Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  But there is one aspect of the past that doesn’t make it into anyone’s conversation: relics. By relics, I mean the bones and objects associated with saints and regarded as sources of divine magic. In the Cliffs Notes version of the Middle Ages, relics have come down to us as one of the great carnival schemes of organized religion. The story of relics is now seen as little more than a centuries-long infomercial in which huckster clergy ripped off a continent of frightened serfs.

  I have been avoiding relics the entire trip, as has everyone else. They are, let’s face it, embarrassing for any contemporary pilgrim. It’s easy to fit much of the ancient pilgrimage into a modern story, but Saint Theresa’s index finger—well, gross.

  Relics constitute part of that old vocabulary of pilgrimage that is out-of-date. But somewhere back there—possibly around the time I became aware of the other pilgrims’ certainty with their traditions—I became hooked. What interests me now is that relics have become relics of themselves. Instead of being transistors of divine power and wisdom, they are proof of man’s foolishness and impotence. Even the clergy is embarrassed today, and they only keep the relics out on display for uneducated peasants and those ubiquitous widows.

  During my walk, I have seen, without much effort, the ulnas and radii, the tibias and femurs, and the metacarpals and metatarsals of probably every well-known saint, and I’ve examined flecks or dust from hundreds of others less acquainted with fame. Historically, it would make sense that relics would flourish on the road; it was an avenue of trade. But relics were also the most concrete manifestation of the need to discover. A pilgrim set out to find something on the road, and it’s no coincidence that many of the most fantastical relics of the Middle Ages were found on or near the road to Santiago. When I left America, the perennial question was, “What do you expect to find?”

  The story of relics is a cautionary tale about the ideology of discovery, something that’s on my sherry-soaked mind as I lumber toward Villafranca. Search hard enough for what you are certain is there, and you will find it.

  Originally, relics were not body parts, but items, such as the filings of the shackles that once bound a martyr’s legs or, say, his handkerchief. Early relics were talismans, called brandea, no different in their mass appeal from the bedsheets of the Beatles or the coat of Elvis today. They were items that conjured up the memory and the power of a great person, an impulse still with us, even among the educated classes. Not long before I left America, Sotheby’s auctioned off the ashtrays and piggy banks and Tupperware of Andy Warhol for millions of dollars.

  The brandea were souvenirs of sorts; the shell of Santiago was one. Visitors to Mont St. Michel still leave with a pebble from the base of the island. In the days of martyrs, tombs had hatches so that the faithful could insert their heads to breathe the rarefied dust of a saint’s remains.

  At first the authorities tried to deter people from infatuation with dead bodies, but this served only to acknowledge the corpses’ power, undermining any effort at restraint and investing them with great value. In 1047 Fernando, the count of Carrion, informed his debtor, the emir of Córdoba, not to send him precious metals: “Of gold and silver I have enough already; give me the body of St. Zoyl.” Most relics were the entire body of a saint, usually with accompanying documentation.

  Nobles began collecting relics, according to historian Patrick Geary, the way the rich today collect art. It was a way to distill wealth into a single physical and portable item. Complete bodily relics were often little more than a few bones and some dust in a sack. But to describe relics so is like saying van Gogh’s Starry Night is a sheet of linen with smears of oil. The bones were direct physical contact points between the wretched and the divine. Relics translated the confounding abstractions of Christianity into something penitents could hold in their hand. Over time relics became a kind of currency, a substantial part of the economy, a hot commodity.

  In 1204 there was a major shift in the commerce of relics when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople. In Eastern Christendom, the collectors were not so picky about a relic being a whole body. They dealt openly in body parts. When the crusaders overwhelmed the town, these parts coursed through Europe, flooding the market. The sudden surge of supply forced up demand in the short run and then created all the problems common to inflation.

  As long as relics had meant entire bodies, value and supply could be somewhat regulated. Now the possibilities for fraud and forgery were out of control. Relicmongers didn’t need to bother themselves with a bag of bones and dust and the semblance of documentation. A simple knuckle would do.

  The market boomed since nothing could stanch the growth, not even common sense. When confronted by reports of two monasteries claiming to have the head of John the Baptist, the master logicians of the day concluded that one was his head as a youth and the other his head as a mature adult.

  St. Hugh of Lincoln was a zealous relics collector. He wore a finger ring set with St. Benedict’s tooth. When St. Hugh was visiting the Abbey of Fécamp, he asked to see the arm of Mary Magdalene. The abbey monks were horrified when St. Hugh ripped into the cloth wrapping with a knife and struggled to snap off one of the lady’s fingers. After that failed, St. Hugh sucked one of her fingers into his mouth and chewed vigorously, “first with his incisors and finally with his molars.” When asked to explain his behavior, St. Hugh responded logically. Hadn’t he just eaten the body and blood of Christ during mass? “Why should I not treat the bones of the saint in the same way,” he said, “and without profanity acquire them whenever I can?”

  In Jerusalem, the true cross was protected around the clock by a battalion of 385 deacons to prevent pilgrims from diving at the cross to bite off a few splinters.

  Relics were valuable for many reasons. They attracted throngs of worshipers. They raised funds. They created prestige and celebrity. They caused miracles. The demand for them grew so intense that monks took to carrying out raids on each other’s reliquaries. Some of these operations were as elaborate as anything an author of a cold war thriller could imagine. The robbery of the body of St. Foy in Agen by the monks of Conques involved a monk-spy named Arinisdus who spent ten years infiltrating the monastery before he pulled off the job. The thrilling stories of the swashbuckling monks on assignment became a literary genre called furta sacra, “holy robbery.”

  In the race to outdo one another in relics, the victor’s laurel probably should go to a cathedral just off the road to Santiago in the town of Oviedo. The clergy there were long said to possess an indestructible wooden ark handcrafted by the apostles themselves. It was built in the Holy Land and smuggled into Africa, then Carthage, then Sevilla, then Toledo, and in the eighth century it was moved to Oviedo for protection from the Moors. It was said that an early bishop named Ponce had opened the trunk but couldn’t see its contents because of shafts of celestial light emanating from within. By 1075 it was decided the time was right for an inventory, and a host of prominent men were assembled. King Alfonso VI was there, as was Spain’s real-life knight, Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, otherwise known as el Cid. The surviving diploma recording the opening bears the epic hero’s actual signature.

  The need to discover achieved its high-water mark in Oviedo. Almost no physical item mentioned or imagined in the Bible is missing from the ark of Oviedo. A partial inventory includes

  ■ bits of the true cross

  ■ a vial of milk from the Virgin Mary’s breast

  ■ part of the handkerchief laid on Christ’s face after death

  ■ eight spines of the crown of thorns

  ■ several pieces of manna rained down on the Israelites

  ■ a large sheet of skin flayed from St. Bartholomew

  ■ locks of the Virgin Mary’s hair

  ■ one of the coins, a denarius, given to Judas in exchange for betraying Christ

  ■ several locks of Mary Magdalene’s tresses, used to dry Christ’s feet

  ■ a portion of the rod Moses used to part the Red Sea
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br />   ■ a piece of the grilled fish and a chunk of the honeycomb that Christ ate after his resurrection and during his appearance before his apostles

  ■ one of St. Peter’s sandals

  ■ one of the jugs from the marriage of Cana, in which Christ miraculously changed the water to wine

  ■ bones of St. John the Baptist

  ■ parts of several of Christ’s apostles

  ■ bones of St. Stephen, the first martyr

  ■ chunks of bread left over from the Last Supper

  As I enter Villafranca, an old stooped man appears from the bushes. He pulls a live brown snake from a filthy sack. He has the snake gripped just below its head so that its open, terrified mouth looks like a satanic nosegay sprouting from his fist. The tail wiggles cantankerously below his outstretched arm.

  “Would you like to touch it?” he asks.

  I decline and change the subject to shelter, and he suggests that I stay at the parador, one of the special hotels found occasionally throughout Spain. Sometime during the Franco regime, the generalissimo thought to attract tourists by rehabilitating old castles, châteaux, or any glorious Spanish edifice of tenuous historical interest. Paradors are famous for classy pretensions and high prices. Somerset Maugham is always quoted on the promotional brochures, saying (dubiously), “If you’re going to stay anywhere in Spain, it should be a parador!”

  When I come upon Villafranca’s parador, I can’t figure out what was preserved unless it was the first Howard Johnson’s in the country. There is a massive parking lot, American in scope, and a flat, nondescript, utilitarian building. It doesn’t seem any better than some of the pilgrims’ inns, and the prices are quite low. So I engage some cheap quarters.

  My room has a comforting familiarity to it. There are two double beds with linens tucked to military specs. A quarter would bounce off the spread. A gleaming gold lamp is permanently fixed on the bedside table. Wickedly, I rev up the air-conditioning. The television set is mounted on a stand jutting out from the wall. I tune in a bullfight. A lengthy bathtub dominates a mirror and tile room charged with the aromas of Crabtree & Evelyn. I fill up the tub, grab the complimentary hotel magazine, and feed myself slowly into a bubble bath of soothingly frigid water. I glance around the room and out the door to my bedroom. I could be in the Kansas City Ramada Inn, but for the enamel abbreviations C and F for hot and cold on the tub’s spigots. And the shrieks of death blasting from my television.

  Later that afternoon while scouring the main plaza to find a restaurant, I spot three bicyclists wearing shells. They are standing around a phone booth. One boy is slamming the receiver into the phone box while another boy and a girl curse in Spanish. This is a relief to see because I thought only spoiled Americans raged at Telefónica, the country’s communications monopoly. But the boy in the booth, named Miguel, tells me that the Spaniards call Telefónica by another name: Franco’s revenge.

  Bike pilgrims and foot pilgrims don’t often have a lot to say to one another. Chances are good we will never see each other again. But these kids are cheerful enough.

  “Have you not been to the tent of Jesus?” asks Miguel.

  “The tent of Jesus?”

  “All the pilgrims are there,” the girl says. “He has water and showers, beds and meals.”

  “Jesus does?”

  “You can’t leave Villafranca without meeting Jesus.”

  Certainly not, so I get directions and walk off.

  I am not sure how I missed the tent of Jesus since it is just off the path I took into town earlier this afternoon. The place is bustling with the frontier chaos that I have come to enjoy. Everyone is here—the cast of the Flemish film, the Welsh Family with the Mule, Javier the Spanish Banker, Willem the Dutch Air Force Officer, the Italian Man, the Old Dutch Couple, the German Man, Louis the Frenchman Who’s Walked the Road Eleven Times, and Paolo the Young Man with Louis. And there are at least twenty or thirty other pilgrims milling about whom I have yet to meet.

  A beaming Claudy calls out from the bar. He is swinging a snifter of brandy and orders me a beer before I can decline.

  “This is the place,” he says, beaming, and sweeps me off for a tour. The tent is a two-room Hooverville hotel built entirely of plastic sheets, used lumber, and bent nails. On one side are pallets and floorboards with enough double bunks or plain mattresses on the ground to sleep a hundred people. The other half is a restaurant and bar. At the juncture of the two main rooms are bathrooms.

  Above the slightly raked incline of plastic canopies are an array of lawn sprinklers—precisely the suburban models that slowly spray fans of water back and forth. Japanese pilgrims from last year had something to do with this advance. The continuous flow of water from above keeps the tent cavernously cool when one of Spain’s dry winds blows in. The off flow of warmed water collects into side tanks, which is heated by solar panels and is used in the showers.

  Jesus is Jesús Jato, a farmer who has adopted all the pilgrims who come through Villafranca. He is a tall dark sinewy fellow, with huge fists and fingers liked knotted rope. From his shorts extend bony, misshapened legs with a baseball of muscle at each calf. The phone at his chaotic desk in the tent rings, and Jesús negotiates the rental price of a piece of farm equipment. Afterward he reminds me that he runs the tent off donations and then stamps and writes in my passport: “May the stars light your way and may you find the interior road. Forward!”

  “My wife will cook you dinner,” he then says. “Tonight is lamb chops. Fifteen hundred pesetas. Take any mattress you find. I will be back in an hour. Drinks are extra.”

  Jesús jumps into the cab of an old, beat-up truck, turns the key with an explosion, and disappears in a cloud of white dust to negotiate another deal.

  The tent exudes a cool breeze and even a slight perfume of shampoos and soaps as miraculous as Ramon’s foyer. The rugged plainness is inviting—the solar showers, the makeshift bar, the worn unpainted lumber assembled into long row tables. No two chairs match. All of them rock gently on three legs. The atmosphere is confusing but as warm as a big family. The intersecting fans of water on the plastic roof and the sheets flapping in the dry wind are as soothing as a summer squall. Though it looks haphazard, there is a stately rustic utilitarianism here, as efficient and clipped as the double iambs of the name Jesús Jato.

  The layout of the tent’s dinner tables and benches form an L at the far end from the door. Two long tables extend down the length of the tent, and another turns the corner. Benches run along the plastic walls. Scattered chairs and stools fill in the gaps, creating a stage for the irrepressible Claudy. He is well advanced into a brandy-inspired nirvana. He dips in and out of private conversations at the tables with the demeanor of a polyglot host.

  Now he is Spanish, prancing before an audience of bicyclists, trying his hand at sexual innuendo (a difficult genre for the unnuanced flamenco). Now he is Flemish for Rick and Karl, rolling his eyes and clutching his heart melodramatically at the appearance of Willie the Filmmaker. Now he is Esperanto, taunting the oblivious Italian Man with an imitation of the poor man’s syntax. Now he is British, entertaining the two Welsh boys, as he often does, with a fresh riddle.

  “Three missionaries are returning from a journey with three cannibals,” he says. “They come to a river but have only one canoe. The problem is, if the cannibals ever outnumber the other men on either bank, they will eat them. Flow do the missionaries get the team across?” Claudy places six coins, three large ones representing the cannibals and three small ones representing the three missionaries, on either side of a crack—the river. The boys fall into argument, pushing the coins backward and forward. Claudy breaks into a Randy Newman number about America dropping nuclear bombs on every other country in the world.

  As the food arrives, the pilgrims set to their plates. Hot lamb chops, bowls of caldo gallego (the regional soup), platters of steaming vegetables. Unlabeled bottles of blood-red wine empty quickly and just as swiftly are refilled. Claudy is losing
his audience as smears of oil grow about the lips of the diners.

  “Don’t you look clean?” Claudy says to me, by way of segueing from his song and dance.

  “I took a bath.”

  “A bath? Are you not staying here in the tent?”

  Uh-oh.

  “Well, actually, I took a room at the parador.”

  “The parador!” Claudy crows in case anyone had missed my answer. Suddenly I have taken over center stage, cruising a field of upturned faces. “Parador” is not a word that needs translation into Flemish, French, English, Italian, or German. The word is part of a pilgrim’s lingua franca. In Spanish it literally means nothing more than “inn” or “lodge.” But it is a word that comes fully dressed in connotation: luxury, indolence, comfort, baths.

  “Yoo air noot uh twoo peal-gwum,” he pronounces in pseudo-Flemish-accented sarcasm. The bicyclists laugh at my plight. They understand this taunt even in English.

  “The parador pilgrim,” says Wyn, the Welsh veterinarian, tossing out a phrase that will chase me the rest of the night. He means it in a playful spirit, like Claudy, but its brevity and aptness give it a demeaning force.

  One of the boys declares that there is only one way to solve the riddle. “The missionaries must be eaten,” he says.

  Javier is disturbed. He and I had a rapprochement after Estella and have had an occasional discussion on the road since then. He looks at me with a countenance of true pain, even betrayal. “How could you stay in a parador?” he asks me, cutting through the ridicule with a straight question.

  “Javier, it’s just a hotel. Not even that good a hotel, to be honest.”

  “But why are you in a parador?”

  “We’ve all stayed in finer pilgrim hostels than this place, I can assure you.” This is not exactly true and not a particularly convincing tack.

  The road, Javier once said to me, was nothing more than a dirt path on which we walked. Over time, the road takes up residence within us and becomes a way to something else. Javier, more than any of the other pilgrims I have spoken to, has troubled himself mightily about the literal and metaphorical road.