Off the Road (24 page)

The road, Javier once said
to me, was nothing more than a dirt path on which we walked. Over time, the
road takes up residence within us and becomes a way to something else. Javier,
more than any of the other pilgrims I have spoken to, has troubled himself
mightily about the literal and metaphorical road.

“A pilgrim has to live off
the land,” Javier says. Others are listening. “He has to accept the kindness
presented to him. He has to carry his goods on his back. A pilgrim is poor and
must suffer.”

Frankly, I don’t feel so
good. Renting the parador was done without any thought. I had heard of paradors
and had long wanted to try one out. But only now I realize I had surrendered
momentarily to the temptations of a
tourist.

“Javier, I’m just staying
there one night.”

The German in the corner
pipes up, in English, “Then why not stay at a parador in every town?”

I never learned the German’s
real name. It is irrelevant. He is a remote fellow and doesn’t talk much, so
his pilgrim epithet never earned any specificity. He was simply the German. He
is a big round-faced Teuton with a meaty nose and arrogant cleft chin. He
hasn’t liked me since we first met. When anyone attempts to speak of the road
in language he finds inappropriate, he makes a production of eye rolling and
chin scratching. I should have seen it coming. The undertow tugging at our
casual conversations is about our pilgrim motive, and it’s beginning to seem
tangible. It was only a matter of time before it burst through the veneer of
aimless banter about history and backpacks and water bottles. Ideas about
proper pilgrimage are losing their abstractness and shaping into coherent
concepts—and judgments.

“You are missing my point,”
I say, not only to the German, but to everyone, it seems. “I’m not saying that
you should stay in a parador every day. But the road is hard. Makes us into
pilgrims. It is hard—and long.”

Huh? The words are not
coming. I am being crushed. My ideas about the pilgrimage, albeit crudely
formed, arrive in my mouth like cotton and come out damp.

The German slices the air
with a knife and says, rightly so, “Pahhh.” His eyes tighten, and his face
assumes the rectitude of Torquemada. This is a man born for auto-da-fé. He
shovels a few more faggots beneath my stake.

“Why not take a car and
drive to Santiago?”

“But I am not driving a car,
now am I?” I am furious, upset, and, quite obviously, wrong. I return to
Javier, whose grimace continues to upset me. I try one more time.

“Should a pilgrim dress
himself as a beggar even when he isn’t? Do we honor the poor by imitating them?
That is not piety.” I begin to find my voice. “It is...” And I search for the
right Spanish word for “mockery.” I guess
travestía,
and thankfully, I
find that it is a word. Javier does not look convinced.

“Only an American would rent
a parador,” interrupts Torquemada.

The German has no shame. And
his nationalistic dig is subtly suggesting: Why is an American here? Why aren’t
I walking the Appalachian Trail? Rafting down the Mississippi? Hitchhiking the
blue highways? I needn’t answer. Ad hominem and xenophobia don’t play well
among international pilgrims.

“Pahhh,” I say. I have
scored a point.

The German tears into a lamp
chop, stripping off a large chunk of charred flesh. His cheeks bulge with meat.

The bicyclist Miguel rises
to my defense. He asks, What is the difference between eating in a decent
restaurant (which all of us have done) and sleeping in a hotel? No one answers
him, and in that silence a nasty judgment is voiced: Who the hell are you,
bicycle
punk,
to talk to those of us on foot?

Bicyclists are dicey allies.
I might as well side with Willie the Filmmaker, who is traveling by mobile
home. I turn away from Miguel to listen to Javier.

“What about the Barefoot Priest
with the Blanket? Isn’t he the true pilgrim?” Javier asks. He is referring to a
priest said to be walking the road barefoot with nothing but a blanket. He has
no money and begs for food from town to town. I have not run across him, and I
have never spoken to anyone who has actually met him. I have long suspected he
was the pilgrim equivalent of an urban legend: if he doesn’t exist, we would
need to invent him. I would wager that a rumor of such a priest floats across
northern Spain every summer.

“Javier, do you really think
he is a truer pilgrim than you?” I ask.

“He is true to the
tradition. He comes with nothing.”

“I respect what he is doing.
But it strikes me as extreme to say that the only way to be a true pilgrim is
to imitate what we like to think a true pilgrim is. The tradition of the
ascetic pilgrim, the beggar, the mendicant, is only one version of what can
happen on this walk.”

“What else is there?”

I feel as though I’m
stepping on solid ground at last. And talking on this level is clarifying, even
though we speak different languages. I converse in Spanish with Javier and
English with the German, which ought to make our discussion more difficult yet
has the opposite effect. The Tower of Babel is not a good place for vagueness
or subterfuge. It is extremely difficult to hide out among nuances. Each of us
is forced to trim our remarks into brief clear statements. Babel is a fine
editor.

“I am saying that a pilgrim
must accept the hardship that the road imposes on him. The difficulty of the
walk is inherent in walking. We needn’t artificially add more hardship than is
already there. That, in my thinking, is being a false pilgrim. We all eat at
restaurants. We all have used the telephone. We all have stayed at hotels. I
don’t believe pilgrims ignored the creature comforts of the road five hundred
years ago any more than we should. Each of us assumes the hardship that the
road demands of us. That is enough.”

A central dichotomy takes
shape: suffering versus labor. According to my theory, anyone who follows the
road on foot, bike, or horse, but accepts the hardship it imposes, is a true
pilgrim. But for Torquemada, additional suffering is essential. My theory has a
certain appeal, but it also is shot full of holes. The German finds one of them
and plunges his dagger in.

“Can anyone who drives a car
be called a true pilgrim?”

“It depends,” I answer.
Pathetic. The problem with my idea is that it’s too expansive and liberal. It
allows everyone to be a pilgrim. The German is right. Why shouldn’t people in cars,
possessed of the right attitude (or whatever I just said), be counted as
pilgrims? Yet the German’s definition is so narrow that no one is included
except, possibly, himself.

I feel trapped and attempt
to extract myself by playing to the audience.

“Aren’t these bicyclists
here true pilgrims?” Miguel and his friends are physically present. It’s easy
to exclude drivers of cars since there is not one here. Will the German dare to
deny the bicyclists even as they sit right next to him?

“They are children, out for
a fresh breeze.” He lacerates the air with his knife again.

I underestimate this man.

“Are people on horseback
true pilgrims?” I ask.

My afflatus returns, however
tardy.

“There is a tradition of
riding horses,” says the German.

“But isn’t sitting in the
comfort of a saddle a bit more luxurious than biking? It requires less
‘suffering’ and less ‘work.’ Why can someone ride a horse but not a bike?”

Jesús’s daughter puts a
plate of food before me. I cut a large piece of meat from a lamb’s bone. It
tastes delicious.

“But that is the tradition,”
says the German, standing his ground.

Expressions of support come
my way. Claudy takes up a position behind me. He has nothing to say (this is
not his kind of conversation), but he physically lines up on my side. Rick
winks at me and puts his clenched fist over his chest. “We know we are
pilgrims,” he means to tell me.

The debate continues into
the night and past many bottles of wine. The distinctions drawn widen and
narrow as my fellow pilgrims struggle to determine just what it is we are up
to. Occasionally schisms erupt over the most unpredictable arcana. The
bicyclists, it seems, have their own private heresies. On one issue they
descend into their own bitter differences and ridicule one another. Some of the
bicyclists ride mountain bikes with thick rugged tires and few gears. They
actually travel on the tough pilgrim’s road, pumping up and down the same
stony, stumbly paths we foot pilgrims do. Others are on racing bikes with thin
elegant tires and ten gears. They are forced by their superior technology to
follow the parallel road of the paved highway.

A dozen standards and
distinctions emerge. After a while I escape into the bathroom and jot down a
Homeric catalog:

all others v. cars

walkers v. bicyclists

mountain bikers v. racing
bikers

short-distance walkers v.
long-distance walkers

imposing suffering v.
accepting suffering

not spending money v.
spending money

tradition v. improvisation
past v. present

walking alone v. walking in
a group

Catholic absolutism v.
non-Catholic relativism

knowledge v. doubt

certainty v. ambiguity

solemnity v. hilarity

Sitting in the solar john, I
run my finger down the list. I am on the right-hand side of every “v” and the
German is on the left. The road is honing its distinctions. That first
question—Who is a true pilgrim?—is demanding its answer. In past centuries, it
was easy: Do you believe that the bones beneath the altar of the cathedral in Santiago are the true body of James the Apostle? No one on the road believes that today.
So our walk and our quarrels are about developing a new standard for inclusion,
a new kind of faith, if you will. Tonight has focused this question
considerably. Is this pilgrimage a sacred task or is it trumped-up tourism?

By the time I return, the
conversation has pacified. Here and there is the familiar patter of arguments
coming to a close.

“But that’s all I have been
trying to say all night...

“Exactly. That really
is
the point.”

Jesús pulls up in his truck,
exploding to a halt just outside the tent. He is back from his enterprises
(probably balancing the books at his investment brokerage agency). He hugs his
daughters, who clamor for his generous affection. He pats the younger ones on
the head and then shoos them all away.

“Es la hora para el Rito de
la Quemada!”
he proclaims. The Ritual of the Burning, he seems to be saying. How fitting.

We are directed to an ornate
doorway of Iglesia de Santiago, a twelfth-century Romanesque chapel up a slight
incline from the tent. This church had achieved a moderate fame during the
pilgrimage’s heyday. It is said that if a pilgrim were ill but made it as far
as the Puerta del Perdón (Doorway of Pardon) of this church, then he could
legitimately turn back and depart with all the privileges of a true pilgrim. Is
this pure “tradition,” as the German might say, or is there in it an element of
medieval Chamber of Commerce improvisation to put a few maravedis in the town
coffers?

The ceremony begins in the
blank darkness at the side entrance to the chapel. The moon is obscured by a
bowl of clouds, studded at the edges with a few stars. The only other source of
illumination is the nearby tent, a giant Japanese lantern. By flashlight Jesús
takes his place on the steps at the doorway. We all gather around as if at a
campfire. Into a large tureen, Jesús pours streams of colored alcohol from an
exaggerated height like a clowning bartender. He speaks about the significance
of the pilgrimage with the easy aplomb of a toastmaster at an Elks luncheon.
Platitudes follow one on another until he holds up a mason jar filled with a
dark, unappealing liquid.

“Every night come the
pilgrims,” he says, affecting a biblical grammar, “and the
quemada
is
prepared. All drink from the same bowl, the same
quemada.
And at the end
of each night, always, what is left in the bowl is kept in a jar and poured
into the next night’s mixture, as it always has been. All pilgrims drink from
the same
quemada.”

At the end of this
intonation, Jesús withdraws a pocket lighter. After failing on the first,
second, and third tries, he finally puts the flame at the appropriate distance
from the bowl’s contents. Like an amateur backyard grill master, Jesús jerks
back as a column of fire hisses to life.

“Quemada!”
the children shout. Jesús
takes a long-handled ladle and parcels the fiery drink into his collection of
mismatched cups. Each pilgrim clutches his own small flame. Jesús utters a
short paean to pilgrim community. He raises his cup and swallows the burning
liquor. Some attempt drinking around the fire. The more cautious blow it out.
We all drink together, as the night’s question lingers even here. Is the
quemada
the continuation of a tradition or the invention of one?