Off the Road (10 page)

(Several weeks later, far
down the road, I will pick up a newspaper in a small town and see a photograph
of two or three drunken “foreign college students” who will have been gored to
death in Pamplona during the running of the bulls. One of the wire photos will
show a fallen man, skinny, long, and brown. I never did see Carlos again, and
after Puente la Reina, no one on the road would ever report running across
him.)

The brothers at Los Padres
Reparadores, who provide shelter, welcome us with the joy of immigration
officials out of Kafka. Our pilgrims’ passports are stamped in jaded silence by
an old man, and a grumpy novitiate escorts us to our sleeping arrangements—a
sonorous room of metal bunkbeds. Inside I meet a gregarious Spanish banker
named Javier, a stoic Frenchman, and two sullen Dutchmen whose willful
ignorance of Spanish and English is matched by their refusal to tell anyone their
names.

When they first meet,
pilgrims are quiet people, and modern ones especially so because we are in an
arrested state of embarrassment. We are afraid that someone might ask us to
explain
why
we are doing this. So each of us feels about as comfortable
as someone who has stumbled upon a stranger in a bathroom stall. The
sublimities are kept to a minimum, but once we find our common tongue, we
prattle on. We talk about what we know best—basic human suffering generally,
blisters specifically.

Like my new friends, I have
taken to mapping my suffering, quantifying it, measuring it. My feet are damp
blocks of pain all day long and all night long, too. I haven’t merely a blister
or even a lot of blisters. I have constellations of them. They seem to have a
life of their own, like cellular automata. Little blister outposts form and
send inquiring tunnels to make contact with the others. Recent reconnaissance
has scouted the tender flesh between my toes and cinched a few of them in
blister bows.

Like hiccups, blisters
attract all manner of homemade cures. One of the Dutchmen makes known "his
recipe of sprinkling sugar water on a Band-Aid. Carlos recommends running a
fine thread through each blister before bed. In the morning, he says, they will
be gone. The stoic Frenchman, Louis by name, tells us never to acknowledge
blisters. Just strap on your boots, ignore them, and walk. We regard him
suspiciously for the rest of the evening.

Pilgrim literature is filled
with ancient remedies. Our predecessors cured their feet ailments with plasters
of sarsaparilla or poultices packed with blackberry leaves. The extract of the
iris bulb was said to reduce swelling. The digestion of spiderweb— rolled
between one’s fingers into little white beads—was reputed to prevent the vomiting
of blood (an ailment I still have to look forward to). Jean Bonnecaze, a
pilgrim in 1748, wrote in his journal the recipe for a remedy said to cure a
host of pilgrim ailments:

Take a cleaned chicken, some pimpernel, chicory, chervil,
and lettuce—a fistful of each. Clean it well, wash it, and dice into some
pieces. Add a viper flayed alive which you will cut into little pieces after
removing the head, the tail, and the entrails, keeping only the body, the
heart, and the liver. Boil it all in three quarts of water, until it is reduced
to three half-quarts. Remove it from the fire, strain it through a colander,
and ladle it out into two soups to take one on the morning of a fast. Continue
its use for fifteen days, purging before and after the fortnight.... If you
cannot find a live viper, substitute for it a fistful of dust.

Quite early the next
morning, we all arise. Carlos is not offering to show us his cured blisters.
And all the other remedies of the prior evening don’t seem so efficacious in
the dawn before a long walk. With a minimum of grumbling, we ease our swollen
feet into their boots and, in our silence, salute the Frenchman for his wisdom.

At the edge of town just
before we cross the Queen’s Bridge to begin the day’s walk, Javier invites me
into a café for a morning coffee. This invitation serves several purposes. It
allows us politely to extricate ourselves from the company of others, and it’s
Javier’s way of asking that we walk together to the day’s goal, the town of Estella.

Javier, my Spanish friend,
is a banker with a wife and kids. He’s in his forties, bald, with tufts of
graying hair above the ears, and possessed of a lanky body riven with restless
tics. Javier is anxious to talk. He confesses that he has longed to walk the
road all his life. Then, quietly and sweetly, he describes himself as a
lifelong Catholic who is earnestly shaken by the vicious history of all
organized religions.

“Every year,” he tells me,
“I reread three books—the Bible, Plato’s
Republic,
and the writings of
Marcus Aurelius. That is my religion. Everything a man needs to know is in
those three books.”

“That’s as good a canon as
any I could devise,” I quip, and throw my hands up in the air. But I miss the
solemnity of what has just happened. For a good Catholic boy who grew up to
become a respected Pamplonan banker, his words are heresy: he is denying the
world of a hundred generations of his Spanish ancestors. I try to make up for
my flippancy by shaking my head with grave concern, but now there is nothing
but silence.

Javier has a wandering eye,
and in the contemplative haze of his confession, it cuts loose, strays inward,
and disappears. His other eye locks on to the view of the road out the window
while he finishes his
café con leche.
Javier is a sincere man whose
earnestness is so pure that it is impossible not to be moved by the gravity of
his pilgrimage. He longs to convince himself of his own ideas.

He asks me why I am walking
the road.

“I used to know,” I tell him
with a nervous guffaw, “before I started.”

He understands this awkward
evasion. “Let’s walk,” he says, and hoists his pack on his back.

Not far on the other side of
town, a farmer approaches us and seeks the blessing of passing pilgrims.

“Please, when you arrive in Santiago, ask Saint James to deliver us from the socialists. They are taxing me to death.
I can’t run my farm. See if you can get González out of office.” (Felipe
González is the socialist prime minister of Spain who is universally denounced
by left- and right-wing voters and then always reelected.)

Javier and the farmer trade
obscene epithets for the prime minister, and then the farmer tells us that we
reek like a shut barn. He says that pilgrims smell worse than any ruminant he
knows. From his front yard garden he rips out two long sprigs of mint, fashions
each into a loop, and hangs one around each of our necks. Then he pops the stem
backward and ties it off so that the top spray of mint points back to our noses
like a microphone.

“See, now you don’t have to
smell yourselves. It’s the greatest gift I have for pilgrims. Hug the apostle,
and pray for lower taxes,” he says, steering us back onto the road.

According to the old
tradition of the road, when a pilgrim arrives in the cathedral in Santiago, he embraces a statue of Saint James and asks for the fulfillment of the wishes
of all the people who helped him on the road. Javier swears he will hug Saint
James and ask for lower taxes. But neither of them seems especially confident
in the apostle’s power against the collusions of González and the European Economic Community.

Javier walks at twice the
speed I do, and I struggle to keep pace. Of course, his backpack is
considerably smaller—a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, and a small toilet
kit. He hasn’t any of the high-tech machinery I am lugging—tent, mess kit,
inflatable air mattress, tube of Instant Fire. And he is a model of
contemporary denial. At lunch in a small town, I want to sit down to a plate of
lamb chops and greasy Spanish fries, maybe half a carafe of red wine. Javier,
though, wins the day. We sit on a rock beneath a tree on an empty plain, throw
down a fistful of shelled pistachios, gulp a quart of water, and move on.

To Javier, all unnecessary
distractions violate the spirit of the road. I acquiesce in the presence of
someone whose certainty of what he’s doing is so thorough and convincing.

By two
p.m.
the sun is slaying me. I’m a
redheaded, ruddyfaced six-footer of Viking stock. The unfiltered heat of midday
in a freshly plowed field reacts with my skin like a barbiturate. I am groggy,
unsteady, and weepy. In order to persuade Javier to rest under the occasional
tree, I must nag or cry. He has the tawny skin of a Basque, and his restless
energy allows him to insult me with helpful folklore, such as “The best remedy
for fatigue is to keep walking in the heat.”

Up over a ridge, Estella
appears as winsomely as her name— the Star. Like so many on the road, this city
was founded by French clerics during the Middle Ages. Several French orders
benefited from the road, but first among them all was the Abbey of Cluny, which
built many of the monasteries and cities along the way. The Gallic presence
here was so entrenched and longstanding that until the mid-1700s the street
language of Estella was French.

The yellow arrows for the
last half mile into the city are all visible from a ridge. They point straight
down a deep gorge in the sloped fields behind a farmhouse and then direct the
pilgrim up a zagging route to the edge of town. The asphalt highway, meanwhile,
winds upward gently, following the path of least sweat to the city gates.
Without even thinking, I step onto the highway. Javier calls out.

“The arrows point this way,”
he says.

“Yeah, but this road is a
bit easier, and I am beat.”

“But this is the way of the
yellow arrows.”

“Javier, those yellow arrows
are simply an attempt to keep us off the highway. Look where they go. Down into
the gorge and back up. It’s essentially someone’s driveway.”

There is no question that I
am right. Most of the road suggested by the arrow painters is authentically the
old cart routes between towns. But, very often, one can sense that the arrow
painters are just trying to keep us away from automobile traffic. Normally I
would accept this intention as well meaning and follow them without question.
But not today.

“Javier this is make-work.
Why climb down into a valley and back up a steep hill when we don’t need to?”

“These are the yellow
arrows. This is the road.” He can’t break away from the stern authority of the
arrows.

“Do you believe that this
long driveway is really the old road?” I ask. The thing is, Javier doesn’t want
to walk down there, either. He wants some cold water and a rest. A solid day of
walking and sweating is enough. But he can’t convince himself.

“This is the road,” he says
with a crack in his voice.

“Listen, Javier, do you
really think that this is the road? Or is it more likely that the ancient route
that approached Estella was widened into a merchant’s road and then in the
twentieth century was paved into this highway? I assert, Javier, that the true
true
road is, in fact, this highway. Medieval pilgrims wouldn’t have just walked
into this gorge. They’d follow the main road into town. From this point into
town, the highway
is
the true old authentic actual real pilgrim road.”

Javier is tortured by my
logic. On the one hand he knows I am right. Yet somehow my observations are in
conflict with his desire for the true road and the deeper reasons he has for
being here. My logic may be clear, but it makes him feel bad. In the end, he is
too tired, and he yields. Without comment he stomps off up the highway. It’s
almost as if he
knew
the truth of what I said but would have preferred
that I had never spoken it out loud.

For a moment I feel
righteous with my arguments. I have challenged the authenticity of the yellow
arrows, the guidebooks, and the unseen experts. Am I not closer to a truth as
it might be sung by boozy serfs? Am I not listening to the song of history
rather than reading its words? Sure. But when Javier buys me a Coke at the
local bar, he’s sullen and quiet. I am suddenly stricken with guilt, as if I
have tempted a small boy from attending mass with a raincoat full of porno
pictures. Javier and I eat a terse dinner in Estella that night. When I awaken
the next morning, he is gone. I search the logical places. But it’s obvious.
Tie slipped out of town before dawn.

A
good week into this walk,
past Pamplona, the road winds through ragged ugly plains, broken up by a brutal
hill or distant ridge. Between the tiny stone villages is th
e
pilgrim’s road, a trail of dusty clods of soil occasionally overtaken by
swatches of volunteer wheat. One mo
rning I spend hours trying to find a
puddle of shade beneath a tree. The infamous Spanish sun appears twice its
normal size. In these parts the old pilgrim’s road overlaps the uninhabited
corridor where earlier authorities strung heavy electrical lines, thick as
ship’s rope. The bulky cables sizzle like agitated crickets.

Relief does come
occasionally, and the pilgrim is tempted to find in the slightest variation of
his suffering a sign or a portent. In a fierce heat, I arrive in Los Arcos. I
locate the town fountain and plunge my head up to my shoulders directly in the
water. I plop down to a lunch of tepid plums when a group of old men and women
signal me over. They are cooking homemade chorizo and fresh bread over a few
cinders on the hot stone street.

I wouldn’t mention these
coincidences except that they arrive almost expectedly—as if the suffering of
the day entitles me to stumble upon a cookout in town or, another time, a
family who takes me in. One extraordinary coincidence takes place with
comforting frequency. Outside of Azqueta, I can find no arrow at an
intersection of two country roads. Out of nowhere, an old Dodge Valiant appears
at the corner. A Spanish man hangs his head out the window. “Pilgrim,” he
advises, “continue straight ahead.”

Farther down the road, a
grassy path seems up to no good. Upon approach, a pleasant looking tree has a
rotting dog, wearing death’s sinister smile, wedged into the crotch of two
limbs. Farther on, an oily bog is inhabited by huge frogs that bark like wild
beasts. The landscape is otherwise deceptively barren and unwelcoming. The
locals grow white asparagus. This Spanish delicacy is achieved by piling up
dirt around each protruding plant so that the sun and the chlorophyll never
interact, yielding thick white juicy stalks. In the bars they are delicious,
but fields of them resemble rows of freshly filled mass graves. Again the path
diverges, and there is no arrow. A man on a bicycle pops into existence.
“Pilgrim,” he says, “take the road to the right,” and disappears.

By midafternoon, on a day
more grueling and punishingly hot than the last, I enter the village of Sansol, which seems to mean Holy Sun. There are no open bars or shops. One man
working on a truck suggests that if I’m looking for water or bread, I should
press on down the next vale and up the hill to Torres del Rio. The time for
siesta has arrived and slowed everything, including me, to a near standstill. I
can’t go on, but I have no choice. At the edge of Sansol, during a momentary
confusion about the road, a woman materializes on a tiny crumbling porch and
directs me to the shortest route.

Torres del Rio is misnamed.
It means Towers on the River. There is no river, and the only toweresque thing
is a stumpy church steeple. The squib in my guidebook says that this town is so
often short of water that the locals store it up during the winter for summer
use. I can find no fountain. It is three
p.m.,
and the heat and sun are crippling. No one stirs. I have not seen a human
being.

Everything in town is built
of the same yellow stone, so that the squat yellow houses rise up from the
yellow bricked streets like baked goods. The air makes a rasping noise, as if
it were scratching the hot stones. I see a Spanish widow, dressed in the
familiar black weeds, disappear around a corner. I dash to catch her, but with
the weight of my pack I turn to stare down an empty cul-de-sac. A dog occupying
the only smudge of shade beneath a stone bench snarls territorially when I
pass.

I grow paranoid in these
conditions. I sense that people are hiding behind their heavy wooden shades,
peeping at me through the cracks. A German tour bus—strange to see—idles along
one street, belching waves of heat. I gesture, but the driver motions me to
move on. From behind the tinted glass windows, a bright red Teutonic face
stares at me as she pulls herself into a coat. The Mercedes air-conditioning
must be too chilly.

At last I come upon a group
of kids, Torres del Rio’s version of the Wild Bunch. One boy is scarred
menacingly on his cheek. The girls are dressed sluttily, an attempt at heavy
metal rebellion. They sulkily direct me to the bar.

It is closed, of course. My
fingers drag on the glass door because the air-conditioning within has caused
lovely droplets of condensation to form on the door. I press the side of my
face to the glass. I shout for the owner. But in the scorched stillness and
stony acoustics of Torres del Rio, my ample voice is useless.

One of the miracles
chronicled in the old books speaks of five eleventh-century knights who swore
to accompany each other on the road. When one named Noriberto fell ill, a testy
debate ended with three of the knights walking on. Felix, the fourth knight,
stayed behind to care for the sick knight. After Noriberto had rested, he got
up to walk. Moments later Saint James appeared from the sky on horseback, swept
up the two noble pilgrims, and flew them to Santiago.

This story may sound like
harmless myth, a quaint hallucination from the collective mind of desperately
tired people. But in the unforgiving sun of the road, impossibility segues
easily into improbability, melts into uncanniness, and then registers as quite
likely. The pilgrim goes over the details of the story just one more time.
Exactly what was it Felix and Noriberto did to get a lift?

On foot, a pilgrim finds
that his mind can get so blurred by the stroke-inducing sunshine that in his
reverie he almost believes that he can control these coincidences. Wish hard
enough, and that horse will gallop right up. On several occasions I have eaten
all the food in my pack, opened it, and found that my stash has reappeared.
Empty bottles of water have filled themselves. Money has appeared when I had
none. On precisely those occasions when I was out of hard currency and hungry,
strangers have offered me meals without prompting. I could go on.

Standing outside the cold
door to the closed bar, I fish through my pockets, looking for money. I intend
to wait for the bar to open. Among my coins I feel a piece of paper. On it is
written, “Torres del Río. Casa Santa Bárbara.” A few days ago, somebody—a
pilgrim, a bartender, a monk, I honestly cannot remember—wrote down the address
of this residence because the owner offers help to pilgrims. A few more days in
this heat and I would be swearing that the piece of paper just appeared there.
Saint James.

The Wild Bunch directs me to
a street on the edge of town. Casa Santa Bárbara is a stunning mansion, a wide
boxy symmetry of two-story windows. I’ve struck it rich. A set of hedges frames
an impressive entrance of twin doors. Every inch of the yellow stone is
blanketed in luxuriously green ivy. Above the doors is a colorful tile
depicting Santa Bárbara, the patroness of military artillery. On the ground is
a curled wrought-iron boot scrape. I use it and then knock.

The door opens swiftly to
frame the extravagant figure of Ramón Sostres. “I am El Ramón,” he says. Elis hands and arms are outstretched like Il Duce’s, and his sense of drama makes his
simple Spanish translate more accurately: “I am the One and Only Ramón.” Which
indeed he is.

He is a tall man for this
part of Spain, with a head of hair that appears cut in a single slice of hedge
clippers. It stands wildly on end, as if he had managed to sleep on all of it.
But who can notice this man’s hair after looking him in the eye? The right one
caroms around the socket like a billiard ball, studying every inch of his
guest. The other is parked madly in the corner near his nose, a small wedge of
black. No pupil. Just one-half of a pair of crossed eyes. His laughter has the
staccato rhythms of Woody Woodpecker. Droplets of saliva leap from lip to lip
as he talks excitedly. He is dressed in thick hot flannel, bedroom slippers,
and several shirts and sweater. I stand dripping with perspiration and look at
him again. A
sweater.

The Amazing Ramón steps into
his foyer. It is a neatly tiled room, touched up by an Italian table and some
thin, modern looking chairs. I drop my pack. There is no air-conditioning on
anywhere. Yet, when Ramón taps open his interior door, a lovely soft breeze, as
if beckoned, sweeps around him. Soon this small room is as frigid as a cave. I
collapse gratefully onto a chair while Ramón buttons his sweater.

I needn’t call El Ramón a
miracle because he is more than happy to do that for me. This is the language
that he uses, occasionally punctuating my disbelief at what he says with, “El
Ramón is a miracle, is he not?” He is a former literature professor from Barcelona who moved into this house after priests left sixteen years ago. He assumed the
tradition of caring for pilgrims.

“I have kept as many as
fifty pilgrims in my house at one time. One pilgrim miraculously conceived
here,” he says, his right eye exploding in ribald ricochets. He makes an O with
his left hand and runs his right forefinger in and out of it to let me know
he’s aware of the miracle’s true source. The Amazing Ramón likes to talk a
little dirty.

“The baby was born in Santiago, and her mother called him Jacobeo—James. He began his life here! Right here!
Where you will stay!”

I have other things on my
mind just now, so I ask Ramón where the bathroom is located.

“Ramón is a pilgrim, too. My
backyard is large and welcoming,” he says. His eyeball does a three sixty, and
a mischievous grin unfurls across his face.

“No, no, you don’t
understand,” I venture as tactfully as possible. “I’m not in need of a bush or
a tree. My problem is more... serious.” A wincing tightens my features, and
language is unnecessary. A two-year-old would understand me.

Ramón disappears
momentarily, returns, and plunges a sheaf of waxy European toilet papers into
my chest. He points again to his backyard. I accept his gift and tell him that
I will give the matter some thought.

Ramón escorts me through the
foyer to the first door on the left, the pilgrims’ quarters. As my eyes adjust
to the penumbra of the extremely dim light, I find myself in a room illuminated
by a single low-watt bulb dangling on a fraying cord. The paint has not been
touched since this was someone’s elegant drawing room a century ago. The place
is empty except for a few discarded car seats, filthied with the hideous smudge
of too many sweaty backs and rear ends.

Ramón is far from being a
rich man. He shows me the washroom, a short walk to the rear. It is dank, with
a few spigots jutting too far out of blasted holes. The air spangles with
flecks of plaster floating in beams of light that radiate through cracks in the
walls. There is a cracked tub covered in grime, above which hangs a brittle
green garden hose. Water leaks from its crumbling mouth. Out of some residual
sense of courtesy, I wash my hands.

Ramón tells me to make
myself at home and disappears upstairs. I hear the crises of a soap opera blare
from a distant television. Those late afternoon agonies are recognizable in any
language. I hear Ramón clinking glasses and then the voice of a young woman. I
feel slightly embarrassed that I have imposed on him during a tryst.

I am exhausted from the day
and the heat. Back in the pilgrims’ room, I unroll my bedding, read half a
sentence in a book, and disappear. An hour of turbulent dreams ends when the
bad guys suspend me across a slim canyon. My head and feet bridge a
six-foot-wide abyss. Below me, certain death. Tied around my hips is a rope
from which dangles a great weight. I struggle to keep this heaviness from
tugging me downward to my death when I awaken in a cold sweat of extreme urgency.
I skittle about on all fours, searching for Ramon’s gift, and bolt out the
door.

In Ramon’s backyard, I
discover why his house could keep so cool in the cruel midday heat. Almost all
of this mansion, except for the elegant facade, has collapsed into itself. As I
venture farther and farther toward the rear, I stumble upon an old underground
bodega, whose ground cover has crashed through. The front rooms are as cold as
a cave because, in a sense, that is what they are, buried beneath stone and
beams and walls. I can see the hose from the bathroom snaking out a cardboarded
window and across piles of rubble to a well. The house has no plumbing. Outside
one second-story window, an antenna, strangely reminiscent of Ramón, pokes
ludicrously in all directions.