by Hitt, Jack
Gitano, I think, means gypsy.
I point in the direction of the setting sun. Jesús consults his stone again, this time publicly. He points into the setting sun and sheepishly confirms, “West.” Now that that is settled, we climb back up the mountain to the intersection where three hours ago I had first suggested we turn left. I have had my fill of local color for the day and am not alone. I could teach Jesús a new word now. A French word. Coup d’état.
Finally and inevitably, a fresh breeze full of omens—manure, mainly—shuffles through the trees. The road widens into a well-walked path, and soon we are threading our way through the seven o’clock rush-hour traffic of Sanfiz de Seo—oxen carts, skittish sheep, ambling herds. The road on the back stretch was as brutal as any I’ve been on. Willie and his wife are smeared with crap and mud. They are scratched and bleeding wherever flesh is visible. Willie’s clothes are shredded as well, so both of them are practically naked. Willie hasn’t said a word or shot a frame since lunchtime. Perhaps he has learned something about pilgrimage. But probably not.
Jesús has been guzzling from his bottle all afternoon, having lost his leadership role to an ugly American. He’s been singing slurred lyrics in a subdialect of Gallego. Without our usual siesta and nap, we pilgrims are exhausted. Our gait is a stumble. We rhythmically shift our packs to find one unused muscle, but there is no comfort.
At a bar, we lumber to a table beneath a curling Bruce Springsteen poster, next to... the telephone. Jesús has no trouble working Telefónica, which confirms all my suspicions about him, the telephone company, Spain, and the ongoing conspiracy of the universe. Over a round of lukewarm Cokes, we sit in catatonic bliss, waving away hundreds of flies with our bandannas. The mule pokes its head through the open door and swishes its tail in empathy.
When Jesús’s friend arrives in a huge American-built Wagoneer, Willie races out to get the best seat. Rick, Claudy, and I are crammed in the rear well with our knees in our faces and our gear on our laps. Claudy translates a message from me to Willie: Remember, Willie, Americans only really do one thing really really well. Kill people.
We agree to return to the tent, and tomorrow Jesús will drive us here to resume our transmontane quest. At the tent I have a glass of wine, which transforms me into a moron. I drift out back among the mattresses, collapse somewhere, and suffer turbulent nightmares until I awake late in the morning, to a real one.
Claudy bought the mule for $150. By the time I intervene, it is too late. Jesús has filled out a sheaf of papers that purport to comply with the fantastically complex Spanish law regarding the movement of pack animals. Spain’s equine stock is infested with something called peste del equino, “horse plague.” By law, movement of such animals into the rest of Europe is forbidden, but even in Spain there are restrictions from region to region.
“Claudy,” I plead, “this mule cannot even carry our packs. What is the point?”
“What do you know, American?” inquires my Dionysian friend.
Meanwhile Rick has stumbled onto some nuns somewhere who have sold him an ancient cape and floppy hat and dozens of shells. With his long gray beard and skinny frame, he now looks like a textbook medieval pilgrim. Despite my best efforts, we retreat into cliché.
At Sanfiz de Seo, we untether our mule, who spent the night there. The morning walk is tedious and slow. Claudy has named the mule Ultreya, an ancient pilgrim cry that means “Go West,” or “Westward-ho.” And that’s the last attention Ultreya gets from its new owner, who gambols ahead, singing “Love Is in the Air.” The noble Karl takes the reins since he speaks mule.
In Greek mythology, all the stories of Dionysus take place at night, where the riotous drinking hellacious fun-loving deity parties with his frenzied maenads and rutting satyrs. Curiously, there is no body of lore concerning Dionysus during normal working hours. I know why. By day Dionysus is a pain in the neck.
In early afternoon, about an hour past the last village, Villasinde, the arrows and markers die out just under the communications tower. O Cebreiro is still a valley and a mountain away. But there is no road. Claudy and I set off on a reconnaissance. The bald mountain’s slope is deceptive. Claudy can walk twenty feet ahead and disappear from view and out of shouting range. I look back and cannot see Rick or Karl. When I try to approach the tower, it gets farther away. Voices float in the breeze. We are lost on a bare hilltop.
When at last I find Rick and Karl, we triangulate our location using the tower, the interstate far below, and the distant peak of O Cebreiro. According to my calculations, if we just keep descending this magical hill toward the northwest, we will come to the town of Herrerías, which will put us back on a marked route to O Cebreiro. Claudy materializes among some shrubs. He has a complicated plan but is voted down.
The knee-high shrubs scrape at our legs. The bristles are tough and vicious. Soon the shrubs rise to chest level, and we raise our arms in the air to accommodate locomotion. The hill pitches down, down, sharply. Rick has lit out ahead, blasting through the brush and crying out in anguish. Somehow I have Ultreya’s tether. The shrubs give way to some bamboolike plant, lined with spikes and monstrous puff balls. Every step blows open a suffocating cloud of green dust. I open my knife and hack my way forward.
We also have to contend with big condo-size anthills. Since none of us can see through the thicket and spore clouds, one step sends ants into pandemonium. They crawl up my legs and feed at the thread lines of blood coursing down into my socks. But I can’t care. I am trying desperately to stay with the others. Five feet in this stuff and visibility ends. I hear Claudy scampering by and yell at him to help me with the mule.
“You fucking brought us this way,” he explains.
Tempers are short.
A sheer four-foot drop-off sends me collapsing into more thicket, twisting and falling until my pack hits the ground. I am turtled, unable to maneuver my carapace.
“Claudy, you motherfucker, come back here and help me.”
“You’re the fucker.”
Rick calls out, “Fuck you both, eh?”
That hurts. Et tu, Rick.
Ultreya is stuck. As I lie on my back, the mule stares down at me from the ledge. Its dull, weary eyes and baggy lips compose themselves into an expression of idiotic superiority.
Karl, then Rick, appears to help me. The mule, in keeping with its internationally notorious reputation, will not budge down the four-foot steep. I cut some sticks, squash some brush by sitting on it, and fashion a makeshift plankway. The mule is not impressed by my ingenuity. So we are reduced to cartoon tactics. Karl and I pull the rope, while Rick pushes the hindquarters.
“Brrrrrrr-eeeepppp,” says Karl. I, on the other hand, speak to the mule in Anglo-Saxon. Ultreya brays fiercely, which I understand as a translation of my own words. At last the mule stumbles forward, hee-hawing menacingly. The beast falls and then scrambles to stand. Karl trills sweet intimacies.
Claudy has worked his way back, offering his late hand. The four of us chop and hack for twenty more minutes. There are curses, and Rick suffers another attack of claustrophobia and dashes off yelling. Claudy shouts curses at him and damns me for this route. When a chestnut tree appears, the area beneath is clear and open. As I walk in, Claudy calls me a son of a bitch. He says we’ll never find Herrerías, and he shoves me in the chest. I stumble back in an explosion of curses. He rushes me, his invective reduced to pure syntax—“Fuck ya fucker, ya fucking fucked up.” We shove and shout, never exchanging true blows. Rick steps over and Claudy pushes him. The bearish Karl intervenes. I swing at him in rage, inexplicably, since Karl could put his thumb on my head and handily force me to take a seat.
After Karl has restored the peace, Claudy collapses to the ground and plunges both his hands onto piles of unshelled chestnuts, which resemble spiked golfballs. Claudy bolts up, bleeding and crying, flashing his stigmata at me since obviously I am to blame. Rick laughs, but it’s a bit premature. This sets Claudy off on a new round of colorful Flem
ish curses.
When Karl finds a small path leading away from the tree, we set off in a sullen silence. A half hour later we walk straight into the backyard of a house. Uneasily we slip around the side, click open the front-yard gate, and step into the street. A car zooms up and screeches to a halt. A man stops and says in Spanish, “Are you pilgrims?”
“Yes.”
“Welcome to Herrerías.” And he drives off.
According to the maps, O Cebreiro is a three-hour climb from Herrerías, straight up. But it seems like nothing. The road is wide and treeless, filled with big stones mortared with the morning’s manure, dried by the afternoon sun and good for uphill traction.
As the road ascends, the temperature drops, and soon it’s almost freezing. The church of O Cebreiro is Roman and dates from the 900s. The local architecture still favors the Celtic stone quarters that predate the Romans. Here, centuries ago, a fallen priest celebrated mass and watched the bread turn to quivering, bleeding flesh and saw the wine thicken into hot blood. The chalice and paten of this miracle are enshrined in a high-tech bulletproof glass vault outfitted with special gas sprays and monitors to track the silver’s fragility. Apparently the miracle is decaying.
After dinner the priest invites us to sleep in one of the authentic Celtic pallozas. They are perfectly circular stone buildings roofed by a cone of straw woven tight enough to keep out the rain, which falls night and day this high up. Our palloza, home to barnyard animals when pilgrims aren’t around, has no fire or heat.
“O Cebreiro is where the Holy Grail is buried,” says the priest, trying to engage us with some local color and another anecdote from the annals of pilgrim tradition. “O Cebreiro was the origin of the Parzival story. Many pilgrims come here to look for the Holy Grail.”
“You’ll have to find someone else to do the work for you,” says Rick in an unusual burst of sacrilege. “We’re too tired to go looking now.” As we all laugh, the priest leaves in a scowling funk. We each immediately stake out a bit of stone arc and scramble into our sleeping bags on the straw floor. I smell shit nearby, extremely nearby. It’s old shit, that’s certain. And if my new powers of discernment are not mistaken (and I would bet money on them now), it is pig shit and of pretty good quality.
“A hard day,” Rick says into the inky darkness.
“Yes,” says Karl, surprisingly.
“I am glad you are here,” Rick says to no one in particular.
“We have a long way to go still,” someone says. The silence is filled with unspoken thoughts—a moment quiet as prayer— and then broken by sighs, grunts, and snores.
The following morning, the path down from O Cebreiro warms with each kilometer, and that’s about all that can be said for it. The landscape is tedious. The Flemish and I climb quietly up rounded hills amid rocky soil covered in a morning mist, unchanged since creation. The towns here are as useless as they were when eighth-century Moors took one look and turned back. In the t
welfth century, the powerful archbishop of Santiago Diego Gelmirez bestowed a few benefits on the valley west of O Cebreiro because of its location on the final leg of the journey. That was the last time the distant power brokers of Spain paid attention to these parts.
By midday the tiny villages of Alto de San Roque, Hospital de Condesa, and Padornelo slip by as quickly as they might in a car. Old men guide their ox-powered carts down the street to the fields. No EEC tractors here. All the young people have moved out. The buildings are wired for electricity. But the presence of technology is mockery. Except for lighting, no one can afford appliances. These little towns are dying, but they’ve been fading for so long that they no longer notice the passing centuries. As they did in the Middle Ages, the old women gather at the town fountain to wash clothes in the early warmth of the sun.
Alto del Poio can only boast of a ruined pilgrim establishment. Otherwise, the guidebook says, “Hoy existen cuatro casas, modernas” (“Today there are four houses, modern ones”).
Fonfría del Camino still can claim the attraction found in its name—a cold-water fountain. The literature speaks of a time when the Hospital de Santa Catalina here greeted every pilgrim with “fire, salt, and water.” The days of such largesse are gone, as is every stone of the hospital, carried off a few centuries ago to make sheep pens.
The open-ended plot line of the soap opera of Willie the Filmmaker takes a worthy twist this afternoon. We climb a steep short hill, and the ridge above is crowded with activity. Tripods are set. People are milling about, careful at the crumbling edge to catch a peek. Cameras roll as we labor up the twisting path. At the top we discover that Willie the Filmmaker has been joined by another Flemish man, obese, jolly, and rich. He drives an enormous mobile home with sitting room, bedroom, and kitchen. It is far superior to Willie’s. And he has come with very sophisticated video equipment. So a dash of free-market competition has been introduced into the play for our pilgrim affections. The result is satisfying. The Fat Man has a grill fired up and is roasting sausages. Cold drinks are packed in ice. Lawn chairs are set around the smorgasbord for our comfort.
Claudy giddily tells me that Willie is in a state of panic. He is broke (and miserly anyway). He has already had a fight with the Fat Man and is now fretting that this guy is stealing his idea. This fresh intelligence restoreth our pilgrim souls.
A nearby bar, named Refuge of the Pilgrim, is just across the field. In fact, we are picnicking in its parking lot. I retreat for a coffee. Inside are dozens of motley pilgrims, all awkwardly dressed, shells at the neck, yet small identical packs strapped to their backs. Obviously, all are worn out from the day’s walk. On half of them baggy lips dangle; their faces are blank with fatigue. A dozen weird stares follow me to the bar.
Pilgrims are a breed of loners, afflicted by a set of problems unknown to outsiders. Like southpaws or fly fishermen or Roosevelt Democrats, pilgrims feel an uncommon glee at a chance encounter with others of their oppressed group—people who can empathize with the difficulty of membership.
I nod and grin as I move among them, touching my shell as if I were communicating the special code, our secret handshake. I say hello to a young man, but he makes a strange face. A grin broadens unnaturally wide, and his eyes well up with tears. When I step up to the bar, another young fellow extends his head like a turtle and makes a gawking expression. He withdraws suddenly, and several others shuffle away with him.
Pilgrim fatigue, I know, can lead to truly strange behavior—a half hour of catatonic abstraction, sleeping standing up at a bar, weeping after a single beer. I forgive them their peculiarities. Some days the secret code just doesn’t work. Again, I say hello to a young girl at the end of the bar. She sticks out her tongue, laughs, and runs off to her friends. From the bathroom, a tall blond man emerges, checking the last inch of his fly. When he detects my presence, he bolts straight for the bar.
“Are you a pilgrim to Santiago?’’ he asks in Spanish.
“I am.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Uh, just a minute. Are you with these pilgrims?”
“I am their guide.”
“I can see from their faces that it’s been a hard day of walking. You all look insane with fatigue.”
“They are not tired or crazy, señor,” he says sharply. “They are retarded.” It is an indictment that comes off practiced, even enjoyed for its easy righteousness. “They are good walkers and can put up with anything you can.”
Apologies and explanations rush so quickly to my lips that not a sound escapes. My mouth hangs open, unable to clear the congested traffic of regrets.
He gathers his troupe and heads out the door. A few untamed smiles flash back at me. The girl sticks her tongue out again and waves her hand furiously in the air.
As I say, the tug of human companionship begins to pull fiercely at a pilgrim after nearly months of blissful solitude. The events at Jesús’s tent clarified the formation of two camps. And the friends and acquaintances that have been
made try to stay in contact. For example, the Welsh family had rested at Jesús’s tent for a day and then planned to follow our yellow plastic strips into the Galician mountains. Poor fools. They might be dead now.
We left a note at the hostel in O Cebreiro for a later rendezvous down the road in Triacastela. But once there, I find no pilgrims, although I did stumble upon a representative of the august councils of European unity in a cafe on the edge of town. The man’s name is Dirk or Derek or Dreek or some variation. He has the bespectacled look of a promising functionary, broad square-frame glasses that say “I am open to new ideas.” He carries a sheaf of papers and resolutions, reports and recommendations.
Dreek is part of the team from Brussels behind the future promotion of the road as a continuing symbol of European unity. He speaks English, but it is the narrow dialect of transnational bureaucrats. It is a language, taught by Berlitz, which favors a thesaurus of buzzwords and phrases sadly familiar: incentive, supply, demand, motivation, genuine excitement, bottom line, broad-based plan, publicity campaign.
When I tell him that it might be difficult to convince modern tourists of the joy of walking a thousand kilometers through rough territory that lacks amusements, at times even electricity and food, he is untroubled.
“Hey, I hear what you are saying. We have a plan here for promotion.”
He spreads his papers and shows me the plan. I recognize part of it. Along the road, I have seen modern billboards that simplify the complexity of the road into digestible journeyettes. Their insignia is the shell, turned on its side and streamlined into a fan of lines intersecting at the left. The lines are the roads of Europe symbolically joined in Santiago with the idea of continental unity. He lets me in on a big secret. In a few years headquarters is going to begin a publicity sweep featuring a cartoon character as mascot. He withdraws a small button and hands it to me.
