
in on a big secret. In a few years headquarters is going to begin a publicity
sweep featuring a cartoon character as mascot. He withdraws a small button and
hands it to me.

On it is Peregrín, a figure
composed of triangles, playfully arranged into the shape of a human being.
Peregrín’s floppy pilgrim’s hat hangs so low that his eyes jocularly peep out
of the top. He is toting a gourd on a staff, and his triangle feet are set in
the reckless abandon of skipping.

“Next year, man-sized Peregríns
will tour Europe,” Dreek says. “In costume. We will sponsor contests and get
maximum media exposure. We have already assisted in the opening of offices in
several countries to serve as clearinghouses of information for the modern
pilgrim. We have contracts in selected towns on the route in France and Spain to open pilgrim gift shops. It’s a comprehensive, broad-based plan.”

I don’t resent Dreek and his
plan. The road has never been without one, the first being the early propaganda
that Charlemagne himself walked to Santiago and discovered the body of Saint
James. The
Codex Calixtinus
of Aimery Picaud is a broad-based plan. It
was the product of bureaucracy—Cluniac and Augustinian monasteries—whose
pan-European organization would make Brussels look like a couple of county
agents. Some of the collapsing stone houses on the road were gift shops five
hundred years ago. My medieval predecessors were quite fond of buying miniature
jet carvings of pilgrims, statuettes of Saint James, maybe a decapitated Moor.
Such items are now priceless. Even the execrable Franco gave money to Santiago at the end of the civil war and twisted the revitalization of the road into a
victory campaign.

I remember a casual remark
by Francisco Beruete, the head of the arrow-painting group in Estella. I had
stopped by his house to talk. He asked me my motive for walking the road, and I
told him I didn’t know. He appreciated my honesty and said, “It doesn’t matter,
really. Pilgrims start the road for all kinds of reasons—history, outdoors, religion,
culture, architecture. They may fight it all they want, but when the pilgrims
arrive, they realize they have all taken the same trip.”

“Dreek,” I say, “let me give
you some free advice.”

“Shoot,” he says, and winks.

“Your plan will fail.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he says
with practiced confidence.

“Trust me, Dreek. I am an
American. Public relations is my second language.”

I translate myself into
Dreek-speak.

“The bottom line is this.
Your plan is good, decent. But it has its down side. We live in an age of image
and celebrity. This is a draw more powerful than amusements and capitalism. You
are not going to attract great numbers of pilgrims by offering cartoon
characters and inexpensive baubles. The key is celebrity.”

“What are you saying?”

“What I am saying is nothing
new, really. The road has been walked by a number of famous people, either in
legend or in fact —Charlemagne, William the duke of Aquitaine, King Louis the
Seventh of France, Saint Francis of Assisi, the Cid, Saint Brigid, the painter
Jan van Eyck, Ferdinand and Isabella, even Pope John the Twenty-third in 1954.”

“Yes, so what you are saying
is—”

“What I am saying, Dreek, is
Julio Iglesias.”

“To walk the road.”

“Precisely. I would wager
that, historically speaking, the road was jammed not long after each of those
famous people walked to Santiago.”

“What a great idea! I will
make a list.”

“Try for some political
heavyweights, Dreek, preferably non-Spaniards. It will broaden your reach. I
think Maggie Thatcher could use a good pilgrimage, maybe two. How about that
inexplicably popular band, Abba? That will attract the youngsters. And you
might get a fallen angel. Are there any famous criminals in Europe who have
recently finished their sentences? A penitent criminal would be ideal. And don’t
confine yourself to Catholicism, Dreek. Drive the road and you will discover
that it is covered with atheists and Protestants, Jews and Asians. Broaden your
broad-based plan, Dreek, and television coverage will come without even
trying.”

“This is genuinely exciting.
What is your name again? Can I get your address? I would like to correspond
with you later.” Dreek gives me the button of Peregrín, which I pin to the
strap of my pack.

When I meet up with the
Flemish and tell them of my conversation, they accuse me of selling out the
pilgrimage. I don’t know. The road has been manhandled by everyone from
Charlemagne to Archbishop Gelmirez to Queen Isabella to the generalissimo. The
cons and schemes come and go. I’m with Beruete. No one who endures months of walking
through northern Spain will mistake the trip for a visit to Euro Disney. The
road can take care of itself.