Off the Road (31 page)

Our Saint James is a
reimagined man, and vastly different from the stoic Romanesque statues or the
bloodcurdling Gothic icons. Saint James has always been the protector of
pilgrims, and this James is on our side, too—an impish fellow, capable of sly
laughter. Were we to carve him in marble, our James would have the cocky
posture of Michelangelo’s
David
and a slim Caravaggian smile with a hint
somewhere, possibly in the eyes, of the ambiguity of this undertaking. In
short, a modern James, willing to wink at our ruses and praise our occasional
virtue.

Were we to walk ten thousand
miles more, our inchoate world might cohere into a lasting one. We have our own
songs and dances, our inside jokes, our stories. A simple hierarchy of
responsibility and set of daily chores have already taken shape. I imagine
Augustín’s tale of cannibalism told over and over again, getting mixed up with
our opinion of Madame Debril, who in our new story gets eaten. In time we would
have our creation myth, a tale of conflict with an older generation, then
death, consumption, and rebirth.

We would find a language,
always inadequate, to revive these moments in ceremony. The image of two mules
might become to our descendants as significant as cows to a Hindu or as lambs
to Jews and Christians. Our robes would be simple, and at the neck would be a
shell. Each costume might feature a dark tunic that fits over the head and
flows down the back. Theologians would explain that it is a symbolic
representation of a backpack. The oral readings would tell a story of hardship
overcome by common action. Or there might be a parable of a confidence man
hoodwinking strangers. The exegetes would interpret it as paradox and fill it
with meaning. This story, they would say, uses irony to inspire readers to
virtue, just as Buddha’s mischievous smile actually signifies solemnity. The
young in the tribe would question the elders for clarification. And the old men
and women would explain, in a language not yet written, that this ceremony,
these robes, these sacred words, point back to a time when their ancestors set
off on a long journey, and after suffering and hazards and quarrels, they found
in a thing as plain as an apple or a piece of bread, awe, humility, and
mystery.

T
he word
tourist
comes
from the French word meaning “circuit.” It is among our chief insults on the
road. I’ve leveled it at others and had it heaped on myself. In the language at
large, it is a mild word, yet nearly all its shadings are vaguely insulting.
Even as an admission, the sense is humiliating: “Oh, I’m just here as a
tourist.” The tourist lacks something vital in travel—a sense of caprice,
spontaneit
y, adventure, the open-endedness of life without a
schedule. The tourist has none of those. He’s treading on t
he circuit.

On the spectrum of travel,
the safe and tedious tourist anchors the far end. At the other end is the true
traveler, the one who first blazes the trail—Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus,
James Cook. In the path maker’s wake come others who are nearly audacious. They
are still considered true travelers. After Columbus opened the transoceanic
route, the names of Cortés, Balboa, and Magellan followed, although maybe we
can’t remember precisely what their specific accomplishments were. Over time,
though, a journey that once was difficult and audacious becomes routine. The
anonymous merchants come. And the trail becomes more well known than the
travelers. Not long after the fifth-grade quiz on Balboa and Cortés, I believe
I was required to memorize “major trade routes.” More people follow until the
pleasure seekers set sail in luxury vessels. And finally the discount fares
kick in, and the great unwashed swarm the route on package tours with specified
hotels and guided visits to famous monuments, many of which commemorate the
first person who did in suffering what the tourist is doing in comfort.

We pilgrims want to believe
that we are not tourists. But by whatever definition you want to use, pilgrims
are tourists. Pilgrims are the lowest of lowbrow travelers, a subspecies of
tourist, the most degraded hybrid there is. Our itinerary is a thousand years
old. Our route has been walked millions of times. Far from being the first, a
pilgrim is in fact the opposite. With each step, we are precisely the last
person to cover that patch of ground. And a few minutes later even that lame
distinction will vanish, our footprint trampled by a crowd of schoolchildren,
or a mule, or robust senior citizens from Holland.

Trying to romance the road
to Santiago is a lost cause, and all efforts to attempt any such thing ended
provinces ago. A pilgrimage resembles nothing so much as a forced march. We
have resigned ourselves to it and are relieved only by the comedy of our burden
and the relaxation that comes with each evening. Daytime is work and sweat, and
a whole morning or afternoon can pass without a word. It’s the quiet
familiarity of friends at work, like old pals on the assembly line. Daytime
meals pass amid the grunting communications of a family, and our duties are
carried out by rote.

The morning after Arzúa, we
resume our daily ritual—a train of wounded pilgrims, beat mules, grousing
children, and sullen men who are scarcely disturbed when we encounter an
enormous problem. Not far out of town, the Spanish government has cut the
initial gorge of an interstate straight through a hill, probably to accommodate
tourists.

We pull up at the edge. Far
below is a red muddy canyon. A set of jerry-built stairs—scrap lumber bound
with nails and bale wire—drop straight down before us. Across the way, another
set snakes up the other side and leads to the continuing path. Normally such a
disaster would require a half hour of theories and solutions, a vote, and then
a moment to assuage Augustín or Claudy or whoever’s idea was vetoed.

But this afternoon we barely
pause. Everyone knows what each must do and performs his or her (or its) task
without comment. Wyn and Claudy walk the compliant mules laterally through the
woods until the slope affords easy passage for the animals. The Spanish
engineer, Augustín, and I carry down the packs. We clamber back up and help the
others down.

By the time our band
reconvenes on the other side, we have what now passes for conversation.

“Whoo, shit,” says Claudy.

“Yeeeoooo,” says Augustín.

“Hooooo,” I say.

“Heee-haaw,” says Ultreya.

“Okay,” says Val.

And we walk on.

Arca is the last stop on the
road, a mere nineteen kilometers shy of Santiago. The small hostel there is an
abandoned house with no running water, airless despite shattered windows, and
no furniture or beds. At the front door is the schoolteacher. He has become a
regular apparition at day’s end, a combination of grim reaper or camp guard. An
unctuous greeting is his way of saying that the place is “claimed.” We tie up
the mules in a nearby yard and push past him without the slightest courtesy or
concern.

Within hours the house is
overflowing with pilgrims. Since it is a warm and pleasant night, we bail out
for a neighboring meadow, along with sixty or so others, and unfurl our sleeping
bags on the ground.

This evening is nearly
silent. Tomorrow all this will end. The air is slightly regretful. No one
bothers with a fire. Meals are eaten from pried-open tins, and chunks of
baguette are passed around. There is anxiety about arrival in Santiago. Will it
all become blindingly clear tomorrow?

Three medieval musicologists
from Belgium named Peter, Martina, and I didn’t catch the third one’s name melt
into the crowd at the hostel. They have studied the road and its medieval
music. In English and Spanish they explain the significance of their work and
their instruments. The hurdy-gurdy is the centerpiece, an instrument that is to
the medieval road to Santiago what a lute is to college Shakespeare
productions. The hurdy-gurdy is a fat violin whose bridge is a cylinder of
sounding board that is cranked while the other hand fingers a set of keys that
press the appropriate strings. It is a complicated Rube Goldbergian instrument,
and to look at one is to understand why it died out. The hurdy-gurdy sound is a
sad, enduring drone. Throughout the night the trio sings pilgrim ditties in
Latin, French, and Spanish, occasionally harmonizing the hurdy-gurdy’s groans
with the sighs of a small pipe or the muffled skirl of a miniature bagpipe.

The lead musician, Peter, is
a serious man. He wears sandals and has an array of crystals and turquoise
dangling at his neck. When he introduces the music, he speaks solemnly,
assuring us that the simple melodies are rich in texture and meaning. He sings
an ancient pilgrim hymn and then loosely translates the words:

Herru Sanctiagu

Got Sanctiagu

E ultreia

E suseia

Deus adiuva nos

Señor Santiago

Great Santiago

Come on, let us head west.

Come on, let us keep moving.

God help us.

Peter says these words with
such respect, in the crisp enunciation of a scholar, that the pilgrims erupt in
laughter. There is a rarefied, exquisite hilarity to that last line, and we
pilgrims are rolling around on the ground venting it. We can’t explain it,
except that we’ve spent so many days in bowed solemnity that we no longer
refrain from shattering someone else’s piety with our laughter. We’re certain
that pilgrims laughed at that line when it was written a thousand years ago. We
know we’re on to something. Maybe it’s taken all this time to achieve this
small moment. It’s a strange sound that undulates across the meadow, a
paradoxical and complex guffaw. There is suffering in it, like the suppressed
laughter heard at a funeral. But it’s a fresh laugh, and new—our laugh. The
musicians are annoyed as the hilarity infects its way through the crowd, across
the gulf of languages, a guess-you-had-to-be-there laughter, and Peter and his
friends haven’t been there.

The next morning the herd
arises and moves out. Through the woods, onto highways, then along a
treacherous stretch of interstate near an airport, back among trees, across a
small brook, we march
—E ultreia! E suseia
!—into Lavacola.

This last village before Santiago has its own rich tradition. Here, in the old days, the pilgrim washed himself to
prepare for the appearance at the cathedral. Actually the guidebooks are quite
circumspect about this ablution. In the footnotes of the more scholarly books,
though, the truth is revealed. In Lavacola the pilgrim went to the river and
scrubbed his behind. In the crude hygiene of the Middle Ages, this act
constituted the highest honor one could pay. But we cannot find a river, and
Lavacola has lost all its medieval charm, being nothing more than a knot of
bars and fast-food restaurants. All that remains of this old tradition is the
town’s fine name, blunt in that medieval way.
Lava
means wash (as in
lavatory) and
cola
means tail (as in colon), literally “ass-wipe.”

A few kilometers farther
along the road, the path works it way upward and then opens onto a broad hill.
From its height the pilgrim can see for the first time the city of Santiago—the glorious skyline dominated by the twin Baroque towers of the cathedral. This
hill is called Mons gaudii in Latin, Monjoie in French, Monxoi in Gallegan,
Monte del Gozo in Spanish, and, in English, Mount Joy. Santiago is a mere
gambol away.

According to tradition,
whoever is first to arrive here is called “king” of the pilgrimage. When
Guillaume Manier arrived here in 1726, he wrote: “I advanced on ahead by a
league, all alone, so that I could be the first to see the towers of Santiago.... Upon seeing them, I threw my hat in the air, making known to my companions,
who arrived after me, that I had seen the tower. All, upon arrival, had to
agree that I was the king.”

For this honor, Manier
continues, “my companions gave me, as their king, a nosegay,” for which Manier
bought his companions “several bottles of wine to fete them in recognition of
my little bouquet.”

In the Middle Ages, this
race to the top of the hill was taken so seriously that the victors
incorporated their new titles into their real names. Several scholars of the
road allege that the commonness of the names King, König, Leroy, and Rex date
from this practice.

The monk Domenico Laffi
arrived here in 1670 and wrote: “Upon seeing Santiago so abruptly, we fell to
our knees and began singing a Te Deurn, but after two or three verses we could
not sing even a word because of all the crying.”

The architecture of this
hill has waxed and waned through the millennium. In the twelfth century, Santiago’s archbishop Gelmirez built a small chapel, which disappeared long ago. In 1495
Herman Künig encountered a beautiful cross of stone and a cairn of
cobblestones. An anonymous fifteenth-century Englishman saw four columns of stone
and reported in verse that the tradition of arrival granted the “king” a
hundred days of indulgence:

By a chapell shalt thou go

Upon a hull hit stondez on
hee

Wher Sent Jamez ferst shalt
thou see

A Mount Joie mony stonez there ate

And four pilerez of ston
ofgret astate

A hundred daiez of pardon
there may thou have.

On the top of Mount Joy today there is a small gazebo, built a century ago as a pilgrim rest stop. But
the open breeziness of the structure was filled in with white concrete several
years ago when the pope spoke on this hill, security reasons. In fact, an
entire forest that once grew here was shaved off, cut bald, to accommodate the
enormous crowds. Huge water tanks were installed to hose down the fainting
masses. These rusting tanks and a plaque authenticating the pope’s visit are
all that remain of that day.

Whatever powerful emotions a
pilgrim struggles to summon at Mount Joy are muted as he tries to negotiate his
way to the city. Tradition again reports that pilgrims would run down the hill
and into the city. But surrounding modern Santiago is a beltway of interstates,
and the city planners left pilgrims out of the design. We bunch up at the edge
of the four lanes complicated by exit ramps, medians, and cloverleafs. We scan
left and right, right and left, waiting for the buzzing traffic to open a small
window of opportunity.

“There, now! Here it is!”