Off the Road (29 page)

Eventually we do come to
terms and work out a language. I carry a long thin stick balanced in my left
hand. It runs the length of her body. When a car approaches or she speeds up, I
rattle the stick in front of her face, a sign to move to the left and slow
down. If she starts to flag, I twist the stick the other way and give her a
good switch on the rump, speeding her up. This contract works so well that
Claudy disappears up the road, thrilled to be free of his duty.

At the top of a hill, where
the road curves sharply, a rolling wave of thunder peels through the trees. I
snap Ultreya sharply in the face, but she is so startled by the roar, she
freezes. A truck rumbling at fifty miles per hour is taking the bend recklessly
and hugging the curve tight. Instinct lays out my options in a half second: I
am stuck between a mule and a moving truck, and I must move one of them. I
throw a low body block into Ultreya. My shoulder digs into her belly, and I
push off the edge of a ditch with all my strength. As the truck blasts through,
its horn a piercing siren, Ultreya tips sideways down into the ditch. The
weight of my pack propels me over her back and to the other side of a thin
trickle of oily water.

The truck is gone. Claudy is
sprinting back up the hill to see if we are dead. Ultreya bolts to her feet and
stands still. A length of snot fires from her nose. Rattling her head, she
stares dead ahead. She reaches deep into her genetic past and summons up her
most elegant posture: the picture-perfect equine profile. I drop my pack and
whack her in the rear. Taking her bridle in hand, I speak directly to her left
eye, a soulful but tentative eye.

“Listen here, dammit. When I
give the command to move left, you move left. Do you understand? I thought we
had a deal. Okay, fine, here’s the new deal: You listen to me, or you die.” I
cock my foot to kick her in the ribs. But I pull up short. I grab her bridle
firmly and rattle her head with considerable force. “Do you understand? That’s
the deal.”

Claudy appears at the top of
the hill.

“And you! I have had enough
of your crap.” He stands at attention and speaks not a word. I should kick
him
in the ribs. “You’re the one who brought this mule on the road, and now you
want to run off.”

“No, no—”

“Shut up. Here’s the deal
for you. You walk in front of us and call out when a car approaches. When we
get to Sarria, we’ll work something else out. But for now, your job is up
front, looking out for danger.”

Claudy turns abruptly and
takes up his position. The rest of the day is spent in solitude. Claudy does
not sing. No one talks. Ultreya is blissfully compliant. Claudy and I may still
have to work out some terms, but my mule and I understand each other
faithfully.

“Mules,” said the book, “so
nervous from having been ill-treated that it is not safe for anyone ignorant of
their nature to go near them, by kind and at the same time firm treatment, as a
rule, become perfectly quiet and tractable.”

My private terror about the
road is coagulating into a rich panic. Maybe Karl was right. We should lose
Claudy. Maybe I should lose them all and return to the proper image of the
road—alone. This companionship, while comforting, is fouling my intent. Instead
of freedom of thought and movement, the road has quickly become bogged down in
a crude version of the world I left behind—a morass of responsibilities,
concerns, people, mules. After I get to Sarria, I have decided to slip away
from Claudy, Ultreya, the Welsh, everyone.

In the midafternoon Sarria
rises out of the slanting sunlight like an oasis. The old village winds itself
around in circles on a central hill, and modern plaster houses and shops spill
down its sides like architectural trash.

Near the top beneath an oak
tree, Rick and Karl cry out from the shade. The two caravans are parked side by
side, and a crowd has gathered, shouting in Flemish.

In our absence, the priest
from Rick and Karl’s home of Keerbergen has arrived, along with half a dozen
Flemish villagers. For a day there was peace and decorum. But now not even the
presence of a man of the cloth can stifle the two filmmakers. A huge dent has
appeared in the side of Willie’s van, and the Fat Man is blamed. As Ultreya and
I enter the circle of shade, the priest is standing between the two
cinematographers, arms outstretched like a traffic cop. To the side their two
wives stand a yard apart, bent at the waist. Their faces hang in the air like
masks, only their mouths move, and from them issue gruff barking noises—Flemish
charges, countercharges, and spittle.

Rick and Karl run and cling
to us as if we were the police. They needn’t say it: Please never leave us again.
And there is more disturbing news. The throngs have slowed their pace and
bunched up. The towns are brimming with pilgrims, and new ones are showing up
on the road all the time.

At the Brothers of Mercy
monastery, which runs a hostel not far from here, a crowd of some fifty
pilgrims is hanging around out front. The brothers refuse to open their doors
until six o’clock, according to their rules. But the sun is burning, and one of
the new pilgrims has
one
leg. He is lurching about on crutches and
shouting obscene Spanish at the monks. He threatens to have them
excommunicated.

In the mob I come upon the
British couple, Roderick and Jerri, and later the Welsh family. We all conspire
to leave with the Flemish in the early morning to outwalk the rabble. We all wear
faces of desperation and fear, as if we were refugees trying to outrun our
pursuers.

That night I sleep in the
monastery’s hostel. It is crowded wall to wall with warehoused bodies. At three
in the morning one pilgrim gets violently ill and the dead air thickens with
the stench of closeted sick. I move to a grass field outside and lie awake
until my friends assemble, and we slip away into the coming dawn.

As we make our way to
Portomarín, I hear the lugubrious chords of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen”
ringing in my ears. The walk is punctuated by sprays of warm drizzle. On
stretches of hard-packed earth, patches of dampness recede almost visibly in
the hot sun. The yellow arrows appear haphazardly. One of them is a banana
peel, splayed in the mud, pointing into a fuggy tunnel of wet trees. The road
is so populated now, the ground is churned into a hot, sloppy muck.

Portomarín lies at the other
end of a long modern bridge over the Miño River. In the early part of this
century, the government built a dam upriver. Out of respect for this ancient
pilgrim town, the main street’s granite arcades and the fortress-style church
were removed to higher ground and rebuilt stone by stone. Because of seasonal
droughts (which occur every season in this part of Spain), the Miño is a
standing thread of water, a thin line of glass framed between two parched red
slopes. The ghostly streets and foundations of the old town visible on the
banks give the arriving visitor a phantom sense of place. By the time we climb
up to the city itself, we eerily know where to go.

Behind the church, the
pilgrim’s hostel is under construction, an old sunken house with punctured
walls and no door. Workers toting Sheetrock and boxes of tools come and go. At
the front door of the pilgrim’s hostel, I see the leader of a group of students
I had met in Sarria. He grins superiorly, which sets off some suspicions. It is
peculiar that he should be here. We woke in the early hours and left long
before he could have. I nod a hello.

In the bunk room, I find Val
and Wyn, who arrived a few minutes ahead of me. They pull me over into a
conspiratorial huddle. The schoolteacher, it seems, is traveling by car. He
motored in this morning and “claimed” all the bunks for his students, who are
walking leisurely. He has already claimed the kitchen by placing an empty pot
on each eye of the stove.

This is petty behavior, even
for pilgrims.

The schoolteacher steps into
the doorway and crosses his arms. I don’t think he understands that we are
traveling with Dionysus himself. Claudy blows past the teacher and scopes out
the problem. The invincible Claudy can outpetty any miserable high-school
lecturer. Claudy rips apart his pack, brashly laying items on just enough beds
to save them for the others who are minutes behind us. He slaps an arm around
the schoolteacher and escorts him to the door. When Karl, who has been limping
lately, and Rick arrive, Claudy asks the schoolteacher in broken Spanish if he
intends to steal bunks from this old man and his crippled companion. Intuiting
their role, Rick and Karl assume the faces of the damned.

The Welsh boys scamper past
Claudy.

“And these little children?”

The pilgrimage takes on a
decidedly different complexion now. Traveling alone is impossible. The
operative metaphor of the lonely drudging hermit has given way to the
stratagems of Clausewitz. It may be petty, it may be juvenile, but at stake are
the basic necessities. So, it’s war.

That night Claudy hatches a
ridiculous scheme. He wants us all —including the two mules—to start walking at
two o’clock in the morning for the next day’s trip to Palas del Rei. Everyone
but myself, and Roderick and Jerri decide to go. When we awake at a reasonable
hour, the neighboring bunks are empty.

By midmorning a sea of
pilgrims oozes out of Portomarín. On top of the occasional hill, the view is
medieval. Broken strings of people inch their way forward. When the path veers
near a paved road, bicyclists pass by in huffing packs. At a small village the
bar is closed, but when word spreads of the sheer number of us, the owner
appears and cranks up the espresso machine, breaks out the bread, and opens
boxes of
magdalenas.

At the edge of Palas del
Rei, we come upon a priest standing in the road. He is directing the traffic of
pilgrims.

“There is no room left in
Palas del Rei,” he says as our band approaches. “We are asking if you wouldn’t
mind sleeping in the field at the athletic arena. Follow this road down the
hill and you will see it on the left.”

The priest tells us that he
has diverted nearly two hundred pilgrims away from Palas del Rei since he was
dispatched out here this morning. Forget sacred, pilgrims are now a municipal
problem.

“Did you happen to see a
group of pilgrims, one man with a long gray beard?” I ask.

“The ones with two mules?”

“Yes, they are the ones.”

“They just came through,
about an hour ago.”

“An hour ago,” Roderick
bleats with glee. “They must have got lost.”

The athletic arena is a
massive building housing a basketball court. On one side is an empty meadow of
crabgrass, on the other a soccer field, and then a public swimming pool. Scores
of people are flowing from place to place. Encampments are set out. Fires burn.
At scattered tubs, men and women and children rinse their socks and shirts in
thick, filthy water. Walking sticks have been spiked into the ground with lines
stretched between them. Wet clothes flutter in the day’s final blast of heat.
Several locals have driven trucks out here and have set up mobile shops,
selling food, drink, and trinkets. Before an oil drum set over a fire, an old
woman is boiling
pulpo,
octopus, until they are finely pink Medusan
heads. The trucks are surrounded by hagglers, who are claiming that the prices
are too high for sacred pilgrims. The locals aren’t moved.

Coming through the fence is
like blending into a world of gypsies. The camp is broken into settlements: The
old men from Holland. The five young German men. The man with one leg and his
rough gang. A group of school girls from Valladolid. The retarded pilgrims. The
two Dutch couples. The Italian man is here, a world until himself. And, of
course, our group. We locate Val and Claudy and the others by asking after them
in the new nomenclature. Pilgrims’ epithets are useless now; there are too many
people. So we go by our tribal names. I ask after the People of the Mules and
am directed to the grass field beside the building.

“Hey, you are not true
pilgrims,” Claudy proclaims as we walk up.

“Really,” says Roderick.

“Oh, you missed an exciting
night. Walking by the light of the moon. It was transforming.”

“Really.”

“We had a perfect time. We
didn’t have to walk with all these people.”

“Really.”

“We got in early and claimed
this great spot.”

Soon, though, the boys start
giggling.

“It was dreadful,”
volunteers Val. “Freezing cold, you see. And the first turn we took was the
wrong one. We spent the whole night in the forest with one dim flashlight,
holding on to one another’s sleeves, trying to find a path where there wasn’t
one. We didn’t regain the road until morning. Frankly, we were terrified that
you might have passed us.”

By late afternoon the world
of this pilgrim’s camp is settled and circumscribed. Inside the basketball
court, groups have taken shape and marked territory. The foul-line key is
occupied by the girls of Valladolid, and despite the indoors, they have strung
up their tents. Other groups have scattered as symmetrically as cows occupying
a pasture, putting in beneath the bleachers or marking a spot along the wall.
In the grass outside each door, a fire burns.