Off the Road (18 page)

“Willie,” I say before he
can begin, “do you see this empty field?” He nods, and I tell him this is one
of the most important places on the road. In the early 1500s this area was
barren, inhabited only by poor, desperate shepherds. One of them was named
Alvar Simón Gómez Fernández. One day he saw the Virgin Mary, who asked him to
throw a stone as far as he could and to build a church there. The locals grew
very excited at this news, and funds poured in from all over the region.
Apparitions so often preceded a church raising in those times, they effectively
constituted a free building program. Here, this burst of enthusiasm created an
entire town, appropriately named the Virgin of the Road. The shepherd Simón was
among the attractions for a while, but eventually he was edged out. This
pilgrim’s stop was so profitable that lawsuits between the clerical and secular
powers were filed and counterfiled for centuries. When Napoleon’s armies passed
through here in the nineteenth century, the situation was resolved when
soldiers razed the pilgrim complex, reducing it once again to this empty field
in the heart of town.

Willie is very excited by
this story. He has forgotten the reason he wanted to talk to me. He charges
back into the van and reappears with his tripod and videocamera. He sets up at
the fence, poking his lens through the wrought-iron slots. He revs up his
camera and slowly pans from left to right, recording the static image of an
empty field. The wind is so slight this morning that even the brown weeds do
not stir.

Down the way, the weary
Claudy, Rick, and Karl are hanging on to the fence, their faces pressed into
the slots like children. I step over beside them. We all stare at the empty
field.

“See, I told you, Willie’s a
fucking idiot,” Claudy informs me.

“Claudy, in my country, one
of the first great philosophers any child encounters is named Bugs Bunny. In
such moments, he would customarily reflect, ‘What an Eskimo Pie-head.’ ”

By the end of the day, a
crowd of pilgrims pulls into Villadangos del Páramo, a place whose name dates
to a time of uncommon frankness. It literally means “Little Village on a Bleak
Plateau.” The modern economy has slightly redeemed Villadangos. The European Economic Community wants to reclaim the road’s old meaning of European unity and
has spent money making the road attractive in places. Here, a freshly built EEC
hostel has separate rooms with stiff bunks, a complete kitchen, clean
bathrooms, hot and cold running water, and an enormous dining area with tables
and chairs. The place is cleaned every morning by a hired staff member. The
facilities are more luxurious than any of the houses surrounding it.

It is clear that lots of
pilgrims have decided to stay here because of the accommodations. I meet two
beautiful Spanish girls in their twenties. There are several young men from France and Spain on bicycles (some of whom are traveling to Santiago to avoid the compulsory draft;
the road calls for many reasons). There is a Welsh family—an out-of-work
veterinarian named Wyn, his wife, Val, and their two boys, Adam and Gregg, ages
ten and eleven. They are a popular sight since Wyn bought a mule after crossing
the Pyrenees. The mule’s name is Peregrino, Spanish for “Pilgrim.” He bears a
huge straw sack with wide berths on either side of his ample belly in which the
Welsh carry their goods.

The good feelings of the
place provoke Claudy to suggest that the pilgrims all cook a meal together. A
chain of language is used to dispense the duties. Claudy speaks Flemish so he
can talk to his people. I can speak Spanish, so I communicate with the
Spaniards, whose knowledge of French brings the crowd full circle. A menu is
drawn up. Claudy will cook a stew. I am contributing a zucchini casserole. Val
will cook a corn dish. The French boys are dispatched to buy wine. Claudy and I
are left to scrounge up cooking pots and knives.

I suggest we buy some, which
Claudy dismisses as “typical fucking American.” He has other ideas. He asks Val
if he can borrow the boys, and the four of us depart the hostel. Claudy
approaches a decent house and rings the doorbell. A middle-aged mother appears.
Claudy asks me to tell her in Spanish that we are poor pilgrims walking to Santiago without any money. This con is beyond me, and while the lady stands in her
doorway, smiling, Claudy is shouting at me to speak. I introduce ourselves as
pilgrims, merely pilgrims. But I can see that Claudy has no patience with my
refined sense of honesty. He jumps into the conversation with his fractured
Spanish, but it is enough. He says we are traveling with these young boys who
haven’t eaten all day. We are tired, but we don’t come to beg. We have bought
the food with the few remaining pesetas we have. But we lack the pots and pans,
forks and knives, with which to eat. Santiago directed us to this house, he
says, because he knew that a good person lives here. All we ask, Claudy adds,
is that you trust us to borrow some equipment until tomorrow morning. We are
pilgrims, honest and true. You can count on us.

It’s an enviable
performance—and to back it up is the sight of us standing there. A day of
walking and sweating has reduced each of us to the image of pilgrim poster
boys. There are smears of dirt on our heads and arms. Our legs are covered in
scratches. We stink, and each of us has a rat’s nest for hair.

Claudy’s eyes well up with
tears. The boys, cunning pilgrims themselves, put on the faces of quiet
cherubic suffering. I’m no fool. I complete the tableau and allow my features
to sag into a Viking’s pieta. The woman clutches her hands over her chest and
cries out Saint James’s name. A few minutes later she returns with a bag of her
best gear: pots, pans, forks and knives, plates and glasses, napkins.

Claudy says thank you in the
charming superlative Spanish offers.
Muchíssimas gracias.
He says it a
dozen times with the unctuous humility of a beggar. The mother encourages us to
have a good night and closes the door. Back at the hostel, the boys tell this
story repeatedly to anyone who will listen. Claudy, everyone says proudly, is a
true pilgrim.

The hostel is buzzing with
good feelings. A potluck dinner brings out the best in everyone. Food and wine
abound. People are moving in and out, cooking meals, getting cleaned up for the
big dinner. Everyone, of course, except Willie. He has parked his camper on a
planted field behind the hostel, which we can see through a plate-glass window.
Claudy volunteers to observe, as we all have, that a planted field probably
indicates that someone has tilled and planted it. No doubt the owner is not too
happy about having a multiton mobile home parked on his future lettuce. Willie
dismisses Claudy’s advice as ignorant and unnecessary.

The little tension of this
moment produces one of the more bizarre events of the night. Willie and his
wife sense the hostility over the parking space, and they resent Rick and
Karl’s chumminess with everyone in the room. So they hook up their camper to
the hostel’s electricity and prepare a separate meal a good bit more aromatic
than the peasant fare we cook. While we have shoved together three long
cafeteria tables to form a banquet table, Willie has dragged a small table off
to the side, set with five places.

“You see?” Claudy says.
“This is how he operates. He won’t let Rick and Karl eat with us. The fifth
place is for me. Willie knows he can’t insult me, or he will hurt his
relationship with Rick. This table is a challenge to Rick and Karl. I say,
‘Fuck him.’ ”

When the dinners are ready,
Rick and Karl actually sit on two chairs angled perfectly between the two
tables. They have places at both. And plates at both. And meals at both. When I
catch Rick’s eye, I tell him King Solomon would be proud. “I am a politician,”
he confesses. “What can I do?”

During dinner the door slams
open, and the owner of the lettuce patch storms into the main room in a rage.
He instinctively homes in on the Spanish speakers, the two girls. They are
baffled. I hasten to intervene, explaining to the girls and the lettuce man
that all of us complained to the owner of the caravan about his choice of
parking space, but he ignored us. I (back in first grade again) point to
Willie: He did it, sir.

Willie is furious that I
have fingered him. (What else could I do?) He wants to yell at me, but fury,
like humor, is among the last things learned in a foreign language. His English
is just not up to the job. So he yells at Claudy in Flemish. He shrieks that
Claudy is somehow responsible for ratting to the lettuce man. Willie shoves
Claudy against the wall. So I jump up and run over. I’m ready to pound this guy
into the ground, and I
want
to slug him. I never beat up anybody in
first grade, quite the opposite. But now I’m big, and I’ve been carrying a pack
for a month.

But Claudy waves me off. He
stands rigid, insulting the filmmaker with what sounds like really delicious
Flemish obscenities. Rick and Karl freeze, as does the whole room. The two men
bump chests and shout. It is a splendid pas de deux, the one perfected by
baseball umpires and team managers. Somehow we all know that no fight will
break out. From the sidelines, suddenly, it strikes all of us as funny. So we
laugh, which pitches Willie into a profound sense of humiliation. He plunges
his hand into his crotch, retrieves his keys, and leaves the building at once.

We quietly listen to the
sound of the caravan pulling away from the building. “It’s Saint James,” Rick
crows. After a while, Willie returns and takes his seat with his wife at the
other table. They eat in fierce silence for the rest of the evening. Rick and
Karl maintain their spot in the DMZ, but everyone knows where their hearts are.

Our table, meanwhile, is a
United Nations gabfest. Jokes and stories are told, translated, retold, and translated
once again. Probably the entire night’s conversation could be transcribed on
two sheets of note paper. But the joy of talking and screaming, conquering the
language barrier, all aided by magnums of wine, has put us in a fine spirit. We
are pilgrims. And Willie’s presence, the crass filmmaker lacking in the natural
humility that we learn on foot, only encourages our bonhomie and spices it with
a tasty dash of schadenfreude.

As we get more acquainted, I
notice that we have developed new names. They distinguish us as pilgrims rather
than as people. I am known as the Red American Who Speaks Spanish. The movie
stars break down into the Funny Flemish One (Claudy), the Pilgrim with the Long
Grey Beard (Rick), and the Quiet Flemish Man (Karl). The Welsh are known as the
English Family with the Mule. And the two Spanish girls are simply the
Beautiful Spanish Girls. We all sense that tomorrow we will probably split up
again, and what good will our other names do? “Jack” means nothing here. “The
Red American Who Speaks Spanish” defines me as a pilgrim, a name that other
pilgrims will recognize.

Not long afterward we hear
the door at the far end of the hostel open. Unoiled wheels squeak up the hall.
From the darkened corridor appears the Italian Man. He approaches the table as
all of us fall into a knowing silence. It seems everyone except the Beautiful
Spanish Girls has had an encounter with the Italian Man.

“Bueno nochesa, pelerin. Un
día del ambulatore termina with the food de la mesa. Que buenos peregrinas.”

No one says a word. Everyone
willfully ignores him. And of course the Italian Man is as innocent as an
infant of the cold shoulder from this crowd. This is how
everyone
treats
him. He’s the kid with the “Kick Me” sign pinned to his backside who never
figures it out.

“Cuanta peregrinas are
here?”
He
counts us all out loud.
“Eins, zwei, tres, quatro, cinq, siete, eight.”

The beautiful Spanish Girls
look to me in confusion. I give them a quick explanation of his peculiar
speaking habits, and they laugh. They haven’t known him long enough to sense
the cruelty.

The entire day has been a
series of flashbacks to childhood. I think of Scott Dorran and Sidney
Carpenter, two kids who were brutalized in my grade school. I believe I joined
the mob in ridicule. Perhaps I led it. And what about the time Tim Trouche, my
best friend, got the crap beat out of him by Herb Butler? The crowd cried for
blood in the recess yard just before homeroom. I stood silently, and the crowd
got what it wanted.

The road invites its
pilgrims to begin again—lifting the traveler from numbing familiarity and
dropping him into new circumstances. Being a pilgrim allows all that, yet how
strange and thrilling it feels.

“Peregrino italiano.”
I stand up to speak his
language.
“Welkommen, bien venue, welcome.”
The words come easy and tug
mightily at the heart of our resident lounge lizard. Claudy catches the hint.
He perks up and begins to sing—Liza Minnelli blown through the pipes of Steve
Lawrence. A French boy fetches another wineglass, and the others clear a place
at the table for the Italian Man.

T
hey overturn and desecrate
our altars,” said Pope Urban II about the Moslem problem in the Holy Land. “They will take a Christian, cut open his stomach, and tie his intestine to a
stake; then, stabbing at him with a spear, they will make him run until he
pulls out his own
entrails and falls dead to the ground.” The day
was November 28, 1095. A few years later the People’s Crusade
set off for Jerusalem.

The battles did not go well
for the Christians at first. One siege of a Moslem castle left the warriors
stranded far from a water supply. After a week, wrote one chronicler, the men
“were so terribly afflicted by thirst that they bled their horses and asses and
drank the blood; others let down belts and cloths into a sewer and squeezed the
liquid into their mouths; others passed water into one another’s cupped hands
and drank; others dug up damp earth and lay down on their backs, piling the
earth upon their chests.” They surrendered. The healthy were sold into slavery;
the rest were executed.

The Christians learned from
their new enemies. In a subsequent battle, an army of infidels rushed from
their fortress into a field of Christians. The decapitations were numerous, and
the Christians tested an innovative way to dampen enemy morale. They placed
each head in a sling and flung it over the fortress wall.

A year later the breaching
of the walls of Jerusalem ended in the slaughter of seventy thousand Moslems.
“If you would hear how we treated our enemies at Jerusalem,” wrote one jubilant
Christian, “know that in the portico of Solomon and in the Temple our men rode
through the unclean blood of the Saracens, which came up to the knees of their
horses.” But Urban never heard the good news. Two weeks after his original
speech, he died, uncertain that his words would come to anything.

Nine of the knights who had
distinguished themselves in the fighting banded together in Jerusalem. They
took as their headquarters a building near the Dome of the Rock, the very
location, it is said, of the temple of Solomon. They assumed the holy duty of
protecting pilgrims who would certainly come to Jerusalem now that it was safe.
Because they saw their job as an essentially religious exercise, these knights
did something unheard of. They took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience,
assuming the attitude of monks. At this time, knights were not romantic
warriors but vulgar mercenaries, mistrusted by all, especially Rome. The nine monks of Jerusalem were different and the church seized the opportunity to
marry the righteousness of the clergy with the brutal force of an army. The
earliest emblem of these knights is a seal showing two men on a single horse, a
symbol of their poverty and humiliation. They took a name, the Poor
Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ, or the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, shortened to the Knights Templar.

Within seventy years their
numbers swelled and the Templars became the most powerful force in the Mediterranean. Their reputation slowly assumed an esoteric character, protectors of the Holy Land and possessors of great mysteries. Money and land grants flowed generously into
their coffers. Their fortresses were flung from the Holy Land to Scotland in the north and from Hungary in the east to Portugal on the Atlantic coast. The Knights
Templar built one of their most impressive and enigmatic constructions in Ponferrada, Spain, on the road to Santiago.

León is a common place for
pilgrims to begin the road, and it’s been three days since my new acquaintances
and I left there. Where I had once walked for weeks without seeing a pilgrim, I
now cannot pass an hour. Ahead, on a rising hill, a creeping fleck of yellow
is, I know, a pilgrim in a rain slicker. Behind me are dozens of pilgrims. We
try to walk together at times, but it never works out. The pace and timbre of
one’s step on a long haul has a unique quality, like a fingerprint. Each of us
moves at our own speed and in our own style. For a short distance we can walk
in sync, but after a while the nuances cause problems. And when the
conversation runs dry, companion pilgrims find themselves disengaging like slow
boxcars, one pulling away from the other. This morning the chilly mists of the
hilly pastures of León province have stretched us across the landscape, an
inept dragging conga line. I have come to know so many of them, many more than
I met in León or Villadangos. We try to stay in touch. In each shelter are
notebooks. We send messages to each other via these books or send inquiries
through other pilgrims. The word on the road this week is to hold up late this
afternoon at a little town called Rabanal, reputed to have a fine hostel.

The pilgrims in their
ponchos and bright shirts provide the only primary tones in this land, where
everything is a variation on the color of manure. The sepia buildings, the
muddy street, the swarthy locals, all seem to have risen chthonically from the
hills of soil and dung.

At Santa Catalina de Samoza,
a squat man steps from a chatting knot of three friends into the sodden street.
Half his face is an enormous purple swag the size of a handbag. The dewlap, a
monstrous sagging deformity, pulls at his eyes and nose. His upper lip is a
blooded fist. No pulling or tugging can rearrange this man’s face into any
expression other than constant sorrow. One of his friends has a dead left arm,
the hand unnaturally flat. His fingers are thin and delicate in their
callouslessness. He takes up a second position in the street with a light,
sensual squish in the mud. His left arm is swaying, perhaps with the breeze.
They assume the hip-lock position of toughs, and at first I am afraid. But this
is not New York, or even the outskirts of León. The handbag snaps open; a crazy
curvaceous hollow sounds the thick grunt of rural Spanish.

“Good day, pilgrim,” he
says.

I was always taught never to
stare at a deformity. I try to look this man in the eye. But he effectively has
only one; the other is sheathed in wattle. I can’t help myself. His face is
unbelievable. I have to study it. Rogue teeth sprout from huge exposed
formations of gum and frame a jagged cavern with a tiny black tongue, a
pelican’s gullet. Yet I recognize the semblance of a smile.

The tradition of welcoming
pilgrims is a thousand years old in these parts of Spain. The legendary
southern hospitality of my home region in America is in its infancy by
comparison. My new acquaintance and his friends must greet a pilgrim each hour
at this time of the year.

“Have you tried our chorizo?”
says the man with the dead arm.

Every region of Spain boasts homemade chorizo, the Spanish sausage, and of course every region’s is the
best. One of the men points to an arrow painted on a stone, indicating the
direction of the town restaurant and the local sausage.

“And how about your own
chorizo!” shouts the man of constant sorrow. His mouth opens tremendously and
exudes a temblor of a laugh. He grabs the cloth of his crotch and bunches it up
in his fist. He pulls manfully at himself.

“The pilgrim girls!” says
one of the men in the doorway.

“We have seen them.”

“We have talked to them!”

“Girls, girls, the most
precious girls! Pilgrim girls!”

I recite the old Spanish
proverb about the road—Go a pilgrim, return a whore—because, I don’t know, to
keep the conversation going.

“Whores!” they all shout at
once. Like grotesques from the canvases of Goya, the men stump and strut. One
man bends over, his hands on his knees, and pries open his mouth to hiss.

Pilgrims may be sacred folk,
walking reminders of a great journey, to
some.
But we are many things,
depending on where we are. In León we might be potential mugging victims. Each
town seems to have its own attitude. Here, as in many small towns, we are the
stuff of prurient daydreams—itinerant men and women, unbound from centuries of
strict Catholic rule. Footloose and liberal. Far from the stern eye of mother
and father. Young men and women in shorts, loosely fitted blouses, hair
unkempt. Careless. Washing in common restrooms. Sleeping in gangs on the floors.
Alone in the pastures. Our raspy breathing may be not the result of our labor,
but a hint of our desire. Ignominious. Wanton. Ah, the mystery of pilgrims.
Whores.

Rabanal is another town like
the last, except that the Confraternity of Saint James, a British group of
loyal Santiago alumni, has recently renovated a luxurious and gleaming hostel.
The bedroom has forty bunks, all of which will be filled tonight. Throughout
the afternoon, pilgrims arrive in a continual parade of activity. Little
Rabanal, as somnolent as every hamlet on this stretch of the road, suddenly
resembles the busy chaos of a frontier town. Bikers brake at the gate. The
Welsh family arrive with their mule. Inside, the bathroom is crowded with men
and women bent over sinks of gray water, grinding their socks. The clotheslines
and banisters display shorts and shirts and, unabashedly, bras and underpants
of every description. The entire village is bustling with pilgrims, most of
whom I recognize. By late sunset Rabanal’s two restaurants are jammed with
tables burdened by wine, huge plates of lamb and steak, potatoes and eggs, and
lively talk.

Allegiances and
acquaintances come and go. Friendships are made and broken, all in the course
of a day or a casual remark. Very few of our discussions concern the touchy
subject of why each of us is walking the road. It almost seems too private.

In the bedroom, later that
evening, I unroll my bag on a bunk. The Flemish are here, and there is Willem,
and the old Dutch couple from León. The Beautiful Spanish Girls are just next
to me. The friendly hellos are interrupted by the old Dutch man, who shouts to
the girls in broken Spanish: “There is the Red American you were asking after,
eh?” He grins and winks. The Spanish girls blush and turn away, a demur so mannered
I can’t imagine it outside a nineteenth-century novel. The Dutchman shoots a
brash thumbs-up in my direction and clicks his tongue on the side of his cheek.
He means well, but however naively, he doesn’t understand the indelicacy of his
remark. The Spanish girls never speak to me again.

Sleeping in a room of nearly
forty exhausted travelers is not easy. When the lights go out at eleven, the
sound sleepers, about half the room, collapse into a zany chorus of snores. The
rest of the pilgrims are giggling like naughty schoolchildren—the girls, the
younger men, the bicyclists, me. The laughter wakes up some of the grouchy men,
who shush the crowd, provoking more laughter, waking up more. More shushing.
More snoring. More laughter, until the hardship of the day wears down the
giddiest and carries us all off to oblivion. We need our sleep. Tomorrow is a
thirty-one-kilometer walk to a famous city, Ponferrada, known for the ruins of
an enormous fortress built by the Knights Templar.

The new marriage of monkish
piety and holy war brutality developing among the twelfth-century crusaders
might have made sense in the bloody sands of Jerusalem. Back home, though, such
arguments violated fundamental precepts. The words
Thou shalt not kill
don’t suggest many loopholes unless you’re Bernard de Clairvaux. His mother
knew she would bear a great orator when she dreamed she bore a barking dog. As
a young man, Bernard had founded the Cistercian order, dedicated to fierce
poverty in a desolate sinkhole of French earth, the Vale of Absinth.

Bernard began his defense of
the Knights Templar at a conference in Troyes on January 13, 1128. The opponent
to this new idea was Jean, bishop of Orléans. He was a notorious sycophant of
the king, but there were other rumors. One scribe called him a “public dancer,”
and another cast aside euphemism, condemning him as a “succubus and a
sodomite.” His nickname among the clergy was “Flora.” His presence at the
proceedings may, in fact, have helped.

Bernard de Clairvaux refined
his arguments, eventually putting them in a letter entitled “In Praise of the
New Knighthood.” By killing infidels, he argued, the Knights Templar were doing
nothing wrong because “either dealing out death or dying, then for Christ’s
sake, contains nothing criminal but rather merits glorious reward.” In this
way, the Templar “serves his own interests in dying, and Christ’s in killing!”
Which is not murder because “when he kills a malefactor this is not homicide
but malicide, and he is accounted Christ’s legal executioner against
evildoers.”

Bernard’s words carried the
day. The intoxicating combination of monkish righteousness and military
ferocity made the knights extremely popular. They assumed the uniform of monks,
dressed in white to display their chastity. The code of conduct, or Rule, of
the Templars was tough and manly (a feature that would later haunt them). It
prohibited the company of women because it is “a perilous thing, for through
them the ancient demon denied us the right to live in Paradise.” The Rule
stated that “none of you should presume to kiss a woman, neither widow, nor
maiden, nor mother, nor sister, nor aunt, nor any other woman; therefore the
knights of Christ must always flee from women’s kisses.” Their weapons were
painted basic black. Their hair would be cut short, but they grew thick, bushy
beards. Violators of the code were punished brutally. An errant knight was
forced to eat his meals directly off the floor, and he was forbidden to shoo
off the competing dogs.