Two Steps Onward

by Graeme Simsion

  ‘Can’t complain about the coffee, either.’ The espresso was a step up from the plunger brews at our French B&Bs. I ordered another double in anticipation of Zoe’s interrogation.

  It was a spectacularly bright summer day, and we started out on a quiet road past gardens full of tomatoes, peppers, pears, apples, tamarillos and figs.

  As we negotiated a maze between the houses of a mid-sized village, Zoe broke into my directions.

  ‘If you could get your head out of your phone for a minute…’ I had downloaded the day’s route, in French, and was translating it into turn-by-turn instructions.

  ‘You could just follow me,’ she said, and pointed to a dove sign. ‘They’ve been there all the way.’

  ‘Probably a metaphor,’ I said. ‘About trust or something.’

  ‘Sometimes metaphors are good. Sometimes it’s better to just say what you mean.’

  ‘You want me to be more concrete and factual?’

  ‘I was thinking more about being open. Not dumping surprises on people in the middle of dinner.’ She paused, probably deciding whether to push it further or try to be conciliatory. A lifetime’s experience of relationships told me she’d push it.

  ‘We’ve both changed,’ she said. ‘Seriously. I’d never have imagined you doing therapy.’

  ‘Or meditation?’

  ‘You do meditation?’

  I nodded, and she went on. ‘Maybe you don’t see it, but I’ve changed too; I mean, ever since I got back from the Camino, I’ve been trying to stay on top of the practical stuff.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll meet in the middle.’

  ‘Maybe we have already. But it means I want to know what’s going on so I can make good decisions rather than waiting to see what happens.’

  ‘Sorry, I should have told you earlier about Sarah. But what’s going on is this: if I don’t get personal leave, I’ll be looking for work. That might open a new door, or it might not. But I wouldn’t have put my career at risk if it didn’t give me the chance to be with you. Does that answer your two questions?’

  ‘Okay then…’ She walked a bit, then turned and kissed me. ‘I told you they were simple questions.’

  What I’d said was true. I wouldn’t have risked my job and walked on with Sarah and Bernhard if Zoe hadn’t been part of it. I was unlikely to be the deciding factor in whether Camille made it to Rome or not.

  ‘If you’re walking on…’ said Zoe.

  ‘There’s no if.’

  ‘Maybe you could work a bit harder on your relationship with Bernhard. It might make it easier with Sarah. You don’t want them feeling it’s them against us.’

  ‘I don’t have a problem with Bernhard. He rubs me the wrong way, but I just have to remind myself that he’s still a kid—and a bit lost. My problem is that Sarah’s at risk of the same thing. I don’t want him dragging her down.’

  ‘Good luck if you think you’re going to pull them apart.’

  ‘I’m not that stupid. But I won’t be upset if it happens.’

  Gilbert was in fine form at the end of the day. I don’t think any reputable personal trainer would promise to get a client fit in three weeks, but we were all doing much better than we had at the beginning. And after the hard days crossing the Alps, the terrain was almost boringly flat.

  He had struggled more than the rest of us, but had been unfailingly positive. I thanked him for it, not for the first time. We were sitting on the terrace of our B&B, sharing a pre-dinner drink.

  ‘With my age and health, it is good to be able to do something I considered impossible.’ He swirled his wine, more reflectively than professionally. ‘As you know, before Camille became ill, we were separated. Things had become difficult between us, and it was my decision to leave. I remained uncertain that I had been wise…or honourable. Then, because of the diagnosis, everything was explained. It was my duty to return and help her, and I am not complaining. Now I have a clear purpose.’

  ‘Camille’s need for support has given meaning to your life?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  If I’d asked Bernhard and Sarah and Zoe why they were walking, their answers would all have involved Camille. And perhaps they would, like Gilbert, assert that her illness had filled a void. It struck me as a little perverse.

  Gilbert and I returned to our daily business of reserving accommodation three days ahead. It was an approach that had served me well on my previous camino: far enough in the future to allow revision of earlier stops if we couldn’t find accommodation, and not so far that we’d have to do a lot of cancelling if plans changed. Quite a few B&Bs were now registered with the online booking sites, which made our lack of Italian less of a problem.

  In case we did have to speak Italian, Gilbert had translated the most important questions into a form that could be responded to with a si or no. Not that our hosts always played the game: tonight we’d ended up further than we’d expected from the centre of Sant’Antonino di Susa. Neither of us were looking forward to telling the others they had a three-kilometre round trip for dinner, then a route retrace in the morning.

  ‘We tell them there was no other possibility,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘We can only hope there’s not an albergo with a vacancy sign right next to the restaurant.’

  He laughed. ‘If the wine is good, we will not notice the walk home. But I am not optimistic.’

  21

  ZOE

  ‘Why would anyone go to Trana?’ Our B&B host was surprised that the walkers who passed through were all

  headed to a town that had nothing to see.

  That was a thing about long-distance walks: you wound up in places that regular tourists wouldn’t care for. And you got to explore the places between: the trail to Trana was beautiful. After a gentle start through the valley, we joined a narrow path of stone slabs that wound us up six hundred metres through the chestnut forests of Chiusa di San Michele. Noticeboards informed us that in the thirteenth century the locals had to pay the monks twelve hens a year to collect the chestnuts.

  Now it was visitors paying tour companies—busloads were at the top. But our climb was worth it: the monastery was magnificent and the three-hundred-sixty-degree views breathtaking. And there were ice creams at the kiosk.

  It was a long day, and I decided that I’d walk the next section with Camille. I’d planned to spend more time with her after Martin went home. Now I would have to make an effort. She had said she would have walked with me alone to Rome, yet now I felt further removed from her than when we were an ocean apart.

  I sat beside her on a ledge as she was taking in the stone walls of Chiusa. It took her a while to break the silence.

  ‘The hills are not easy. Even after we have climbed over the Alps.’

  ‘But you can do them. Are you feeling stronger than when you started? I know I am.’

  ‘I feel invincible.’

  ‘Really? I mean, that’s great.’

  ‘Before…I would never think I could do this.’ She laughed. ‘Or wish to do this.’

  ‘So, what changed?’

  ‘You know the answer. I have multiple sclerosis.’

  I swallowed and waited.

  ‘I had the scans and there were white bits in my brain that should not be there.’ Camille shrugged. ‘This is why I was getting tired and forgetting things.’

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘Not so much now. The pills have helped. Perhaps the walking also.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘They will not cure me. One day I will need Martin’s cart.’

  ‘But…it could be years off, right?’

  ‘This is an unpredictable disease. Sometimes it stops, sometimes it gets worse suddenly. I walk now because I can.’

  I gave her a quick hug. As much for me as her.

  ‘I walk to atone for my sins.’

  ‘Which is what the candles are about, right?’

  ‘They are for the small sins.’ I saw something cross Camille’s face and felt a deep drea
d. Could this whole walk be about what happened a quarter of a century ago? The thought had nagged at me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

  ‘You aren’t…This isn’t about getting forgiveness for the abortion, is it? Because…’ I felt my voice rising and stopped.

  Camille looked back to Chiusa and down into the forest below us before she turned back to me and squeezed my hand. ‘No, it is not that.’

  ‘So why, Camille? You’re walking a thousand miles. You were never that religious.’

  ‘You know this how? What about you? How many miles did you walk to atone for your guilt about your husband killing himself?’

  I flinched.

  ‘You came to me then,’ said Camille. ‘Why?’

  I edged back a little; the uneven stone wasn’t designed for comfort. What was she getting at? ‘We’ve always been there for each other. If you hadn’t lent me that money on the Camino—’

  Camille waved her arm dismissively. ‘I felt bad about dragging you into my mess.’

  I put a hand on her arm. ‘It was only a mess for me because I told my mother. My fault. And I dealt with that on my first Camino.’

  ‘Your Camino was not just about falling in love, then.’

  ‘It was about forgiving myself for Keith and my mother… and finding myself again. The me that got you to Los Angeles back then.’

  Camille pulled away and looked at me. ‘And here you are again.’

  I nearly responded ‘for you’, but there was something in her look that silenced me—a flash of something painful.

  ‘My priest tells me to pray for forgiveness for my sins,’ Camille said. ‘My doctor tells me to exercise. The pilgrimage provides me with both. And the disease has made me think about what is important.’

  She stood up and started walking toward the track which wound around the mountain. I sat, relieved that Camille’s pilgrimage wasn’t about the abortion or the ‘pro-life’ tirade from my mother when I’d stupidly dropped by on the way back to St Louis.

  I had read about cultures where saving a life meant you were forever responsible for that life. Maybe there was a little of that in my feeling for Camille. But Camille had dodged the question about the sin that demanded a private audience with the Pope—the one she was walking a thousand miles for.

  22

  MARTIN

  Another pleasant day’s walk, under blue Italian skies. And the occasional shout of Buon Cammino. Pilgrims might be scarce on this path, but they were recognised.

  We arrived in Trana, a pretty town on a river, tucked in among surrounding hills, to be ambushed by a middle-aged woman who offered accommodation—for all six of us. It seemed she was the local pilgrim-welcomer and must have stationed herself on the route for mid-afternoon arrivals. If we hadn’t already made arrangements, I would have been tempted to accept: Zoe and I were missing the connection with other walkers, and staying in dedicated accommodation might have given us something of that sense.

  ‘Trana is really nice,’ said Zoe, for some reason sounding surprised.

  ‘Do you see many pilgrims?’ I asked our lady and got the answer we’d come to expect.

  ‘One or two a week, sometimes alone, sometimes couples, in the high season. I don’t wait for them in the low season, but they call on the telephone.’

  ‘How do they cross the mountains in the low season?’ said Gilbert.

  ‘They don’t. They are doing it in stages, so they are starting perhaps in Susa, at the border.’

  We were led into a small annex of the church, where our credentials were duly stamped. Camille and Zoe lit candles.

  ‘Where are we staying?’ asked Sarah. I gave her the name of our hotel and she punched it into her navigation app. ‘Race you,’ she said to Bernhard.

  They were off and running awkwardly with the weight of their packs and had disappeared across a shaky wooden footbridge before I could elaborate.

  ‘Almost there,’ said Zoe to Camille, and Gilbert and I exchanged glances.

  ‘Just a mile or two,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We pushed it out to bank a bit for tomorrow.’ We’d taken a recommendation from our previous night’s B&B host. ‘It’s on the route—more or less—and apparently much nicer than Trana.’

  It, when we arrived an hour later, sat alone on the main road and appeared to cater for itinerant workers rather than tourists. Gilbert spotted that the hotel’s proprietor shared a surname with our previous night’s host, and we established that she was his sister-in-law.

  But there was a restaurant, with a canteen ambience, and a swimming pool. That had been a selling point. Eternally upbeat, Gilbert suggested we meet beside it for pre-dinner drinks.

  The weather was fine, and he secured a bottle of Italian white, but not much else fitted the picture of ‘Drinks by the pool in Northern Italy.’ The pool was empty and we had to bring our own chairs from the dining room.

  Then Sarah and Bernhard appeared, both in shorts. They’d had time to recover, but Bernhard was hobbling.

  ‘Dad! It was four point three kilometres. You said we were stopping in Trana…’

  ‘And how long did it take before you realised you had that far to run?’

  ‘About thirty seconds.’

  ‘So, you could have stopped. But you didn’t.’

  Actually, I was feeling a bit chuffed. She might be directionless in life, but she’d found the motivation to run four kilometres with a backpack.

  ‘Who won?’ I said.

  Bernhard pointed to Sarah and I felt doubly chuffed.

  Then he lay on his stomach on the small patch of grass, and Sarah set to work massaging his calves. And his thighs.

  I turned to Zoe. ‘This is your territory, isn’t it?’ She had financed her first camino with massages for weary walkers.

  ‘You want me to massage Bernhard?’

  ‘Well, if he’s got an injury—a muscle strain…fair enough… save it for later.’

  23

  ZOE

  The first time Martin and I got together—in Spain, with Martin’s injured knee bandaged up—I had been worried about not looking like I was twenty anymore. For all my belief in inner beauty, I could not totally let go of society’s message that a woman over forty was invisible. But after the initial nerves, I accepted that neither of us were twenty, and we were both mature enough to value the other’s deeper qualities.

  When Martin came to San Francisco, I hadn’t had a partner for a while, and things with Keith hadn’t been great in the few years before that. The reawakening was a reminder of all I’d missed; not just the physical pleasures of intimacy but the trust and the deep inner sense of all being well. For the first couple weeks since we’d started sharing a room on this walk, I’d felt that again.

  Now that we both knew what worked, we were getting into a routine, maybe because we were too exhausted at the end of the day to think of anything different. I had begun to wonder if the caution we both brought to this rekindled relationship—and the uncertainty of whether there was a future together—was getting in the way of our having a deeper intimacy. Or more fun.

  Luckily, I was travelling with an expert, or at least someone with way more experience than I had. I tried to not make it about me—or to be too obvious.

  ‘What was the funniest thing you remember about college?’ I asked.

  Camille stopped dead, stared into space, then started walking again. ‘I was trying to collect my thoughts together. Sometimes walking helps; sometimes it is better to stop. In this case, neither. I do not remember college as a time of funny things.’

  ‘Well, I always remember how we used to think that because you were French, you knew all about men and…what they liked…and—’

  Camille burst into laughter. ‘College was not funny, but this is. First Sarah, then you, asking for advice. What will happen if because of the problems with my mind I give you a crazy idea? Perhaps you will cause Martin or yourself an injury. But why are you asking me? If yo
u want to know what men like, you should ask men.’

  Before I could respond, she added, ‘I am joking, of course. First you should think about what you want.’

  Camille followed with a lecture that took me to a few places I’d never thought about and would try not to think about again. At the end, I laughed, a bit uncomfortably. ‘Gilbert’s a lucky man.’

  ‘Gilbert? Horreur. If I did these things with him, it would give him the wrong idea.’

  It had been a long day, but we were in bed early as usual. Martin went to turn the lights off.

  I put my hand on his bare chest. Firmly. ‘Leave the lights on.’

  He raised his eyebrows, but didn’t object as I channelled my inner dominatrix.

  Perhaps the hardest thing to do with someone you know well is not to giggle. But regardless of the role I was playing, what I was doing was making Martin feel good.

  At the right moment, I took advantage of not bringing a nail file on the walk, and raked my fingernails down his back. I guess I underestimated my strength, because Martin let out an almighty yell.

  There were thumps on the wall from both sides.

  ‘I’m okay. Just slipped,’ Martin called, before we both dissolved in fits of laughter.

  24

  MARTIN

  ‘There’s a restaurant.’

  That was my only comeback as we trudged through traffic toward another ‘slightly off-Chemin’ hotel, an anticlimactic ending to an otherwise pleasant day navigating our way through cornfields.

  In principle, you should be able to undertake a waymarked pilgrimage without maps. It’s a romantic notion, particularly for the Camino de Santiago, which has feeder routes all over Europe. Find a scallop shell on a lamppost in Stuttgart or Sarajevo or Stockholm, and follow it all the way to Santiago. In reality, and certainly on the Chemin d’Assise, the signage varied from overdone through inadequate to misleading. On one occasion, I suspected a prankster had turned a couple around.

  In these days of satnav, paper maps didn’t justify their weight. Bernhard’s navigation app favoured the shortest distance without regard to terrain—hence the bush-bashing episode. It took a combination of two apps (Bernhard’s and Sarah’s), a natural sense of direction (Zoe) and arbitration (me) to get through the days without retracing, cutting our own path through the forest or just plain getting lost.