Off the Road (5 page)

I hail a cab.

B
y late afternoon my cab
pulls up at an inn. Saint-Jean is an ancient town with a medieval fortres
s and retaining barricade at the center. New bars and homes spill out
past the flaking crenellated walls and d
own the slope of a hill. In the
distance are the Pyrenees, some storm clouds snagged on their peaks. Madame
Debril, the governess of pilgrims, lives among the older houses on narrow
cobble streets within the wall, number 44, rue de la Citadel. On her shutter is
a plaque declaring
“Centre d’études Saint-]acques de Compostelle.”
A
knock on the door brings the lady herself, dressed in a bright flowered blue
dress. Her gray hair is swept back recklessly from her face. Spectacles sit at
the lowest possible point on her nose. A single long front tooth rests on her
lower lip. Red blossoms beam from her cheeks.

“Oh, God,” she says through
a mouthful of food. I have only said “Hello,” but it is enough for her to realize
she has an English speaker at her door.

“I am eating dinner,” she
says, half in French and English.

I am all apologies.

“I am fatigued?” she adds.
Her insecurity about English usage turns statements into questions. “I have
seen many pilgrims?”

“Oh, I will come back in the
morning, then.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” she
says, opening the door wide.

Madame Debril’s office is a
clutter of Santiago memorabilia. An old 3-D topological map of the Pyrenees hangs beside the door. She is wearing a scallop shell around her neck. On her desk
is a silver shell presented to her by the people of Pamplona. Clay shells hang
from posts and on the wall and are draped over the edges of cabinets. A dozen
real shells ride the chaos of papers on her desk. Rolled-up posters, photo albums,
and an old typewriter occupy a small bed against the wall. At her foot is a
teenager’s boom box. The wall behind her is an enviable library of books about
the road. I am directed to a caned chair that rides so low to the floor that my
nose barely peeks above the desk.

“You are pilgrim to Saint
James?” she asks, looking down at me. Her teeth are laced with baguette.

“Yes.”

“Where did you come from
today?” she asks officiously.

“I came from Orthez, but—”

“That is a lie,” she
declares. “You could not walk from Orthez to Saint-Jean in one day.” A truly
menacing look slowly fills out the rustic features of this old woman. The
metamorphosis is werewolfian. She waves a few promiscuous strands of hair away
from her face. Medusa rises from her chair.

“Well, to be honest, Madame
Debril, I took a taxi from Saliers de Bearn because—”

“Taxi? You are not a true
pilgrim. Why do you come here?” Madame Debril says.

I begin to tremble, half in
undeserved rage and half from fear. She is revered on the road, mentioned in
the guidebook. She is legendary. She is
authentic.
Her schoolmarm looks
ignite an old guilt. I’ve been caught cheating on my homework.

So I did give up on
Saint-Guilhem, and I didn’t like the road from Orthez to Saint-Jean. Well, I
wanted to get the project going.

“You do not look like a
pilgrim,” she says.

Oh, that hurt. It’s true
that I had washed up at the inn and put on my one pair of nice slacks and dress
shirt I had packed for special occasions. But attire was one aspect of the trip
I had thought through. Yet, seated on Madame Debril’s cane chair, I realize
that regardless of what circuitous route I took to arrive at my tastefully and
WASPily restrained sense of pilgrim attire, it won’t matter to Madame Debril. I
look like a preppie tourist out for a constitutional, which in her eyes is
exactly what I am.

I tell her I am writing a
book, certain that she will want to flatter me to insure a good mention.

“We don’t need another
guidebook!”

I bow to her integrity (a
quality in short supply on this side of her desk).

She rants that the road is
being debauched by false pilgrims. True pilgrims, she explains, are those on
foot or on horseback. Those others on bikes, or in cars, or in
taxis
simply don’t count. The ancient trust is being abused.

She waves a card in my face.
“This is a
carnet?”
she says. It is a small folded card that serves as a
pilgrim’s passport. They are stamped by monks or civic officials along the
road, validating the pilgrim’s journey. At the cathedral in Santiago, the
carnet
is exchanged for a “diploma,” testifying to the pilgrim’s walk. Without the
carnet,
she says, the journey is pointless. Staring down her nose through her
spectacles, she insists I will not get one because “you are not true pilgrim?”

It is strange how much I
want this old woman’s approval. Somehow I suspect that I am not the first
person to prop his nose on her desk and seek her blessing. Being a true pilgrim
is no longer a matter of medieval clarity. Only a few pilgrims on the road
would confess that they believe the actual corpse of Saint James rests beneath
the altar of Santiago’s cathedral. The modern pilgrim has to look elsewhere for
verification. We long to believe that the very act of going somehow
substantiates our status. How prosaic of Madame Debril, I think, to reduce the
walk to a matter of the proper papers.

Nevertheless, I can see that
the stamp bears her name and address. This may be validation of the most
perfunctory kind. But I want it. So I decide to beg.

Of course,
this
works. She calms down. Not long after, I spot on her shelf a copy of an ancient
book I have read in translation. The
Codex Calixtinus
is the first book
ever written on the pilgrimage, in 1160. It has reports on the inns, the food,
the quality of the rivers, the character of the people. Devotees of the road
call it the first tourist guide. Madame Debril is impressed that I know this
work and hands me her ancient copy. I turn the crisp yellow pages and coo.

We are getting along now,
and she gives me some advice on walking (look out for bees). Then she mentions
a questionable American who passed through her house not long ago.

“He is Utican?” she seems to
say.

“Utican?” I ask.

“No, he is just?”

“Just?”

“No, he is wheezy?”

“Wheezy?”

“He is juicy?”

“Juicy?”

“No, he is juicy?”

“Jewish?”

Madame Debril understands
that I now understand. She waves her hand in the air and makes a sour face. I
recognize this expression. In my native South, a private discussion of, say,
blacks can culminate in a tiny slight from one speaker punctuated by this face.
The listener is invited to return the expression, and then both are free to
advance the conversation to more clandestine topics. It is a kind of code. But
I am in no mood to bond, anti-Semitic-wise, with Madame Debril. I want the damn
card, but not at this price. Who am I to judge a Jew walking the road to Santiago?

I return a stone face, and
Madame Debril reads me clearly. She sets aside the official
carnet
and
stamps a torn piece of note paper. That’s all, it seems, I will get. On the way
out the door, I try to reintroduce more pleasant topics in order to bring this
encounter to a less than dismal end. I ask Madame Debril how many times she has
walked to Santiago. Her face grows dark.

“When I was young, I was too
busy, and now that I am old, I am too tired.” Her eyes REM with anger.
Clutching my rag of paper with her stamp, I glare with incredulity.

“You mean, you have never
walked the road to Santiago?”

“No,” she says, and shuts
the door.

The next morning, I take a
big breakfast at the local inn, hoist my backpack, and walk straight out of
town. Actually I backtrack a quarter mile so I can begin beneath the
fifteenth-century pilgrim’s arch, a stone monument at the mouth of town. All
the locals said this was the official thing to do. Being a pilgrim with a cab receipt
in my pocket, I leap to any confirming tradition I can find. When I reenter
town, I come upon Madame Debril in the street, a baguette in one hand, a hammer
in the other, and a mouthful of nails. She is walking with a carpenter and
about to step into a crumbling plaster house.

“One day this will be a
pilgrim’s shelter,” she says.

“Very good.”

“Pilgrims will stay for
free,” she says.

“Excellent.”

“Only if they have the
proper papers!”

The way out of town is
straightforward, and as the last curve leads the pilgrim into the countryside,
a simple burnt wood sign says “Santiago” and points left.

According to my map, I
should soon come upon a hamlet, Saint Michel, then the road should turn right
and begin an acute climb into the Pyrenees. I do reach Saint Michel, but the
road merely bends right, slightly right, yet there is nowhere else to go.
Overhead is a canopy of oak and pine. A hill rises to my left. Crashing along
my right is a swollen river. The road on the map indicates a sharp uphill
ascent, but my road is flat, meandering, easy. I slouch forward, anxious to
feel the weight of my pack shift from my waist to my shoulders, and I lock my
ankles into the painful angle that signals an uphill climb. But the road won’t
conform to my hallucinations. It just unfolds, flatly, around another deceptive
curve. This river, I notice, is flowing with me, that is downhill, a fairly
convincing piece of evidence that I am not walking uphill and shouldn’t expect
to be doing so any time soon.

The woods grow dark after
black thunderheads move in and threaten all morning long to unburden themselves
in a mighty release. Instead, they leak all day. The hot June sun, a gray
blister behind the clouds, gives the air a thick texture. My view of the
allegedly beautiful French country is seen from between the blinders of a
poncho’s cowl and then through the treacly drizzle. It is a holiday of some
kind in this valley. No one’s seen me walk by, except a vigilant turkey at one
farm. He sits alert upon a post, wattle tossed rakishly, juking his neck
absurdly as I pass. The few shops along the way are closed. The farmhouses
appear abandoned; everyone is off to Grandpa’s for the big meal. I can’t help
thinking they heard I was coming.

I press on down the road for
nearly an hour and a half. Despite every indication to the contrary-—instinct,
the position of the sun’s occasional wink, compass,
gravity
—I stubbornly
believe that the road will translate itself into the right one. Around a
(descending) curve, a lone farmhouse appears in the crotch of two sloping
mountain faces. Two dogs race out to loudly inspect my boots.

A timid knock brings a young
man to the door. Soon the entire table assembles on the porch for the grand
event of a stranger in the yard. I explain that I am a pilgrim on the road to Santiago and fear I am heading the wrong way. They are delighted. Directions, I quickly
learn, are a great way to jump-start a conversation. It immediately locates you
in the ditch of ignorance and puts the stranger upon the heights of knowledge.

A young man steps forward
proudly and points toward a set of receding mountain peaks, but he is shouted
down. This small crowd of French Basque farmers and their wives, daughters, and
cousins spill off the porch into the front yard. Each has his or her own theory,
and all of them involve a different direction and separate mountain ranges. An
elderly man ends the arguments with a motion and announces—half in
untranslatable French, half in the international language of exaggerated
gestures—the best way to Santiago. He suggests I head to a village named Saint
Michel and take a left. He points in the direction I have come. I can’t really
understand the details of what he is saying, but I am certain it ends with the
Basque equivalent of “You can’t miss it.”

I retrace the same slow
curves of the morning, once again taking in the boarded shops and closed
farmhouses. The turkey is at his post and watches me pass. He is perfectly
still. His garden-hose head musters a slightly superior tilt.

The repetition of the walk
is interrupted only by a young, excitable pup, who explodes from a tangle of
mountain laurel and joins the walk. She is a cute mutt and loves to walk at my
feet. A sweet image floats into view—arriving in Santiago, hand-carved birch
staff in one hand, a gamboling puppy beside me. She is all chaotic tail between
my legs and a delight until I am brutally reminded that with a pack stiffening
my back, I am as agile as a hod of bricks.