Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  At San Martín de Elines is a man exhibiting his penis while tightening a garrote painfully around his neck. When I left America, I had read press accounts of teenagers strangling themselves during masturbation—autoerotic asphyxia—as a novel way to heighten the pleasures of self-abuse. Yet it wouldn’t be so new to neighbors of Santos Cosme y Damián de Bárcena de Pie de Concha, where a corbel shows a man onanistically exercising while squeezing his neck.

  At Santa Maria de Piasca is a beautiful corbel of a man holding a woman’s chin, in cinematic fashion, kissing her lips lightly.

  At San Vicente de la Barquera, a man is taking a woman from behind. They appear almost to be flying. Around the corner is a priest in robes, hiking his skirts to show his erect penis.

  At San Pedro de Cervatos, it is a pornographer’s dream. One corbel shows a woman with her legs pinned behind her ears, offering for public view a finely detailed, naturally proportioned vulva. Beside her is another corbel of a man with a hand on his chest and another fiddling with his visible scrotum and penis. A few corbels down is a man performing cunnilingus on a woman. Farther on is a woman with an infant dangling halfway out her vagina. Another, stunning to see, is a couple copulating upside down. Protruding generously toward heaven are their two buttocks, with a pair of testicles visible and an erect penis tightly sheathed in her vagina. Yet another shows a woman in the classical position of the Playboy foldout—on her stomach, her feet in the air, flashing her vulva at the viewer. Farther on, a woman is showing hers and looking flirtatiously across the space of a corner to a man who is showing his. Finally, there is a man, seated, with his enormously erect penis in his own mouth.

  When language is something of an impediment, as it is with Don Mauricio and me, we can only laugh. He speaks a thicket of architectural jargon, which is straining my conversational Spanish. But he makes his explanation plain. The medieval world understood human nature in ways very different from us. Clearly, he says, they were a bit more frank. These images weren’t meant to tantalize, although they may have. Rather, the outdoor corbels were meant to summarize the life that man and woman suffered outside the church. Taken as a whole, the exterior of the Romanesque was an imagistic retrospective on the human condition: the mad calling of sex, the dangers of crazed beasts, the certainty of death, the pains of daily life, and the hardship of labor. The opening chapter of the Romanesque story was a documentary: This is the world you inhabit. It is chaotic and strange, swayed and tormented by appetites and yearnings no one can understand.

  “The beauty of Romanesque,” Don Mauricio says, “after you have looked at the outside, is to step inside the church.”

  The following morning the ride back to Frómista is slow, and of course San Martin is closed. The mayor’s wife remembers me and advises that I walk to a bar called Tanin and shout the name “Salva.” This will open the church.

  Tanin is a bar like all others in Spain. The television, fat and 1950s looking, occupies a corner and is so loud that neither Salva nor anyone else can hear me. Television in Spain is no longer cultural white noise. Here television has utterly vanquished every public room. The irritating crackle you hear in the interstices of television’s humming silences is your own voice.

  I locate Salva, a rheumy-eyed gentleman nursing a late-morning drink. He doesn’t want to be disturbed by a tourist or a pilgrim or anyone else. He is watching a television game show celebrating the economic union of the nations of Europe. Salva agrees to take me to the church, but then orders another drink. I get a coffee and settle down with the guys to watch some television. A group of continental beauties in bikinis from Portugal, Spain, England, France, Italy, Germany, and a Benelux country—all well oiled—struggle to climb a giant greased cone to snatch their national flag from the top. This effort entails a lot of comical sliding. I think of the images I saw in Don Mauricio’s office, and I conclude that some comparisons are better left unexplored.

  At the commercial break, Salva produces an ancient key and pries himself from his chair.

  Don Mauricio had told me to enter the church. After spending some time outside, the temptation is irresistible. Frómista is a tidy box of a church, as big as a large A-frame house. Its exterior sculpture calls a visitor to the front door. The tour of life’s madness on the exterior changes abruptly. At the main entrance is a semicircle of sculpture called the tympanum, a space of carving that challenges everything else you’ve seen. On all Romanesque churches, it is orderly and serene. Most often Christ sits up vertically in defiance of the horizontal chaos and invites the visitor to step from this world of suffering and madness into one of perfection and order.

  Within, the gracious curves of those simple arches are sustained by columns, each carved with a scene at the top. Altogether they form three forward-moving aisles. But Romanesque does not hasten the visitor. The invitation is to linger. It is not merely a mise-en-scène, but a story—distinct from the chaotic images outside.

  At the beginning are depictions of what gives our world a sense of order and meaning, images of labor and daily routine. Here are men carrying a barrel of wine. Another shows a group of marching soldiers. Farther up the aisle the pillars advertise familiar stories. Here are Adam and Eve kneeling before a tree wrapped with a serpent. Or, the capitals are pure geometry— carvings of vegetation or the stone lace of chevrons, dog-tooth, twisted cable—said to be inspired by the medieval art of illuminated manuscripts, making them literally the translation of the word into image.

  The sculptures visible on these capitals are cramped and flat and seem primitive. This apparent crudeness is evidence not of ignorance, but of restraint.

  “Even in its most passionate moods,” writes the French critic Henri Focillon, Romanesque “is held in check by a discipline which forbids it to flourish and posture about the church or to launch itself turbulently into space.” Gothic architecture would end all that and pirouette up the aisles. For Romanesque, the stone was subordinate to the story, translating the message that the unpredictability of the world could be contained by the word. Order could be imposed on chaos. Meaning could be heard in the cacophony of Babel.

  The Romanesque church is a balance of righteousness and humility. It doesn’t think too highly of itself. Like a pilgrim, Romanesque is not really in a position to. Humility comes with the territory—flat arches all around. After reveling in the place of San Martin, I am joined by a German choir. For an hour they sing early chants and madrigals. The director tells me afterward that he and his choir are touring Europe and singing in every Romanesque church they can find. I ask him why he doesn’t visit the grand cathedrals in Burgos or Leon.

  “It is the difference between rock ’n’ roll and chamber music,” he says. “The Gothic and the Baroque were built for amplification. The Romanesque was built for harmony.”

  Entering a big city is like waking from a dream. My solitary days of amiable walks in the countryside, chatting and lunching with locals and winning praise from farmers and shepherds for my effort, comes to a crashing end. León is my next

  stop, a city of kings and cathedrals, court intrigue and tradition. The city’s name is a contraction of a pow erful Roman army unit, Legio VII Gemina, once stationed here. Spain’s famous medieval knight el Cid was married downtown in the Romanesque church San Isidoro. A notorious Moorish general named Almanzor made several punitive raids on León. He was a tenth-century man with a twentieth-century sense of public relations. After each victory, and there were many, Almanzor returned to his tent and brushed the dirt and filth of battle into a box. When he died, his coffin was lined with this exquisite dust, and he was laid in it. Even the Spaniards begrudgingly admire him.

  But a pilgrim walking into a city this size does not encounter history. If I were in a car, I could zoom straight to the old center of town. But I am on foot, entering a modern urban thicket. So my introductions are aging factories, fenced-in toxic dumps, and abandoned vistas of distressed commercial real estate. Gradually the outer industrial rim gives w
ay to contemporary poverty. The wealth of the inner city seems distant. High-rises filled with the modern poor forge bleak canyons. The unemployed men, who gather in packs to smoke or drink, stare at me. No noble pilgrim now, I am a weirdo, a suspicion. I feel the old wariness of the New Yorker ebbing back. Just a few miles ago, the laborers in the fields fixed me with a look, too, but it was one of true curiosity and then admiration. Not here. My peripheral vision at León tunes out dogs and wolves and weather and begins to pick up familiar blips—gangs of kids in a side alley, slow-moving cars, the odd pacings of feet behind me.

  The dangers of the Castilian plains summoned childhood fears. These streets call up adults-only terrors—mugging, stabbing, robbery, beating. A car full of teenagers drives past, and two faces lunge hooting from the windows. I hear the car turn around behind me and pull alongside me. Then, colorful Spanish invective.

  “Eh, German! Asshole. Fuck you. Fuck your mother.”

  I am not German, I want to say, but instead I smile that stupid smile that says Oh, you kids, so young and foolish, now go and play somewhere else.

  “Suck my chicken!” Or a metaphor to that effect. The car speeds up, spins around, and creeps back toward me. Great. I remember that someone told me not to yell “Help!” in Spain, but “Fire!” which will at least attract attention. I consider yelling curses back at them and prove that I can give as good as I get. I have already learned the ultimate Spanish insult (actually of Cuban origin): Me cago en el coño de tu madre muerta. I shit in the cunt of your dead mother. It is marvelous; all the vitals— scatology, genitals, death, mothers—packed so economically. This phrase is, however, an invitation to a fight unto death. So I keep my wry grin fixed firmly on my lips.

  The car slips by once again, and two behinds, unclad, fit themselves quickly and snugly into the windows.

  “German asshole! Kiss this blossoming flower!” Or a metaphor to that effect. Keep smiling. Keep walking.

  The pilgrim is soothed only by the yellow arrows, constant friends, even here in the ghettos. They sneak out from behind bullfight posters or leap off litter-filled gutters. They do look dashed off, sloppy gashes of yellow. A subliminal message from the painters: Hurry.

  Downtown, the arrows direct the pilgrim just past San Isidoro to a rear entrance, possibly where the Cid held his nuptial reception. A pair of wrought-iron gates are open, and a bent arrow nods inward.

  Lights! Camera! Action! The receiving courtyard is filled with filmmakers and crew. A director’s recreational vehicle is parked to the side. A camera turns my way, and voices cry, “Peregrino, peregrino.” I am being filmed. I nod, I wave. No, wait. I am a pilgrim. A dour expression of suffering blooms on my face. How embarrassing. I am not ready for my close-up.

  Laughter erupts from all sides. A priest, in a stagy long black robe and gold belt cinched tight with dangling tassels, waves me off with a “just kidding” flap of the hand. The group turns into itself and resumes a discussion of the next shot, I presume.

  To my left is an open doorway to the pilgrim’s shelter, and outside, sitting in the sun, is a small man.

  “My name is Jack,” I say in Spanish.

  “From the accent,” he says in English, “I would guess you are an American.”

  “Very good.”

  “I rarely misjudge an accent,” he says. He stands erect and introduces himself as Willem. After reclaiming his seat, he carefully cuts up a peach.

  “Would you like a wedge?”

  Willem is Belgian, a slim man with a sunken chest and the jerky silent-film body language of Charlie Chaplin. He started walking from his house in Belgium several months ago. His English is grammatically perfect, no slang, no contractions. His accent is Oxbridgean, erudite and musical. He speaks Spanish, I soon learn, with a Castilian’s aristocratic lisp and German with the authoritarian tones of the kaiser. A retired air force captain, Willem exudes a military precision with every action and phrase. Each afternoon he spends his siesta writing his wife a five- to ten-page letter. Every night he calls her for fifteen minutes. His knowledge of the road is exhaustive. He takes notes at every stop and has already argued with the priest about the history of San Isidoro. A heart attack several years ago served as a “memento mori” (his words) and put him in mind to walk the road, a lifelong desire. To prepare for his fifteen-hundred-kilometer journey, he practiced the entire trek, walking twenty-five kilometers around town every day for three straight months. “I just wanted to be certain I could do it,” he acknowledges. Makes sense, sort of. But Willem knows what he knows.

  “Stay away from the Flemish, at least some of them,” he advises in a coy whisper.

  “Which Flemish?” I ask.

  “The filmmaker, Willie, and the others. They are foolish. They are pranksters. I cannot quite guess why they are walking the road.”

  He leans over conspiratorially and talks in a slight whisper to tell me their story, introducing each character replete with prudish commentary. The short wiry Flemish man is Rick. He is a pilgrim cliché: bald pate, long stringy white hair, and salt-and-pepper beard to his navel. He drinks a bit too much and cannot be taken seriously. His friend is Karl, the only one among them of any worth. Karl is bearish and quiet and handsome with a trim gray beard, a Flemish Sean Connery. The two of them are local aldermen in the town of Keerbergen. Several months ago the issue of repairing a priceless ancient organ came up, but no one could find the money. The town’s poor insisted the rich pay, and the rich resented the demand. At a nasty village meeting, where old friends cursed one another, Rick shouted down the room and announced with appropriate drama, “I will walk to Santiago de Compostela!” Karl jumped up and said, “If that old man can walk to Spain, I can too.” Each citizen pledged a certain amount per kilometer, and the bet was on. If the two old men could make it to Santiago, the town would have enough to repair the organ.

  Willem doesn’t seem as impressed by their story as I am. What a fine beginning (and so uncomplicated; I’m jealous). Pilgrims walked the road for many reasons in the old days. Many simply announced their intention. Others begged for some favor—sparing the life of a relative was fairly common. Several centuries ago, a pilgrim named Jacques Lemesre of Dunkirk begged that his mother survive a painful illness. En route to Santiago, he was kidnapped by pirates, pressed into slavery, and eventually presumed dead. When he did return three years later, his mother, who was cured, was so astonished to see him that she died of shock.

  After the road to Santiago was established, the reasons for walking became as numerous as pilgrims. Over time, the walk to Santiago, Rome, or Jerusalem even became a civil penalty. Countries frequently sentenced their worst criminals to one or two pilgrimages. In one case, a murderer was condemned to a pilgrimage with the corpse of his victim strapped to his back. Typically, though, the sentences were more humane, at least by medieval standards. A murderer would be welded into shackles made from the murder weapon and sent on a forced march, often naked. The irons could come off only after they were rusted through by sweat and urine.

  But the most respectable of the pilgrimage traditions was simply to make a vow. Knights often did this and then headed off to Santiago for a blessing. These Flemish seemed to me to be true pilgrims indeed. But Willem is not interested in my historical digression.

  “The worst of them is the man with the mustache. He is lazy. He drinks all the time and involves himself in trouble.” Claudy is his name, pronounced “Cloudy.” He is a sinewy, bent-legged man with a face straight off the canvas of a Dutch master. His mustache is grand and ostentatious. Below his bottom lip is a little tuft of jazz beard. His hatchet face, almond eyes, and thin crescent smile give him a foxy look of unspeakable cunning.

  The filmmaker is a man named Willie. “He is an odd duck,” says Willem, nodding at him by way of saying, Just take a look. The filmmaker has a puffed-up pompadour, hooded Salman Rushdie eyes, and a greasy smile. He looks like a game-show host. What Willem wants me to notice, and I can’t help but do so, is the filmmake
r’s short short pants. He seems to prefer to carry his valuables—wallet, keys, cards—in the well of his crotch. Where one might expect to see the graceful curves of human flesh framed by such tight pants, one sees instead geometric shapes protruding unnaturally. Willem’s nod is his way of saying, Nuf said. And indeed, it is.

  “There are others you should meet. I will introduce you,” he says. He carves another slice of peach with the precision of a surgeon. He pulls the flesh free from the crenulated stone with a raw rip.

  “Another wedge?” Willem obviously wants to be my Virgil, conducting me into the little inferno of pilgrim relationships at this shelter. I accept the gift, but not without the odd feeling that I’ve made a trade.

  He touches me gently on the leg. “You are a good man,” he says.

  When Willem and I enter the shelter, I see a number of people ambling about. On my left are five double bunks, ten beds. At a dinner table are two elderly folks, eating out of tins. My new face causes ripples of concern. At Willem’s introduction, a German man says hello but immediately informs me in broken English that this—and he points—is his bunk. Just in case I wanted to know.

  The elderly couple, Belgian like Willem, kindly offer me a place at the table, but they pull their food closer to them as they do. Their generosity has limits. A man exits the bathroom. Upon seeing my new face, he introduces himself, but while he talks, he casually gravitates toward his gear and bunk. Mine, this is mine, he wants to tell me.

  There are a lot of people here. Many pilgrims start around this part of the road, and the Flemish and their crew have been resting here a few days. So it’s quite a scene. This is the first crowded shelter I have visited, and there is a strange discomfort. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. I would date it to the first grade-—that elementary Hobbesian jungle of personal jostling and wrangling. In a pilgrim’s shelter, where people are separated by language and culture and class, and united only by common suspicion, the maneuvering is clumsy and obvious. We speak first in gestures and motions, actions and movement.