I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (22 page)

When I arrived at the top of the first giant hill I saw a kid from Quebec I had met the night before who was complaining of having a broken toe already. He is always listening to rap music on his headphones and had stopped to rest his toe and was bopping his head along with the rap in his ears when I walked up. He saw my approach. “Ah! The almond man!” he called, a nickname he had given me from the night before because I was offering many of the other pilgrims some of my almonds and raisins I had packed for the pilgrimage. He was munching on some Oreos.

“Did you drop one of those about a mile back?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Well, you were part of my first answered prayer on the Camino,” I said. “All I could think about was not having gotten my own Oreos from the vending machine this morning.”

I watched him hobble off after wiping the chocolate crumbs from his mouth and putting his headphones back on. “The almond man is nuts!” he called back over his shoulder.

I stopped for a needed breakfast a few miles on and ran into a young girl named Doris from Stuttgart, whom I met last night at the hostel. We had coffee and pastries together and she told me she was walking the Camino to try to decide if she was going to break off her wedding engagement. We got to talking about what types of men we liked. “My type is that movie star who is named Hugh,” she said.

“Hugh Jackman?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Hugh Jackman is an angel. I would fuck Hugh Jackman.”

I actually did a spit take when she said that.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, both of us laughing at her honesty.

I told her about meeting Hugh and what he had told me. We both shook our heads. “Does this mean I should get married or not?” she asked me.

“I think it just means we should keep walking and see what else the Camino has in store for us,” I replied, stuffing the last of my croissant into my mouth and heading outside.

*   *   *

I stopped in Port de Rein and bought some fruit for the afternoon and some chocolate and a big piece of delicious ham. I also went into a pharmacy and bought some much-needed knee braces for the walk or I won’t make it all the way across Spain. I haven’t even been on the path for a week and my knees are now really killing me.

I stopped in one of the village’s squares to eat a bit of the ham and attach the braces to my knees. Next to me was an elderly man and woman who also seemed to be walking the Camino and taking a break. Hunched and white-haired, their wrinkled cheeks ruddy with the morning’s exertion, they were sharing a perfectly ripened tomato that the woman was cutting up with one of the blades of a Swiss Army knife. I was intrigued watching how careful she was to make sure the man—her husband, I presumed—got just the slightest bit more of the tomato than she was giving herself.

Our eyes met and we nodded and confirmed that we were all pilgrims on the path. “Are you guys Catholic?’ I asked my usual question.

The couple smiled rather knowingly and shook their heads no.

“So you’re Protestant,” I guessed.

“Jewish,” the old man mumbled, his mouth full of the tomato’s lusciousness.

“And German,” said the woman. “Don’t forget German. German Jewish. From Frankfurt-am-Main.”

The old man’s smile widened, a bit of the tomato’s juice sliding one of its seeds from the corner of his mouth and staying there in the white stubble of his chin where I stared at it. He brushed it away with an elegant sweep of his hand so quick and sure it convinced me he must have conducted a bit of Schumann at some point in his life. His brown eyes held mine. I turned my attention to the woman, who was offering me a piece of her portion of the tomato.

I declined it. “So why are you walking the Camino?” I asked.

“For our hearts,” she said, shrugging, as I watched her pop that bit of tomato she had offered me into her mouth.

The man reached over and touched her hand, the one that wielded the knife. “For our one heart,” he said, the sound of his own kindness—more fine-tuned than feeble—seeming to take him by surprise as it caught there in his grizzled throat.

It caught in my throat as well.

5/6/09

I fell into bed and had an odd dream about walking through one of these tackily ornate Catholic churches that dot the countryside on the Camino and are so filled with stabbed statuary profusely bleeding and a profusion of dark-haired rather harried angels painted along so many gold-leafed ceilings, not a blond one in the bunch. Blond ones seem only to come into my line of vision in Starbucks, I guess, or wild haired and holding Buddhist beads. I kept walking though the ornate cathedral and down a flight of stairs into a dank basement full of discarded statuary and dark-haired angels. I found my way out of the dankness into a clearing of trees yet couldn’t get my bearings. I decided to turn back into the cathedral and retrace my steps, but when I did the basement had been refigured into a well-lit gift shop filled with Buddhist knickknacks. One particular one—was it Buddhist?—was glistening and beckoning to me. I went to purchase some Japa mala beads and woke up.

I couldn’t fall back to sleep so decided to go down to breakfast. I sat down at the table with only one other pilgrim, a Canadian named Colin who has become a friend of mine as well as of Toby and of Lucas. Colin is a wiry little sixty-three-year-old Englishman who now lives in Vancouver. He is walking the Camino after surviving open-heart surgery only a year and a half ago. He and I haven’t yet fallen into as easy a friendship as I have with Lucas and Toby. In fact, I’d describe our relationship as a prickly one. He’s married and plans to meet his wife halfway to Santiago so she can reach the cathedral with him. Maybe that’s the reason I find his incessant flirting with young women along the Camino kind of distasteful. He certainly seems to find my being a gay man so, especially my being so open about it. I will admit that my openness about my being gay can seem to some to verge on aggression.

Colin and I groggily faced each other across the hostel’s kitchen table as I sipped my coffee and he his tea. To make conversation, I was telling him about the wild dream I had had the night before.

“Maybe you wouldn’t have such dreams if you stopped popping all those pills you pop,” he tersely told me.

“Those are my HIV meds,” I blurted out in an attempt to deflect his terseness. There was a shared intake of breath at the table, each of us stopping just short of a gasp. What had I just done? Was this some sort of confession on my part? Or was I just being, yes, aggressive and trying instead to start a confrontation? My eyes met Colin’s for the briefest of moments and we each saw in the other an acceptance finally of our own mortality—a shared humanity—this man with his stitched-up heart and I with an immune system that could be described as marginal even as I rejected such a notion for myself.

It was in that instant of unlikely recognition that the reason for my being on the Camino was revealed to me. It was no bolt to my consciousness. No epiphany. Instead the reason seemed to come to rest there in that moment, flutter into place like the fluttering voice of the angel of Roncesvalles. Up until now, I have measured my whole life in the years before my HIV diagnosis and the years that have followed it. Nothing I have done, no matter how hard I’ve tried, has ever been able to erase that diagnosis as the demarcation that has defined me. But now there is another demarcation. This was the instant longing that I had experienced to be here in Spain on such a spiritual journey as I sat on that barstool back in New Orleans over a year ago now after Perry had first suggested it. It was a kind of cure that was incomprehensible to me before I began this pilgrimage. I will now measure my whole life in the years before the Camino and all the years that are still to come. The Camino has replaced HIV. Not in my body. My bloodstream. It has replaced it in some deeper stream I can’t quite name. Some might call it my soul.

*   *   *

The walk today was long and arduous. Blazing hot. Not much shade. I walked over thirty kilometers and spent the morning walking with Toby. I told him too about my HIV status. He listened and lowered his eyes as I talked.

*   *   *

I went to a bar tonight with Lucas. I loved watching him relax as he drank a few beers and flirted with some young girls who were also walking the path. He has let his scant beard sprout about his face and I longed at one point to reach out and touch the ridge of his cheek—a bit pudgier than my father’s long-ago more chiseled one—to see if his sparse whiskers felt as splintery as my father’s once had. As he danced with one of the girls I sat in the corner by myself and remembered all those times I’d peek through the crack in my parents’ bedroom closet when I’d hide in there all alone and watch them dance about the room, my father humming in my mother’s ear before she’d reach up and run her fingers along those cheeks of his, then hold his face in her hands and kiss him. I wanted to watch Lucas kiss the girl with whom he was dancing, but he didn’t. I wanted to kiss him myself. I knew I never would.

When he and I left I teased him about not being able to close the deal with the girl. We laughed and joked and lingered on the street a bit. He then said he and Toby had been talking about me. “We said one to the other one that though you are the one with the most pain we have met on the Camino, you are the one who makes everybody smile.”

It was then that I reached up and touched the stubble on his cheek—it was more feathery than splintery—and said good night. I went inside my hotel but did not shut the door all the way. Through the crack, I watched him walking toward the hostel across the street. I imagined him turning around to smile at me.

5/7/09

Another long day on the path. When I arrived in Ventosa this evening I saw Daniel—the California boy with the wild blond hair who was holding the Buddhist beads—emerging from the bathroom at the hostel where I’ve stopped for the night. He lingered and talked to me as I shaved my head. He’s now tamed his own hair into a bunch of dreadlocks and he has paired up with a lovely German girl who has a crew cut, so they are a very art-directed couple. Danny with his abundance of hair and she with her lack of it. Stunning really. Both gorgeous. She’s now wearing his beads around her neck.

5/8/09

When I got back to the hostel last night after dinner with Lucas and a few others, I began reading the novel
The Weekend
by Peter Cameron in my bunk bed. I fell asleep after finishing a few chapters and woke up in the middle of the night to see Daniel and his new girlfriend in the lower bunk over to the right in front of me. They were naked and sitting cross-legged facing each other. They were staring into each other’s eyes. The moonlight streamed in through the window and enveloped them in a kind of velvety whiteness. They were ever so slightly rocking to and fro. They never stopped staring into each other’s eyes even though I noticed she was masturbating him very slowly. I could tell he was uncircumcised, for each time she would stroke him the head of his cock would emerge from his ample foreskin and glisten a bit more in the moonlight. I waited to watch him ejaculate—I knew he was close—which he did in spurt after spurt, suddenly putting one of his new blond dreadlocks between his lips to bite down on it so as not to make any noise. He kept on ejaculating and it looked as if the moonlight itself had thickened and begun to streak the air about them. The girl lifted her hand, covered in what she had coaxed from him, and, taking the dreadlock from his mouth, smeared the concoction onto it and stuck it in her own mouth. She pulled him toward her with the sticky dreadlock lodged now between her teeth and kissed him. The dread dropped from their mouths.

*   *   *

Once they had dozed off in each other’s arms I decided to just get up and sneak out of the hostel at 4:30 a.m. and begin walking. It was so dark out I had to make my way with the tiny light from my iPod to try to find the yellow arrows that mark the Camino. The arrows signal to us pilgrims which direction to go and which fork to take when the path confronts us with one.

It was deadly quiet at that time of the morning out in the countryside. Kind of scary. But I do love to start the walk each day before sunrise and then watch the sky scare itself awake with light, scarlets and ambers and burnt oranges combining with yet another example of nature’s orderly abandon that I’ve come to respect and admire these last few days on the path. The birds also awaken as the sky lightens, and I love walking in their early-morning songs. I’ve never really noticed how lovely the songs of birds are to wake to. I feel enveloped by them and their songs seem gently, knowingly, to urge me on.

Sometimes people leave rocks on the path in the shape of arrows to point the way for other pilgrims as well. Or, oftentimes, the rocks are left in the shape of hearts and crosses. I came upon one such formation today outside an ugly little city I quickly walked through to get up into the hills outside it. The large rocks I came upon were formed in the shape of a heart and inside, with pebbles, someone had spelled out this two days before: “MAMA 06-5-09.” I stopped and stared at the configuration that had been formed with such obvious care and realized the Camino was once again speaking to me. Two days before had been my own mother’s birthday and I had not thought about it since I had been so wrapped up in my own life and thoughts of my fatherlessness. But my motherlessness is just as big an issue to me and here was someone on the path who had honored his or her own mother, not knowing that in so doing my own was also honored.

I did the math. My mother was born in 1931. She died in November of 1964 after having turned thirty-three. Everyone said it was cancer, but I knew it had been a broken heart after she lost my father in that auto accident in August the year before after he had just turned thirty-two. My father was born only one day after my mother, on May 7, 1931. It was his birthday yesterday and I had not stopped to think about that either.

At that moment, for the first time, I knelt on the Camino. I then took some rocks and made a heart right next to the one that was already there. I took a handful of pebbles and spelled “DADDY” in it and beneath it “07-5-09” to mark his birthday yesterday. I did the math again in my head. My parents, if alive, if truly so, would have been seventy-eight today. I placed a hand inside each heart and silently asked them to keep guiding me on the Camino.