Off the Road (28 page)

Had I brought along my seer
to read the entrails of a chicken, I suspect the auspices would be gloomy. As
if Dreek weren’t an ominous enough introduction, the Triacastelans have a dark
history. The three castles of their name vanished inexplicably a thousand years
ago. I suspect the culprits were the locals, who have plagued pilgrims since
our history was first written.

The Santiago “tradition”
associated with Triacastela, thankfully in decline, was to force each pilgrim
to carry a huge chunk of limestone on his back ninety kilometers to Arzúa.
There it was smelted into lime for use as cement in the twelfth-century
construction of the cathedral of Santiago. One author of the history of the
road speaks of the cathedral being held together as much by the sweat of
pilgrims as with mortar.

Literature from the 1400s
shows that the Triacastelans charged pilgrims a toll—strictly forbidden by a
succession of Spanish kings.

By 1682 the Triacastelan
hospital (now gone, not a trace) took up the practice of charging two reales
for pilgrim funerals. I suspect a lot of pilgrims died here since they were
worth more dead than alive.

The only “historical”
building that survives in Triacastela is a four-hundred-year-old pilgrim
jail.
It seems too Freudian that the locals would take such care to preserve this
building. On the wooden planks forming the doors are the pathetic carvings of
French names, no doubt belonging to pilgrims waiting for someone, anyone, to
loan them some bail money. Also among the names are crude depictions of a
gamecock, apparently an old French symbol for “yearning liberty.” Triacastela
is a medieval speed trap.

By the time I join Rick and
Karl at an outdoor café, the soap opera has turned violent. This afternoon
Willie returned to his caravan after shopping in Triacastela and found it
kneeling like a dying elephant, two of its tires slashed. Willie suspected
Claudy, decked him with a punch to the jaw, and threatened to kill him. Karl
had to intervene. Claudy peaceably withdrew to cope with the better-tempered
Ultreya and find some free pasture. Later Willie also called the fat man an
“amateur” and shoved him to the ground.

Even Karl is upset by day’s
end and has ordered Willie not to leave the area of his beached caravan. We are
sitting out on the main street at a cafe table. So from time to time Willie
emerges and bellows curses down the street but never crosses the invisible line
drawn by the bearish pilgrim.

Karl is worried because he
and Rick are slated for their weekly phone call home this evening and an
interview on the radio. Rick explains that they will have to discuss Willie and
the Fat Man and are concerned about what to say. They are politicians, after
all. So we huddle and discuss “spin control,” Flemish city council style.

Rick and Karl figure out a
convincing ruse to avoid the topic, but Karl wants me to do him a favor, in the
name of Santiago: take Claudy away from them for a few days so he can try to
cool things off. The road does temporarily split in two at Triacastela and
rejoins two days on. One way leads into pure wilderness broken only by a
sixth-century Benedictine monastery at Samos. The other follows the rural road.
We flip. I am going to Samos.

When we discuss Willie’s
slashed tires, none of us believes that Claudy could have done it since he has
been with us throughout the day. That leaves the Fat Man, conclude Karl and
Rick. But I have my own theory, and I tell them the history of Triacastela.

The waiter is a
hatchet-faced man with an aspiring mustache, who whines that he has to balance
his books and wants payment now. He presents us with a bill for several rounds
of coffee and a couple of plates of food. It’s for eighty-six dollars.

Morning in Triacastela
arrives not upon rosy fingers or amid dew-dappled grasses, but on a wind so
foul that Claudy and I awaken in our hostel amid coughs. Have a thousand sheep
been flogged into convulsive flatulence? Is an errant pilgrim being burned at
the stake? Perhaps Willie is behind it. Claudy and I make no investigations but
strap on our packs, untether our mule, and head off to Samos.

On the way out, I see a
poster plastered to a wall that declares Triacastela to be “the pearl of the Oribio.”
The Oribio is a cloacal rivulet that barely trickles beyond the parish line.
Triacastela’s epithet seems as parochial as any I’ve seen, and I’m from South Carolina, “home of the first lampshade.”

Shaking off the dust of the
pearl of the Oribio, the road winds up and down among tranquil hills. Ultreya
takes no time in detecting the absence of the strong hand and yodel of Karl. It
behaves like a child set loose from its parents and placed into the care of a
frightened baby-sitter. Our mule zigzags back and forth across the road.
Ultreya brays and drools and runs at the nose intolerably when we suggest
walking straight. To Ultreya, the road is not a linear passage but wild
temptation. Long turgid stalks of something that smells like licorice, a species
of anise, grows in the ditches. It is the asinine equivalent of catnip. The
two- or three-hour trip to Samos takes up most of the day.

Claudy is in no mood to
help. My polite and restrained requests for assistance are met with a
lounge-lizard descant:

When I was just a little
baby.

I didn’t have many toys

But my mamma used to say,

Son, you got more than other
boys.

You may not be good looking,

And you may not be too rich,

But you’ll never ever be
alone

’Cause you got lucky lips.

Lucky lips are always kissing

Lucky lips are never blue

Lucky lips can always find a
pair of lips or two.

Ultreya seems nonplussed,
possibly offended at the mention of said lips. I laugh mildly at first, which
Claudy mistakes for appreciation and seizes upon with the tenacity of a child.
By the time we amble into the valley of Samos and the top of the monastery
appears amid the trees, I am in a brown study of regret: I should be walking
alone.

I trundle into Samos with Ultreya’s lead line hoisted over my shoulder sailor style. I pull her into town
like dead weight. Several once blank synapses have been permanently branded
with the opening stanza of “Lucky Lips.”

Claudy is depressed,
possibly at the forced exile from his Flemish friends or because of my own dark
disapproval. His solution is to drink the rest of the day. The village is in
the middle of seasonal fiestas, and at early evening everyone assembles on a
field beside the ancient monastery for a traveling fair. A wretched imitation
of an American rock band has taken the stage. The lead singer is an obese man
misshapened by decades of Spanish cuisine. His costume is knickers, a sawed-off
T-shirt, and a psychedelic tam-o’-shanter. Swags of shamelessly visible fat
rock ’n’ roll to the beat of “Eleanor Rigby,” “Satisfaction,” and “MacArthur Park.”

Claudy follows me like a dog
as I use every trick I know to lose myself in this crowd. He is staggering
drunk by the time the band begins. With the help of shots of Carlos Primero,
the morning’s song has become to him a multilayered joke so dense with strata
of humor that he can barely blurt out a line before being engulfed by hilarity.
To me, the song has broken down into linguistic phonemes, atomic packets of
sound unmoored from their meaning like a single word repeated to the point of senselessness.
Even here, the words cut through the cacophony of the fair and hammer on my
eardrums like nails. I remember reading of laboratory orangutans subjected to
repetitive sounds over a period of time. Eventually they ate their fingers.

At one of the food booths, I
strike up a conversation with a man on vacation. He is a professor of American
literature at a university in Barcelona.

“I specialize in modern
American fiction,” the professor says, “specifically Jewish and southern
writers.”

“Who does that leave out,
Joan Didion?”

A face lurches beside us and
bellows, “I didn’t have many toys,” before crumpling away in the darkness.

“Right now,” he says, “I am
teaching a course on Bret Easton Ellis. His novel
American Psycho.”

“Why?”

“It’s the most talked about
subject in America.”

“It’s just one of New York’s periodic publishing scandals,” I argue. “Dime a dozen. We have a couple every
year.”

“Precisely,” he says. And he
explains that while Europeans hold to some fraudulent standard of “greatness,”
only Americans have revealed the true arbiter of the sublime: PR, scandal,
hype.

The band strikes up its
version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” The obese man sings. As I try to argue
with the professor, the troupe of retarded pilgrims appears beside me. The
young girl who yesterday stuck her tongue out at me has motioned me to dance.
How can I decline? I start pitching back and forth in that sad WASPy gyration
that is to dance what Spam is to smoked Virginia ham. And the professor shouts
on.

I want to attempt a rebuttal,
but his view sounds oddly convincing way out here. American culture is a
Walpurgisnacht at this fair. The band’s rendition of the Carpenters’ “We’ve
Only Just Begun” is unnaturally loud and riddled with head-banging electric
guitar riffs. If Dante were to consign all of American culture to one circle of
hell, our circle would resemble this scene with a third-rate Spanish band
playing America’s worst music.

A lumbering figure crashes
between me and my dance partner. “I may not be good looking...” Two bloodshot
eyes sink to the ground and crawl away.

I turn my attention to the
only redemption at hand, my dance partner. I whip myself into a dancing
machine, and she responds in kind. Her friends and then others join in the
erupting chaos. We become a band of howling, drooling, gyrating maniacs. The
keening vocalist competes with the roars from our twisting throng. Some are
retarded, some are pilgrims, all momentarily indistinguishable.

The evening before, Claudy
and I had discovered a bit of paradise for Ultreya. Behind an abandoned house
was a modest glade of anise sprouts on the banks of a flowing river. This
morning the sound of our approach is recognizable. Ultreya stirs from a
couchant position and stands for our arrival. Our mule trumpets hee-haw blasts
crackling with excitement. The banks are shorn of anise, a flat terrain of
stubble. When I untie Ultreya to begin the day’s walk, the mule nuzzles several
of its dampest orifices into the nape my neck.

By coincidence I came across
a book yesterday afternoon during a discussion of mules with one of the
monastery’s laymen.
Horses,
Asses,
Zebras, Mules, and Mule
Breeding
was written a hundred years ago by two British military men, W. B.
Tegetmeier and C. L. Sutherland, “late of the War Office.” In its pages the
authors proclaim the mule’s greatness: “Sure of foot, hard of hide, strong in
constitution, frugal in diet, a first-rate weight carrier, indifferent to heat
and cold, he combines the best, if the most homely, characteristics of both the
noble houses from which he is descended. He fails in beauty, and his
infertility is a reproach, but even ugliness has its advantages.”

Mules, I had forgotten, were
man’s first attempt at genetic engineering—a mix of the European horse and the
African ass. Although ridiculed as a beast with “no ancestry and no hope of
posterity,” the mule has certainly worked out better than some of our other
hybrids—the toy poodle or baby corn, for instance. But the mule was, in fact, a
dangerous creation. Its unnatural endurance turned war from a local phenomenon
to a regional one. On the other hand, it made food production more efficient.
Leisure may owe its origin to the mule.

A mule requires work and
effort, and I am slowly coming to understand her. (Today Ultreya assumes a
gender.) She is a little society all unto herself. Ultreya wants to eat and
rest as often as possible. And I don’t want her to. So we gradually work out
the fundamentals of a social compact.

As we leave Samos, Claudy teaches me by his own thoughtless error. He takes the lead line and walks
twenty feet ahead, leaving her to meander from side to side in a zagging wake.
When the mule slows down, which is often, Claudy barks orders at me from the
front.

“Beat her, eh? You’re not
helping.”

“Claudy, I don’t think we
can just pull her. We have to walk with her.”

“Uhh. You fucking Americans
always want to tell everyone everything.” He yanks the rope and jerks her head
forward.

I resign myself to my
position. I walk alongside Ultreya, whispering apologies for Claudy’s behavior.
When a car approaches, I nudge her closer to the side of the road. And she
responds. There is a twinkle of understanding in her eye.

Every hour or so I suggest
we let her take a few minutes to feed on roadside dandelions, buttercups, or
the wheat that grows through the fences. At a river I let her drink. In
exchange for this privilege, I walk beside her, pulling her bridle when she
speeds up and slapping her rump when she slows down.