Off the Road (13 page)

“Four stars,” we insist.
“Hot and cold water. Four stars.”

José Marie launches one hand
straight into the air like a traffic cop. “No, no,” he says, and his hand
sweeps through the air with the practiced ease of a leggy model showing off a
car at a trade convention. Father José Marie finally winds up pointing to the
woman. “As long as there is one beautiful woman among us,” he says, “all the
other stars are dimmed. So there is only one.” In five languages, eyes roll.

Before having us to dinner,
Father José Marie would like us to attend church. We report to a small chapel
off the larger Romanesque church and take our place among a few scattered
chairs. Over the altar, early Renaissance paintings by no one particularly
famous have been cut out of their frames with a knife sometime earlier in this
century. Vandals long ago pried the goldworks from their mounts. Screws and
various sconces hang empty all around. Only the relics—glass tubes filled with
bones or locks of hair—remain unmolested.

José Marie steps from around
the altar and begins the service in Spanish. Paolo nudges me to point out three
Spanish widows who have appeared in the back of the chapel. All three are
dressed in solid black widow’s weeds, with thick wool stockings bunched at
their calves and black blocky shoes. Wherever in Spain a church opens, these
women appear as if by spontaneous generation. In this town where almost no one
lives, in a small service in a side chapel for pilgrims, they have found us.

“You only see them,” says
Paolo, “in the churches and at the
Once
windows.”
Once
is Spain’s national lottery.

I nod in agreement.

“Same odds, I suppose,” he
says.

Dinner is a collection of
plates—a plate of bread, of chorizo, of cheese, of ham, another of cheese. José
Marie sets out several bottles of a good red wine (this man knows how to eat
and drink) and then brings on an enormous pot of his garlic soup. This soup has
been the subject of much rumormongering on the road. The Frenchman has declared
it to be divine and mysterious. For the rest of the pilgrimage this soup is the
source of much speculation. The ingredients are simple—garlic, water, bread.
This combination may sound unappetizing or too simple, but it is delicious.
José Marie does something with it that no one has cajoled from him. I give it
my very best to slip the secret from him—sneaking into the kitchen, cunning
conversational gambits—but I get nowhere.

José Marie is witty tonight
and full of stories of pilgrims who are just ahead of us—a pilgrim with a
monkey, a divorced woman, a barefoot penniless priest, a pilgrim with a fatal
disease, a seventy-eight-year-old pilgrim, a pilgrim with a mule, two married
pilgrims with their two pilgrim children
and
a mule, a pilgrim on
horseback,
negro
pilgrims.

Before any of us knows it,
José Marie is launched into the long story of his rescue of San Juan de Ortega.
It is a morality play of sorts, with José Marie as the hero. He tells of the
day-to-day existence of the rescuer, begging for money. He rehabilitated the
church stone by stone. He has built the pilgrims’ quarters shower stall by
shower stall. It is ongoing and terribly expensive. His story even includes a
refran
—one
of the millions of Spanish axioms that pepper all conversation. (On the wall in
his kitchen appears Saint Teresa’s famous
refran:
“God can be found
among the pots and pans.”) José Marie tells us, “Los
palacios son despacios.”
More or less: “It takes a long time and a lot of patience to build a palace.”
José Marie fixes a bead on me.

“The streets are paved with
gold in America, no? Isn’t one of your car companies Catholic?”

I assume he has read that
the head of Chrysler is Lee Iacocca, and presumably he
is
Catholic. I
tell José Marie that while the streets are paved with gold all over America, in my neighborhood they are simple asphalt.

“I understand, I understand.
But you must go back and tell people about San Juan and what has been done
here. If every pilgrim spreads the word, then my work can continue.”

I haven’t a dime on me. It’s
Sunday, and I can’t cash a traveler’s check. But a few miles up the road, I
mail some money back to José Marie. At each pilgrim’s stop, I have donated
money. It only seems fair. And José Marie seems worthy of more than the usual
few pesetas.

Not according to the
Dutchmen or the Swiss man, though. Back at the pilgrims’ sitting room, they are
furious that the sacred moment of a pilgrim’s meal was defiled with
fund-raising. Perhaps as an American, I don’t blanch as quickly at the mention
of money.

“The Catholic Church is
rich,” says one of the Dutchmen, sneering. “Why do they want our money?”

The evening broadens into a
general bitch session about the road and eventually arrives at the subject of
Ramón Sostres. All these pilgrims have experienced the miracle of the don of
Torres del Rio. The Swiss man thinks Ramón is a menace and scares people. He
says he met half a dozen French girls on the road who stayed there one night,
but at three
a.m.
the whoops and cries from upstairs drove them to pack
up and hit the road. I try to defend Ramón. Sure, maybe he’s crazy, but he
offers pilgrims a cool place to rest and cold water to drink in a town that is
otherwise uninviting. He even provides bathroom facilities, after a fashion.
Where else but on the road to Santiago could a schizophrenic living in a
collapsing mansion find such a fitting use for his fading wits? This earns a
harumph from one of the Dutchmen. The Swiss man goes on, talking darkly of
multiple personalities, and hints at the possibilities of rape and serial
murder. This is the age we live in. He and his friends intend to draft a letter
to the Santiago organization that paints the arrows to ask that Ramón no longer
be suggested to future pilgrims.

The Swiss man is that kind
of fellow. He makes a grand show of piety, but he is a true debunker. While
we’re talking about the resurrected chickens of Santo Domingo, he assures us
that the miracle is a cheap carnival trick. Here’s how it’s done: Pour a capful
of some tasteless alcohol such as vodka into your palm. Feed it to the chicken,
which will consume practically anything. The effect will be anesthetic,
knocking the bird out for a while. Then pluck the feathers from the bird,
exposing his skin. Rub that down with some condiment—cinnamon works best—so
that he appears to look cooked. Set him on a plate surrounded by garnishes so
that with his limp head and dangling claws, he looks like an aristocrat’s lunch.
At the precise moment when the audience is listening to your patter about the
bird, slowly push a small saucer of vinegar or ammonia near the chicken’s beak.
This will arouse the bird and awaken him to the painful fact that he is without
feathers. You can count on him to dance and crow with astonishment.

When I had arrived at Santo
Domingo de la Calzada, I entered the church and looked up to see the continuing
hilarity of this miracle. In the transept of the church set above the door is
nothing more ludicrous and inappropriate than a chicken coop, gilded with rich
ornament. Inside are two scurrying fowl, clucking at passersby and pecking
noisily for a kernel of food. Any local will tell you that the chickens you see
inside the church today are the direct descendents of the original miraculous
pair. During mass, the priest often has to shout his sacred words so the
congregation can hear above the cock-a-doodle-doos screeching from this holy
little barn. According to legend, only a pilgrim can feed these chickens. In
the winter months, when pilgrims are scarce, it is said that one of the old
folks in town has to dress in traditional pilgrim’s clothes to get them to eat.

Miracles are “a reminder of
the bounds imposed on the mind by habit,” according to St. Augustine’s
biographer. In the seven hundred years since those chickens danced, this single
amusing act has defined and carried away this town. Outside the church, in the
public square, the local kids play. When they see a pilgrim, they sing an old
song that has only two rhyming lines.
“Santo Domingo de la Calzada, donde
cantó la gallina después de asada."
It means, “Saint Dominick of the
Highway, where the hen sang after being roasted.” Sort of loses its playfulness
in translation.

A
fter a month of walking, a
pilgrim loses his mind—not in the psychiatric sense, but like an obsolete and
forgotten appliance. Think of an eight-track tape player permanently misplaced
in the cellar, but
you know it’s there, so that one day, should
you ever need it, you can always go down there and retrieve it.
When I
walk, I stare at the ground sliding beneath my feet, and I am speechless, lost
in a hot, pulsing haze. Long-distance athletes speak of a runner’s nirvana—a
euphoric state achieved in the proximity of utter exhaustion. The pilgrim has
his equivalent, only it doesn’t look as graceful. Runners have their knees
pumping, head up, chest out, arms chugging. To look me in the eye, you’d see
the milky cataracts of an aged ox strapped into his traces, lugging his burden.

I’ve spent entire afternoons
slogging through a trench cut so deep into a wheat field that I am invisible to
all except the birds flying directly overhead. Central Spain is nothing but
wheat fields, vast parcels of countryside devoted to nothing but wheat, and
wheat, it seems, finds me fetching. Mosquitoes inexplicably prefer some people
over others. I’ve never had this problem with insects because apparently I am
spoken for by the plant kingdom. I am beloved by wheat. Their stalks bend
toward me in the wind, anxious to propel their seed my way. They mistake me for
rich topsoil (not so surprising after a month of pilgrimage) or simply a large
strip of ruddy Velcro. Wheat burrs assault me from all directions, hitting me
in the face, once swiftly—whoa —plugging up a nostril. I frequently pull them
out of my ear. They gather into harvest decorations in my hair. They bury
themselves in the wrinkles of my filthy flaccid clothes. After a morning’s
walk, my legs and socks are dense congregations of future generations of wheat.

When the road occasionally
veers out of the wheat fields and overlaps with a real highway, I seem
invisible, occupying a sphere all my own. The cars zoom by so fast, I am nothing
more than a blur to them, as they are to me. At the rate a car travels, I
cannot make out a face. Neither of us can manage a hello or a polite tilt of
the head. I have left that dimension. My only acquaintances are the poor
farmers puttering on tractors or families piled onto an old hay wagon drawn by
mules. These people see me and always greet me kindly. I am one of them.

One morning an old man on a
moped buzzes by me. After he passes, I hear the sputtering cough of a tiny
engine gearing down and turning. He pulls up alongside me and removes a
handmade cigarette from the torn pocket of an old white shirt, brown at the
seams. He is small and frail with a transparent face and a wheeze like a
child’s rattle. He smokes constantly as he speaks in the slack accents of a
rural man. If the deep drawl of inland South Carolina has a counterpart in Spain, it’s in the nearly indecipherable all-vowel nosespeak of this man.

“You must be careful up
ahead,” he advises.

“Careful?”

“There is much danger up
ahead.”

“Danger?”

“Yes, and great torments and
evil.”

In Spanish the words ring
medieval.
“Hay tormentas y mal tiempos.”
Great, I am thinking. At last,
some action.

“Will I encounter the
tormentas
soon?”

“Yes, a day’s walk from
here, when you come to the plains of Castille.”

“What should I do?”

“You should just be ready. I
don’t know what pilgrims do. Perhaps you shouldn’t walk.”

“Are the plains always full
of torments and suffering?”

“No, but when it comes, it’s
bad,” says my thin mystic.

“How do you know this?” I
ask.

He pauses, a bit sad. “I saw
it on television.”

As my shaman putters off, I
marvel at this surreal answer, a charming mix of folklore and technology. In
the mindless fog of pilgrim’s nirvana, it is a good hour before I am moved to
open my dictionary and learn that these words mean “rainstorm” and “bad
weather.” My shaman was quoting the TV weatherman.

Every pilgrim claims a
specific saint to serve as a guardian spirit. Saint Groucho of Marx, watch over
me.

The only relief from the
wheat field is a tiny village named Hornillos. It means “Little Stoves” and was
founded in 1156 to provide pilgrims with a last meal before walking into the
vast emptiness of the Castilian plains. Now there is nothing left here for the
pilgrim except a tilted shed beside the church, so infested with flies that I
skip my daily siesta and continue to the edge of town. Three widows, black with
elaborate lace, sit on a bench in the pose of eternal silence. They call out:
“Un
abrazo por Santiago
.” A hug for Saint James.

I nod my head to acknowledge
them and their request.

“Beware of wolves,” says
one.

“Wolves?”

“On the plains, there are
wolves,” says another.

“Wolves?”

“Sharpen your stick,” she
says.

“Wolves?”

“A hug for Saint James, eh?”
says the last widow.

These words sound eulogistic.

The famous plains of
Castille are misnamed. They should be called the plateaus. A few miles outside
Hornillos, the road zigzags up a fierce incline until arriving to a level lip.
Ascending those last few feet is exhilarating. The cramped acreage of the bottomland
opens to an infinite vista of—wheat. Wheat and more wheat, as far as the eye
can see. Dorothy’s poppy fields on the outskirts of Oz hold nothing to this
view. I have never seen this much of the planet in one take.

I had been warned about the
plains, not only by the old man, but by others who said that they were
frightening and hot. There are no towns up here. No bars. No shed. Not even
shade. The farmers drive here in their tractors to tend their wheat fields, and
the occasional shepherd visits his flock. Otherwise, there is no one.

No matter how far I walk,
the horizon unwinds like a scroll, laying out more wheat fields. But the wheat
up here is different. It is sickly thin and almost translucent up close, no
more than eighteen inches high, struggling amid tough clods and rocks the size
of fists. The larger rocks and boulders have been plucked out, probably
centuries ago, and gathered into unintended cairns. They are blanched an
unnatural white and pitted with hollows by centuries of wind blasts and hot
sun, like monuments of skulls.

The afternoon moves slowly
and seems ripe with portents and signs. Up ahead a dark figure appears on the
horizon, clad in black from head to toe. As it approaches, I start to worry a
little. I
am
out here all alone. I fondle my Swiss Army knife, always in
my left hip pocket like a talisman. Maybe it’s one of the highwaymen or
blackguards so often mentioned in the old books.

Pilgrim testimonies
frequently speak of the terror of the Castilian plains. Even by medieval standards
they were considered unnaturally barren and inhabited by strange beasts. In
April 1670, an Italian pilgrim named Domenico Laffi left Bologna for Santiago. He saw many odd things along the way; but here, on the plains of Castille,
according to his diary, he saw a pilgrim attacked and eaten alive by a swarm of
grasshoppers.

As the ebony figure gets
closer, the wind picks up and blows its black skirts from side to side. But
what is it carrying? An eight-foot pole with a long crescent blade. This is not
a hallucination, but definitely a tall man in a black robe carrying a scythe of
exaggerated proportions, a badly cast Mr. Death from a high school drama.

As I get closer to him, it
is clear that he is not on the road, but far off to the right, cutting or weeding
the wheat. His large hood envelopes his face. He shouts something
unintelligible at me. Maybe it was hello. Maybe it was a request for a hug of
Saint James. It sounds oddly urgent. Another warning, perhaps? I wave grandly
and pass on.

The narrow channel of dust
that scores these wheat fields is so dry that the ground has cracked open in
places. Why hadn’t I noticed these before? Did these fissures yawn open a few
moments ago? These are not minor cracks, the kind I would expect on a dry road
burned by the sun. No, these are crevices. I could trip on one. My gaze goes
downward, oxen-eyed and cautious.

Now, I am a little scared, I
will admit. In South Carolina, they call it getting snakes on the brain: You’re
walking in the woods, having a dandy time, and suddenly you hear something
rustle in the bushes. For the rest of the day, any slight movement and you jerk
back in panic. That’s having snakes on the brain. I got them on a wide-open
plain, and suddenly it’s crowded up here —wolves, carnivorous grasshoppers,
serial-murdering scythe-toting shepherds, poltergeists, and cracks open to
hell.

I also don’t want to look up
because I have seen the clouds rolling in. Big, glorious, Hollywood clouds.
These are Steven Spielberg props—cottony bales that hang so low over these
plains, I imagine I could reach up on tiptoe and finger their dark, feathery
bottoms. Some remnant of childhood superstition keeps my eyes on the ground. To
look up would encourage them to break open and soak me with rain.

About ten feet in front of
me, a small brown bird wings its way out of the clouds and falls lifelessly on
the road in front of me.

Oh, come on.

I am jabbering aimlessly to
myself. I have sung every song and recited every poem I know. Movies that I
have visually memorized,
Diner
for example, have played from beginning
to end out here in the whistling expanse of the spacious Castilian Gigantoplex.
A few weeks ago the wind bore only the squeal of a phantom car. That was then;
today it’s a hallucinatory open house. I hear singing in the wind: four-part
harmonies of Renaissance madrigals, shopping mall renditions of Christmas
carols, all the top-forty hits fried onto my synapses before I left (the
opening mandolin riff of REM’s “Losing My Religion” perversely floats up every
ten minutes like a human-rights violation). I hear arguments and
conversations—my mother frets again about my quitting my job, Madame Debril
offers her apologies, an old girlfriend confesses she can’t live without me.
It’s an auditory Rorschach out here.

The distant clouds have
grumbled a few times. I try not to listen to what they have to say. The horizon
never changes—a thin black line drawn between the brown wheat and darkening
clouds ahead. From time to time the fields betray a slight upward incline. As I
make my way up, I hope to see a gorge or valley appear on the other side, maybe
even take in the warm sight of buildings. But one mild hump leads only to
another, more wheat, more stones. In the middle of this new field, three dogs
scour and sniff in the distance. I open my pocket knife and sharpen the point
of my stick.

Pilgrims don’t like dogs. At
the museum of Roncesvalles, the one icon I remember most vividly was a wooden
bas-relief of a pilgrim being devoured by five or six dogs. One greyhound was
stretched the entire length of the pilgrim’s height, his paws set on the poor
man’s shoulders and his maw ready to sink its teeth into his face. The
pilgrim’s expression of primal horror was finely carved and particularly
memorable.

A pilgrim gets to know dogs
pretty well after a while. Dogs are everywhere in Spain. Trained ones work with
the shepherds to control flocks of sheep. Each yard has a savage dog chained to
a stake. Every small town is overrun with skinny strays. They snake around the
corners of buildings and nose up the alleys, prowling for scraps. Tailless cats
with slack bellies scramble in their wake.

In America, dogs are domesticated. In Spain, even yard dogs are wild to some degree. Animal
training is not how a Spanish pet owner spends his time. People are expected to
learn how to deal with dogs, not the other way around. Pilgrims learn this in a
jiffy.

Dogs generally keep their
distance. They are pack animals and aren’t particularly brave. I know the
timbre of their bark and what it means. A pilgrim learns to speak the idiom of
a dog’s bark as fluently as a parent comes to know the meaning of a child’s
cry—the squall of wounded pride, the chugging yelp of a skinned knee, and the
sickening tocsin of bloody pain.

Dog’s barks are similar, and
one can understand this language. A healthy throated sound, deep in the bass
register, is a statement of territory. It is a declarative sentence and nothing
more. As long as the pilgrim maintains his pace on the road, he hasn’t much to
fear. But there are other grammars. Skinny dogs, desperate from hunger, can let
rip with a fierce scraping sound. In the syntax of the wild, these are the
irregular conjugations. Be very afraid.