Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  It’s an enviable performance—and to back it up is the sight of us standing there. A day of walking and sweating has reduced each of us to the image of pilgrim poster boys. There are smears of dirt on our heads and arms. Our legs are covered in scratches. We stink, and each of us has a rat’s nest for hair.

  Claudy’s eyes well up with tears. The boys, cunning pilgrims themselves, put on the faces of quiet cherubic suffering. I’m no fool. I complete the tableau and allow my features to sag into a Viking’s pieta. The woman clutches her hands over her chest and cries out Saint James’s name. A few minutes later she returns with a bag of her best gear: pots, pans, forks and knives, plates and glasses, napkins.

  Claudy says thank you in the charming superlative Spanish offers. Muchíssimas gracias. He says it a dozen times with the unctuous humility of a beggar. The mother encourages us to have a good night and closes the door. Back at the hostel, the boys tell this story repeatedly to anyone who will listen. Claudy, everyone says proudly, is a true pilgrim.

  The hostel is buzzing with good feelings. A potluck dinner brings out the best in everyone. Food and wine abound. People are moving in and out, cooking meals, getting cleaned up for the big dinner. Everyone, of course, except Willie. He has parked his camper on a planted field behind the hostel, which we can see through a plate-glass window. Claudy volunteers to observe, as we all have, that a planted field probably indicates that someone has tilled and planted it. No doubt the owner is not too happy about having a multiton mobile home parked on his future lettuce. Willie dismisses Claudy’s advice as ignorant and unnecessary.

  The little tension of this moment produces one of the more bizarre events of the night. Willie and his wife sense the hostility over the parking space, and they resent Rick and Karl’s chumminess with everyone in the room. So they hook up their camper to the hostel’s electricity and prepare a separate meal a good bit more aromatic than the peasant fare we cook. While we have shoved together three long cafeteria tables to form a banquet table, Willie has dragged a small table off to the side, set with five places.

  “You see?” Claudy says. “This is how he operates. He won’t let Rick and Karl eat with us. The fifth place is for me. Willie knows he can’t insult me, or he will hurt his relationship with Rick. This table is a challenge to Rick and Karl. I say, ‘Fuck him.’ ”

  When the dinners are ready, Rick and Karl actually sit on two chairs angled perfectly between the two tables. They have places at both. And plates at both. And meals at both. When I catch Rick’s eye, I tell him King Solomon would be proud. “I am a politician,” he confesses. “What can I do?”

  During dinner the door slams open, and the owner of the lettuce patch storms into the main room in a rage. He instinctively homes in on the Spanish speakers, the two girls. They are baffled. I hasten to intervene, explaining to the girls and the lettuce man that all of us complained to the owner of the caravan about his choice of parking space, but he ignored us. I (back in first grade again) point to Willie: He did it, sir.

  Willie is furious that I have fingered him. (What else could I do?) He wants to yell at me, but fury, like humor, is among the last things learned in a foreign language. His English is just not up to the job. So he yells at Claudy in Flemish. He shrieks that Claudy is somehow responsible for ratting to the lettuce man. Willie shoves Claudy against the wall. So I jump up and run over. I’m ready to pound this guy into the ground, and I want to slug him. I never beat up anybody in first grade, quite the opposite. But now I’m big, and I’ve been carrying a pack for a month.

  But Claudy waves me off. He stands rigid, insulting the filmmaker with what sounds like really delicious Flemish obscenities. Rick and Karl freeze, as does the whole room. The two men bump chests and shout. It is a splendid pas de deux, the one perfected by baseball umpires and team managers. Somehow we all know that no fight will break out. From the sidelines, suddenly, it strikes all of us as funny. So we laugh, which pitches Willie into a profound sense of humiliation. He plunges his hand into his crotch, retrieves his keys, and leaves the building at once.

  We quietly listen to the sound of the caravan pulling away from the building. “It’s Saint James,” Rick crows. After a while, Willie returns and takes his seat with his wife at the other table. They eat in fierce silence for the rest of the evening. Rick and Karl maintain their spot in the DMZ, but everyone knows where their hearts are.

  Our table, meanwhile, is a United Nations gabfest. Jokes and stories are told, translated, retold, and translated once again. Probably the entire night’s conversation could be transcribed on two sheets of note paper. But the joy of talking and screaming, conquering the language barrier, all aided by magnums of wine, has put us in a fine spirit. We are pilgrims. And Willie’s presence, the crass filmmaker lacking in the natural humility that we learn on foot, only encourages our bonhomie and spices it with a tasty dash of schadenfreude.

  As we get more acquainted, I notice that we have developed new names. They distinguish us as pilgrims rather than as people. I am known as the Red American Who Speaks Spanish. The movie stars break down into the Funny Flemish One (Claudy), the Pilgrim with the Long Grey Beard (Rick), and the Quiet Flemish Man (Karl). The Welsh are known as the English Family with the Mule. And the two Spanish girls are simply the Beautiful Spanish Girls. We all sense that tomorrow we will probably split up again, and what good will our other names do? “Jack” means nothing here. “The Red American Who Speaks Spanish” defines me as a pilgrim, a name that other pilgrims will recognize.

  Not long afterward we hear the door at the far end of the hostel open. Unoiled wheels squeak up the hall. From the darkened corridor appears the Italian Man. He approaches the table as all of us fall into a knowing silence. It seems everyone except the Beautiful Spanish Girls has had an encounter with the Italian Man.

  “Bueno nochesa, pelerin. Un día del ambulatore termina with the food de la mesa. Que buenos peregrinas.”

  No one says a word. Everyone willfully ignores him. And of course the Italian Man is as innocent as an infant of the cold shoulder from this crowd. This is how everyone treats him. He’s the kid with the “Kick Me” sign pinned to his backside who never figures it out.

  “Cuanta peregrinas are here?” He counts us all out loud. “Eins, zwei, tres, quatro, cinq, siete, eight.”

  The beautiful Spanish Girls look to me in confusion. I give them a quick explanation of his peculiar speaking habits, and they laugh. They haven’t known him long enough to sense the cruelty.

  The entire day has been a series of flashbacks to childhood. I think of Scott Dorran and Sidney Carpenter, two kids who were brutalized in my grade school. I believe I joined the mob in ridicule. Perhaps I led it. And what about the time Tim Trouche, my best friend, got the crap beat out of him by Herb Butler? The crowd cried for blood in the recess yard just before homeroom. I stood silently, and the crowd got what it wanted.

  The road invites its pilgrims to begin again—lifting the traveler from numbing familiarity and dropping him into new circumstances. Being a pilgrim allows all that, yet how strange and thrilling it feels.

  “Peregrino italiano.” I stand up to speak his language. “Welkommen, bien venue, welcome.” The words come easy and tug mightily at the heart of our resident lounge lizard. Claudy catches the hint. He perks up and begins to sing—Liza Minnelli blown through the pipes of Steve Lawrence. A French boy fetches another wineglass, and the others clear a place at the table for the Italian Man.

  They overturn and desecrate our altars,” said Pope Urban II about the Moslem problem in the Holy Land. “They will take a Christian, cut open his stomach, and tie his intestine to a stake; then, stabbing at him with a spear, they will make him run until he pulls out his own

  entrails and falls dead to the ground.” The day was November 28, 1095. A few years later the People’s Crusade set off for Jerusalem.

  The battles did not go well for the Christians at first. One siege of a Moslem castle left the warriors stranded far from
a water supply. After a week, wrote one chronicler, the men “were so terribly afflicted by thirst that they bled their horses and asses and drank the blood; others let down belts and cloths into a sewer and squeezed the liquid into their mouths; others passed water into one another’s cupped hands and drank; others dug up damp earth and lay down on their backs, piling the earth upon their chests.” They surrendered. The healthy were sold into slavery; the rest were executed.

  The Christians learned from their new enemies. In a subsequent battle, an army of infidels rushed from their fortress into a field of Christians. The decapitations were numerous, and the Christians tested an innovative way to dampen enemy morale. They placed each head in a sling and flung it over the fortress wall.

  A year later the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem ended in the slaughter of seventy thousand Moslems. “If you would hear how we treated our enemies at Jerusalem,” wrote one jubilant Christian, “know that in the portico of Solomon and in the Temple our men rode through the unclean blood of the Saracens, which came up to the knees of their horses.” But Urban never heard the good news. Two weeks after his original speech, he died, uncertain that his words would come to anything.

  Nine of the knights who had distinguished themselves in the fighting banded together in Jerusalem. They took as their headquarters a building near the Dome of the Rock, the very location, it is said, of the temple of Solomon. They assumed the holy duty of protecting pilgrims who would certainly come to Jerusalem now that it was safe. Because they saw their job as an essentially religious exercise, these knights did something unheard of. They took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, assuming the attitude of monks. At this time, knights were not romantic warriors but vulgar mercenaries, mistrusted by all, especially Rome. The nine monks of Jerusalem were different and the church seized the opportunity to marry the righteousness of the clergy with the brutal force of an army. The earliest emblem of these knights is a seal showing two men on a single horse, a symbol of their poverty and humiliation. They took a name, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ, or the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, shortened to the Knights Templar.

  Within seventy years their numbers swelled and the Templars became the most powerful force in the Mediterranean. Their reputation slowly assumed an esoteric character, protectors of the Holy Land and possessors of great mysteries. Money and land grants flowed generously into their coffers. Their fortresses were flung from the Holy Land to Scotland in the north and from Hungary in the east to Portugal on the Atlantic coast. The Knights Templar built one of their most impressive and enigmatic constructions in Ponferrada, Spain, on the road to Santiago.

  León is a common place for pilgrims to begin the road, and it’s been three days since my new acquaintances and I left there. Where I had once walked for weeks without seeing a pilgrim, I now cannot pass an hour. Ahead, on a rising hill, a creeping fleck of yellow is, I know, a pilgrim in a rain slicker. Behind me are dozens of pilgrims. We try to walk together at times, but it never works out. The pace and timbre of one’s step on a long haul has a unique quality, like a fingerprint. Each of us moves at our own speed and in our own style. For a short distance we can walk in sync, but after a while the nuances cause problems. And when the conversation runs dry, companion pilgrims find themselves disengaging like slow boxcars, one pulling away from the other. This morning the chilly mists of the hilly pastures of León province have stretched us across the landscape, an inept dragging conga line. I have come to know so many of them, many more than I met in León or Villadangos. We try to stay in touch. In each shelter are notebooks. We send messages to each other via these books or send inquiries through other pilgrims. The word on the road this week is to hold up late this afternoon at a little town called Rabanal, reputed to have a fine hostel.

  The pilgrims in their ponchos and bright shirts provide the only primary tones in this land, where everything is a variation on the color of manure. The sepia buildings, the muddy street, the swarthy locals, all seem to have risen chthonically from the hills of soil and dung.

  At Santa Catalina de Samoza, a squat man steps from a chatting knot of three friends into the sodden street. Half his face is an enormous purple swag the size of a handbag. The dewlap, a monstrous sagging deformity, pulls at his eyes and nose. His upper lip is a blooded fist. No pulling or tugging can rearrange this man’s face into any expression other than constant sorrow. One of his friends has a dead left arm, the hand unnaturally flat. His fingers are thin and delicate in their callouslessness. He takes up a second position in the street with a light, sensual squish in the mud. His left arm is swaying, perhaps with the breeze. They assume the hip-lock position of toughs, and at first I am afraid. But this is not New York, or even the outskirts of León. The handbag snaps open; a crazy curvaceous hollow sounds the thick grunt of rural Spanish.

  “Good day, pilgrim,” he says.

  I was always taught never to stare at a deformity. I try to look this man in the eye. But he effectively has only one; the other is sheathed in wattle. I can’t help myself. His face is unbelievable. I have to study it. Rogue teeth sprout from huge exposed formations of gum and frame a jagged cavern with a tiny black tongue, a pelican’s gullet. Yet I recognize the semblance of a smile.

  The tradition of welcoming pilgrims is a thousand years old in these parts of Spain. The legendary southern hospitality of my home region in America is in its infancy by comparison. My new acquaintance and his friends must greet a pilgrim each hour at this time of the year.

  “Have you tried our chorizo?” says the man with the dead arm.

  Every region of Spain boasts homemade chorizo, the Spanish sausage, and of course every region’s is the best. One of the men points to an arrow painted on a stone, indicating the direction of the town restaurant and the local sausage.

  “And how about your own chorizo!” shouts the man of constant sorrow. His mouth opens tremendously and exudes a temblor of a laugh. He grabs the cloth of his crotch and bunches it up in his fist. He pulls manfully at himself.

  “The pilgrim girls!” says one of the men in the doorway.

  “We have seen them.”

  “We have talked to them!”

  “Girls, girls, the most precious girls! Pilgrim girls!”

  I recite the old Spanish proverb about the road—Go a pilgrim, return a whore—because, I don’t know, to keep the conversation going.

  “Whores!” they all shout at once. Like grotesques from the canvases of Goya, the men stump and strut. One man bends over, his hands on his knees, and pries open his mouth to hiss.

  Pilgrims may be sacred folk, walking reminders of a great journey, to some. But we are many things, depending on where we are. In León we might be potential mugging victims. Each town seems to have its own attitude. Here, as in many small towns, we are the stuff of prurient daydreams—itinerant men and women, unbound from centuries of strict Catholic rule. Footloose and liberal. Far from the stern eye of mother and father. Young men and women in shorts, loosely fitted blouses, hair unkempt. Careless. Washing in common restrooms. Sleeping in gangs on the floors. Alone in the pastures. Our raspy breathing may be not the result of our labor, but a hint of our desire. Ignominious. Wanton. Ah, the mystery of pilgrims. Whores.

  Rabanal is another town like the last, except that the Confraternity of Saint James, a British group of loyal Santiago alumni, has recently renovated a luxurious and gleaming hostel. The bedroom has forty bunks, all of which will be filled tonight. Throughout the afternoon, pilgrims arrive in a continual parade of activity. Little Rabanal, as somnolent as every hamlet on this stretch of the road, suddenly resembles the busy chaos of a frontier town. Bikers brake at the gate. The Welsh family arrive with their mule. Inside, the bathroom is crowded with men and women bent over sinks of gray water, grinding their socks. The clotheslines and banisters display shorts and shirts and, unabashedly, bras and underpants of every description. The entire village is bustling with pilgrims, most of whom I recognize. By late sunset
Rabanal’s two restaurants are jammed with tables burdened by wine, huge plates of lamb and steak, potatoes and eggs, and lively talk.

  Allegiances and acquaintances come and go. Friendships are made and broken, all in the course of a day or a casual remark. Very few of our discussions concern the touchy subject of why each of us is walking the road. It almost seems too private.

  In the bedroom, later that evening, I unroll my bag on a bunk. The Flemish are here, and there is Willem, and the old Dutch couple from León. The Beautiful Spanish Girls are just next to me. The friendly hellos are interrupted by the old Dutch man, who shouts to the girls in broken Spanish: “There is the Red American you were asking after, eh?” He grins and winks. The Spanish girls blush and turn away, a demur so mannered I can’t imagine it outside a nineteenth-century novel. The Dutchman shoots a brash thumbs-up in my direction and clicks his tongue on the side of his cheek. He means well, but however naively, he doesn’t understand the indelicacy of his remark. The Spanish girls never speak to me again.

  Sleeping in a room of nearly forty exhausted travelers is not easy. When the lights go out at eleven, the sound sleepers, about half the room, collapse into a zany chorus of snores. The rest of the pilgrims are giggling like naughty schoolchildren—the girls, the younger men, the bicyclists, me. The laughter wakes up some of the grouchy men, who shush the crowd, provoking more laughter, waking up more. More shushing. More snoring. More laughter, until the hardship of the day wears down the giddiest and carries us all off to oblivion. We need our sleep. Tomorrow is a thirty-one-kilometer walk to a famous city, Ponferrada, known for the ruins of an enormous fortress built by the Knights Templar.