Off the Road (9 page)

French critics can get quite
exercised when told that their nation’s First Great Work is not the achievement
of a lone genius, but rather is the collaborative work of hairy itinerant
peasants who played out their themes of violence according to the moody
applause of beery serfs.

For a pilgrim troubled by
doubts of authenticity, the theory is restorative. The idea that no one person
wrote the
Chanson de Roland
dates to the work of Albert Lord, who
studied the only oral epic poets to survive into our time. In the middle of this
century he traveled to the isolated mountains of Yugoslavia, where the last
heirs to the juggler still carried on the tradition. And he made discoveries
that, when considered next to the
Chanson de Roland,
make the French
apoplectic.

Lord called the poet of oral
tradition a “singer of tales” and described him as an illiterate man with a
talent for strumming a simple instrument and singing many lines of verse,
upward of three thousand. Where we might hear his song and think the peasant
had done a good job of memorizing a very long poem, Lord discerned an odd
characteristic to prove otherwise. From performance to performance, the singer
changed the song— shortening or lengthening it by hundreds of lines, changing
the order of events, altering the names of the characters, playing out some
scenes, abbreviating others. No two performances were ever the same.

The singer of tales had not
memorized a poem, nor was he improvising each performance. Rather, Lord
discovered that each singer of tales had learned hundreds of phrases, called
formulae, that allowed him to compose the song spontaneously and differently
every time he sang it. To Lord, this talent was comparable to learning another
language. Where we might learn words and compose the ordered sentences of standard
human conversation, these singers learned formulae and sang long narrative
songs. When Lord asked some of the singers to tell him what a “word” was, they
could not answer him. They thought in phrases only.
We
think in words.
This was not merely another form of expression. It was a different way of
thinking. Among those illiterate singers who were taught to read, for instance,
Lord witnessed the fading of the singer’s capacity to compose spontaneously. It
seemed as if the two modes of expression were not compatible.

What Lord was implying with
his discoveries was a bombshell in the tiny world of epic scholars. The poems
handed down to us were not merely mementos of another era, but a different way
of expressing the truth and telling history. “Our real difficulty,” Lord says,
“arises from the fact that, unlike the oral poet, we are not accustomed to
thinking in terms of fluidity.”

Our literate, word-plagued
minds demand a point of origin, a single beginning, the
real
story—in
the case of Roland’s assassination, a lone-swordsman theory. But, Lord adds,
“Once we know the facts of oral composition we must cease trying to find an
original.” The mystery of who killed Roland not only can’t be solved, it’s not
even the right question. Each “performance is an original.” To us, “it seems so
basic, so logical, since we are brought up in a society in which writing has
fixed the norm of a stable first creation in art, that we feel there must be an
original for everything.” But in oral composition, “the idea of an original is
illogical.” Lord warns that we who are reared in the ambiance of the printed
word are troubled by a longing “to seek an original, and we remain dissatisfied
with an ever-changing phenomenon.”

The singers of tales
continue to speak to the modern pilgrim. Their stories shouldn’t be studied for
the facts, but listened to for other melodies. Don’t read history, say my
illiterate hairy muses, listen to it sing.

History and tradition plague
a pilgrim at night when a break in the day’s labor grants enough time to worry
about them and maybe read up. Otherwise, the mind is occupied with the
quotidian details of a new life—locating the fruit-and-vegetable trucks that
stop in the small villages, or finding a watering hole, or flattering a tavern
owner to crank up the coffee machine for a
café con leche
during the odd
hours.

A few miles out of Espinal
and shy of Mezquiriz, I discover another pilgrim sport. I am patching up two
nicks in my legs after unsuccessfully negotiating a barbed-wire fence when a
peripheral flash catches my eye. I look down a valley, across a small stream,
and over another fence and spot a figure hooded by the high rise of a pack. For
only a second, I see a familiar movement. The swaying lope is distinctly
pilgrimesque, and then the man disappears into a dark copse of oaks.

I know there are pilgrims
just ahead of me. From time to time from a field or window a local will shout a
freelance update of what they know about the road. I have heard already of two
men walking together. Somebody else up the way has a mule. And this morning, en
route to Pamplona, I know that there is a pilgrim just ahead. Hurry up, the
locals tell me, assuming that I am anxious to make contact with another on
foot. Which I am.

The dark trees on this
stretch form a humid tunnel, and evidently, when pilgrims aren’t around, it is
a favored trail among the local holstein. The cow flops are fresh and
numerous—piled one atop the other. In the funky embrace of dense oaks, the road
achieves a certain primal soupiness and piquancy that the pilgrim would gladly
trade for a busy interstate. But it makes tracking my immediate predecessor
easy. His bootprints are longer and deeper than my own, leading me to conclude
through elementary sherlockian logic that my pilgrim friend is one big

guy-

Where the trees above
occasionally pull back to let in a ray of sunshine, the cow plops harden into a
path of sawdust pancakes that burst underfoot with a satisfying crunch. One
time I hear just ahead of me the snap and crackle of brittle cow flops giving
way under foot. I rush up the road but the sound recedes Doppler-like, and I
never catch the source.

After a while, I think I may
have imagined this other person. But the evidence keeps arriving. On the
outskirts of a wretched hamlet called Zubiri there is a magnesium factory that
laminates the entire valley with a fine gray-white talc. For a mile, the road
appears hosed down with Yuletide Styrofoam snow, and even here I make out the
familiar boot treads.

The phantom pilgrim never
materializes. By the time I get close, the road dissolves among the
cloverleafs, entrance ramps, and bypasses of the city of Pamplona. But the hope
of his appearance has served as a perverse incentive. Instead of walking the
fifteen to twenty kilometers I have budgeted as the per-diem limit of the first
week of the pilgrimage, I have clocked a good forty kilometers. I have a
headache, and my legs feel as if they have been filled with concrete. I check
into a hostel off the Plaza del Castillo in the heart of town, lie down on my
bed, and assume the curled, whimpering position of the moribund.

Ten minutes later I cannot
get up. A syrupy sweat pastes my arms to my sides. Every muscle is winched
tight. I have to push my feet off the bed with my hands when hunger insists I
move. I cannot straighten my arms, and my fingers are curled into dry claws.
Hunched over, I have stiffened into a bow-legged question mark. A two-minute
trip across the town square to a restaurant takes twenty minutes of struggle. I
move like a sick penguin, waddling in super-slo-mo. Teenagers are quietly
laughing at me, and I am laughing, too. But mine is an unhinged hilarity. I am
scaring small children.

Two days of rest later, I
let out from Pamplona and walk straight down into a valley and up the other
side. The sun is brutal, but a deep warm sweat lowers the voltage of the bolts
of pain that fire up from my feet and explode in the femur of each thigh. By
late afternoon I ascend the top of a ridge and look back to see that where I
had begun this morning is perched on the other side of the sky. The entire
vista of the earth, all that I can see and as far as I can see, I have covered
on foot. Pilgrimage creates a paradoxical effect. Instead of short distances
seeming long, it’s just the opposite. The vastness of a great distance shrivels
when it falls within one’s grasp. This afternoon, the length of the earth has
been reduced to a half-day’s work. I can see each stop from Pamplona—the clutch
of houses called Cizur Menor, then Guendulain, and, just below me, the shadowless
village of Zariquiegui. I can trace every foot of the winding path I have
followed from one horizon to another.

Turning west, I step down
from the ridge into a bleached rocky slant that drops into a sparse overlit
forest. Behind me the two horizons blink, and the day’s view is gone.

A few kilometers into this
small valley, I enter a tiny village called Uterga. An old man calls me from a
window to come in, rest, and have a drink. He is the patriarch of a Basque
family, all of whom are visiting. His daughter, a jolly woman of about fifty,
insists on pouring a dark liquid from a decanter and crying out until I down a
few. It is very good, smoky, alcoholic. I want to know if it is some local
confection or an authentic Basque libation. Oh, no, they tell me, excited that
they’re about to impress me. From a cabinet they produce an enormous bottle of
Jack Daniel’s Tennessee mash.

Americans have a strange
effect on Spaniards, even Basque Spaniards. I’m not sure what it is, but I
think it has to do with our reputation as hardworking, successfully
profiteering capitalists. Spaniards still fear that they are inferior to the
more brutal capitalists one finds in parts of Italy or all of Germany. The lazy Spaniard, drunk and stretched out in siesta, is an image they seek
constantly to dispel.

When the old Basque
grandfather wants to show me his accomplishments—trophies for some obscure
sport he mastered in the 1930s—his three grandchildren wince in anguish. In a
glass case is some kind of baseball bat and beanies embroidered with dates. I
am listening attentively, but the two boys and one girl— all teenagers—are in
unspeakable agony, whispering hostilities in hissing Basque and slapping their
heads in silent-movie displays of shame. Then the grandfather reaches for a musical
instrument—a version of a fiddle.

The road has a long
tradition of folk music. The writer Walter Starkie, an English fiddler, walked
the road to Santiago in the middle of the century and wrote about the changing
musical traditions along the way. I long for a Starkie moment, a purifying dose
of old-time Basque melody. But I won’t be hearing any authentic tunes this
afternoon. The grandchildren are apoplectic. I can make out patches of their
remarks, and they boil down, more or less, to this: Grandfather, our American
guest gets to listen to Michael Jackson and REM all day long. Please don’t
humiliate us with your corny old queer music.

My Spanish is getting more
and more fluent as the refills of the smoky brown liquid keep coming. The
grandfather manages to understand that I
do
want to know more about the
past and the road. When he begins an anecdote about pilgrims from fifty years
ago, he is silenced by the teenagers’ daggered looks. And my attempts at
expressing heartfelt interest in what the old man has to say are understood as
mere courtesy for the elderly. And somehow in the argle-bargle of my Jack
Daniel’s Spanish, my questions become a request for a tour and a non sequitur
description of every item this old Basque man owns. After examining some of the
motel paintings on the walls and hearing a story for each chair and couch, I am
taken to the cellar to view a lifetime of junk.

After handling every tool on
the workbench, the old man spoons a handful of ball bearings from a box. They
range in size from golfballs to fine birdshot.

“These are Basque ball
bearings,” he says proudly. “They are made in the Basque lands. See how round
they are.” In the slim doorway to upstairs, the three kids cringe in horror,
haloed in the amber basement light.

“Yes,” I say, “they
are
very, very round, impressively round, really.”

Not far up the way, just
outside the small town of Obanos, the road from Pamplona merges with the other
major French path. This trail slides downhill for a while, joins the highway
for a few hundred meters, and winds into the ancient town of Puente la Reina
(literally the Queen’s Bridge), built to help pilgrims. It was settled by the
French in the late eleventh century during one of the early bursts of
propagandistic expansion of the road. Either Sancho the Great’s wife or his
granddaughter Stephanie erected this beautiful Romanesque stone bridge in 1090,
and according to my waiter at dinner later this evening, things have been a bit
slow since.

On the edge of town, I
encounter my first pilgrim near a modern cast-iron sculpture honoring those of
us who walk the road. He introduces himself as Carlos from Brazil. Sinewy and deeply roasted by the Spanish sun, Carlos wants me to join him in a scheme. In
about three weeks Pamplona will hold its famous running of the bulls. But, says
Carlos, the parties have already begun. So he wants to hitchhike back to Pamplona, stay drunk for about a month, and then hitchhike back to Puente la Reina and
continue the walk.

“You know, Carlos,” I say,
“as it happens, you are talking to a profoundly flawed and corrupt pilgrim, and
yet this plan stretches even my powers of rationalizing.”