by Hitt, Jack
The other school of criticism mocks all this. They say that Turold is nothing more than a scribe who wrote down one version of the poem. At best, Turold polished a well-known work so that it had a sophisticated sheen. The original bards who sang the poem along the road and throughout Europe altered it to suit each particular audience and happily added names, changed events, or altered outcomes. In France these minstrels emphasized French honor. Elsewhere, his Christianity was paramount. In Spain the treachery of Arabs was key to their propaganda. In the Basque version—and there is one—it is a story that confirms their legendary ethnic ruggedness. The story of Roland is a collective effort, formed by slow accretion of plot and details.
French critics can get quite exercised when told that their nation’s First Great Work is not the achievement of a lone genius, but rather is the collaborative work of hairy itinerant peasants who played out their themes of violence according to the moody applause of beery serfs.
For a pilgrim troubled by doubts of authenticity, the theory is restorative. The idea that no one person wrote the Chanson de Roland dates to the work of Albert Lord, who studied the only oral epic poets to survive into our time. In the middle of this century he traveled to the isolated mountains of Yugoslavia, where the last heirs to the juggler still carried on the tradition. And he made discoveries that, when considered next to the Chanson de Roland, make the French apoplectic.
Lord called the poet of oral tradition a “singer of tales” and described him as an illiterate man with a talent for strumming a simple instrument and singing many lines of verse, upward of three thousand. Where we might hear his song and think the peasant had done a good job of memorizing a very long poem, Lord discerned an odd characteristic to prove otherwise. From performance to performance, the singer changed the song— shortening or lengthening it by hundreds of lines, changing the order of events, altering the names of the characters, playing out some scenes, abbreviating others. No two performances were ever the same.
The singer of tales had not memorized a poem, nor was he improvising each performance. Rather, Lord discovered that each singer of tales had learned hundreds of phrases, called formulae, that allowed him to compose the song spontaneously and differently every time he sang it. To Lord, this talent was comparable to learning another language. Where we might learn words and compose the ordered sentences of standard human conversation, these singers learned formulae and sang long narrative songs. When Lord asked some of the singers to tell him what a “word” was, they could not answer him. They thought in phrases only. We think in words. This was not merely another form of expression. It was a different way of thinking. Among those illiterate singers who were taught to read, for instance, Lord witnessed the fading of the singer’s capacity to compose spontaneously. It seemed as if the two modes of expression were not compatible.
What Lord was implying with his discoveries was a bombshell in the tiny world of epic scholars. The poems handed down to us were not merely mementos of another era, but a different way of expressing the truth and telling history. “Our real difficulty,” Lord says, “arises from the fact that, unlike the oral poet, we are not accustomed to thinking in terms of fluidity.”
Our literate, word-plagued minds demand a point of origin, a single beginning, the real story—in the case of Roland’s assassination, a lone-swordsman theory. But, Lord adds, “Once we know the facts of oral composition we must cease trying to find an original.” The mystery of who killed Roland not only can’t be solved, it’s not even the right question. Each “performance is an original.” To us, “it seems so basic, so logical, since we are brought up in a society in which writing has fixed the norm of a stable first creation in art, that we feel there must be an original for everything.” But in oral composition, “the idea of an original is illogical.” Lord warns that we who are reared in the ambiance of the printed word are troubled by a longing “to seek an original, and we remain dissatisfied with an ever-changing phenomenon.”
The singers of tales continue to speak to the modern pilgrim. Their stories shouldn’t be studied for the facts, but listened to for other melodies. Don’t read history, say my illiterate hairy muses, listen to it sing.
History and tradition plague a pilgrim at night when a break in the day’s labor grants enough time to worry about them and maybe read up. Otherwise, the mind is occupied with the quotidian details of a new life—locating the fruit-and-vegetable trucks that stop in the small villages, or finding a watering hole, or flattering a tavern owner to crank up the coffee machine for a café con leche during the odd hours.
A few miles out of Espinal and shy of Mezquiriz, I discover another pilgrim sport. I am patching up two nicks in my legs after unsuccessfully negotiating a barbed-wire fence when a peripheral flash catches my eye. I look down a valley, across a small stream, and over another fence and spot a figure hooded by the high rise of a pack. For only a second, I see a familiar movement. The swaying lope is distinctly pilgrimesque, and then the man disappears into a dark copse of oaks.
I know there are pilgrims just ahead of me. From time to time from a field or window a local will shout a freelance update of what they know about the road. I have heard already of two men walking together. Somebody else up the way has a mule. And this morning, en route to Pamplona, I know that there is a pilgrim just ahead. Hurry up, the locals tell me, assuming that I am anxious to make contact with another on foot. Which I am.
The dark trees on this stretch form a humid tunnel, and evidently, when pilgrims aren’t around, it is a favored trail among the local holstein. The cow flops are fresh and numerous—piled one atop the other. In the funky embrace of dense oaks, the road achieves a certain primal soupiness and piquancy that the pilgrim would gladly trade for a busy interstate. But it makes tracking my immediate predecessor easy. His bootprints are longer and deeper than my own, leading me to conclude through elementary sherlockian logic that my pilgrim friend is one big
guy-
Where the trees above occasionally pull back to let in a ray of sunshine, the cow plops harden into a path of sawdust pancakes that burst underfoot with a satisfying crunch. One time I hear just ahead of me the snap and crackle of brittle cow flops giving way under foot. I rush up the road but the sound recedes Doppler-like, and I never catch the source.
After a while, I think I may have imagined this other person. But the evidence keeps arriving. On the outskirts of a wretched hamlet called Zubiri there is a magnesium factory that laminates the entire valley with a fine gray-white talc. For a mile, the road appears hosed down with Yuletide Styrofoam snow, and even here I make out the familiar boot treads.
The phantom pilgrim never materializes. By the time I get close, the road dissolves among the cloverleafs, entrance ramps, and bypasses of the city of Pamplona. But the hope of his appearance has served as a perverse incentive. Instead of walking the fifteen to twenty kilometers I have budgeted as the per-diem limit of the first week of the pilgrimage, I have clocked a good forty kilometers. I have a headache, and my legs feel as if they have been filled with concrete. I check into a hostel off the Plaza del Castillo in the heart of town, lie down on my bed, and assume the curled, whimpering position of the moribund.
Ten minutes later I cannot get up. A syrupy sweat pastes my arms to my sides. Every muscle is winched tight. I have to push my feet off the bed with my hands when hunger insists I move. I cannot straighten my arms, and my fingers are curled into dry claws. Hunched over, I have stiffened into a bow-legged question mark. A two-minute trip across the town square to a restaurant takes twenty minutes of struggle. I move like a sick penguin, waddling in super-slo-mo. Teenagers are quietly laughing at me, and I am laughing, too. But mine is an unhinged hilarity. I am scaring small children.
Two days of rest later, I let out from Pamplona and walk straight down into a valley and up the other side. The sun is brutal, but a deep warm sweat lowers the voltage of the bolts of pain that fire up from my feet and explode in the femur of each thigh. By la
te afternoon I ascend the top of a ridge and look back to see that where I had begun this morning is perched on the other side of the sky. The entire vista of the earth, all that I can see and as far as I can see, I have covered on foot. Pilgrimage creates a paradoxical effect. Instead of short distances seeming long, it’s just the opposite. The vastness of a great distance shrivels when it falls within one’s grasp. This afternoon, the length of the earth has been reduced to a half-day’s work. I can see each stop from Pamplona—the clutch of houses called Cizur Menor, then Guendulain, and, just below me, the shadowless village of Zariquiegui. I can trace every foot of the winding path I have followed from one horizon to another.
Turning west, I step down from the ridge into a bleached rocky slant that drops into a sparse overlit forest. Behind me the two horizons blink, and the day’s view is gone.
A few kilometers into this small valley, I enter a tiny village called Uterga. An old man calls me from a window to come in, rest, and have a drink. He is the patriarch of a Basque family, all of whom are visiting. His daughter, a jolly woman of about fifty, insists on pouring a dark liquid from a decanter and crying out until I down a few. It is very good, smoky, alcoholic. I want to know if it is some local confection or an authentic Basque libation. Oh, no, they tell me, excited that they’re about to impress me. From a cabinet they produce an enormous bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee mash.
Americans have a strange effect on Spaniards, even Basque Spaniards. I’m not sure what it is, but I think it has to do with our reputation as hardworking, successfully profiteering capitalists. Spaniards still fear that they are inferior to the more brutal capitalists one finds in parts of Italy or all of Germany. The lazy Spaniard, drunk and stretched out in siesta, is an image they seek constantly to dispel.
When the old Basque grandfather wants to show me his accomplishments—trophies for some obscure sport he mastered in the 1930s—his three grandchildren wince in anguish. In a glass case is some kind of baseball bat and beanies embroidered with dates. I am listening attentively, but the two boys and one girl— all teenagers—are in unspeakable agony, whispering hostilities in hissing Basque and slapping their heads in silent-movie displays of shame. Then the grandfather reaches for a musical instrument—a version of a fiddle.
The road has a long tradition of folk music. The writer Walter Starkie, an English fiddler, walked the road to Santiago in the middle of the century and wrote about the changing musical traditions along the way. I long for a Starkie moment, a purifying dose of old-time Basque melody. But I won’t be hearing any authentic tunes this afternoon. The grandchildren are apoplectic. I can make out patches of their remarks, and they boil down, more or less, to this: Grandfather, our American guest gets to listen to Michael Jackson and REM all day long. Please don’t humiliate us with your corny old queer music.
My Spanish is getting more and more fluent as the refills of the smoky brown liquid keep coming. The grandfather manages to understand that I do want to know more about the past and the road. When he begins an anecdote about pilgrims from fifty years ago, he is silenced by the teenagers’ daggered looks. And my attempts at expressing heartfelt interest in what the old man has to say are understood as mere courtesy for the elderly. And somehow in the argle-bargle of my Jack Daniel’s Spanish, my questions become a request for a tour and a non sequitur description of every item this old Basque man owns. After examining some of the motel paintings on the walls and hearing a story for each chair and couch, I am taken to the cellar to view a lifetime of junk.
After handling every tool on the workbench, the old man spoons a handful of ball bearings from a box. They range in size from golfballs to fine birdshot.
“These are Basque ball bearings,” he says proudly. “They are made in the Basque lands. See how round they are.” In the slim doorway to upstairs, the three kids cringe in horror, haloed in the amber basement light.
“Yes,” I say, “they are very, very round, impressively round, really.”
Not far up the way, just outside the small town of Obanos, the road from Pamplona merges with the other major French path. This trail slides downhill for a while, joins the highway for a few hundred meters, and winds into the ancient town of Puente la Reina (literally the Queen’s Bridge), built to help pilgrims. It was settled by the French in the late eleventh century during one of the early bursts of propagandistic expansion of the road. Either Sancho the Great’s wife or his granddaughter Stephanie erected this beautiful Romanesque stone bridge in 1090, and according to my waiter at dinner later this evening, things have been a bit slow since.
On the edge of town, I encounter my first pilgrim near a modern cast-iron sculpture honoring those of us who walk the road. He introduces himself as Carlos from Brazil. Sinewy and deeply roasted by the Spanish sun, Carlos wants me to join him in a scheme. In about three weeks Pamplona will hold its famous running of the bulls. But, says Carlos, the parties have already begun. So he wants to hitchhike back to Pamplona, stay drunk for about a month, and then hitchhike back to Puente la Reina and continue the walk.
“You know, Carlos,” I say, “as it happens, you are talking to a profoundly flawed and corrupt pilgrim, and yet this plan stretches even my powers of rationalizing.”
(Several weeks later, far down the road, I will pick up a newspaper in a small town and see a photograph of two or three drunken “foreign college students” who will have been gored to death in Pamplona during the running of the bulls. One of the wire photos will show a fallen man, skinny, long, and brown. I never did see Carlos again, and after Puente la Reina, no one on the road would ever report running across him.)
The brothers at Los Padres Reparadores, who provide shelter, welcome us with the joy of immigration officials out of Kafka. Our pilgrims’ passports are stamped in jaded silence by an old man, and a grumpy novitiate escorts us to our sleeping arrangements—a sonorous room of metal bunkbeds. Inside I meet a gregarious Spanish banker named Javier, a stoic Frenchman, and two sullen Dutchmen whose willful ignorance of Spanish and English is matched by their refusal to tell anyone their names.
When they first meet, pilgrims are quiet people, and modern ones especially so because we are in an arrested state of embarrassment. We are afraid that someone might ask us to explain why we are doing this. So each of us feels about as comfortable as someone who has stumbled upon a stranger in a bathroom stall. The sublimities are kept to a minimum, but once we find our common tongue, we prattle on. We talk about what we know best—basic human suffering generally, blisters specifically.
Like my new friends, I have taken to mapping my suffering, quantifying it, measuring it. My feet are damp blocks of pain all day long and all night long, too. I haven’t merely a blister or even a lot of blisters. I have constellations of them. They seem to have a life of their own, like cellular automata. Little blister outposts form and send inquiring tunnels to make contact with the others. Recent reconnaissance has scouted the tender flesh between my toes and cinched a few of them in blister bows.
Like hiccups, blisters attract all manner of homemade cures. One of the Dutchmen makes known "his recipe of sprinkling sugar water on a Band-Aid. Carlos recommends running a fine thread through each blister before bed. In the morning, he says, they will be gone. The stoic Frenchman, Louis by name, tells us never to acknowledge blisters. Just strap on your boots, ignore them, and walk. We regard him suspiciously for the rest of the evening.
Pilgrim literature is filled with ancient remedies. Our predecessors cured their feet ailments with plasters of sarsaparilla or poultices packed with blackberry leaves. The extract of the iris bulb was said to reduce swelling. The digestion of spiderweb— rolled between one’s fingers into little white beads—was reputed to prevent the vomiting of blood (an ailment I still have to look forward to). Jean Bonnecaze, a pilgrim in 1748, wrote in his journal the recipe for a remedy said to cure a host of pilgrim ailments:
Take a cleaned chicken, some pimpernel, chicory, chervil, and lettuce—a fistful of
each. Clean it well, wash it, and dice into some pieces. Add a viper flayed alive which you will cut into little pieces after removing the head, the tail, and the entrails, keeping only the body, the heart, and the liver. Boil it all in three quarts of water, until it is reduced to three half-quarts. Remove it from the fire, strain it through a colander, and ladle it out into two soups to take one on the morning of a fast. Continue its use for fifteen days, purging before and after the fortnight.... If you cannot find a live viper, substitute for it a fistful of dust.
Quite early the next morning, we all arise. Carlos is not offering to show us his cured blisters. And all the other remedies of the prior evening don’t seem so efficacious in the dawn before a long walk. With a minimum of grumbling, we ease our swollen feet into their boots and, in our silence, salute the Frenchman for his wisdom.
At the edge of town just before we cross the Queen’s Bridge to begin the day’s walk, Javier invites me into a café for a morning coffee. This invitation serves several purposes. It allows us politely to extricate ourselves from the company of others, and it’s Javier’s way of asking that we walk together to the day’s goal, the town of Estella.
Javier, my Spanish friend, is a banker with a wife and kids. He’s in his forties, bald, with tufts of graying hair above the ears, and possessed of a lanky body riven with restless tics. Javier is anxious to talk. He confesses that he has longed to walk the road all his life. Then, quietly and sweetly, he describes himself as a lifelong Catholic who is earnestly shaken by the vicious history of all organized religions.
“Every year,” he tells me, “I reread three books—the Bible, Plato’s Republic, and the writings of Marcus Aurelius. That is my religion. Everything a man needs to know is in those three books.”
