Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  “Oh, God,” she says through a mouthful of food. I have only said “Hello,” but it is enough for her to realize she has an English speaker at her door.

  “I am eating dinner,” she says, half in French and English.

  I am all apologies.

  “I am fatigued?” she adds. Her insecurity about English usage turns statements into questions. “I have seen many pilgrims?”

  “Oh, I will come back in the morning, then.”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she says, opening the door wide.

  Madame Debril’s office is a clutter of Santiago memorabilia. An old 3-D topological map of the Pyrenees hangs beside the door. She is wearing a scallop shell around her neck. On her desk is a silver shell presented to her by the people of Pamplona. Clay shells hang from posts and on the wall and are draped over the edges of cabinets. A dozen real shells ride the chaos of papers on her desk. Rolled-up posters, photo albums, and an old typewriter occupy a small bed against the wall. At her foot is a teenager’s boom box. The wall behind her is an enviable library of books about the road. I am directed to a caned chair that rides so low to the floor that my nose barely peeks above the desk.

  “You are pilgrim to Saint James?” she asks, looking down at me. Her teeth are laced with baguette.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you come from today?” she asks officiously.

  “I came from Orthez, but—”

  “That is a lie,” she declares. “You could not walk from Orthez to Saint-Jean in one day.” A truly menacing look slowly fills out the rustic features of this old woman. The metamorphosis is werewolfian. She waves a few promiscuous strands of hair away from her face. Medusa rises from her chair.

  “Well, to be honest, Madame Debril, I took a taxi from Saliers de Bearn because—”

  “Taxi? You are not a true pilgrim. Why do you come here?” Madame Debril says.

  I begin to tremble, half in undeserved rage and half from fear. She is revered on the road, mentioned in the guidebook. She is legendary. She is authentic. Her schoolmarm looks ignite an old guilt. I’ve been caught cheating on my homework.

  So I did give up on Saint-Guilhem, and I didn’t like the road from Orthez to Saint-Jean. Well, I wanted to get the project going.

  “You do not look like a pilgrim,” she says.

  Oh, that hurt. It’s true that I had washed up at the inn and put on my one pair of nice slacks and dress shirt I had packed for special occasions. But attire was one aspect of the trip I had thought through. Yet, seated on Madame Debril’s cane chair, I realize that regardless of what circuitous route I took to arrive at my tastefully and WASPily restrained sense of pilgrim attire, it won’t matter to Madame Debril. I look like a preppie tourist out for a constitutional, which in her eyes is exactly what I am.

  I tell her I am writing a book, certain that she will want to flatter me to insure a good mention.

  “We don’t need another guidebook!”

  I bow to her integrity (a quality in short supply on this side of her desk).

  She rants that the road is being debauched by false pilgrims. True pilgrims, she explains, are those on foot or on horseback. Those others on bikes, or in cars, or in taxis simply don’t count. The ancient trust is being abused.

  She waves a card in my face. “This is a carnet?” she says. It is a small folded card that serves as a pilgrim’s passport. They are stamped by monks or civic officials along the road, validating the pilgrim’s journey. At the cathedral in Santiago, the carnet is exchanged for a “diploma,” testifying to the pilgrim’s walk. Without the carnet, she says, the journey is pointless. Staring down her nose through her spectacles, she insists I will not get one because “you are not true pilgrim?”

  It is strange how much I want this old woman’s approval. Somehow I suspect that I am not the first person to prop his nose on her desk and seek her blessing. Being a true pilgrim is no longer a matter of medieval clarity. Only a few pilgrims on the road would confess that they believe the actual corpse of Saint James rests beneath the altar of Santiago’s cathedral. The modern pilgrim has to look elsewhere for verification. We long to believe that the very act of going somehow substantiates our status. How prosaic of Madame Debril, I think, to reduce the walk to a matter of the proper papers.

  Nevertheless, I can see that the stamp bears her name and address. This may be validation of the most perfunctory kind. But I want it. So I decide to beg.

  Of course, this works. She calms down. Not long after, I spot on her shelf a copy of an ancient book I have read in translation. The Codex Calixtinus is the first book ever written on the pilgrimage, in 1160. It has reports on the inns, the food, the quality of the rivers, the character of the people. Devotees of the road call it the first tourist guide. Madame Debril is impressed that I know this work and hands me her ancient copy. I turn the crisp yellow pages and coo.

  We are getting along now, and she gives me some advice on walking (look out for bees). Then she mentions a questionable American who passed through her house not long ago.

  “He is Utican?” she seems to say.

  “Utican?” I ask.

  “No, he is just?”

  “Just?”

  “No, he is wheezy?”

  “Wheezy?”

  “He is juicy?”

  “Juicy?”

  “No, he is juicy?”

  “Jewish?”

  Madame Debril understands that I now understand. She waves her hand in the air and makes a sour face. I recognize this expression. In my native South, a private discussion of, say, blacks can culminate in a tiny slight from one speaker punctuated by this face. The listener is invited to return the expression, and then both are free to advance the conversation to more clandestine topics. It is a kind of code. But I am in no mood to bond, anti-Semitic-wise, with Madame Debril. I want the damn card, but not at this price. Who am I to judge a Jew walking the road to Santiago?

  I return a stone face, and Madame Debril reads me clearly. She sets aside the official carnet and stamps a torn piece of note paper. That’s all, it seems, I will get. On the way out the door, I try to reintroduce more pleasant topics in order to bring this encounter to a less than dismal end. I ask Madame Debril how many times she has walked to Santiago. Her face grows dark.

  “When I was young, I was too busy, and now that I am old, I am too tired.” Her eyes REM with anger. Clutching my rag of paper with her stamp, I glare with incredulity.

  “You mean, you have never walked the road to Santiago?”

  “No,” she says, and shuts the door.

  The next morning, I take a big breakfast at the local inn, hoist my backpack, and walk straight out of town. Actually I backtrack a quarter mile so I can begin beneath the fifteenth-century pilgrim’s arch, a stone monument at the mouth of town. All the locals said this was the official thing to do. Being a pilgrim with a cab receipt in my pocket, I leap to any confirming tradition I can find. When I reenter town, I come upon Madame Debril in the street, a baguette in one hand, a hammer in the other, and a mouthful of nails. She is walking with a carpenter and about to step into a crumbling plaster house.

  “One day this will be a pilgrim’s shelter,” she says.

  “Very good.”

  “Pilgrims will stay for free,” she says.

  “Excellent.”

  “Only if they have the proper papers!”

  The way out of town is straightforward, and as the last curve leads the pilgrim into the countryside, a simple burnt wood sign says “Santiago” and points left.

  According to my map, I should soon come upon a hamlet, Saint Michel, then the road should turn right and begin an acute climb into the Pyrenees. I do reach Saint Michel, but the road merely bends right, slightly right, yet there is nowhere else to go. Overhead is a canopy of oak and pine. A hill rises to my left. Crashing along my right is a swollen river. The road on the map indicates a sharp uphill ascent, but my road is flat, meandering, easy. I slouch forward, anxious to feel the weig
ht of my pack shift from my waist to my shoulders, and I lock my ankles into the painful angle that signals an uphill climb. But the road won’t conform to my hallucinations. It just unfolds, flatly, around another deceptive curve. This river, I notice, is flowing with me, that is downhill, a fairly convincing piece of evidence that I am not walking uphill and shouldn’t expect to be doing so any time soon.

  The woods grow dark after black thunderheads move in and threaten all morning long to unburden themselves in a mighty release. Instead, they leak all day. The hot June sun, a gray blister behind the clouds, gives the air a thick texture. My view of the allegedly beautiful French country is seen from between the blinders of a poncho’s cowl and then through the treacly drizzle. It is a holiday of some kind in this valley. No one’s seen me walk by, except a vigilant turkey at one farm. He sits alert upon a post, wattle tossed rakishly, juking his neck absurdly as I pass. The few shops along the way are closed. The farmhouses appear abandoned; everyone is off to Grandpa’s for the big meal. I can’t help thinking they heard I was coming.

  I press on down the road for nearly an hour and a half. Despite every indication to the contrary-—instinct, the position of the sun’s occasional wink, compass, gravity—I stubbornly believe that the road will translate itself into the right one. Around a (descending) curve, a lone farmhouse appears in the crotch of two sloping mountain faces. Two dogs race out to loudly inspect my boots.

  A timid knock brings a young man to the door. Soon the entire table assembles on the porch for the grand event of a stranger in the yard. I explain that I am a pilgrim on the road to Santiago and fear I am heading the wrong way. They are delighted. Directions, I quickly learn, are a great way to jump-start a conversation. It immediately locates you in the ditch of ignorance and puts the stranger upon the heights of knowledge.

  A young man steps forward proudly and points toward a set of receding mountain peaks, but he is shouted down. This small crowd of French Basque farmers and their wives, daughters, and cousins spill off the porch into the front yard. Each has his or her own theory, and all of them involve a different direction and separate mountain ranges. An elderly man ends the arguments with a motion and announces—half in untranslatable French, half in the international language of exaggerated gestures—the best way to Santiago. He suggests I head to a village named Saint Michel and take a left. He points in the direction I have come. I can’t really understand the details of what he is saying, but I am certain it ends with the Basque equivalent of “You can’t miss it.”

  I retrace the same slow curves of the morning, once again taking in the boarded shops and closed farmhouses. The turkey is at his post and watches me pass. He is perfectly still. His garden-hose head musters a slightly superior tilt.

  The repetition of the walk is interrupted only by a young, excitable pup, who explodes from a tangle of mountain laurel and joins the walk. She is a cute mutt and loves to walk at my feet. A sweet image floats into view—arriving in Santiago, hand-carved birch staff in one hand, a gamboling puppy beside me. She is all chaotic tail between my legs and a delight until I am brutally reminded that with a pack stiffening my back, I am as agile as a hod of bricks.

  At Saint Michel, near a bridge, I see a small paved road that lurches straight up and out of the village. How did I miss it? And there is a yellow arrow painted on a post—the flecha amarilla. The yellow arrows are said to be painted especially for pilgrims at every small intersection between here and Santiago. Seeing my first arrow summons a child’s pleasure of joining some secret guild. People in cars wouldn’t even notice these crude glyphs of yellow paint—three quick splashes on a fence post or tree or the back of a road sign. They awaken a warm intimacy with the hundreds of millions of pilgrims who have walked this road in the last millennium or so. Surely these yellow arrows would come to mean something powerful to a pilgrim. I jot down in my notebook, “Yellow arrows and metaphor?” and walk on.

  When the arrows cease to appear, even momentarily, a dismay settles in. And the longer they refuse to appear, the more impending feels the doom. Not far up this hill, fear and ignorance compel me into the driveway of a rural cheese farm. The drizzle has temporarily stopped. My leaping pup is with me. A cheese-maker and his daughter approach, both of whom have happily squished their way out front in their yogurt-stomping boots. From behind their legs, a dog the size of a grizzly bear gallops out. His eyes are blazing straight for my puppy. The farmer yells out in French, something along the lines of “actually very friendly, loves children.”

  I drop my pack and begin the stutter step of a guard blocking for his quarterback. The bear blows me aside like a bug and dives into the yin-yang tumble of a dogfight. The cheesemaker’s dog sinks his teeth into the hip of my pup. And again—crunch —into her neck. From the blur of confusion, I can see my little dog, her eyes wide with fear and, so it seems to me, betrayal. Seconds later the victor saunters off, wagging his butt with a bully’s confidence. In the distance the cheesemaker waves and says something to the effect of “wouldn’t hurt a flea, bark worse than his bite.” My pup bolts into nearby woods. I call after her. My whistles are carried off by a slight, humid breeze.

  I envision a shady oak beneath which the little pup finally drops, licking her wounds, cursing her stupidity for leaving her territory, until death overtakes her. But just who is outside his territory if not me? Only a few hours into the pilgrimage, here is another fabulous incident brimming with significance. I reach for my notebook.

  This is the problem with the road. Despite its literalness, the idea of the pilgrim’s journey is a metaphor bonanza. Everything that happens on the road seems to translate itself instantaneously from what it is to what it means. I get lost! Yellow arrows! Fleeing dogs! Metaphor? Friend, I’m slogging through it. The road itself is the West’s most worn-out palimpsest and among our oldest tropes. The obvious metaphors click by. The high road and the low, the long and winding, lonesome, royal, open, private, the road to hell, tobacco, crooked, straight and narrow. There is the road stretching into infinity, bordered by lacy mists, favored by sentimental poets. There is the more dignified road of Mr. Frost. There is, every four years, the road to the White House. There is the right road. And then there is the road that concerns me most today, the wrong road.

  This wealth of cliché was one of my motivations as well. The world I left behind is obsessed with new metaphors, new ideas, new vocabularies. I took up the pilgrimage because of its contrarian possibilities. I wanted to traipse through one of the oldest junk yards of Western metaphor.

  Then again, maybe I should calm down. Instead of trying to tickle meanings out of every curve (it’s only noon of my first [true] day), maybe I should adopt a more conservative attitude. Maybe a dogfight near a cheese farm should remain a dogfight near a cheese farm. So I close my notebook and head up the hill in the direction the cheesemaker sends me.

  Almost two hours after I leave the cheesemaker, it’s the middle of the afternoon. The yellow arrows have completely disappeared, and I am plunged into despair. According to the sketchy map drawn by the cheesemaker on the back of a crumpled envelope, I should continue on this narrow paved road until I hit Spain. Around a curve the towers of a town rise into view. My guidebook says this town could be a Basque village called Untto, cut into the side of the mountain, or possibly Erreculuch. Whichever, the place is certainly flourishing, having overgrown its mountain slope and surrounded a river. I spot an old farmer hoeing a few rows of corn in his side yard.

  “Greetings, sir,” I say expansively. “I am a pilgrim to Santiago. Can you tell me the name of this town?”

  “That one?” he says, pointing.

  “Well, yes,” I say, looking around at the otherwise undisturbed forests surrounding us.

  “That’s Saint-Jean Pied de Port, a famous town on the road to Santiago.”

  What can I say? Suddenly I can make out the crenellated walls of the old fortress. There is Madame Debril’s street. From this slope, I can see that I am about twen
ty minutes from the burnt wood sign at the edge of town. My eyes water, and the farmer seems amused at the funny dance and high-pitched noises made by his visiting pilgrim.

  An hour or so later I have reclimbed the mountain to a simple intersection where the cheesemaker’s map had indicated a right turn. Of course, there is a yellow arrow on a rock, pointing to the left, as obvious as the one at Saint Michel. How could I have missed it? I take some comfort in knowing that the turkey on his post in the valley is no witness to my afternoon’s effort.

  From the top of the peak, the work of my first morning comes into focus. I have traced a rambling circle from Saint-Jean Pied de Port to the Basque farmhouse, back up and over a mountain, and again to Saint-Jean—a bowed triangle of walking. I am tempted to bring out my notebook and jot down a sublime note or two. If I am in search of Big Meaningful metaphors, here’s a beauty. I am going in circles. But it is late afternoon and I have the Pyrenees ahead of me and, after that, the entire breadth of Spain. My first day out I have circumscribed a huge loop. This is often the gist of the last chapter of travel books—ending where one starts. Now that I have that out of the way, I am ready to begin.

  All maps distort the land they describe. Most of us learn this in grade school when the teacher explains that Greenland is really shaped not like a fat arrowhead, but more like a pointed lozenge. For a pilgrim, a map is a constant disappointment. Over and over again, I learn that maps were invented for people in vehicles. Regardless of the era—ancient ships, modern cars—maps are for those who can engulf vast distances. A wrong turn in a car just means spinning around and heading back. It’s just a few minutes. The same mistake on foot can cost you an afternoon or a meal.