Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  At the same time, she was sufficiently intuitive so that she could generally get the sense of a sentence spoken to her, whether or not she knew what the individual words meant. Consequently the two of us together almost amounted to a person capable of carrying on a conversation. I could cobble together a sentence and fling it out there, and she could translate the response for me.

  This system worked best if we didn’t switch roles. If I tried to work out what somebody was saying, well, the worst thing that might happen was that I’d miss it. But when Lynne tried to talk, strange things could happen.

  I’m reminded of a beastly hot day when we walked for hours under a relentless sun. I’m not sure where we were, but it was probably in León. (One problem with the pilgrim route was that it hadn’t been designed with climate in mind. In order to arrive in Santiago de Compostela in time for the Saint’s Day celebration on July 25th, you had to cross the Pyrenees while they were still snow-covered—viz., the avalanche that had delayed us. And by the time you got to the central plains, it was summer, and the heat was hard to bear. There was something to be said for starting in Santiago in the spring and traversing the route in the opposite direction, and I’d heard of people who did it that way, but not many of them. It was just too weird.)

  On this particular occasion we’d walked a long way on a hot day, and when a café turned up it seemed heaven sent. We got a couple of coffees and went to a table, and I dropped my pack on the floor and collapsed into a chair. Lynne asked if there was anything she could get me.

  More days than not, I’d buy a Spanish newspaper, generally El País, sometime in the afternoon, and read it over a cup of coffee. My eyes were okay with the language, it was my ears that had all the trouble, and with the aid of a pocket dictionary I could at least get the gist of most of the news stories. So what I told her was that I’d love it if she could rustle up a paper.

  And how should she ask for it? “¿Tiene usted un periódico?” I said. She repeated the sentence a couple of times to make sure she had it down, and then she went over to the bar, and a moment or two later she came back, looking very troubled.

  “I think I said something wrong,” she reported. “He got all flustered and blushed and everything.”

  “What on earth did you say?”

  “What you told me to say.”

  “Say it,” I said, and she did, and I sighed. “I can’t be entirely sure,” I said, “but it sounds to me as though you asked him if he was having his period.”

  “Oh, God. I’ll bet that’s why he turned red.”

  “I imagine it is.”

  “I feel terrible,” she said, and left the table, only to return a moment later looking even more disconcerted. “I went to apologize,” she said, “and I think I just made it worse, and I can’t understand it.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Just, you know, that I was sorry if I embarrassed him.”

  “You said that whole sentence?”

  “Well, no,” she said. “Of course not. I just pointed at him, you know, and said ‘Embarazada.’ What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “First you asked him if he was having his period,” I told her, “and then you told him he was pregnant. Drink your coffee, will you? I think we’d better get out of here.”

  The real reason our Spanish never improved was we only used it when we had to. We saw a lot of it on signs, and got reasonably good at making out what they said. And I developed a certain proficiency at reading El País, or at least those articles on subjects with which I had some familiarity. (I couldn’t have made sense of the financial reportage or the essays on Spanish politics if they’d been written in English, so how could I expect to grasp them in Spanish?)

  But as far as the spoken Spanish language was concerned, we weren’t that much more adept at the trip’s end than at its onset. And that’s because we rarely had occasion to speak Spanish. We used it to order food, to secure a room for the night, to determine whether to go left or right, and, one memorable afternoon, to get directions to a pharmacy. (After a night in one of the less salubrious refugios, I’d acquired head lice. I didn’t know what to call the little bastards, so I made do with pantomime, which I’ll leave to your imagination. Worked like a charm—and so, thank God, did the stuff they sold me.)

  All of that rarely amounted to more than a few sentences per day, and they tended to be the same sentences over and over. The rest of the time, when we weren’t getting a room or ordering a meal, we were walking with only each other for company. We did a lot of talking while we walked, but, curiously enough, the lingo we employed was English.

  And when we talked with other pilgrims, other peregrinos walking the Way of St. James, we spoke English with them, as well.

  PEREGRINOS

  After we left the train we’d taken from Zaragoza, and after a night of unaccustomed luxury at the parador, we walked on toward Puente la Reina, where we could connect with the traditional pilgrimage route. Halfway there, we stopped for the evening at a roadside inn, after a long and arduous morning on the road. There was a TV in the dining room. We walked in on a news bulletin on the most recent ETA bombing, which threw an eloquent hush over the room there in the Basque country, and then the feature resumed, and we gazed up at the screen, where Jeff Bridges seemed to be speaking Spanish.

  It was a dubbed version of Eight Million Ways to Die, the lamentable film made from a book of mine and released in the States (as into a sea of popular and critical indifference) five years earlier. Around us, people resumed their conversations and paid no attention to the movie. I can’t say I blamed them.

  At Puente la Reina the next day, we officially became peregrinos, and found out what we’d been missing. Someone steered us to an office where we were supplied with official peregrino passports, yellow cardboard affairs designed to be stamped at the various refugios we’d pass through along our way. When we reached our destination, this would serve as proof to the church officials that we had in fact traversed the route from point to point, and thus deserved the promised plenary indulgence.

  (That, back in the day, had been a major selling point of the Camino de Santiago. Get there and all your sins would be washed away. You’d have a clean slate—which, given the history of human behavior along the pilgrim route, would very likely be covered with fresh celestial chalk marks by the time you were back home.)

  Our particular party, composed as it was of a lapsed Catholic and a secular Jew, hadn’t made the trip in fear of hell or hope of heaven. All the same, we shared a pragmatic view of the prospect of a plenary indulgence—to wit, Nu? What could it hurt?

  If any of our fellow pilgrims had come seeking a remission of sins, they kept their hopes to themselves. We met a good many of them over the next two months, and had brief or lengthy conversations with a fair number of them, and I can’t recall a single one whose motivation was traditionally religious. Typically, our fellows felt impelled to walk the walk, and did so without talking the talk; they were only occasionally Catholic by birth or upbringing, attended any church infrequently if at all, and had become peregrinos in response to some inner prompting which they were hard put to define.

  Still, one did hear of pilgrims whose motivation was religious, and who were seeking something in the nature of absolution. We were told more than once of a priest who walked all the way from his church in Germany, crossing the Alps en route to the Pyrenees, and then continuing all the way to Santiago—barefoot. I couldn’t begin to guess what he’d done to justify imposing such penance upon himself, but I suspect there’s a whole generation of altar boys who could shed light on the subject.

  I can’t say we got to know any of the peregrinos terribly well, and I find it difficult to summon up any names or faces. I remember a pair of Englishmen who were covering the route by bicycle. They were in no great hurry, which explains how we were able to keep up with them for a while, but eventually they got a day or two ahead of us, and after that we never saw them a
gain. I think they were the ones who first told us that a special church council had established that bicycle pilgrims would receive absolution for half of their sins.

  There were quite a few Dutch heading for Santiago, and of course they were all fluent in English, as well as French and German. (And, I would have to suppose, Dutch.) Dutch pilgrims didn’t fly anywhere, or begin the trek with a train ride. They just packed up their things, walked out the front door and down the well-scrubbed stoop, and kept on walking.

  As did the two Swiss priests, two brothers who might even have been twins, who had walked all the way from Switzerland. They were well up in their sixties, tall and thin and enviably fit, striding confidently over hill and dale. We never spoke with them, but we had heard tell of them a few days before they caught up with us, most likely from the English cyclists. Then one day we saw the two of them, and then that day or the next they passed us, and we never ran into them again.

  Lynne likes to characterize our great stream of pilgrims as a sort of fluid community, flowing toward Compostela. In many of the refugios we’d find a guest book, not unlike what one finds in, say, a twee bed-and-breakfast in Bucks County, where visitors could inscribe their names (“Henry and Claudine Thorpe”) along with their addresses (“Pratt, Kansas”) and their comments (“Loved the chintz bedspread—and oh, those cranberry muffins at breakfast!!!”). There were precious few chintz spreads or breakfast muffins at the refugios, but the guest ledgers were to us as fire hydrants to dogs, affording the opportunity to sniff out the spoor of those who’d preceded us while we in turn left our own calling card for those following in our wake.

  In addition, a form of bush telegraph kept us current on other fellow travelers. Before we’d passed the central plains of Castile, we began to hear about a Welsh family, a couple and their two children, who would have been remarkable enough in any event—they were, as far as we knew, the only pilgrims brave enough to bring their kids along—but who became genuinely famous, in an admittedly limited circle, because their party included a donkey. They’d bought the poor creature when they crossed the border, and reports indicated it was doing a fine job of toting their gear, and occasionally their children. Sort of like a shopping cart, Lynne observed, but one that ate grass.

  Inevitably, the rest of us called them the Holy Family.

  The Welsh turned up in Santiago de Compostela a few days after we arrived there, and it didn’t take us long to run into them, or any time at all to dope out who they were, as they still had the donkey. We told them we’d heard a lot about them, and they confided that they’d read our entries in the refugio ledgers; if their fame had preceded them, ours had evidently trailed along behind us.

  Like everyone else, we asked if they’d be able to bring the little donkey home with them, and they said it was probably going to be impossible. The UK had rather draconian regulations regarding the importation of livestock, and pet dogs and cats were subject to something like a six-month quarantine to prevent the introduction of rabies, so what chance did a donkey have?

  So they’d probably have to sell it, the man said, or find a home for it. And it would be a wrench for the kids, the woman added, but she didn’t see how it could be helped.

  “You can always buy another donkey once you get home,” Lynne suggested. And the two of them stared at her as if she had lost her mind.

  MEETINGS

  Life became a good deal more collegial from Puente la Reina on. We ran into other peregrinos on the trail, at roadside cafés, and in the villages where we’d end the day’s walking. We spent even more time with them at the refugios, where sleeping accommodations were often dormitory-style, and a shared wait for the shower gave people a chance to talk—and, if the wait was long enough, something to talk about.

  But most of the time Lynne and I had each other for company. We didn’t walk side by side every step of the way; my natural pace was faster, and sometimes I’d wander off ahead while she trailed along behind me, until I’d drop my pack and sit down and wait for her to catch up with me. For the most part, though, we walked together, and it was generally just the two of us on the trail. When a larger group chanced to form, it didn’t stay together very long.

  As a result, the trip became a remarkable bonding experience for the two of us. We’d already evidenced a curious ability to tolerate each other’s company in close quarters, all those months driving around in search of Buffalo made that abundantly clear, but this was an exponentially more intense phenomenon. There we were, cut off from everything, with yesterday ten or fifteen miles to our rear and tomorrow as many miles in front of us, and both of them well out of sight. We weren’t always chattering away, and the shared silences were as intimate as the continuing dialog.

  I can’t remember what we talked about, but neither can I point to anything we didn’t talk about. From its beginnings, our relationship had been characterized by a degree of candor far removed from our prior experience, so we’d been talking intimately for years. Still, this was different, because there was so much of it, and so little of anything else.

  And we didn’t just have conversations. Every once in a while we had a meeting.

  In 1977, as I mentioned earlier, I stopped drinking. Lynne underwent the same life change four years later, and in fact we first became acquainted at a meeting of a group of people who had all stopped drinking and using drugs, and who convened regularly to share a dark little room in the West Village, along with their experience, strength, and hope.

  Attending such meetings had become a regular part of our lives. We went to them separately or together, and we went often—on average, several times a week. Meetings of this sort are held all the time throughout the world, and we’d gone to them during our sojourn in Florida, and during our years of driving back and forth across America. We’d even sought out meetings during trips abroad.

  They wouldn’t be available to us in Spain. There are meetings held in Spain, and I’d even been to English-speaking meetings in Madrid and Barcelona when I’d come over for the Madrid Marathon. But we weren’t going to be in either of those cities, we were going to be in hamlets and villages strung across rural Northern Spain, where no one spoke English, and where it would be virtually impossible (and profoundly inconvenient) to find a meeting. And even if we did find one, we wouldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. (And what could we say? “Me llamo Lorenzo, y soy un puerco borracho.” “Hola, Lorenzo!” Terrific.)

  It’s not that we were worried we wouldn’t remain sober. We felt reasonably confident of our ability to stay away from a drink at that stage in our lives. But while the primary purpose of the meetings is to help members maintain their sobriety, that’s not their only function. In a way I don’t entirely understand, they make it easier to maintain one’s emotional equilibrium, to be comfortable in one’s sobriety.

  But all it takes to have a meeting is two members gathered together for that purpose. And so we established what we wound up calling the Peregrino Group, and either of us could call a meeting simply by declaring one to be in session, reading the designated preamble, and calling on the other to give a talk.

  Meetings back home typically consisted of a speaker who talked for twenty minutes or so, telling what his life used to be like, what had happened, and what it was like now. We’d heard each other many times over the years, but at our Peregrino Group meetings we wound up exploring parts of our past we’d never gotten around to recounting before, in a meeting or in our private conversation. Aspects of childhood, of family history. Incidents from our drinking years that might have seemed inappropriate in a larger assemblage. Anything, really.

  These sessions were not just intimate conversations, because we maintained the formality that prevailed at a meeting. The speaker talked, and there was no back and forth; the other person listened without interrupting. When the speaker was done, the other would talk for a while—about what the speaker had said, or about anything else that came to mind. And then we’d recite the Serenity Prayer
and conclude the meeting.

  The cumulative effect of these two-person meetings was quite extraordinary. They helped remind us of our commitment to sobriety, not a bad idea given the amount of time we were spending in bars and cafés. (In one refugio, the chap in charge was buzzing around the place the night we were there, brandishing a bottle of colorless liquid which he identified as aguardiente and offering it to all comers. All the efforts of the Peregrino Group notwithstanding, that bottle was not entirely unappealing.)

  Beyond that, the meetings did what meetings at home did. They made us more comfortable, and improved our dispositions. Calmed us. Settled us down.

  And this was particularly useful the day we got seriously lost.

  GETTING LOST

  Everybody got lost now and then. I don’t know that it’s an inevitable part of any pilgrimage, although I can see where it might be. I do know it was part of ours.

  We’d picked up a guidebook in Puente la Reina, with a pretty decent map of the route. But here’s the thing about the Camino—much of it is an off-road event, with marked paths inaccessible to wheeled vehicles.

  This enhanced the whole experience beyond measure. Walking on a two-lane highway isn’t unpleasant, in the ordinary course of things, but there were stretches in Catalonia where we had to share narrow roads with large trucks. Sometimes the roads had no shoulders, and sometimes there was a sheer drop-off at the side of the road, and that wasn’t much fun.

  When you were on a path through the fields, you didn’t have to dodge trucks or inhale carbon monoxide. And it was a lot easier to forget you were still in the twentieth century. The hills and the trees and the sky were, after all, not that different from what peregrinos might have seen ages ago.

  (And, thanks to the Fascist dictatorship that had kept Spain backward and impoverished for decades, the villages hadn’t changed that much, either. We walked through some of them—in Galicia, especially—just as they were beginning to change; we would see farmers plowing with oxen, and then a mile away we’d spot Japanese cars parked in a village that still hadn’t been wired for electricity. If we’d walked the Camino a few years earlier, those cars wouldn’t have been there; if we walked it today, I expect we’d find tractors had replaced the oxen.)