Off the Road (33 page)
Authors: Jack Hitt
“Name?”
“Hitt.”
“Eeet?”
I spell it for him.
“Full name.”
John Thomas Leonard Hitt.
“Very long.” He is troubled.
Maybe my full name won’t fit.
“What was your motive for
walking the road?”
He doesn’t bother to look at
me until I answer.
“To discover my motive.”
“That is not an appropriate
answer.” He turns his papers around so that I can see that the three correct
responses are religious, cultural, or historical. I don’t remember which one I
checked.
Later that afternoon we
pilgrims file by the appropriate window to pick up our diplomas. Mine is made
out to Joannem Thoman Leonardum Hitt, and I carefully stow it in a safe corner
of my backpack. And that is the last the church has to deal with us, or we with
it. If we look for confirmation of our act, it won’t be here, in history or
tradition or art. We’ll have to improvise.
Outside, the conversation
turns to celebrations, party dates, and gossip. In the streets, we
pilgrims—even those who never once met on the road—know who we are. We stand
out in the densest crowd. Our shoulders are broad, our waists are small. I have
taken to glancing at a man’s belt. Is there a new notch cut into it?
Our haggard look and Li’l
Abner build is a confirmation of our status.
On the first night, the gang
of Flemish pilgrims and their fellow villagers gather at the Sostel Hotel. Many
others, even pilgrims I never met, wander in. The party spills into the
streets, and there is glorious news all around. I hear the final chapter of the
Willie saga. Somewhere past Mellid, a horrific fight broke out. Each filmmaker
stoned the other’s caravan, smashing windows and splitting the aluminum siding.
Even the kindly priest, says Claudy, lost his temper and told them both to
“fuck off.” The priest smiles; he’s happy to be on our side.
From time to time I see
Willie’s caravan, dented and listing, prowling the side streets of Santiago, an uninvited guest.
For three days the parties
rage. Stories are told and retold until they feel comfortable enough to tell to
strangers. The only common aspect of these confirming tales is that none of
them takes place here in Santiago. They all occur somewhere back up the road
when the days were hard and the nights were spent in solitary wonder or
orgiastic drunkenness. But in the next day or two, the celebrations thin out.
In the streets the pilgrims grow fewer, and eventually those of us remaining
realize that some have left, never to be seen again. One languid afternoon, I
bump into Rick on a side street. He is walking with his wife, who had recently
arrived to take him home. His wife is a colossal and merry woman, a Venus of
Willen, all curves and luxuriant body fat.
“I have many children,” Rick
says by way of explanation. After introductions, the encounter is awkward. The
tidy world we had created is over. Our time together has become something else
now, something with a beginning, a middle, and now an end. It is fragmenting,
and it is strange to feel it do so. We are sorry, almost ashamed, when we see
one another. In the broad daylight and normalcy of Santiago, the past season
recedes quickly and seems almost a hallucination. We are strangers again and
have little to say. The pilgrimage is being broken down, packed up in the boxes
of our little stories for safe transport back home, either to the world we left
behind or, more likely, the next one we will inexorably begin making.
By the third day, Rick and
Karl are gone. Javier has returned to his bank in Pamplona. Wyn, Val, and the
two kids sold their mule and have left for St. David’s, Wales. Ultreya has taken up residence on a farm at the edge of town. Claudy is scarce,
having hooked up with a Spanish girl. I see him briefly on the street one day,
and he tells me he’s moving to León to live with her. It becomes increasingly
difficult to spot the other pilgrims. New clothes have been bought. We have
shaved and gotten our hair cut. Several days of warm showers, comfortable
sleep, good food, Rioja wine, long conversation, television programs, and
newspaper dispatches are turning us back into ourselves.
I stayed a week in Santiago, and by the end I didn’t know a soul.
Before my noon train to Madrid and a plane to America, I spend a final morning in the cathedral. At the Portico,
the twenty-four men of the Apocalypse have remained as I had left them. Which
is surprising because this orchestra is carved unlike any other sculpture I saw
on the road. Most Romanesque and Gothic sculptures of this theme always depict
the men sitting formally and seriously. But Santiago’s men, scheduled to play
the final symphony, seemed strangely unconcerned with their momentous task.
They are chatting and joking and laughing with one another. Even the more sober
statues on the columns don’t seem so sober. A tall life-size statue of Daniel
is grinning at somebody—no wait, Daniel is clearly ogling Esther across an
archway.
Master Mateo’s work is
beautifully subversive. Among the musicians, groups of two or three have their
heads tilted toward another, whispering. Others are rosining their strings.
Still others are tuning their instruments. According to the traditions of
religious iconography, these men are about to begin the melodies that signal
the end of the world. This is the grand theme, noble and solemn, yet Mateo has carved
a private human moment. The men are smiling, laughing, as if they were on to
something, cracking private jokes. The guild of musicians captured here
casually fooling around is set not merely to end the world, but to start a new
one.
When Master Mateo carved
this sculpture, he used as his inspiration a story from the Revelation of St.
John. The critical verse (5:9) reads: “And they sang a new song.” Man invents
his truths and then clings to them so stubbornly that he will shape the world
around him to conform to them. The tenacity to believe is the greatest folly,
said Erasmus. Yet he concluded that it was our only hope.
For a long time god was this
belief, and we furiously confirmed his existence. On every mile of this road,
the proofs still stand, although sustained now mainly with government funding.
A thousand years ago, from this belief but also from crude political
calculation, financial desperation, and military necessity, the pilgrimage
emerged as a journey to truth. What one finds on the road may not be what god
wrought, but it is what man wrought, and, for a time, it was the best we could
do.
At the statue of James, a
short line of tourists and Spanish widows wait to take up the special place
before it. Ever since the journeymen who hoisted this stone in the 1170s set it
straight with a plumb line, the pilgrims have knelt here and with their flat hand
touched the column beneath James’s bare feet. So many have done so that the
marble seems to have gone soft. The old stone is worn smooth in one place,
about an inch deep, in the perfect shape of a human hand. With my new pants and
shirt and fresh-washed face, I have no privileges now. No one notices me. So I
take a place in line. One cannot make literature here. When my time comes, I
put my hand into the stone and pray.
a note on the
type
The text of this book was set in Sabon. It is based on
designs of Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561). The modern form was designed by the
German typographer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974). Because it was designed in
Frankfurt, it was named after the Frankfurt type founder Jacques Sabon who died
in 1580.
