The Spanish eat their main meal mid-afternoon, which was about the time I usually arrived at my destination, but, rather than change the habits of a lifetime, I settled on eating in the evenings. The smaller, family-owned bars would cook anything at any time if you asked. Away from the big smoke of San Sebastián, there was less variety. In Basque country, most of the tapas were bread-based, and the olive, pepper and anchovy combination was ubiquitous. In the morning, I’d run on coffee for the first two or three miles, then stop for a tortilla and a freshly squeezed orange juice. If the day got warm, I’d grab an ice cream before the final stretch, a childhood indulgence that I could afford with all the exercise I was getting.
As I followed the yellow arrows along the coast, letting the days and the miles accumulate, I had three problems to deal with.
The first was the German offer. I didn’t want to sell myself short. If they were willing to pay that sum now, there was no reason why they should not carry it through to the trade fair, tactics notwithstanding. The Chinese manufacturer and Jonathan’s army people were still in the mix. I’d heard nothing from the French distributor since their response to my original enquiry.
The second, and most important, issue was Sarah. She had gone quiet. No response to Skype messages or texts, with one exception. Are you OK? drew a one-word reply: Yup.
And Zoe. Should I try to contact her? If so, when?
Then I walked into my hotel in Bilbao, and she was sitting in an oversized Chicago Bulls sweater at a computer with a cartoon of me on the screen.
I wasn’t sure which I was more surprised by: Zoe, who should have been an ocean away, or the cartoon of me, which was (perhaps deliberately) a poor likeness. Except that she’d managed to capture something that I recognised only now that I saw it—a man with every possibility in front of him, but hesitating, not quite able to seize the day.
She interrupted my contemplation of how others—or at least one other—saw me by standing and throwing her arms around me, as she had on the night of the English Bastards. ‘Oh God—I’m so sorry…’
I had long ago come to terms with what had happened in St Jean Pied de Port. ‘I’m the one…Or are you apologising for the cartoon?’
‘It’s only your cart. It’s not meant to look like you. No beard. Listen, this is so rude but I’ve got to reply to this email. But there’s a whole lot I want to explain.’
‘I’ll buy you dinner.’
‘You don’t have to…shout.’
‘Have you been to the Guggenheim yet? We’ll go there first. In half an hour?’
I met her in the foyer. She was in walking trousers and a baggy T-shirt hanging off one shoulder and tied in a knot over her hip.
‘I lost all my stuff in St Jean Pied de Port. So, forget anywhere fancy.’
‘I went to one of the best restaurants in the world in what I’m wearing now, more or less. You look great.’
Outside Frank Gehry’s extravaganza of random curves and interconnecting stone, glass and titanium that caught the light and made it part of the building, Zoe hesitated. ‘What do you think of it?’ she said.
‘What do you know about modern architecture?’ I didn’t want to talk down to someone who’d studied art. She might have done a thesis on deconstructionist and expressionist design.
‘Zip.’
I took her through some of the background to the style, with the advantage of a real building to illustrate. I didn’t hurry: I had a sense that she wasn’t sure about going inside. Possibly she was uncomfortable about being put on the spot and having to explain a range of art she wasn’t up on.
‘You love this, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Not just the architecture—talking about it.’
‘Very observant of you.’
‘So why aren’t you an architect?’
‘I told you, back in the church in Estaing. I got a scholarship in engineering. I was pretty grateful to get to go to uni.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Twenty-one. I’d been working for two years.’
‘And you’re going to let a decision you took back then define who you are for the rest of your life?’
‘I’ve adapted. I teach design theory, which has strong connections with architecture—but I do it as an engineer. Did it. And now you’re going to ask why I don’t become an architect. I’m fifty-two.’
‘I’m forty-five. I might have just got my first real job as an artist—what I’ve wanted to be all my life—today. What are you going to do next? I’m guessing you’re not going to spend the rest of your life improving your cart design.’
‘You want the truth? I haven’t thought much beyond it. How long’s the cartoon job for?’
‘No idea. So, here we both are in the middle of our lives, starting again. Are we going to be bold or just go back to what we were?’
‘There’s a slightly more urgent decision we need to take.’ I pointed to the museum. ‘The sign says it closes at eight. It’s late, but I guess we’re not going to get another chance.’
53
ZOE
When I’d sat outside the Guggenheim sketching earlier in the day, I was on a mission and my mind was racing with ideas. I was too busy to think about going inside. Now, I realised it was more than that. I was a walker on a walk, not an artist on a tour of the galleries of Europe. I hadn’t had this feeling at the churches in Estaing or Conques, which had seemed part of the Camino. But even as I walked through a modern city, looking in shop windows and taking advantage of its technology, I felt separate from it.
Fortunately, Martin pushed me—he didn’t insist, but after his lecture on the exterior architecture I wanted to show him I knew something too. Great. Having turned me into an entrepreneur, the Camino was now making me egotistical and competitive.
For whatever reason, I got an hour’s taste of amazing art. And I had the perfect companion for touring a gallery renowned for its interplay of art and architecture.
As we stood before a huge Clyfford Still canvas, with its bright colours in stalagmite formations, he made a big deal of looking at it from every angle short of standing on his head.
‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘Go find some Old Masters if you’re not interested.’
‘Tell me about it.’
I had been to the Still museum in Denver, so this was not the first of his works I’d seen. I wasn’t sure what Martin knew about modern art but felt he might be better able to put Rothko and Klein into perspective by seeing a Still first.
‘He was considered the first of the abstract expressionists,’ I explained. ‘American.’ Martin was taking it in, seriously now. ‘Unlike the artists after him, his colour-field paintings are not regular. Paint laid on canvas—he wanted colour and texture and images to fuse.’
I found us a Rothko.
‘No point in altering head position for this one,’ he said.
‘More challenging, agreed,’ I said. Sensual, my Russian-born art teacher had told me; then, like Martin now, I struggled to see anything in the rectangular shapes.
‘Truth is,’ I told Martin, ‘for years, anything I saw in Rothko was too ephemeral for me. I preferred Georgia O’Keeffe. Colour and imagery that’s evocative and accessible.’ As a student in St Louis I had loved her work, only to move away from it as I tried to be more sophisticated. Now, I thought of her words and she inspired me again: she had always been terrified but had never allowed her fear to stop her.
‘The flowers or the vaginas?’ said Martin.
‘Why do men see sex everywhere?’ But I doubted Keith would have known that much about O’Keeffe’s work, if he knew of her at all.
‘Do you really want an answer to that?’
‘As it happens, I do think there was subconscious imagery happening. Makes them all the more powerful.’
‘And these rectangles?’ Martin looked back at the Rothko.
‘Spiritual. Agony and the Ecstasy, without religious icons. Though he was religious—collected a lot of religious art for his chapel
. He was…’ I looked at the painting: Walls of Light, in yellow and red. ‘It seems to hover, don’t you think? Like we are looking at a landscape and yet…’ The size and vibrancy of the painting in real life, compared with the reproductions I’d seen in books, allowed it to do what I guessed the artist, preoccupied with death, had intended. For me, in the moment, this picture was not a landscape but a look over the horizon into another world. Rothko had committed suicide. There, in the distance, was the world he—and Keith—now belonged to.
Martin was looking intently, not just trying hard but taking something from it.
As 8 p.m. approached, the museum staff began pushing us toward the exit.
‘We could come back in the morning,’ said Martin.
‘We could, but I might never finish the walk. Or draw cartoons. I’m a professional artist now, remember?’
I was. For the first time in my life. A professional artist—a cartoonist—and writer, living on my wits, three-quarters of the way into a thousand-mile walk. And a widow. Three months earlier, I could not have imagined any of this. Now I was about to go to dinner in the company of a British adventurer with a hint of a Harrison Ford smirk, with whom I’d just spent two hours talking art and architecture at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. On—let’s face it—a date.
54
MARTIN
I felt I’d managed to invite Zoe to dinner without giving the impression of it being a date. I was finding my way with her again, and not keen on a repeat of the events in St Jean Pied de Port.
It wasn’t as if it was the first time we’d eaten together. That said, Bilbao is a serious city, the biggest on the Camino del Norte, and the restaurant was a world away from what we’d become accustomed to in rural France: modern, sharp, small tables and stools at the bar, and a glass-topped display of tapas with a focus on seafood and vegetables. It felt out of place on a walk, even a little disorienting, but San Sebastián had prepared me. Zoe’s smile indicated I’d made a good choice.
We secured a table for two as the place was filling up with locals, young people having after-work drinks.
With a couple of glasses of rosé and a round of tapas on the table, I threw it over to her. ‘Go.’
‘You first.’
‘No, you. I’m the one who’s supposed to be walking to Santiago.’
She filled me in, from the Skype call with her daughter, to the week in the Pyrenees wilderness, to the email from the Chronicle. She would have spent the whole meal apologising for standing me up in St Jean Pied de Port if I hadn’t dismissed it, sincerely: ‘For God’s sake, I thought it was an understandable thing to do even without the news.’
She didn’t mention her financial situation, but I could guess. She had changed her top but not the trousers.
Her husband’s—Keith’s—apparent suicide was not so easily dealt with, and she was still coming to terms with it.
‘I let him down,’ Zoe said. ‘If I had been there for him he might still be alive.’
‘You think that was what it was about? How much support you offered? That was all?’
‘I guess not. But I should have seen the signs.’
‘Or he could have told you. It cuts both ways. If that’s what happened. If it wasn’t an accident. You don’t know. You can’t know.’
She took a deep breath. ‘His business was in trouble. He took out an insurance policy. A big one.’
‘Doesn’t mean he planned to die. He had money problems? It was a way he could put some protection in place, if anything happened. Do something positive at a time when he was struggling to find solutions…And if he had stuff on his mind…he could have been distracted when he had the accident.’
I could see she wanted to believe it—but didn’t. ‘The more I think about it, the more it seems all the signs were there. I should have…stepped up.’
‘I don’t want to sound harsh, but we’re responsible for ourselves. We make our own decisions.’ There had been moments when I’d thought—fantasised, rather than truly contemplated—ending it, and for the worst possible reason. To get back at Julia. Who would have been rightly angry back at me. ‘If you do believe it wasn’t an accident, then in all the pain I guess there must be a bit of anger too.’
She drank some wine, and tried the shrimp and peppers. Then she nodded, slowly. ‘You’re right. I was pretty angry with the universe, pretty angry with myself…I was angry with my mother for a while…after all these years.’ She stopped and I let it sit.
‘Something else,’ she said. ‘You know I said I forgave my mother? In Conques? I’ve been wondering what would have happened if I’d forgiven her first back then—when she was dying. Maybe it wouldn’t have meant anything to her, but I could have tried.’
‘Tough thing, to forgive someone when they’re in the wrong.’ She laughed. ‘That’s what forgiveness is. Anyway, thanks for listening…for understanding.’
‘I wish you’d let me do that in St Jean Pied de Port. But fate seems to have brought us together again,’ I said. ‘Not just you deciding to walk on, but us both taking the northern route, and then today…’
She laughed again. ‘It’s been good to have someone to talk to.’
‘Do you want to walk with me tomorrow?’
‘Thanks, but I think I need to stay here another day, do some more cartoons…’
‘I’ll wait, if you like.’
‘Thank you. But…I don’t think it’s a good idea. I liked walking with you in France, but I wasn’t thinking about what I needed to think about.’
‘I can keep shtum.’
‘You do that most of the time anyway. It’s more than that. I need to be independent, and if I was walking with you…’ She waved her hand to indicate our surroundings. ‘Five-star restaurants every night.’
‘They only go up to three.’
‘Whatever. I need to do it myself.’
She reached across and took my hand. ‘One day, when this is all done, when I’ve got my shit together…This is just the wrong time. Maybe for you too. Maybe you need to deal with the past before you can move on.’
‘It’s more about accepting it than dealing with it, if that distinction makes any sense. I’m not good at that—I’m more about finding solutions. I don’t know there’s anything else I can do.’
She looked at me thoughtfully. ‘When we get stuck, sometimes, instead of pushing at the problem, we need to look inward and question the things we believe, the stuff that might be blocking us. Is that too Californian for you?’
‘Not at all. I say the same thing to my students, in pretty much the same words.’
‘So, maybe think about it.’
I walked her back to the hostel and kissed her goodnight, starting with a peck on each cheek and finishing with something more intense.
‘I’d ask you to come in,’ she said, ‘but…’
‘We could go back to my hotel.’
She thought about it, then shook her head. ‘Not a good idea.’ She kissed me again. ‘All right, I’m torn and will regret this as soon as you leave. I would like to spend time with you, but I need to get my head straight, feel that I’m solid in myself, in case I disappear before I’ve fully rediscovered who I am. I really do.’
‘I’m thinking I’ll try to meet the Brazilians in Oviedo,’ I said. ‘They arrive April 28.’
‘You didn’t tell me that.’
‘See, we need more time to talk. They’re taking three weeks off, then doing another section, the Camino Primitivo. Turn left at Villaviciosa; it’s about the same length but not along the coast, which I think’s a good thing. Not so much development. It’s supposed to be the toughest Camino.’
‘Keep talking.’
‘When do you have to be in Santiago?’
‘My flight’s May 13.’
‘That’s my due date in Paris. I need to be in Santiago on the 11th to catch the train the next day. If we both happen to hit Oviedo on the same day and your head’s clear…Call it fate.’
‘I can�
��t promise…’
‘I’m not asking you to. Five p.m. at the tourist office in Oviedo on April 28—two weeks tomorrow. Or not.’
‘No promises. Either of us.’
‘I heard you. How’s the money holding out?’
‘Fine, now that I’ve got a job.’
‘I mean right now? It’ll be a month before you’re paid. Minimum.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I’ll lend you five hundred.’ It was my daily withdrawal limit. And about the limit of what I could spare.
‘I…How would I pay you back? I’ll only take it if I can pay you back.’
I took out the packet that held my passport, cards and cash, and she wrote down my account number. Then we went to an ATM, sorted it out and kissed goodbye for the third time. She didn’t mention the scallop shell and nor did I. It would give me a reason to contact her if we didn’t connect in Oviedo.
That said, I hoped she would take the Camino Primitivo, if only to keep open the option of meeting. And, paradoxically, that we wouldn’t see each other on the track until then.
55
ZOE
CARTOON: An elderly Caucasian woman is walking slowly, carefully. Her bag of sins is open and empty, and her face is glowing. Ahead of her, a man of colour, some grey in his thinning hair, is waiting for her. He has a picnic prepared on a table.
STORY: Marianne, from France, is eighty-two. She and her three closest friends had dreamed of walking the Camino ever since they heard about it in elementary school. The time had never been right: too young; too busy; their families needed them. And now, they have accepted that they are too old. Except Marianne.
Marianne has been widowed ten years and has had a stroke, which has left her with a limp. Her daughter thinks she should be in a nursing home but Marianne does not think her life is over, and wishes to pay homage to the church that has seen her through difficult times. She will walk the Camino for herself and her friends. Her daughter makes her call in every second day and interrogates Marianne to check that she is not losing her mind: Who is the French president? What is the capital of Morocco?
Two Steps Forward Page 19
