Off the Road (30 page)

In the bathrooms normally
reserved for visiting basketball teams, boys and girls and men and women strip
naked, wash, change, and clean. The intense work of the walk has burned off the
libido of even the most adolescent among us. Young girls in panties and bras
take sponge baths at the sinks. The men spend their time at the urinals. Others
are naked, but there is nothing to it.

I try to peek. Some vestige
of my sexual self wants this be an erotic experience. But the image of a young
girl in her skivvies scraping crisps of dried mud from her shins or pinching
bugs from her hair doesn’t light a spark. One of the old Dutch men is in the
middle of some peculiar ministration that requires his pants at his feet. When
he suddenly attends to his ankles, he moons the room.

At our campsite, Val is
talking to an old Spanish man of weathered good looks. Augustin is in his
sixties, a former merchant marine who had spent his life at sea. Not adjusting
well to life on land, he walked out of his house a few weeks ago because he
“missed the sea.” His thick mane of white hair is wrapped pirate style in a
blue bandanna, set off by a handsome smile of perfect teeth. He wears blue
jeans, a green cotton shirt, and a sailor’s pea coat, which he sleeps in. On
his arm is a tattoo of a dagger, its sharp edge grown dull with age.

Out of trash Augustin stokes
a magically long-lasting fire to cook dinner. He has thrown his coat on the
ground. It’s his way of joining our group. By dinnertime our tribe has grown
yet again. Wyn has befriended a young Spanish engineer, his delicate wife,
their two young sons, a fifteen-year-old daughter, and a girlfriend.

Out on the edge of the
soccer field, groups are gathered around fires sparking from paper and green
wood. Soft songs in Spanish and German and Dutch float from site to site. As I
work on supper, I catch bits of Augustin’s early evening ghost story for the
kids. It is a horrifying tale that culminates in a woman who eats her young.

By early evening the fires
are dying on our side of the camp. Inside the court, the songs have degenerated
into improvisation. Across the cathedral space, homemade lyrics answer back and
forth, telling an episodic story of the road, a song about blisters and dogs
and weather and loneliness and bad food and wrong directions and dry fountains and
heavy packs, and finally, as always, sleep.

Our sights today rest on
Mellid, a mere fourteen kilometers through accommodating terrain. But
everyone
is heading to Mellid. By the time we pack and set off on the day’s walk, we are
cast amid the flowing crowd. Five minutes later we tie our mules to lampposts
in front of a hostel and gather inside at a long wooden table for coffee and
omelets. We agree to a lengthy breakfast so that the Welsh boy Adam can rest.
He was up all night with a stomachache. After an hour and some, Adam descends.
He is blanched and tired. His hair is knotted. His walk is tentative. True
pilgrim that he is, he has agreed to press on.

The road out of Palas del
Rei dumps us briefly onto an interstate. A yellow arrow at a large highway bar
points to the right, indicating a narrow beaten path disappearing into the
woods.

On the interstate, Adam
grows dizzy and falls. I suggest Adam ride Ultreya, but he can’t take the
bumpiness. Wyn heaves his heavy son into his arms. Exhausted and pathetic, Adam
drapes himself across his father’s chest. His head is limp on Wyn’s shoulder,
and he is weeping.

Val insists that we all walk
on. She will stay with Adam in Palas del Rei and catch up with us in Mellid.
That would certainly have been the solution only a week ago. But not now. We
are bound together now—the People of the Mules. So we stand around the parking
lot of the last bar in town, debating our options.

A Mercedes careens around
the corner, shooting past the restaurant, and suddenly brakes. It whines into
reverse, twisting into the parking lot. Out jumps a tall man, his wife, and a
young boy. He walks straight up to me.

“Hello,” he says to me in
unaccented English. “Are you American by any chance?”

“I am.”

“Is your name ‘Jack’?”

“Why, yes.”

“I have just returned from Santiago. My father is Willem, the Dutchman.”

“Oh, yes.” This news stings
a bit. I know the pilgrimage is not a race, but we’re still a week shy.

“Willem will be staying
there for a few days before taking the train home. He hopes he will see you
there. He told me to be on the lookout for a giant red American on the road.”
This description of me must disturb Willem’s son, since he towers over me by a
good four inches.

“Tell me,” I ask, “did
Willem really walk twenty-five kilometers a day for three months in your
hometown in order to practice for the road?”

“Yes. My father is very
efficient.”

“He is a true pilgrim,” I
add magnanimously.

I make introductions, and we
all step into the bar for more coffee and food. Once Willem’s son understands
the difficulty of our situation, he happily agrees to drive Val and Adam ahead
to the shelter in Mellid. We ceremoniously put up a fight, but he insists.

Saint James.

Henry David Thoreau
explained in
Walden
that he kept three chairs in his house, “one for
solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Thoreau was wise to keep his
idea of society limited to three. Our society numbers fifteen, and if one
includes the mules, and we do, the scales tip at seventeen.

Those days have settled into
rituals—stoking fires, cooking meals, handling the animals, corraling the
children, dealing with Claudy. And, of course, incidents occur. At Mellid we
were turned away from one pilgrim’s hostel, and Augustín exploded in rage at a
clergyman. We had to stuff half of us in the single hotel room Val had rented
so Adam could sleep off his illness. The rest scattered for the night.

By suppertime, Augustín
disappeared. I found him the following morning sleeping on a park bench. He
made some excuses, but I suspect the old mariner sampled some of the local
female talent. Despite Augustín’s cantankerousness, he’s one of us, and no one
could imagine cutting out of town without him. He can find combustibles where
there aren’t any, and he has an enviable talent for coaxing roaring fires from
thin air. By night he becomes our storyteller, although his tales always
involve elders devouring youngsters.

The next day, when the
engineer’s wife turns her ankle, I load her onto Ultreya. By afternoon
responsibility for her has drifted to Val, who is steamed. A meeting between
Val and me gets ugly. She accuses me of permanently inviting the Spaniards into
our group with the offer of Ultreya and then abandoning them to her because
she’s a woman. She’s right, of course, so I agree to work more with our
wounded, and things are patched up. Throughout such crises, temper tantrums
erupt from Claudy with a certain regularity, about every morning, noon, and
night, I’d say.

But the routine tensions
within our clan can’t compare to the anarchic competitions among the tribes of
pilgrims when we enter a town in the late afternoon. In Arzúa—several days shy
of Santiago—the panic is visible. Groups range through the streets, looking for
the best quarters. The guidebook lists five pilgrim hostels differing in
capacity and amenities. Augustín suggests we set up temporarily at an athletic
facility on the edge of town and then send reconnaissance teams throughout the
city to see what else is available.

The Spanish engineer and I
are dispatched to one hostel described in the book as having a panoramic view,
an open meadow, kitchen, beds, and swimming pool. When we arrive, the loathsome
schoolteacher is standing at the front entrance like a gendarme.

“All taken,” he says
brusquely. We both shrug, privately happy because the place is grotesque
compared to our gym. It is parked on the side of an interstate. The “meadow” is
an overturned bowl of dust. The roots of the snatches of grass are exposed like
stuck spiders. The pool is slightly larger than the cab of a pickup truck and
has washed so many clothes that it is a brown milky color.

By the time we return,
Augustín has finished a shopping spree and volunteers to cook tonight. We have
slabs of steak, eggs, a variety of cheeses, baskets of apples and plums, juices
and colas for the children, magnums of wine, and a sack of baguettes. Out back
on an unused street facing a forest, Augustín has already built his kitchen and
laid in a night’s supply of wood with three chunks of a broken beam, our Yule
logs. Our grill is a slotted manhole cover pried out of the gutter.

By nightfall two new girls
and a few other pilgrims have been invited for dinner. Augustín fills the air
with the aroma of steak and eggs, lamb, and potatoes wrapped in tinfoil. Every
adult has a glass of wine in his hand, and the children are plied with sodas.
Augustín passes around the fresh fruits and stuffs a baguette in every fist.
The old mariner pronounces a toast before dinner and then recites a poem. The
Welsh children sing a song in English, and the Spanish children return the
compliment in their language. Augustín has another story for the kids; again
the theme is parental cannibalism.

A truck inches down the back
street and stops since our party takes up almost both lanes. Augustín strides
to the cab window, cocks an elbow on it, and chats amiably. Presently the truck
driver parks, and our missing guest joins us for a plate.

For a moment, the labor and
resentments of the day melt away into wine, darkness, song, and laughter. The
night above is clear. The Milky Way, for which this road is also named—the Vía
Láctea—stretches a blurred canopy above us. Chances are that some of the
pilgrims who preceded us camped right here as well, looked up at the same jet
sky spangled with lights, and dined with the same intensity.

The hard work of our day and
the sweat and toil it took to get us into this cul-de-sac makes the
intellectual questions of the road—who is a true pilgrim—gloriously irrelevant.

A pilgrim is out beyond the
fields. He is stripped not merely of the accoutrements but of the assumptions
of his society. A pilgrim is cast back upon first principles and then forced to
make some sense of the lunatic impulse that propelled him down this road. Our
little tribe has grown over time, beginning in León. Were we to walk for
another year or ten years, I can imagine our rump society metamorphosing into a
real one.

Before I left America, I assembled a file of notes. I had intended somewhere on this road to make some
withering comparisons between the vivid metaphors of modern science and the
dead language of ancient religion: Our modern theologians are astrophysicists.
Saint Thomas Aquinas had his exhaustive explanation of the universe,
Summa
Theologica,
and Stephen Hawking has his “theory of everything.” Even the
religious notion of mystery has been translated into the scientific idiom as
“complexity.”

Since the big bang theory
gained acceptance, scientists have struggled to conjure bracing metaphors for
their new vocabulary. I have in my notes a collection of attempts to describe
the universal essence: “cold dark matter”; “a great wall”; “supercluster”; “the
Zeldovich pancake”; “superdense loops of matter”; “opaque plasma”; “extremely
faint wrinkles”; “subtle broad ripples of wispy matter”; “gigantic bubbles”;
“meatballs”; “spongelike topology.” I wonder how many extremely faint wrinkles
would fit on the head of a pin.

In my reading, I found that
the mythographer Joseph Campbell believed that the language of science could
rescue the desiccated metaphors of religion: “Not the neolithic peasant looking
skyward from his hoe, not the old Sumerian priesthood watching planetary
courses from the galleries of ziggurats, nor a modern clergyman quoting from a
revised version of their book, but our own incredibly wonderful scientists
today are the ones to teach us how to see; and if wonder and humility are the
best vehicles to bear the soul to its hearth, I should think that a quiet
Sunday morning spent at home in controlled meditation on a picture book of the
galaxies might be an auspicious start for that voyage.”

I think my small tribe might
advise Mr. Campbell to put down his Time-Life picture book of quasars and buy a
pair of boots. Haltingly, uncertainly, we have created something. Were we to
try to pin down the fragile sense of ourselves that has emerged, it would be
about as useful as defining the amiable laughter that animates our nights
(staccato puffs of oscillating air, I believe).

But perhaps some part of it
can be seen in none other than Saint James himself. He has become a new man for
us. In the Gospels, he was a toady. In eighth-century Spain, he was a simple reflection of Christ himself, dead and resurrected. By the height of
the Moorish conflict, he had taken up sword and shield, an ur-Knight Templar,
as cunning and as cruel as any Saracen.

During the Renaissance,
there was an attempt by the backers of the freshly sainted Teresa de Avila to
have her named patron saint of Spain. This attempted coup d’état fired the
imaginations of James’s supporters, chief among them Spain’s famous writer
Francisco de Quevedo. His defense:
A Sword for Santiago
(still required
reading in Spanish grade schools after four hundred years) re-created James as
a kind of elder statesman, national patrician, and kindly grandfather. The Age
of Reason then reduced him to an addled and quixotic senior citizen, but James
survived until he had another revival in the nineteenth century. Not so long
ago, Franco straightened the bent arm of our patron into a fascist salute.