Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  In society, relationships are forged with a bit more delicacy and nuance. When we meet people, we share a language and possibly a profession or a hometown or a college or a taste in movies. Pilgrims share nothing but the desire to craft a simulacrum of civilized comfort out of few elements—a bedroll, some food, a flashlight. Personal space becomes a means to form relationships but also serves as a dividing line, a boundary. Everyone is struggling to find a place. We are, as adults long out of practice, trying to create a system of trust. We are trying to make friends.

  “All the bunks are taken,” says the German. “You will have to sleep on the floor.” His statement is not meant to be threatening, just informative, just so I will know where things stand. I say that I will be happy to sleep on the floor. The whole room seems to be put at ease by this statement.

  The German stretches out on his bed and swishes his legs back and forth. Mine, this is mine.

  Amid these group politics, I am being vetted, so I try to put forth my most gregarious self. But it is clear that a lot of vetting has preceded my arrival. Most of the people here already know their place and the place of others. As in the first grade, the group has already determined, with the same brutish nastiness common among children, that one among them is universally despised and openly mocked.

  His name is Giuseppe, but he is known as the Italian Man. When he enters the shelter he says nothing but sits on his bunk, removes his shoes, and puts a tennis shoe on his left foot and a climber’s boot on his right. He gets up and leaves. Willem says out loud, “That is the Italian Man. He is most strange.”

  I wince at his loud candor.

  “Do not worry. He cannot speak a word of English, or any other language.” A few people snicker.

  The Italian Man looks like a CIA agent on vacation. He dresses in green shorts and flak jacket lined with numerous pockets of varying sizes. His teeth are black, and he smokes incessantly, although he never inhales. He clamps down hard on each filter of his Marlboros, soaking the end, and sucks noisily until a cloud of fresh gray smoke flows from his lips into the air. Perhaps what marks him as the class wanker is his pack. It is a cloth box fastened to a steel frame with big wheels. He pulls it behind him. He looks like an old lady on a shopping spree. The pack is covered with decals from cities all over Europe, the kind one can see plastered all over the rear bumper of Airstream Trailers. His flak jacket is covered with pins proclaiming the European unity of 1992., buttons with photos of Pope John Paul II, and souvenir pins from the countries that once made up the Soviet Union.

  When he returns, he goes into the bathroom, closes the door, quickly flushes the toilet, and immediately steps out again. Everyone looks at one another, and childlike grins flash from some of the bunks. What the hell was that about?

  The Italian Man sits on his bed, removes his shoes, and then puts on bedroom slippers and shuffles about the hostel. He enters the bathroom, repeats his flushing ritual, and finally sits at the table.

  “Aufiedsein.” he says to me.

  “I am not German, I am an American,” I say in English.

  “Buona ventura, ist ein Americanishe.”

  “I am American.” This time I try Spanish.

  “Buena fortuna, pelegrino. Comme si, comme ça. La peregrinación es muy difícil, yes?”

  After the Italian Man leaves, Willem explains, “Giuseppe imagines he can speak every European language. I am not even certain how good his Italian is.” Willem, for all his London erudition, is something of a bitch.

  When the Italian Man returns a short while later, I listen carefully. He mangles his native Italian into a Spanish-sounding accent and throws in a few words of the language he is trying to speak, French, German, English—a pilgrim’s Mr. Malaprop. What I might find charming, though, the others loathe. The Italian Man can’t advance any conversation past the weather or merry howdy-dos. Like the social misfits I remember from my youth, he is despised by others not for his iconoclastic clothes or peculiar behavior, but for his stunning lack of self-awareness. On some level he is wholly innocent of just how much fun is being made of him, the classic butthead.

  “See the tree how big it’s grown,

  But friend it hasn’t been too long.

  It wah—zint big.”

  The Flemish troublemaker Claudy storms into the shelter, singing in the unctuous baritone vibrato of a lounge lizard.

  “You are an American.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Word gets around. I know all the American hits.”

  A pilgrim with a taste for Bobby Goldsboro. I am speechless.

  “Moon river, you heart shaker, wherever you’re knowing, I’m blowing your way.”

  “The words are ‘heart breaker, wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.’ ”

  “Oh, I know all the words. I am just testing you, American. What’s your name?”

  “Jack.”

  “Claudy.” He shakes my hand vigorously. I can see in Willem’s face a look of disdain. “I am Flemish.”

  “I know. Word gets around.”

  “All the pilgrims will be eating dinner tonight at the finest restaurant. You must come eat with us.”

  Willem makes one of his faces. I see it. Willem sees that I see it. Claudy sees it, and sees that Willem sees me seeing it.

  “Oh, everybody but Willem. He has to call his wife! He does not eat in restaurants! He goes to bed so early! You must come.... Great. Then you will come. We will all be eating at eight.”

  Dinner is a mad debauchery, emceed by our own Claudy. Like Willem, he is fluent in several languages, but his vocabularies are vulgar and colloquial. His English has the singsong quality of an American doing a bad imitation of a Liverpudlian accent. He opens the evening with several horrible jokes that provoke nothing but groans of pain.

  But it is impossible to condemn Claudy if only because no one can get a word in. His performance is improvisational and takes its source material at random—someone’s shirt, the food, a picture on the wall—but always winds back around to his own biography, which he serves up in comic dollops. He has sung in major nightclubs throughout the United States and England. He is a genius computer programmer and knows the president of Hewlett-Packard on a first-name basis. “I could call him right now, and he would beg me to work for him.”

  The subject of gambling comes up. Claudy brags that he holds the Las Vegas record for playing blackjack continuously— ninety-six hours—and is listed in The Guinness Book of World Records. The secret: cold showers during the fifteen-minute breaks. He has slept with women on all continents. The best are American. He winks at me for confirmation. But nothing beats the seduction of a good Spanish Catholic girl.

  Claudy speaks the worst Spanish, the only continental language he has yet to master. But somehow he has the waiter so tangled in laughter that free wine and brandy flow all night long.

  When the Italian Man (who was not invited) becomes the topic of conversation, a married British couple named Roderick and Jerri attempt an explanation but are cut off by Claudy.

  “Oh, he’s a bloody weird one. He smokes all day. And he takes a one-second leak in the bathroom like a dog and then flushes. At night he falls asleep in two seconds. Rick, do your imitation.”

  Rick makes loud snorting noises. Everyone at the table seems to know what these unpleasant sounds refer to, and they all participate. DRDRDRDR. AGAGAGAG. BTHBTHBTHBTH.

  “He snores like a fart,” Rick ventures in his first bit of English. The table erupts with laughter, and the waiter pours another round of Spanish brandy.

  The pilgrim shelter locks its gate at eleven p.m. Just before then, we pay up and decamp. Our little room is full. Other latecomers are laying out rolls on the floor. Willem is in his bed, reading by flashlight. I avoid his look. As I prepare to unroll my pack on the floor, Claudy whispers from a bunk to come over. He removes his walking stick and boots from one claimed bed.

  “You can have this one,” he says conspiratorially. I demur, insisting tha
t I don’t want him to sleep on the floor.

  “I won’t,” he says. “I always claim two bunks so I can give one to a friend.”

  Willem is looking up from his pool of light, and his face speaks of betrayal. I am casting my lot here. Willem or Claudy, the follower of rules or the breaker of rules. Retired air force captain or Dionysus. Hobbes never said it would be easy.

  I unroll my bag on the mattress. Willem returns to his book unhappily. Claudy is already on the other side of the room, alternately cracking jokes in Flemish with Rick and Karl and cutting some kind of deal with the elderly Dutch couple. Bedrolls are shifted, and now Claudy is sleeping in the top bunk next to mine. I cringe at what Willem is making of all this sudden intimacy.

  Lights are out and the room is dark. I hear the rattling of the gate, and at last the Italian Man enters through a doorway of moonlight. He undresses by flashlight. His unzippings and zippings are loud and interminable. At last he flops on the bunk with an odd grunt.

  DRDRDRDR, the Italian Man says. I hear Claudy holding back a cackle. In the distance I can make out the muffled giggles of Rick and then Karl.

  AGAGAGAG. The old Dutch couple make suffocating noises. I am holding back a big one myself.

  BTHBTHBTHBTH. The ticklish Rick isn’t holding up well; some puffs of authentic hilarity are popping out. The room is quivering with contained laughter. The contagion builds and approaches instability. Rick explodes. Claudy’s out of the bag. I lose it. Oblivious, the Italian Man falls into a loud, ragged snore uncommonly like flatulence. Right on cue. The room vibrates with the laughter of an unmonitored homeroom. In the cacophony, I can pick out each of them. I know these people now. I can hear them all, except Willem, silent in the dark.

  The life of the pilgrim is always advertised in the grandest terms. There is talk of stripping life to its barest essentials, paring away to the tabula rasa of one’s soul. The rigors of the road scale life down to this level almost immediately. But when one is walking in a group, what gets built up again, almost before one knows it’s happening, are these crude alliances, borne on puerile jokes, mean pranks, and small favors. Acquaintances are made and destroyed in juvenile terms, employing tactics I vaguely remember from the playground at recess. All our actions—the gift of a peach, the indulgence of a bed—mean to say what was said so frankly as children: Be my friend. And if these offerings fail, then: You are not my friend. I hate you.

  The next morning, I lose Willem. Around six a.m. everyone gets up at the same time. It’s unavoidable with that many people in a room. Willem wants me to leave with him at once. He flatters me. I am a serious pilgrim, not like them, he tells me. But I linger at the table and drink my coffee with the others. When I look around again, he’s gone. Later that day, on the road, I walk with the Flemish. At a bar where we take a break, I have a beer. Willem, by perverse coincidence, walks in for a glass of water. I invite him to join us. “I do not drink alcohol before sundown,” he announces. Hoots of grade school disdain from the Flemish. I have my first enemy.

  And by early afternoon I have a second one. Willie, the filmmaker, has made it clear to Rick and Karl that my presence is fouling his movie. Willie pulls up alongside us in his caravan from time to time to shoot some pictures and to entice Rick and Karl with drinks and food. On the one hand, Willie is simply bribing them. They are old men and can’t resist the occasional cold drink and sandwich, especially when we are walking in the heat. But this particular entanglement, I quickly learn, is perverse and political. When the two Flemish aldermen left Belgium, Willie was an unemployed teacher who showed up to videotape their departure on his home camera. A local television station bought a piece of it for the news. And since then, Willie has assumed the tyrannical impatience of a studio director. “He thinks he’s fucking Ingmar Bergman,” Claudy tells me.

  Moreover, Rick and Karl are boxed in. Willie’s film will chronicle their trip. They can’t insult him or even question him. They are politicians, and Willie is, strangely, the media. So they treat him as gingerly as the White House coddles the Washington press corps. Willie despises Claudy, who tagged along after meeting them in France, but on this account, Willie is also boxed in. Claudy doesn’t take guff from anyone; he is simply too loud, overbearing, and rude to be humiliated into going away. Besides, Rick likes Claudy’s bacchanal performances at every watering hole. So whatever keeps Rick happy, Willie must endure.

  But the image of a red-haired American who speaks no Flemish is bollixing his film. Like so many of us, Willie has come to the road with a load of preconceptions and resists adjusting them. He wants images of intense suffering and a crew of pilgrims who look the part. Both Rick and Karl are Central Casting pictures of the traditional pilgrim: beards, long hair, leather faces. My presence confuses Willie’s outline. Claudy confides to me that this morning the discussion inside the van, where I am not allowed, has turned on the delicate matter of getting rid of me. Claudy warns me that Willie is going to try to talk to me.

  In the small town of La Virgen del Camino (the Virgin of the Road) outside of León, the van parks alongside a large empty field fenced in by wrought iron. Willie steps outside to offer me a cup of coffee, which I accept, and then cozies up for a little chat. He can understand English if it is spoken very slowly.

  “Willie,” I say before he can begin, “do you see this empty field?” He nods, and I tell him this is one of the most important places on the road. In the early 1500s this area was barren, inhabited only by poor, desperate shepherds. One of them was named Alvar Simón Gómez Fernández. One day he saw the Virgin Mary, who asked him to throw a stone as far as he could and to build a church there. The locals grew very excited at this news, and funds poured in from all over the region. Apparitions so often preceded a church raising in those times, they effectively constituted a free building program. Here, this burst of enthusiasm created an entire town, appropriately named the Virgin of the Road. The shepherd Simón was among the attractions for a while, but eventually he was edged out. This pilgrim’s stop was so profitable that lawsuits between the clerical and secular powers were filed and counterfiled for centuries. When Napoleon’s armies passed through here in the nineteenth century, the situation was resolved when soldiers razed the pilgrim complex, reducing it once again to this empty field in the heart of town.

  Willie is very excited by this story. He has forgotten the reason he wanted to talk to me. He charges back into the van and reappears with his tripod and videocamera. He sets up at the fence, poking his lens through the wrought-iron slots. He revs up his camera and slowly pans from left to right, recording the static image of an empty field. The wind is so slight this morning that even the brown weeds do not stir.

  Down the way, the weary Claudy, Rick, and Karl are hanging on to the fence, their faces pressed into the slots like children. I step over beside them. We all stare at the empty field.

  “See, I told you, Willie’s a fucking idiot,” Claudy informs me.

  “Claudy, in my country, one of the first great philosophers any child encounters is named Bugs Bunny. In such moments, he would customarily reflect, ‘What an Eskimo Pie-head.’ ”

  By the end of the day, a crowd of pilgrims pulls into Villadangos del Páramo, a place whose name dates to a time of uncommon frankness. It literally means “Little Village on a Bleak Plateau.” The modern economy has slightly redeemed Villadangos. The European Economic Community wants to reclaim the road’s old meaning of European unity and has spent money making the road attractive in places. Here, a freshly built EEC hostel has separate rooms with stiff bunks, a complete kitchen, clean bathrooms, hot and cold running water, and an enormous dining area with tables and chairs. The place is cleaned every morning by a hired staff member. The facilities are more luxurious than any of the houses surrounding it.

  It is clear that lots of pilgrims have decided to stay here because of the accommodations. I meet two beautiful Spanish girls in their twenties. There are several young men from France and Spain on bicycles (some
of whom are traveling to Santiago to avoid the compulsory draft; the road calls for many reasons). There is a Welsh family—an out-of-work veterinarian named Wyn, his wife, Val, and their two boys, Adam and Gregg, ages ten and eleven. They are a popular sight since Wyn bought a mule after crossing the Pyrenees. The mule’s name is Peregrino, Spanish for “Pilgrim.” He bears a huge straw sack with wide berths on either side of his ample belly in which the Welsh carry their goods.

  The good feelings of the place provoke Claudy to suggest that the pilgrims all cook a meal together. A chain of language is used to dispense the duties. Claudy speaks Flemish so he can talk to his people. I can speak Spanish, so I communicate with the Spaniards, whose knowledge of French brings the crowd full circle. A menu is drawn up. Claudy will cook a stew. I am contributing a zucchini casserole. Val will cook a corn dish. The French boys are dispatched to buy wine. Claudy and I are left to scrounge up cooking pots and knives.

  I suggest we buy some, which Claudy dismisses as “typical fucking American.” He has other ideas. He asks Val if he can borrow the boys, and the four of us depart the hostel. Claudy approaches a decent house and rings the doorbell. A middle-aged mother appears. Claudy asks me to tell her in Spanish that we are poor pilgrims walking to Santiago without any money. This con is beyond me, and while the lady stands in her doorway, smiling, Claudy is shouting at me to speak. I introduce ourselves as pilgrims, merely pilgrims. But I can see that Claudy has no patience with my refined sense of honesty. He jumps into the conversation with his fractured Spanish, but it is enough. He says we are traveling with these young boys who haven’t eaten all day. We are tired, but we don’t come to beg. We have bought the food with the few remaining pesetas we have. But we lack the pots and pans, forks and knives, with which to eat. Santiago directed us to this house, he says, because he knew that a good person lives here. All we ask, Claudy adds, is that you trust us to borrow some equipment until tomorrow morning. We are pilgrims, honest and true. You can count on us.