Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  I can’t believe that I am going to die out here, struck by lightning. Bolts are now exploding on both sides of me like bombs. I can see them clearly. I can smell them. In my mind, each spot is marked by charred wheat stalks and a modest puff of smoke. I run for fifteen minutes. Run and scream, to be accurate. Run and scream and hoot and howl and hoo-wee, to be even more accurate.

  I am surrounded by illusions. Lightning is blasting at my side. Voices scream in the wet wind. I hear footsteps pursuing me. Up ahead, another hallucination makes the horizon suddenly telescope and shrink, drawing itself toward me. It gets nearer, and as it does so, the earth cracks open at the edge and a small black cross pops up out of the ground before me. Following behind it, a small stone pyramid forces the cross higher until it is clear and visible and lovely—an optical illusion that undoubtedly has comforted pilgrims for a millennium. And, shortly, an entire church pushes its way up out of the muddy earth and into view. Other buildings crowd around its side and rear up. A town in a valley.

  The pilgrim’s path suddenly drops off into an alley of stone. I can hear the rumble of cattle and the cackle of fowl. The rain gathers and sluices through this street, softening the manure into a sludge and freeing pent-up odors. At the church I run to its wall to try to get out of the downpour. This is the town of Hontanas. In old Spanish the name was Fontanas, literally “Fountains”—so named since it was the first watering hole after the hot blistering plains. An open doorway across the street reveals four old women playing cards.

  “Pilgrim, would you like a sandwich?” one of them says to me in Spanish.

  “Yes, yes, please, please, yes.”

  “I will bring you one.”

  I call out a thank-you from under the slight eave of the church.

  “You were caught in the rain,” another says.

  “Rain!”

  I can’t even think of what to tell them.

  “It was raining very hard, wasn’t it?” another adds.

  “Rain!” I say in my simple, awkward Spanish. “Beautiful ladies. Rain! Dogs death birds hell fear”—I am capable only of uttering nouns for the moment—“Rain! Yes, rain, but there were, there were”—I can’t call forth the word for lightning. “How do you say in Spanish when light comes down from the sky?”

  “Tormentas?” one of the ladies answers.

  “Tormentas. Yes, yes, that is the word, isn’t it?” I am laughing crazily, at myself a bit, but mostly from relief. “Tormentas, sí, sí, tormentas. Muchas tormentas. Tormentas grandes. Muchissi-mas tormentas." I am laughing the laughter of an idiot. I am hysterical. I can’t stop until the woman appears with a sandwich. She hands it to me cautiously. The sandwich is huge—ham and a Spanish omelet on a baguette the size of my arm. I tear into it like a jackal.

  By about the halfway point of the Spanish leg of the road, which is where I am here on the Castilian plains, the pilgrim becomes something of an amateur of the church. Not the abstraction of “the Church,” but of the building itself.

  The road to Santiago is absolutely littered with churches. They anchor every village, town, and city. Often, they are seen situated alone in a field or tucked into the corner of a glade, taking in the country air—all that is left of a village or monastery that went belly up a few hundred years ago. The road is a walking tour of the entire history of western architecture up to and including some of the most embarrassing contemporary monstrosities: new churches that look like bloated cafeterias with chain-link fencing twisted into the shape of a cross, a fish, or something unidentifiable.

  The pilgrim takes up church watching for many reasons. They are always the first view of any town. In Hontanas, the church burst from the ground and swept me into her embrace. On any normal day’s walk, a church always appears in the distance like a waiting behemoth, the buttresses of her haunches tucked at her sides, with her head up, always vigilant and alert for the call to stretch and slouch toward Jerusalem. In time, the little houses come into view, like pups gathered around her for safety.

  It is said that Gibbon received his vision of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire after witnessing a group of monks ambling and praying among Latin ruins: the rise of Christianity had necessitated another bureaucracy’s collapse. One would like to know what Gibbon would make of the image of the church on the pilgrim’s trail today. Most are unoccupied, unused, and unwanted. I have yet to meet a priest who manages fewer than four of these village churches, and none is too happy about it. On any given day at any hour, even in the smallest towns, the churches are always bolted and locked. The few silver chalices that haven’t been filched, or the paintings that haven’t been cut from their frames, or the silk robes with gold embroidery that haven’t been lifted at night, or the few elephantine folios of five-hundred-year-old illuminated liturgies that haven’t been fenced in Barcelona are hawkishly guarded by the ubiquitous Spanish widows, each of whom seems to carry a heavy ancient key to the nearest church.

  Most of the churches are in poor condition because of neglect; their exterior sculpture has been worn by wind and rain to featureless fetal shapes. The interiors are eaten by mildew; the stone flakes into powder at the touch. But a pilgrim who says a kind word to any weathered old woman in black can watch her produce the rusty key. And then he may enter.

  Pilgrims admire churches because they are always cool on a hot day and because pilgrims are, in almost every church, the star of the show. No church on the road neglects to honor the pilgrim in the presumed eternity of stone. We are cut into the walls, carved atop the capitals, painted onto panels, and sculpted in wood. Our image is everywhere; and our patron Santiago, in one guise or another, looks out from nearly every wall. After a brutal day’s walk, sitting in the cool of thick stone, it’s hard not to feel a little flattered.

  Despite the grandeur of the Gothic, Baroque, and other styles, I find myself drawn to the secure comfort of the Romanesque— the heavy walls, dark interior, thick columns, and simple sculpture. If I could conduct a poll among pilgrims, I’m certain the Romanesque would win. The style flourished in the 1000s and 1100s, and the churches were built largely because of pilgrim traffic. Some critics even call this style of building “pilgrim architecture.”

  Romanesque appeals to pilgrims because it is built to a scale that is especially fitting for someone on foot. These churches are small and cozy; even the Romanesque cathedrals are manageable spaces. They are humble, comprehensible buildings. The columns are low. The sculptures are visible at eye level or just above. From town to town they play out the same themes and tell the same story. The repetition is soothing. After a while, they feel like home.

  A pilgrim can’t say this about the Gothic cathedrals. They are spacious, overwhelming, and impressive, and they mean to be. I came to Europe fully schooled in the architectural propaganda in favor of Gothic and expected to be transported by the sights. The critic Ernest Short writes that Gothic is the “master synthesis of religious architecture.” Sartell Prentice alleges that “the role of the Romanesque church was that of a prophet and forerunner, a John the Baptist in stone, preparing the way for one still mightier that was to come.”

  The pilgrim gets a bit defensive about Romanesque after reading such remarks. We even resent the name, a nineteenth-century coinage. That “esque” makes the style sound derivative and second-rate, a rip-off of the Romans. It may be (some of the early Romanesque churches did plunder Roman ruins for their stonework). But, in defense, we pilgrims remind ourselves that the word Gothic comes from the Goths, famous for bullying, overbearing, loud behavior.

  Romanesque is denigrated for its heavy walls, thick columns, and simple round arches. It is described as leaden and earth-bound, crude and dense. The essential building block of Romanesque is called the “arch that never sleeps,” as if it were some squat, dim-witted peasant, always at work, with no time for appreciation of beauty. The Gothic can claim the elegant pointed arch that relieved the stresses and pressures of the building and opened up the space until the flying b
uttress thinned the walls to the point that they could be fitted with mere stained glass. These inventions literally blew the roof off the Romanesque church, creating an enclosed canyon.

  A Romanesque church asks a visitor to step back and make sense of what can be seen, which is everything. Gothic can only be seen in part. It is literally and figuratively beyond comprehension. Gothic doesn’t serve the grandeur of creation; it competes with it. Gothic is architectural braggadocio—bullying, overbearing, loud. The stones of the Romanesque don’t threaten, they whisper. They want to tell you something. Romanesque has been called the “church that speaks.” The Gothic cathedral was nicknamed “an encyclopedia in stone.” One has a simple story to tell; the other one can’t shut up.

  But there’s something else about the Romanesque style. It radiates an optimism amid chaos, continually upbeat against all odds. Romanesque flourished not long after the passing of the last millennium. The year 1000 was widely perceived to be Judgment Day, the end of time. Sometime soon, the people thought, the dead would shake the dirt from their bones and literally rise up from their graves. In the meantime, the sun would go black and the moon would dissolve into a pool of blood. A common statement in the wills of that period begin, “Seeing that the end of the world is at hand...” The gloom hung in the back of everyone’s mind the way the threat of atomic destruction has more recently tortured us.

  When the moment passed by and nothing happened, there was an intense sense of liberation, of pardon, of new hope. This wave of medieval glasnost was boosted by the sense that the barbarian invasions of centuries past were in fact over. As a result, building exploded. Suddenly the enclosed security of the medieval monastery could be turned inside out. Instead of having populations of laymen living within the walls, one could build a kind of embassy in the middle of town, right out in the open—a church.

  There had been churches, of course. The early ones, called basilicas, were modeled on old Roman meeting halls, which the first Christians rented to hold their services. Basilicas were built of wood with flat timbered roofs. When the Goths or Longo-bards arrived in the old days, these buildings were the first to get the torch.

  The idea was to replace them with buildings that were not only fireproof, but worthy of the new mood that inspired them. Instead of dark wooden beams, they would be built of rich blond stone. They would raise high those roof beams by adapting the Roman arch. The rebuilding of medieval infrastructure was so widespread and fast that one contemporary observer, Rodulphus Glaber, wrote in 1003 that “the world seemed to be doffing its old attire and putting on a new white robe of churches.”

  The church was to become a way of disseminating the essential idea of Christianity: although the chaos of the world was frightening, the scriptural word granted access to the harmony and transcendence of the divine. But how does one educate a continent of peasants about the power of the word when none of them can read? There were ideas. In 1025, the Council of Arras concluded: “Certainly there are simpletons and illiterates in the church who cannot contemplate the scriptures.... And although one does not worship a chunk of wood, the interior mind of man is excited by the visible image... which can be written on the tissue of one’s heart.” Even then, the seductive power of the image over the word was apparent. A narrative carved in stone—this was the Romanesque church.

  Tens of thousands of Romanesque churches with the same basic story to tell were built in the century and a half after the year 1000. Even today, after another millennium, there survive more than ten thousand Romanesque churches—from Bohemia and Poland in the east, to the Italian islands in the south, to Ireland and Scandinavia in the north, to Spain and Portugal in the west. The Romanesque church repeated these same coherent images to widespread audiences—a single story rerun over and over again. It was a form of mass communication, of broadcasting. Crude though it was, the Romanesque church was the first successful attempt at a medium we would later call television.

  The most famous Romanesque church on the road, except for the church in Santiago, is San Martín in Frómista. The first stone was laid in 1066, when William the Conqueror was setting sail for England. Frómista is merely thirty kilometers beyond Hontanas, and for two days I slog through heavily worked wheat fields to get there. That figure in the black hooded robe swinging an outsize scythe has gathered into gangs. At times the plains of Castille seem host to a Mr. Death convention. At last, from the tedious wheat fields that surround everything, the amber hulk of San Martín of Frómista appears. It is bolted and locked when I arrive.

  On the outside of a Romanesque church, the eaves of the roof are held up by small sculptures called corbels, triangles of stone fitted against the wall and beneath the roof with elaborate carvings along the hypotenuse. Here at Fromista’s San Martin, they are surprising—no biblical imagery or faces of Apostles, but pagan depictions of animals and people and vegetation.

  Walking around the outside of the church is a tour of the surreal. Here is a laughing wolf, a hysterical dog, a bird of prey, a man with his head in the mouth of a lion, a toothsome maniacally grinning beast, a pineapple, a naked seated child, a hideously contorted man with a child, another animal head flashing his molars, a man with a finger in his ear, a monster inserting his hands in his mouth, a woman with the floppy ear of a ruminant whose hands point to her distinctive feature, a human head with a long neck, an animal holding the head of a naked man between his knees, an animal with human hands stuffed in its mouth.

  Perhaps they are images drawn from the common bestiary, the second biggest seller in the Middle Ages after the Bible. Elsewhere on the road, I have seen corbels carved with panthers, dragons, wolves, elephants, and hyenas; mythological beasts— griffins, sirens, basilisks, centaurs, chimeras; and others whose names are still mysterious after translation—manticores, skiapods, hippopods, cenephali.

  A local woman instructs me to walk a few blocks to the town’s information booth to find out when the church will open. At the booth, a young man who speaks educated Spanish tells me the church is open.

  “I have just been there,” I tell him. “It is closed.”

  “No, it is Wednesday. It is open. If you go there, it will be open.”

  So I naively return, and it is closed. Another local advises that I visit the town mayor.

  The mayor is not in, but his wife is. She stamps my passport with the insignia of Frómista.

  “Do you know if the church of San Martín will open today?”

  “Oh, no,” she explains. “It is Wednesday. It is closed.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It will open tomorrow.”

  “The man in the information booth says it is open today.”

  “Yes,” she says. It is not a question or a confirmation or a statement. This is Spain, in a nutshell. But I believe her because —the church is closed—at least she and I inhabit the same time-space continuum. I return to the information booth because there were some books and pamphlets about San Martin for sale. The young man and I chat about San Martin, and I ask him why the outside is in such better condition than all the other Romanesque churches.

  “It was restored a hundred years ago.”

  “Really?”

  “A big controversy.”

  “Controversy?”

  “Yes. Some say they changed some of the carvings.”

  “Really, why?”

  “They were obscene.”

  “Really, so where are the obscene carvings?”

  “I believe they are in the Regional Museum in Palencia.”

  “How far is that?”

  “About a half hour on the bus. There will be one here soon. But if you go to Palencia today, you won’t be able to see the church.”

  “Why not?”

  “Tomorrow is Thursday. The church is closed.”

  I decide to take a day off and go to Palencia. As I wait for the bus, I flip through some of the brochures on Frómista. The town’s name is the linguistic collapsing of the Latin word frumentum
. It means “wheat.”

  Palencia is a large town, and by the time I get there in the late afternoon, the place is beginning to reawaken from the siesta nap. My search for the Regional Museum gets me nowhere because it doesn’t exist. Never has, the lady in the tourist office says. I ask after the corbels of Frómista, and I am sent to City Flail, which sends me to the Sacred Arts Museum, which wants to direct me to the Archaeological Museum, but, I’m told, it closed forever. Happened a few weeks ago. The administrators lost their funding.

  I walk to the Archaeological Museum anyway, maybe to mortify the spirit a bit more than I have. The front door is a squat wooden square with thick beat-iron hinges and one of those colossal locks from centuries ago. Who’s to say who possessed me? Saint James, perhaps.

  I pound on the door.

  A Spanish cliché drags open the heavy scraping door. He is a short man bent over with an enormous hump in his back. His head seems to nestle in the center of his chest. He explains that the museum is closed forever. I point to my shell. I pout. I let my eyes water. I wipe my brow. Pilgrims have their ways.

  Presently, a handsome middle-aged man named Don Mauricio del Amo appears and introduces himself.

  We ride up the elevator to his office and he fixes me a coffee. According to Don Mauricio, whatever corbels were taken down have been lost or stolen. He doesn’t have any and doesn’t know where any are. In the Spanish art world, he explains, there is a touch of scandal regarding Frómista because the restoration was done during the last century, which Don Mauricio assures me was as Victorian in Spain as it was in England.

  Many of the corbels of the Romanesque period, he explains, were quite obscene, at least by modern standards. They can still be seen here and there in Spain and in other countries. But most of them have been removed. Don Mauricio pulls from his library some books and photographs. We slowly leaf through the surviving corbels of the Romanesque. Each photograph is labeled with its location.

  At the Colegiata de Santillana del Mar is a man and woman splayed crotch to face, a primitive 69 position.