by Hitt, Jack
I am thinking about the redemptive power of the hard work of the road and about how good it feels to be walking instead of arguing in a tent. My sublime reflection is interrupted when Bacchus gooses me with his staff.
“We are going to find the old Santiago road through the mountains,” says Claudy. “No interstate for you, eh? Twoo peel-grim.”
At a bar on the edge of town, we stop in for a final drink. Claudy and Rick order their brandies. Willie makes weird circumnavigations about the barstools. It is his way of condemning Rick’s decadence. Karl and I drink several cafés con leche. Jesús announces that there are only a few villages on the way. We all buy bottles of water and strap them to our packs.
On the outskirts of Villafranca just past the dilapidated electrical station, a white corrugated concrete road lurches straight up and disappears into distant mountain clouds like an infinite driveway.
“Ho,” says Rick.
“Brrrrrrr-eeeepppp,” cries Karl to the mule, and slaps the beast amicably on the rump. Karl worked with mules in Belgium and speaks their language. Jesús withdraws a huge long-necked bottle of mysterious liquid and pours a pint straight down his throat. He yodels the official local cry.
Nothing like an acute angle to quickly silence an enthusiastic crowd. Immediately we are forced to cut back and forth, like deer ascending a steep hill. Willie is dressed in his usual—pale blue, short-short jogging pants with built-in underwear. His crotch is a Euclidean tent of belongings. More disturbing, though, is that his wife has adopted this habit. They are both wearing the equivalent of bedroom slippers. Jesús, acting on Galician instinct, stays away from them.
Willie’s tiny daypack holds his videocamera. His plan today is to film the pilgrim’s reclamation of the medieval road to the top of the first mountain. Then he will descend and drive his mobile home to O Cebreiro to meet us in the evening.
From time to time Claudy fills me in on the continuing soap opera, which has always come across as opaque since it is performed in Flemish. A few days back, relations between Rick and Willie broke down. For the nonce, Willie speaks directly only to Karl. This makes our morning conversations simple but comically complex. Whatever Willie has to say must go through Karl, then to Claudy, who speaks English, then to me, because I speak Spanish, and at last to Jesús. This morning’s excursion is the pilgrimage in miniature.
The road is a garbage dump for Villafranca. To our left it shears precipitously into uninhabited scrub canyons streaked with landslides of burned stoves, open refrigerators, stripped cars, and burst bags of paper trash. An hour later the road assumes a cinematographically rustic look. Willie bolts up the hill, popping his slim hips like a speed walker, to film the same old shot of trudging pilgrims, now locally colorized by the mule and the leathery Jesús.
I ask Claudy to ask Karl to ask Willie what the story line of his narration will be. I am trying to be friendly, but I am also curious. Willie has nothing but miles of footage of the Flemish grunting and stumping. Word seeps back that Willie will not adulterate his film with narration. The images will speak for themselves. Claudy shrugs at me as he explains Willie’s answer. From time to time Claudy enjoys learning an Americanism. I teach him a new one: putz.
When the road levels out a bit, old farmers wielding scythes appear in the slanted fields. Babushkaed crones in black togs stuff grasses into outsize gunnysacks slung over their backs. Every view frames a Brueghel painting. Willie shoots some picturesque B-roll. A clutch of houses appears, called Dragonte.
Jesús ululates outside a gate, and a small gray man with a blank face appears at his door, an American gothic translated into Spanish. We are introduced to José. He has an odd smile, a feeble wrinkle that suggests he’s out of practice. His smile comes on like a switch—click—and then disappears. He invites us into his bodega, a half-underground hut poorly lit by a square dimming bulb. When José steps to the back, maybe twelve feet away, I can’t see him. The timber is black from age. The moist air is dank but feels cool and refreshing. Around me on the hard dirt floor are kegs of wine, cheese wheels, and mounds of potatoes. Many of the potatoes have sprouted long green fingers groping for the door, a desperate attempt at escape. José twists a small spigot on a red wine barrel and fills cups. Willie grabs the first one, downs it, and asks for more before everyone else is served.
“This is how a rich man eats cheese,” Jesús announces. He takes a wedge of José’s sheep cheese and carves out the soft creamy belly. He pops it in his mouth.
“This is how a poor man eats cheese.” He skins the rock-hard rind, throws it away, and bites off a piece of the toughened edge.
“And this is how a pilgrim eats cheese.” He slices off the stiff hide of the rind again, but this time he gnaws at it.
Willie missed this photo opportunity because he was engulfing José’s cheese (eating like a rich man). So he asks Jesús to repeat the story, which he does. But the lens cap was still on, so Jesús does it yet again—all the while it’s so dark that each of us is little more than a flash of cheek or Cheshire-cat grin. Willie films away.
José continues to refill our cups and carve us wedges of cheese until we are stuffed and drunk. When he passes a plate of cakes, Willie scarfs down the helpings before even his wife has a piece.
Claudy looks at me inquiringly.
“P-u-t-z,” I remind him.
The misty road out of Dragonte climbs up through tall scrub, drops down into a stream, and pitches up again past a field. The brush is high and wet, a temporary shield from the warming sun. At each possible intersection, Jesús halts and ties a yellow strip to a shrub. He drinks more from his bottle. Then he whacks the mule.
“Oooohhh-aaaauuuuu,” he howls.
“Brrrrrrr-eeeepppp,” adds Karl.
The mule lumbers into motion, and we proceed. About an hour later the path takes us around and up a bald hill covered only in flowering heather and broom, as if we have climbed out above the tree line. At the top, for the first time, a distant view of Galicia’s mountains rises before us. Willie gleefully makes a honking noise signifying pleasure and aims his lens at the pacific horizon. Three mountains over, each one higher than the last, is a communications tower. Jesús tells me that O Cebreiro is just beyond the tower.
“We will make it by sundown,” he says confidently.
Jesús unscrews a tin of fishlike substance and offers around bits of blackened scaly sea meat on a shard of bread. Everyone declines except, of course, Willie. After snacking, Willie sends word through the grapevine that he’s had enough and is turning back. Jesús tells me that in thirty minutes or so we will link up to the marked road. He intends to call his daughter and drive down the mountain. Jesús asks me to offer Willie and his wife a ride down with him.
I explain this to Claudy. Rick understands it, and the three of us entertain a foul plot. We won't tell Willie, thereby forcing him to endure several hours of thigh-trembling, knee-buckling descent.
Then Rick says that Santiago wouldn’t appreciate this unpilgrimlike attitude and that there’s no reason to punish the innocent wife. We all reluctantly agree and spill the news. Willie’s face brightens so much at the prospect of a ride in a car that we all immediately regret our virtue.
Jesús offers me a swig of his drink. I throw back a swallow. My nostrils flare. My eyes widen. I feel the tender flesh of my interior cheeks dissolving, but I swallow. Jesús is chugging colored grain alcohol. We’re all lit from José’s bodega, but for the first time I notice Jesús’s bloodshot eyes. His pupils are pinpoints, and his eyeballs no longer make contact with the soft skin of the socket. He is completely stinko.
Forty-five minutes later the road takes a deep, wet slide. The mule walks sideways and brays its contempt. As do we. A trickle of stream water dampens the road. Our boots are slathered with mud. Willie and his wife follow literally in our footprints, trying to keep their bedroom slippers dry. Toward the bottom of this gulch, the road levels out and the tight undergrowth disappears. We are in a forest of anc
ient chestnut trees. The canopy of cool shade makes the woods majestic and magical. Each tree is crouched at the trunk, massively thick, sprouting convoluted tumors of bark the size of basketballs. In the distance another house appears and then a small village, Moral de Valcarce. Willie is relieved since the town means that he is minutes away from a ride.
Then again, maybe not. The only accessible roads are ox paths, all paved in squishy sheets of bovine and ovine dung. The village smells of fresh shit, quite piquant in the late morning. Parked at the front door of each house is an ox, who welcomes us by evacuating his bowels in a small explosion. At the occasional post is a tethered cow who also seems genuinely excited by our arrival and speaks oxen. Scrawny dogs howl at our approach, scampering along and then slip-sliding in an impressive 180-degree halt. Chickens flit along the surface of the shit, screeching an unconvincing claim of ownership.
Let me say this about shit. I have spent months walking through all manner of it. To tell the truth, a pilgrim comes to like shit. I know this sounds like an acquired taste, possibly born of necessity. But shit, of the rural variety, can have an attractive odor. I am not including humans; don’t even want to talk about it. But ruminants, horses, rural dogs, and chickens produce tons of dung along the road. And I welcome it because the wafting perfume of manure is an olfactory signal of pending rest. It means animals, which mean people, which means shelter, which means coffee and water and food.
A pilgrim’s appreciation of shit, however, has not been achieved by Willie the Filmmaker or his wife. They tiptoe with the deliberation of soldiers in a minefield. The rest of us happily plow through. Sliding down one street, we pass an open barnlike area just below a house on stilts. Inside, a middle-aged housewife and her two sons, about ten years old each, are standing in a shed impressively full of shit. They appear to be raking it, possibly grooming the place for show.
The woman looks to be in her forties, although I suspect she is in her twenties. She stares at us in fear, which is actually shyness. She has on green slacks and a white tank-top T-shirt. Just beneath her armpits, one can see the supporting strap of her bra. All of her clothes, even her undergarments, are filthy with dirt. Yet I can see her beauty, ruined by labor but still visible in her bashful green eyes. Jesús says hello and explains that we are pilgrims.
“We haven’t had pilgrims in many years,” she says coyly.
“My friends and I are marking the old road so you will have more pilgrims in the future,” he says.
She is happy at this news. She brushes her hair out of her eyes and shuffles about, embarrassed in the presence of so many men. She wipes the shit off her sons’ faces. As if she had temporarily forgotten her manners, she lets out a yell and disappears. She returns with two bottles of wine and stacked glasses.
None of us has been sober this morning. Willie, naturally, is first to the bottle.
Suddenly the Flemish are in a rumpus, talking excitedly and pointing at the woman because the slogan on her T-shirt is in their language. It also happens to be in English. There is a picture of a car and beneath it a meaningless Madison Avenue oxymoron: “The only unoriginal.” Willie is overcome by the coincidence, and somehow this sets off many ideas for him. He draws his camera from his tiny daypack like a sword and starts filming. Our presence is hard enough on this painfully shy woman. Willie closes in with the camera, working his way around for an artistic arc shot, and swoops in close to her shirt.
It is bunched up just at the Flemish words. Without so much as a howdy-do, Willie yanks out her shirttail and begins pulling it down over her pants. He tugs at her shirt around her crotch and then smooths the fabric flat up to her neck. He touches her breasts. The woman stands at extreme attention, like a patient enduring some unspeakable medical exam. She turns her head sharply to one side, in the direction of Jesús. It looks like a cry for help.
Jesús speaks rapidly at me. I don’t understand his words, but I do understand his meaning. I turn to Claudy, who understands, and he wails at Karl in Flemish. But our chain-letter translation takes too long. Willie is turning off his camera now, absolutely oblivious of our anxiety. The young woman stands frozen. We are speechless, and the thick fog of our languages has made us incapable of saying a word. We stand as stiffly as she, resorting to the crinkled smile of José. It’s the best we can do to say we are sorry.
In these mountains the business is cows and oxen and sheep, so naturally the road out of Moral and deep into the woods is nothing but an endless trench of manure, freshly dampened by morning dew, then thinned by a trickle of stream water and the natural humidity of this forest. The banks are crumbly and wet and laced with aggressive brambles. The only painless route is straight through the trough.
Jesús has graciously allowed Willie the Filmmaker’s wife to ride on the mule. This is a dubious luxury, sitting upon an A-frame of plywood and two-by-fours. On an incline, the mule stumbles and takes the age-old precaution. It pitches its burden to the ground. Willie’s wife flies off the mule, but not before her gym shorts catch a nail in Jesús’s homemade saddle. The entire backside of her shorts is ripped out. The valuables in her crotch spill into the muck. We are embarrassed but stare. One of them is a spoon.
Willie is angry because after two hours of treacherous walking the village with the phone and the car ride has not appeared. Jesús mumbles that it will be soon. We help Willie’s wife, who has a few bruises and below the waist now wears nothing but a blue polyester loin flap.
In another chestnut forest — it’s probably around one p.m. — we stop for a rest in the shade. No one has food, and we’re all a little weak. Rick produces a candy bar and breaks off a piece for everyone. Jesús turns the key on another can of sardine parts. I look through my pack for a plum or pear and discover my breakfast cache from the parador.
Genuine jubilation breaks out as I unfurl a cornucopia of fruit and sausage, bread and cheese. Willie pops over and sits beside me. When I pass a portion of food for his wife, he takes a bite before handing it on. I hope Saint James won’t think poorly of me when I am driven to beat his brains in with a rock.
Not far up the road, the chestnuts reveal an unnatural geometry, a rooftop, and soon another remote village. Villar is nothing more than six houses on the path, all red roofs with white walls listing with age. A pink man and his pink wife open a door and greet us. His face is a perfect circle, completely bald, topped by a beret that shuffles from side to side but never falls. Willie lets it be known that he wants me to ask the man if there is a telephone.
“Of course,” says the man, almost offended. “The last house on the street has one, but it hasn’t worked for several months.”
Claudy reminds me that we almost sent Willie back down the mountain with a lie; instead look what splendid horrors virtue produced.
“Saint James,” says Rick.
Jesús and the pink man are talking animatedly around the mule. Their Spanish is fast and colloquial, but enough words finally come through. Jesús is trying to sell the mule for the equivalent of $400. The pink man will offer nothing more than $150. He pries back the mule’s baggy lips, points at her receding gums, and scoffs at Jesús’s claim that the animal is young. He walks around the animal’s backside and sizes up her hips. Too narrow, he says, not a good worker. They both argue until the pink man starts swearing and curses Jesús as a typical gitano. It means “gypsy.” I realize that we are not marking the old road, but accompanying Jesús on a business trip.
Meanwhile Willie has climbed a cherry tree and snapped off an entire branch. The pink man cries out that he sells cherries for a living and calls Willie many bad words. Willie ignores him while he plucks, eats, and spits.
I offer to buy some in order to keep the peace (such an American). I don’t know the going price of cherries in these parts, so I give him about five dollars in pesetas for a small bag. We are instantly restored to his graces, and soon his wife emerges with a tray of exquisite coffees. We drink three pots. The coffee is so tasty, I am again thinking Amer
ican. These beans will make me a fortune back home. When I ask her where she gets her beans, she returns with a regular coffee can. The trick is her secret ingredient, and she holds up a bottle of lethally potent guapa. So we get tanked yet again.
The road out of Villar pulls a sharp U-turn and then twists back again to a major intersection of dirt roads. The three mountains and the communications tower are as far away as when we began. Jesús hunkers down beside a rock, taking his compass reading in private, as he prefers. He points to the rightward path.
This doesn’t make sense because it’s due north. The road always moves west—the path of the setting sun—and its arc is unmistakable. Due west is down an old road to the left. Besides, the path on the right appears freshly cut. But Jesús invokes the privileges of local color, chugs some more from his long-necked bottle, and insists we follow him. The sun doesn’t always set in the west, I console myself; it’s a deceptive guidepost. The road descends sharply for an hour and then halts in a massive quarry shimmering with quartz.
We reclimb the entire road to the top, and Jesús takes another private compass reading. He points to a curving narrow swath. This looks to me like a cow path that rambles among the contours of least resistance. Man cuts wide roads that tend to go straight. But I am overruled.
After a half hour of downhill twisting among sharp stiff shrubs, the path dissolves into a meadow flung like a spread over the mountainside, a beautiful place for a cow.
I sense a mutinous mood among my compadres. Jesús crouches to take another compass reading. I tiptoe closer and peer over his shoulder. Jesús is mumbling strange words while dangling a string from his forehead. Attached at the end is a pink stone set in gold. The stone circles around until it settles into a back-and-forth pendulum motion. Jesús rises (a bit startled by my presence) and points away from the sun and declares it to be west.
