Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  Increasingly, the contradiction of miracles was becoming apparent. Thomas of Monmouth, the author of the paperwork forwarded to Rome on behalf of St. Thomas of Canterbury, wrote, “But as each miracle follows the last and the astonishing is succeeded by the spectacular, I must take care to restrain my enthusiasm, or else the piety of my readers will be dampened by the tedium of reading so many marvels.”

  The proliferation of miracles had trapped medieval thinkers on an intellectual Mobius strip. What was a miracle? It became more and more difficult to say. Caesarius of Heisterbach wrote, “We speak of a miracle whenever anything is done contrary to the normal course of nature at which we marvel.” But Thomas Aquinas wrote that the creator “does nothing contrary to nature.” Augustine had tried to prevent this debate by acknowledging the contradiction inherent in divine miracles. But now that the discussion was seriously engaged, only ridicule would end it.

  In 1748, David Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” halted the debate by stating a blunt truth: “But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages.” In the current Catholic encyclopedia, Hume’s position is scorned as “superficial.” Indeed, but it was enough.

  What happened to the idea of miracles is that it got saddled with too much meaning. Augustine’s small private pleasure was creation’s constant reminder—often funny—that there are always new ways of imagining things. This simple idea was burdened with a lot of heavy lifting, and a complex administration was set up long ago to manage miracles and their meaning.

  The functionaries of this bureaucracy, who first took their seats around the time of Charlemagne, continue at their desks. Canonization is still carried out in Rome. Today to be a saint, a man or woman needs two proven miracles. It used to be four, but the church quietly reduced the requirement in 1983. From time to time in Rome, a board called the Consulta Medica convenes. Since all miracles these days are those of healing, this commission is composed of nothing but Italian doctors. They review the files of miracles to determine authenticity. Each doctor is paid roughly $250 per miracle, rejected or affirmed. According to the Vatican, the average number of miracles authenticated annually is fifteen.

  Saint Dominick of the Highway taught his craft to other monks. Two days past Santo Domingo, I enter San Juan de Ortega. This town is named for Santo Domingo’s most famous student, who also picked up his master’s sensibility for epithets. San Juan de Ortega means, literally, Saint John of the Stinging Nettle.

  For centuries San Juan was an oasis in the scrub forests of Burgos Province, a thriving pilgrim hub famous among my predecessors for uncommon generosity. Over time, the town boasted a beautiful church, a full monastery, and a convent. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the place ran out of money and respect. One of the many waves of anticlerical fury washed the last monks and nuns from the area. The abandoned cathedral, with its high ceiling and cavernous stone niches, was adopted by the local farmers as a hay barn. Today six or seven descendents of those farmers are all who live here.

  A few other pilgrims—the Frenchman Louis, a young Italian fellow named Paolo, the two dull Dutchmen and a Swiss man— have converged here this afternoon. All of us have gathered out front of the old monastery and hear the story of this place, told by Father José Marie. A part-time resident, he has personally presided over San Juan’s rescue and rehabilitation. José Marie is a part-time priest at five churches in this region. But he’s been working on San Juan for decades, cadging a few pesetas from pilgrims, flattering tourists until they poke a bill in his offertory box, and hounding the federal government in Madrid to come forward with some historic preservation money. Coin by coin, he has saved the church. The old monastery has been partly converted into an impressive pilgrim’s shelter. The rotting convent next door awaits future work—a sideshow of smashed walls, rooms exposed to the elements, and high weeds sprouting from cracks.

  José Marie is an extraordinarily short man with a throw-pillow paunch. He has the face of a smoker, although he isn’t one. Euclidian lines and angles are etched deep into dark skin. His face looks like a crumpled paper bag.

  He’s a restless man, always in motion, rearranging himself. He slides and clicks his feet, tapping the stone floors with his loafers, forever in search of a comfortable position. His introductory banter is a friendly questioning, yet he barely waits for answers.

  “Where are you from? No, let me guess.

  “Where did you start?

  “How long have you been walking?

  “Isn’t San Juan the best pilgrim stop on the road?

  His hands slip in and out of his pockets. Items are extracted and forced to re-up in the continuing odyssey of objects orbiting his body. Keys appear from his pants, are fiddled, and then are secreted inside his sports jacket. A knife emerges, opens, and closes before disappearing behind his back. He checks his shirt buttons and his collar. An envelope is examined, read, and then dispatched to a new location. While talking, José Marie steps outside the building for no reason. All of us follow and rearrange our group around him, and then he moves again.

  “Come, come, come, let me show you,” he says, hastily waving a few of us into the church. A pilgrim gets to see a lot of churches, so by now standards are pretty high. José Marie shows us the ornate sepulcher of San Juan himself. And he tells us the story of one of San Juan’s miracles, which ends with a pilgrim opening his empty rucksack and finding a loaf of bread. Knowing nods are exchanged.

  Near the nave he directs our attention to a finely carved capital of the Annunciation. As amateurs in Romanesque architecture, we admire its pristine condition. Being nearly a thousand years old, it’s in better condition than any I have seen on the road. José Marie explains that because the church spent a century or two stuffed with hay, a great deal of the destructive water was soaked up. The paradox of neglect, he explains, is that it bequeathed to him a church of unmatched preservation.

  José Marie’s smile draws open to show a big, perfectly arranged display of ivory dice. He has an overcompensating grin, the kind that tries too hard and is common among priests and TV hosts. But his schtick, this energetic gregariousness, is tempered by an amusing intelligence, and it’s tough not to cotton to him. José Marie points to a window and says that for many, many years in the old days, the pilgrims walked the road and tried to time their arrivals to San Juan de Ortega on the day of the equinox in March and September.

  “On those two days,” José Marie says in an exaggerated hush, “when the length of the day and the night are exactly the same, at five p.m. precisely, a single ray of light spills over the bottom of that arched window there and illuminates the capital of the Annunciation perfectly from corner to corner.” From a pocket he produces a postcard photograph of the capital bathed in a soft squared golden light. The postcards are for sale.

  “Look at this,” he cries. José Marie is handing out glow-in-the-dark rosary beads. He puts one near a lamp and then cups it inside his sports jacket. Each of us is obliged to put our heads inside his coat to see the glowing beads.

  “Think of what we could have done with these—in the old days.” His eyes light up mischievously.

  José Marie invites us to dine with him tonight and then sends us to our quarters to get washed up. They are extravagant by pilgrim standards. Huge rooms with great windows. Comfortable beds. Expansive bathrooms. Hot and cold running water. Even makeshift laundry facilities—a place to wash and, crisscrossing the cloister, drying lines on pulleys pinched by clothespins. There is even a sitting room for pilgrims to relax— comfortable chairs, side tables, clean ashtrays.

  After we wash up, we return to the center of action to find José Marie chatting with tourists who have driven out of the way to see the old church and monastic buildings.

  From across the way, we see José Marie at work. He greets the only woman in the group by taking her hand, bowing grandly, and madly kissing the back of his own palm.

  It is difficult to maintain any cynicism in the face
of such cornpone. This is Father José Marie, and he knows what works. At the end of the afternoon, he will ask these tourists for a donation, and they will give amply. The show is vaudeville, but he does well with what he can.

  “How many stars do our accommodations have?” he shouts to us as we walk up.

  “Four, four stars,” each of us cries in our competing tongues.

  “No. One star. There is only one star,” says José Marie.

  “No, no. Four,” comes the response. Louis the Frenchman looks at me, and I look at a Paolo. The Dutchmen and the Swiss guy—all of us—exchange wide-eyed glances to underscore our sincerity. We mean it: San Juan is debauchery, luxury, flowers on the table, mint on the pillow.

  “Four stars,” we insist. “Hot and cold water. Four stars.”

  José Marie launches one hand straight into the air like a traffic cop. “No, no,” he says, and his hand sweeps through the air with the practiced ease of a leggy model showing off a car at a trade convention. Father José Marie finally winds up pointing to the woman. “As long as there is one beautiful woman among us,” he says, “all the other stars are dimmed. So there is only one.” In five languages, eyes roll.

  Before having us to dinner, Father José Marie would like us to attend church. We report to a small chapel off the larger Romanesque church and take our place among a few scattered chairs. Over the altar, early Renaissance paintings by no one particularly famous have been cut out of their frames with a knife sometime earlier in this century. Vandals long ago pried the goldworks from their mounts. Screws and various sconces hang empty all around. Only the relics—glass tubes filled with bones or locks of hair—remain unmolested.

  José Marie steps from around the altar and begins the service in Spanish. Paolo nudges me to point out three Spanish widows who have appeared in the back of the chapel. All three are dressed in solid black widow’s weeds, with thick wool stockings bunched at their calves and black blocky shoes. Wherever in Spain a church opens, these women appear as if by spontaneous generation. In this town where almost no one lives, in a small service in a side chapel for pilgrims, they have found us.

  “You only see them,” says Paolo, “in the churches and at the Once windows.” Once is Spain’s national lottery.

  I nod in agreement.

  “Same odds, I suppose,” he says.

  Dinner is a collection of plates—a plate of bread, of chorizo, of cheese, of ham, another of cheese. José Marie sets out several bottles of a good red wine (this man knows how to eat and drink) and then brings on an enormous pot of his garlic soup. This soup has been the subject of much rumormongering on the road. The Frenchman has declared it to be divine and mysterious. For the rest of the pilgrimage this soup is the source of much speculation. The ingredients are simple—garlic, water, bread. This combination may sound unappetizing or too simple, but it is delicious. José Marie does something with it that no one has cajoled from him. I give it my very best to slip the secret from him—sneaking into the kitchen, cunning conversational gambits—but I get nowhere.

  José Marie is witty tonight and full of stories of pilgrims who are just ahead of us—a pilgrim with a monkey, a divorced woman, a barefoot penniless priest, a pilgrim with a fatal disease, a seventy-eight-year-old pilgrim, a pilgrim with a mule, two married pilgrims with their two pilgrim children and a mule, a pilgrim on horseback, negro pilgrims.

  Before any of us knows it, José Marie is launched into the long story of his rescue of San Juan de Ortega. It is a morality play of sorts, with José Marie as the hero. He tells of the day-to-day existence of the rescuer, begging for money. He rehabilitated the church stone by stone. He has built the pilgrims’ quarters shower stall by shower stall. It is ongoing and terribly expensive. His story even includes a refran—one of the millions of Spanish axioms that pepper all conversation. (On the wall in his kitchen appears Saint Teresa’s famous refran: “God can be found among the pots and pans.”) José Marie tells us, “Los palacios son despacios.” More or less: “It takes a long time and a lot of patience to build a palace.” José Marie fixes a bead on me.

  “The streets are paved with gold in America, no? Isn’t one of your car companies Catholic?”

  I assume he has read that the head of Chrysler is Lee Iacocca, and presumably he is Catholic. I tell José Marie that while the streets are paved with gold all over America, in my neighborhood they are simple asphalt.

  “I understand, I understand. But you must go back and tell people about San Juan and what has been done here. If every pilgrim spreads the word, then my work can continue.”

  I haven’t a dime on me. It’s Sunday, and I can’t cash a traveler’s check. But a few miles up the road, I mail some money back to José Marie. At each pilgrim’s stop, I have donated money. It only seems fair. And José Marie seems worthy of more than the usual few pesetas.

  Not according to the Dutchmen or the Swiss man, though. Back at the pilgrims’ sitting room, they are furious that the sacred moment of a pilgrim’s meal was defiled with fund-raising. Perhaps as an American, I don’t blanch as quickly at the mention of money.

  “The Catholic Church is rich,” says one of the Dutchmen, sneering. “Why do they want our money?”

  The evening broadens into a general bitch session about the road and eventually arrives at the subject of Ramón Sostres. All these pilgrims have experienced the miracle of the don of Torres del Rio. The Swiss man thinks Ramón is a menace and scares people. He says he met half a dozen French girls on the road who stayed there one night, but at three a.m. the whoops and cries from upstairs drove them to pack up and hit the road. I try to defend Ramón. Sure, maybe he’s crazy, but he offers pilgrims a cool place to rest and cold water to drink in a town that is otherwise uninviting. He even provides bathroom facilities, after a fashion. Where else but on the road to Santiago could a schizophrenic living in a collapsing mansion find such a fitting use for his fading wits? This earns a harumph from one of the Dutchmen. The Swiss man goes on, talking darkly of multiple personalities, and hints at the possibilities of rape and serial murder. This is the age we live in. He and his friends intend to draft a letter to the Santiago organization that paints the arrows to ask that Ramón no longer be suggested to future pilgrims.

  The Swiss man is that kind of fellow. He makes a grand show of piety, but he is a true debunker. While we’re talking about the resurrected chickens of Santo Domingo, he assures us that the miracle is a cheap carnival trick. Here’s how it’s done: Pour a capful of some tasteless alcohol such as vodka into your palm. Feed it to the chicken, which will consume practically anything. The effect will be anesthetic, knocking the bird out for a while. Then pluck the feathers from the bird, exposing his skin. Rub that down with some condiment—cinnamon works best—so that he appears to look cooked. Set him on a plate surrounded by garnishes so that with his limp head and dangling claws, he looks like an aristocrat’s lunch. At the precise moment when the audience is listening to your patter about the bird, slowly push a small saucer of vinegar or ammonia near the chicken’s beak. This will arouse the bird and awaken him to the painful fact that he is without feathers. You can count on him to dance and crow with astonishment.

  When I had arrived at Santo Domingo de la Calzada, I entered the church and looked up to see the continuing hilarity of this miracle. In the transept of the church set above the door is nothing more ludicrous and inappropriate than a chicken coop, gilded with rich ornament. Inside are two scurrying fowl, clucking at passersby and pecking noisily for a kernel of food. Any local will tell you that the chickens you see inside the church today are the direct descendents of the original miraculous pair. During mass, the priest often has to shout his sacred words so the congregation can hear above the cock-a-doodle-doos screeching from this holy little barn. According to legend, only a pilgrim can feed these chickens. In the winter months, when pilgrims are scarce, it is said that one of the old folks in town has to dress in traditional pilgrim’s clothes to get them to eat.

&nbs
p; Miracles are “a reminder of the bounds imposed on the mind by habit,” according to St. Augustine’s biographer. In the seven hundred years since those chickens danced, this single amusing act has defined and carried away this town. Outside the church, in the public square, the local kids play. When they see a pilgrim, they sing an old song that has only two rhyming lines. “Santo Domingo de la Calzada, donde cantó la gallina después de asada." It means, “Saint Dominick of the Highway, where the hen sang after being roasted.” Sort of loses its playfulness in translation.

  After a month of walking, a pilgrim loses his mind—not in the psychiatric sense, but like an obsolete and forgotten appliance. Think of an eight-track tape player permanently misplaced in the cellar, but

  you know it’s there, so that one day, should you ever need it, you can always go down there and retrieve it. When I walk, I stare at the ground sliding beneath my feet, and I am speechless, lost in a hot, pulsing haze. Long-distance athletes speak of a runner’s nirvana—a euphoric state achieved in the proximity of utter exhaustion. The pilgrim has his equivalent, only it doesn’t look as graceful. Runners have their knees pumping, head up, chest out, arms chugging. To look me in the eye, you’d see the milky cataracts of an aged ox strapped into his traces, lugging his burden.

  I’ve spent entire afternoons slogging through a trench cut so deep into a wheat field that I am invisible to all except the birds flying directly overhead. Central Spain is nothing but wheat fields, vast parcels of countryside devoted to nothing but wheat, and wheat, it seems, finds me fetching. Mosquitoes inexplicably prefer some people over others. I’ve never had this problem with insects because apparently I am spoken for by the plant kingdom. I am beloved by wheat. Their stalks bend toward me in the wind, anxious to propel their seed my way. They mistake me for rich topsoil (not so surprising after a month of pilgrimage) or simply a large strip of ruddy Velcro. Wheat burrs assault me from all directions, hitting me in the face, once swiftly—whoa —plugging up a nostril. I frequently pull them out of my ear. They gather into harvest decorations in my hair. They bury themselves in the wrinkles of my filthy flaccid clothes. After a morning’s walk, my legs and socks are dense congregations of future generations of wheat.