Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  The Freemasons and other neo-Templar organizations created hundreds of different grades of knighthood, with a fee for each ascendance, new uniform, and chest of badges. The mystery of god was a cottage industry. Secret charters began to appear. One was written in blood, another in a secret indecipherable code. Long, tedious genealogies surfaced, tracing an unbroken line of Templar masters to eras long before Christ. Bombastic constitutions appeared; one spoke of the priories of Japan, Tartary, and the Congo.

  Some strains of neo-Templarism faltered. In 1831 one self-proclaimed Templar tried to start a new group centered on the supremacy of three men—Confucius, Parentier the apostle of the potato, and the banker Lafitte. It didn’t catch on.

  How did Columbus discover America? According to twentieth-century Templar historians Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, “Columbus himself was married to the daughter of a former Grand Master of the Order [in Portugal], and had access to his father-in-law’s charts and diaries.”

  When these historians approach the subject of the neo-Templars and America, they find connections everywhere. Ben Franklin was knighted the provincial grand master of Pennsylvania in 1734. Later, while in France, he was dubbed the master of the nine sisters and was later accepted into the Royal Lodge of Commanders of the Temple West of Carcassonne. George Washington, Paul Revere, and John Hancock were Freemasons. The philosopher behind the American political idea, Montesquieu? Freemason.

  To read the history of America from the pages of Templar-fired imaginations is to learn that our founding was less a revolution than a conspiracy. Of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, possibly a third were Freemasons. Nearly half of the general officers of the Continental army were Freemasons. The minutes for the November 30, 1773, meeting of the St. Andrew’s Lodge in Boston contain this significant note: “consignees of the Tea took up the Brethren’s time.” This phrase is held up as proof that the Boston Tea Party was a Templar soiree. George Washington’s appointment as commander in chief was fixed by fellow Freemasons.

  According to this strain of thinking, the Templar mysteries had at last found its ultimate expression, the Constitution of the United States. The idea of the rights of man, the precept that power should be invested in continuous offices and not in people, the theory of federalism, and the notion of checks and balances are old Templar methods of bureaucratic organization that date back to the time of Tutankhamen. “Philosophers such as Hume, Locke, Adam Smith, and the French philosophes are regularly enough invoked,” write Baigent and Leigh of the origins of the American idea, “but the Freemasonic milieu which paved the way for such thinkers, which acted as a kind of amniotic fluid for their ideas and which imparted to those ideas their popular currency, is neglected.”

  The most visible evidence of Templar control of the American experiment apparently is Washington, D.C., itself. Tour guides may say that the Frenchman Pierre l’Enfant designed the city, but they neglect to add that George Washington himself altered the plan. If you look carefully at the great Mall and the grid streets bisected by diagonal boulevards, you might notice “octagonal patterns incorporating the particular cross used as a device by masonic Templars.” For some Templars passing over the capital by plane, a simple glance out the window confirms that the ancient mystery has at last found a local habitation and a name.

  After the sun goes down in Ponferrada, the town withdraws. The storekeepers turn out the lights, and bolt the doors. The houses too are dark. The little balconies seem dressed in mourning, lined with flowers colorless in the night light, or draped in the afternoon’s laundry snapping the iron rails. From one or the other balconies stare faces of fatigue, a tired housewife, a housebound teenage girl, an old man taking his cigar in the cool air. Ponferrada is in retreat, and the refuges are the bars.

  At the dark woody establishment where I left my dinner companions, other pilgrims and more locals have gathered. Above the head of the bartender hang haunches of Spanish prosciutto dripping grease into tiny cups. On a scarred mahogany bar is a setting of small plates, tapas of roasted peppers, ham and bread, Spanish omelet. Outside and in, crowds form at small tables.

  “You are an American,” says a German pilgrim I have encountered once or twice before. He introduces me to an angry Spaniard who wants to know if the military installation a few miles back up the road is under the control of the American military establishment. Several years ago Spain joined NATO, apparently under some kind of pressure from American politicians. On the road today, I saw several splashes of graffiti that translate “Spain. NATO. Out.”

  “Is this part of an American spy ring?” the Spaniard wants to know. He rattles his glass of whiskey menacingly. The German nods, a jerk of the head that places him squarely against the Americans. But my mind is filled with secret passageways, cryptic messages, long-lost treasures. I am in a Hardy Boy mood, and these men want to discuss international politics.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t had my CIA briefing this week.” I wander over to another table.

  I take cover in a group of nearby pilgrims who are lamenting the absence of some of the Rabanal gang who didn’t make it this far. The Welsh family and the Flemish group seem to have been waylaid in Molinaseca—literally “Dry Hill” yet famous for its flat terrain, crashing river, and giant swimming hole.

  At a nearby table some other pilgrims are speaking with a red-haired man. I grab a beer and step over. He is not a Spaniard, although as the walk moves farther west, red hair is common among the locals. His brogue is Irish. His name is James, and he is a stumpy but well-fed man, distinguished by his powerful arms and buttery hands. I pick up from the conversation that he used to be a priest. The glassy look in his eye, either from alcohol or insanity, is offputting. When I walk up I hear him discussing the Antichrist.

  The mystery of god that passeth all understanding is quite comprehensible to James. From his chatter I sense that he is a demented soul who wandered into the orbit of the Templar mystery in Ponferrada and has never managed to escape. As I listen, he explains one of his theories.

  The current pope is the Antichrist. James has the proof. Our age is drowning in a decadence not matched since Noah, he says. Everyone nods in agreement. The first pope of this era, Pope John Paul I, was legitimate. But the time for the forces of evil had arrived, so he was killed off and replaced by Satan’s proxy, Pope John Paul II. This truth is revealed in an ancient formula. James scratches onto a waxy scrap of bar napkin the words Vicarivs Filii Dei.

  “This is the pope’s title in Latin,” he says. “It means ‘vicar of the Son of God.’ It is three words, and this pope is the first one to take a three-word name, Pope John Paul.” James looks around, knowing that this is scant evidence to a group of road-hardened pilgrims and longtime locals. He readies his pencil for some of the requisite math.

  The formula works like this. Hidden in the pope’s Latin title are Roman numbers. He rewrites the title using only the numerical letters, so that it looks like this:

  V

  I

  D

  I

  L

  I

  C

  I

  I

  I

  V

  Which translate into Arabic numbers:

  5

  1

  500

  1

  50

  1

  100

  1

  1

  1

  5

  Add up the columns:

  112

  53

  501

  And then add up those three numbers:

  666

  He circles the digits many times in bold strokes of his pencil: “666.” Cocked eyebrows all around.

  I mention—sarcastically, I thought—that Ronald Wilson Reagan was the first president in American history to have three names of six letters each. James reaches out to shake my hand. I speak his language.

  When I spot Louis across the room, I drift away from James for a while.
I want to explain to the Frenchman the marvelous Templar theory I picked up in the bookstore. Everyone in town has one, and now I do too.

  Later I amble back to the mystic corner, and James is deep into Templar lore. He has his rap down beautifully and can segue effortlessly from secret numerical codes to eerie modern coincidences. He has an American dollar on the table and is pointing to some of the symbols. And there is a piece of German currency, along with some other documents. A bar napkin is now crowded with algebra. I regret missing the setup. James is explaining that there are modern Templar organizations such as the Freemasons that still transmit the secrets. And I am left to wonder if the mystery of the universe might not have been passed onto the Charleston, South Carolina, chapter of the Shriners. For all I know, those old men in fezzes who drove crazy-eights in go-carts during the local parades of my youth were trying to tell me something.

  What was the mystery of the Templars? James asks. Well, it’s not what people think it is. It’s not the Holy Grail, or the true cross, or the Ark of the Covenant. Oh, no, he says, the mystery is not an object. That is the diversion. The mystery dates way back. The gnostics knew it. The desert dwellers of the Holy Land knew it (they told the Templars, in fact). Christ knew it, but there were those before him who knew it. The mystery precedes the builders of the Pyramids of Egypt (how else could they have pulled off such an impossible feat of engineering?). Noah knew it, and so did others before him, because the mystery of the Templars is the knowledge that Adam learned when he bit into the apple.

  “Good and evil,” says a member of the little audience.

  “The Bible is full of clues,” James says, clearing another napkin.

  I have had enough beers to contemplate telling James that after well over a month on the road, I have my own theory about what Adam learned when he bit the apple. It was the most perverse revelation in history. He learned that the apple was just an apple. Adam wished he had learned some secret knowledge. What he learned was far more brutal—whatever he believed about the apple was his own making. According to Genesis, Adam’s first postbite revelation occurred when he “opened his eyes and saw that he was naked,” both literally and metaphorically. The apple was just an apple. And for learning this, he was punished, cursed to labor and to roam out of Paradise through the fields to re-create the original mystery of the apple. Adam was the first postmodern pilgrim.

  But I keep quiet. How could I possibly compete with James, whose patter barely pauses for air? He has the numbers, the specifics, the code. He turns to his napkin, scribbling madly at his figures. He is adding and subtracting, working out algorithms, performing translations; his audience is rapt with attention and appears comforted as he turns words into calculus and back into meaning.

  The morning out of Ponferrada begins with so many good omens; I should know by now that the road signals its pilgrims in perverse ways. I sleep late, so I am alone when I leave for this morning’s leg to Villafranca. As I walk, a synopsis of Spanish history unfolds before me. The pilgrim sets off from the me

  dieval center of town and winds through blocks of the Renaissance until the alleys widen into the Victorian er a. Now the balconies are elegant and suspended by wrought iron. These are the homes of characters from the naturalistic novels of Galdos—Spain’s Zola or Dreiser.

  At the edge of town, the postwar public works of Generalissimo Franco wrench Ponferrada into the twentieth century. Towers of colorless concrete with blocky balconies soar at the edges of four-lane frontage roads, the domain of trucks and buses. The yellow arrows are neat swatches of paint, tucked low to the ground in an unsuccessful attempt at being inconspicuous. From the inside of curbs, wrapped around the cylinder of a light post or coyly turning at the corner of a building, they scream out amid the simple fascist gray of this exurb.

  The arrows direct me into the rusting industry of the 1940s and 1950s. Moments later I slip into the commerce zones funded by the new money of King Juan Carlos I and his Common Market investors. The arrows thread among newer plants, windowless factories, toy makers, and furniture builders—neat, clean facilities. Eventually homes reappear, and soon enough the streets lose their names and the sidewalks disappear. Yards expand beyond fences into pastures. They are bounded by trees or ditches, holding not only clotheslines and scattered toys, but small apple groves or victory gardens. The paved road breaks up into rubble, then becomes a familiar path of hard-packed dirt and, finally, the comforting view of a pilgrim’s day—a ribbon of road traversing fields of peppers and miles of corn, patches of cabbage and melon, then stands of grapes, apricots, and figs, and orchards of cherries, oranges, apples, and pears.

  It is late in the afternoon when I enter the town of Cacabelos and I stop for lunch at Prada a Tope, a restaurant suggested by some farmers I passed this morning.

  I order a modest meal, yet inexplicably out comes heaped plates of vegetables, mashed green items, a casserolelike substance, and a salad. I start to protest, but the waiter shrugs. A few minutes later he returns with a cutting board piled high with meats—a plump turkey leg, joints of lamb, and thin slices of pork, veal, and a boned chicken breast.

  I eat, of course, because “no” is just not a word you want to introduce into a conversation with a Spaniard. After the waiter removes my plates, he replaces them with a bowl of quivering flan. No sooner do I push aside the half-eaten dessert than he appears again with a cigar the length of my forearm, flown in from the Canary Islands. He removes from his pocket a cigarette lighter, sets the dial to blow torch, and puts the flame before my face. I light up. Then a different man arrives with a decanter of twelve-year-old sherry and pours two glasses. He is the owner of the place, and he pulls up a chair. He proclaims his love of pilgrims and tells me my entire meal is on the house. He pours me another glass of thick sherry before sending me back to the scorching dust and the walk to Villafranca. Andrew Boorde, a British traveler who preceded me by four centuries, said of good Spanish sherry that it makes “the brain apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes.”

  At day’s end, when I catch up with the others, I will tell my story of lunch, probably topping it off with a joke about walking into the hot sun of León province with a mind sautéed in aged sherry. Every night at the shelter is story time for pilgrims. In these stories I am beginning to discern different pilgrim narratives. The first group is the smallest and the least significant. They adhere fiercely to the ancient vocabulary of pilgrims. These few would have no problem describing my free lunch as a miracle. They are an intense lot. One of them saw a statue move. They avoid the rest of us, as we do them.

  The most populous school of pilgrim thinking interprets the day’s actions through tradition. They insert themselves into the anecdotal customs of the road or make an effort to learn the history of each place. They measure their own actions by what others did and knit the past into their experience. For example, in the mountains between Rabanal and Ponferrada is a place called Foncebadón. Roman soldiers stationed in these parts knew it as the Mountain of Mercury. Pagan tradition encouraged wayfarers to pick up a rock in the valley, carry it to the peak, and toss it onto a pile. Today, a skinny shorn pole topped by an iron cross is embedded into this magnificent heap. Pilgrims adapted this tradition a thousand years ago and made it their own.

  For several days Foncebadón was the talk of the shelter. Did you throw your rock? Did you know it was a pagan custom? Did you know the mountain was once protected by the Roman god Mercury, a kind of pilgrim in his own right? How many rocks do you think are up there?

  Accounts of these activities fill the tables at supper and become the basis for the ongoing story of our pilgrimage. For the traditionalists, my serendipitous lunch happily confirms the great tradition of unimaginable charity on the road.

  Then there is the rest of us, a pilgrim miscellany. We constitute not a school of thought, but a condition. We’re anxious, mainly. We’re too cautious to discover a deliberate pattern in our luck. We’re hesitant abo
ut forcing our experiences into a coherent tale. So we end up telling jokes, or sitting quietly, or, like Claudy, drinking heavily throughout the day.

  I suspect that these varying approaches to pilgrimage have always existed on the road. I began my walk clinging desperately to history and tradition and never managed to get very comfortable with either of them. When it comes to matters of (pick any of the following) clothes, church architecture, miracles, attitude, mysticism, local customs, I’ve tried them all on. And I’ve been shucking tradition, in one form or another, since the Pyrenees. What I’m left with is a kind of pilgrim neurosis.

  While I become less and less confident about being here, the others grow increasingly assured of their enterprise. Arrival in any town means locating the rituals, the traditions, the history. This often means going to the church to see the pilgrim sculpture or painting. In another place it might mean finding some site of historical interest or looking at some town’s rendition of the ubiquitous statue of James himself. In and around each of these items one finds the stories and traditions, which then become the topics at dinner. So each day and each night provides the pilgrim with fresh but strangely familiar material, which he can comfortably work into the story of his modern pilgrimage.