Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  It all feels like border country here, because everything is getting greener and more ‘European’: the landscape becomes more mountainous as the river valley rises and narrows; the vegetation becomes richer. The ubiquitous encina trees of the Spanish meseta disappear, replaced by a much lusher, more recognisably European, forest ecology in which oaks, chestnuts, and birch trees dominate. Here is a list I found of the diverse natural vegetation of the Sanabria region I was now delightedly walking through:

  laburnum, cork oak, heather, Spanish lavender, chestnut tree, cytisus hystrix, white Spanish broom, Scotch broom, striated broom, Portuguese gorse, evergreen oak, erica umbellata, rock rose, broom, thicket, Pyrenean oak, elm tree, Scots pine, Austrian pine, maritime pine, padded brushwood, rosemary, willow, thyme.

  To which list I can add that I saw wild iris, buttercups, and silver birch trees. In this granite country, village architecture had changed, too: there were no more whitewashed brick houses. Coursed granite was the preferred building material now, used for solid, unpainted, stone houses with huge window and door lintels of split-stone slabs: houses built to last for many centuries. The villages became more open and spread-out, with more generous gardens and open village commons; again, more northern European in spirit than the densely knit Spanish pueblo.

  Ríonegro del Puente was charming. We stayed in a tiny refugio, with room only for four beds laid side by side, which was an old, converted stone barn, alongside a village lavanderia (communal laundry, out in the open). The laundry tubs are made of heavy concrete: ample piped water is freely laid on, and there are built-in, serrated stone washboards for rubbing clothes clean with soap; rinsing tubs below; and drying lines. There I met a woman from the village doing her washing, and we chatted. When I told her I was a pilgrim to Santiago, she spontaneously and sweetly said to me: ‘Thank you for all the hard work and prayer you are offering up to God for us in making your pilgrimage.’ It was a revelatory moment, because until then it had never occurred to me to think of my pilgrimage as a sacrifice and prayer offered up to God and to help others. But it was a lovely thought, and it left me feeling glowing. I mumbled something to the effect that I was really enjoying my pilgrimage walk, that it really wasn’t a sacrifice at all … but I thanked her for her kind words.

  Ríonegro was a pretty town, a stone village in a soft, green valley. It had a fine, large church — how did such small villages always manage to have such impressive churches? — and also a bar–grocery store combined. It was the only shop in the village, run by an attractive young Bulgarian woman named Sofia, partnered with a local Spanish man and her sister Olga, who was on a long-term visit. Both young women were blonde, pretty, and cheerful, and they were the main attraction that kept the bar and shop humming. Although the only hot food on offer (it was a small place) was pre-packaged toasted sandwiches, the chilled beer and wine was good. I talked to Sofia: she said it was a good life in rural Spain, people were kind to her, and she had learned Spanish and wanted to settle here. It is interesting to see how eastern European immigrants are coming into Spain in quite large numbers to fill useful economic niches in such villages that are struggling to hold onto their populations and services, as young Spanish people drift away to better jobs and more money in the cities. The local council, understanding the importance of keeping a bar and shop going for the population of about 400 people in and around Ríonegro, sensibly offered this building to Sofia at a nominal peppercorn rent.

  We walked on the next day to an equally friendly village, Cernadilla, with a spic-and-span, large, newly restored municipal refugio for pilgrims in the central square — it was really quite palatial, and Richard and I once again were the only pilgrims there. It had a large dormitory, magnificent hot showers, and a communal kitchen and dining area, all cleverly retrofitted into an old building. We went to evening Mass, ate well, and watched more World Cup football. Then, on the next day, passing through a string of villages close together now in this lushly forested valley, Richard got ahead of me; I wanted to walk slowly and enjoy the beautiful terrain here. I visited the parish church of Otero de Sanabria, with its famous wooden wall-carving portraying seven sinners in the fiery furnace. Actually, it is a sweet little carving: the seven naked men and women have their hands clasped in prayer, and are submerged waist-down in what looks more like watery waves than a fiery furnace: they look calmly contemplative rather than suffering. It might just as well be a picture of a river baptism.

  Onwards, to the large and impressive regional hilltop town of Puebla de Sanabria — much more than a village, but not quite a city. I found Richard and several other pilgrims already ensconced in a comfortable pilgrim refugio within a convent, the Colegio de Nostra Señora de las Victorias, near the castle and cathedral on top of the hill in the old town.

  This town’s records go back to 569 A.D. On a steep granite bluff hundreds of feet above the Río Tera stands a twelfth-century Romanesque church and a dramatic sixteenth-century castle out of Verdi, built by the powerful Duke of Benavente. I think this castle was built more as a political assertion of Spanish sovereignty than for serious military defence, because the medieval age of castles and sieges was now over. This castle has several little windows, even a romantic balcony, let into its high walls that grow straight out of the granite cliff below: it is a fanciful, Alexandre Dumas sort of castle, the kind of place in which you can imagine D’Artagnan creeping into a lady’s bedroom and then hurriedly escaping down the castle wall using a rope ladder or knotted sheets. The castle is a bit Hollywood, but great fun.

  Puebla de Sanabria was a picturesque, neat town, and it all looked busy and prosperous, if perhaps a bit touristy: the sort of place that comes alive at weekends with lots of short-term visitors. The hinterland of Puebla de Sanabria has good roads into an attractive mountain region of high alpine lakes, scenic walks, and even skiing in winter.

  The next day was a short walk (though we did at one point get a bit lost — there are many lanes and villages confusingly spread all around the rich valley here, and the waymarking was sparse) on to the village of Requejo de Sanabria, on the main A52 road at the foot of the first mountain pass. On this our last night in Castile, we happened on a gem of a commercial hostal, the Restaurante-Hostal Tu Casa (‘Your Place’), run by a charmingly hospitable and dignified patron, Francisco Fernandez Pequeño. His wife cooked us up a magnificent dinner on the menú del dia. I was now sad to be leaving my Spain of the past seven weeks, to be going into the different culture of Galicia. Francisco was a real Castilian, a man of great natural presence and graciousness. He recognised me — we had both been at the same Mass the evening before (a Saturday) in Puebla de Sanabria.

  The next day, we had to cross not one but two mountain passes — a marathon thirty-four kilometres, with nearly 1000 metres’ vertical climb, all on the now-disused former highway N631 that had been replaced by the motorway. We crossed two high passes, the Portillo de Padornelo at 1329 metres, and the Portela da Canda at 1262 metres. The day was pleasantly cool, but it was not particularly attractive country. The mountains were quite barren, their great original oak and chestnut forests having been greedily clear-felled in the industrial revolution, then left to sheep and goats and never properly replanted. I saw a lot of erosion. There were some recently planted young pine-forest plantations, but many of these had been burned out — the hilltops were drying out from declining rainfalls in recent years, and had suffered badly from forest wildfires a few years before. It was a sad, damaged landscape.

  ***

  To while away the climb, Richard and I talked about our lives. We already knew that we had much in common: we had both travelled widely; we enjoyed challenging exercise; and we took comfort and pleasure in a rich, old-fashioned family life at home, enjoying the company of a loving wife, children, and grandchildren. We were both old-fashioned family men, maybe even a bit patriarchal, Christian in spirit yet worldly and practical at the same time. Yet our life experi
ences had been, in important ways, very different.

  Richard had lived in the world of international commerce. He was well settled now, retired with his wife in a comfortable apartment in La Coruña, with their children living not far away. His peak career years had been spent with Spain’s largest fishing and fish-exporting company, but he’d spent his entire career in international marketing all over Europe, about which he told me many interesting tales. (He speaks four languages fluently.) He is naturally conservative, not too keen on the present Spanish government, but not thrilled by the alternative either. Basically, he mistrusts politics and government. On the other hand, my whole career had been in politics and government. We were both quite naive about one another’s worlds.

  But what came through to me, as we got to know one another better, was how well Richard has balanced his life. Superbly fit at seventy, he also knows how to relax and to enjoy his well-earned retirement. Comfortably off, he is not greedy to own new things or to have new holiday experiences. His pleasures are simple and homely: enjoying good company, and good food and wine; being with his grandchildren; staying at his country-retreat farmhouse; and going on regular distance-walks with friends to keep fit. He has walked four different caminos to Santiago already, totalling some 3500 kilometres. Every now and again, when he feels the old urge coming on, he says to his wife, ‘I’m off again on the camino’, and away he goes for a few more weeks with his old, homemade rucksack frame, in his spartan T-shirts and shorts. He is physically as tough as old boots, stocky but with no surplus fat at all, and a gentle and civilised man. He grew up in Bavaria, so he must have spent his first nine years of life under Nazi rule, and the rest of his childhood under the privations of early post-war Germany — but he never talked about those times.

  What was most striking to me, during our time together, was how his mobile phone rang hot with calls from family members and friends, including many men and women from his former company, asking how he was faring and when he was coming home. It was clear that many people loved and cared about Richard. And this got me thinking — here was a man of seventy, strong both physically and morally, still inspiring his friends, attracting great affection and loyalty, making a powerful contribution to the happiness of those around him, part of a rich human community of people who clearly needed his strength and love as much as he needed theirs.

  I looked back by comparison on what I had to show for my thirty years in Australian government service. I asked myself, how many real friendships had I kept up from those long years of shared public working life? Had I let old friendships atrophy and wither on the vine, that I should have valued more? What was the quality of my family life — was I giving enough time and love to my family to go on earning their love in return? Richard may not know or want to know as much as I do about politics, but he knows a lot more than me about building and nurturing a good personal life around yourself. I learned much from his example.

  He also taught me a lot about stamina and self-discipline, as much moral as physical: pacing yourself at night, eating and drinking in moderation, saying no to the third or fourth glass of wine, having fresh fruit instead of a rich ice-cream dessert. It is not that Richard was an ascetic or a kill-joy — he enjoyed these pleasures as much as anyone — but he understood that pilgrimage was a serious business. One was asking a lot of one’s body every day, so one had to treat it with care and respect.

  We did not talk all the time — indeed, for a lot of the time we walked either in companionable silence or some distance from each other, one of us (more often Richard) setting the pace and jauntily striding out ahead, listening to his favourite radio talk-programs. We would always, sooner or later, meet up again during the day. I found that you don’t need to chatter all the time on the camino to enjoy the comfort of a travelling companion. We did most of our talking of an evening, in the bar and over meals, when we were not watching World Cup football, which was often. Thank you, Richard, for your company and friendship: I won’t forget you.

  chapter twelve

  Into Galicia

  I had crossed the León Mountains into Galicia, and Santiago was only 210 kilometres ahead, possibly only a week away. The end of the journey was now distressingly close. It had seemed only yesterday that I was far back on the Spanish meseta, on the road from Baños de Montemayor to Salamanca, feeling that so much journeying still lay ahead of me. That had been two weeks ago. But where had those two weeks gone? Had my feet taken wing as my soul drifted through time and space?

  I was being reminded again of the sad truth that the second half of any life, even a pilgrim’s little life, goes more quickly than the first. The real midpoint of life is not the chronological midpoint, in your forties. It is at about age 25–30, when you foolishly think that the best years are ahead, and old age and death are still far away. Time on my pilgrimage had sped up now, just as the years of normal life speed up as you grow older. I wanted to cry out: Please God, slow down the clock! Make my life pass more slowly again, the way it did when I was young, and every day seemed dreamily repetitive and long. Bring back those sublime, endless days of childhood, and bring back my idyllic month of ambling through Andalucia and Extremadura, those days of walking with little thought of destination, when it still seemed Santiago was half a continent and a lifetime away.

  I understood now that the real midpoint of my camino had been back around Mérida, a month and 600 kilometres before. I had still thought then that endless miles of walking lay ahead, but remorseless time had now caught up with me. How space and time had played tricks on me. I had started off in Granada with the fear of not being able to make the distance to Santiago, which then seemed impossibly far, and I had thought then that the only possible strategy was to take each day as it came, one by one, not thinking about the final goal. Now that the journey was nearing its end, my mind was reaching for a similar protective logic. As I felt the panic of my approaching ‘little death’ in Santiago, I tried to put that knowledge out of my mind, savouring each precious day that was left as it came, determined not to think about the journey’s end.

  But Richard was already planning ahead, talking enthusiastically about us being able to reach Santiago in six days, if we managed to walk thirty or forty kilometres a day. He had helped me build up to a high level of fitness now, and we both knew my body could do it with him. He was keen to get home: his wife and family were awaiting him in La Coruña, he had a beloved granddaughter’s birthday party coming up in La Coruña in ten days’ time, and he also wanted to fit in a final walk from Santiago to Finisterre. He was keen to press on as fast as possible.

  I knew that, God willing, Richard would enjoy more pilgrimages to Santiago. Richard was too nice a man to ever say anything, but he had been holding back his pace for me since we started walking together a week before. I had to make a hard decision now that I would ask him to go on alone ahead of me. Much as I was enjoying his company, and the challenge of pushing my body to its limits, I knew that I really needed to experience the final days of this pilgrimage at a more leisurely, meditative speed, to try and recapture that magically suspended state of being, the high spiritual awareness, that I had briefly glimpsed in the wondrous week between Baños de Montemayor and Zamora. I wanted to go back to slow, reflective, solitary walking, because I knew this would probably be my last time in Europe and my last pilgrimage. I didn’t want these precious final days to be swallowed up in a blur of fast walking and evening exhaustion.

  Was I being selfish? Yes. But I knew Richard would manage the last few days well on his own, and I knew he was keen to get home. So, on our second night in Galicia, at Campobecarros, I told Richard. He received the news with great grace and charm. The next day, I got up early for breakfast with him and to farewell him. It was a necessary parting, but a sad moment for me and, I think, also for him. For all their brevity, pilgrimage friendships can grow to be real and strong.

  ***

  We h
ad walked down from the high passes into Galicia, and at our first Galician stopover, Vilavella, we had watched Australia lose 1–0 to Italy in the Octavos (‘Round of Eight’, that is, eighth-finals) of the World Cup football. It was a tensely exciting game, with no scores by either side as the game drew to its end. But then, in the final ten seconds, Australia incurred a questionable penalty right in front of the goal it had successfully defended against every Italian attack for eighty-nine minutes and fifty seconds. It was an infuriating way to lose a close game. As Italy in later days cruised through an easy quarter-final win against an out-classed Ukraine, and then achieved two cliffhanger victories over Germany and finally France to win the 2006 FIFA Football World Cup, I could not help feeling some chagrin at the fickleness of the sporting gods. How far might Australia have gone if it had had no last-moment penalty awarded agaisnt it, and if it had then achieved the miracle of defeating Italy in overtime playoffs? Could we have gone to the quarter finals, the semis, even to the very final? But that is the World Cup, in all its glory and frustration for every team but the winners. Better luck in 2010, Australia! Clearly, six weeks of pilgrimage and contemplation had not purged me of my native competitiveness and will to win.

  Richard was immediately and loyally supportive. ‘It’s a scandal!’, he exploded. ‘What did that umpire think he was doing? The Italian just fell over. There was no Australian foul at all!’ Most others in the bar agreed. Uncomfortably, it was a Spanish referee. Someone (not Richard or me) raised a Machiavellian conspiracy theory: an Italian was due to referee the Spain–France octavo game the next day — could it be that the Spanish referee had offered Italy ‘a little favour’ at the end of the Australian game, in the hope that his Italian counterpart might kindly reciprocate in any tight calls the next day? Of course, I refused to consider that such skullduggery might ever be possible in a World Cup! And, in the event, the next day France rather easily knocked out Spain 3–1, so the theory was never tested.