Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  On it is Peregrín, a figure composed of triangles, playfully arranged into the shape of a human being. Peregrín’s floppy pilgrim’s hat hangs so low that his eyes jocularly peep out of the top. He is toting a gourd on a staff, and his triangle feet are set in the reckless abandon of skipping.

  “Next year, man-sized Peregríns will tour Europe,” Dreek says. “In costume. We will sponsor contests and get maximum media exposure. We have already assisted in the opening of offices in several countries to serve as clearinghouses of information for the modern pilgrim. We have contracts in selected towns on the route in France and Spain to open pilgrim gift shops. It’s a comprehensive, broad-based plan.”

  I don’t resent Dreek and his plan. The road has never been without one, the first being the early propaganda that Charlemagne himself walked to Santiago and discovered the body of Saint James. The Codex Calixtinus of Aimery Picaud is a broad-based plan. It was the product of bureaucracy—Cluniac and Augustinian monasteries—whose pan-European organization would make Brussels look like a couple of county agents. Some of the collapsing stone houses on the road were gift shops five hundred years ago. My medieval predecessors were quite fond of buying miniature jet carvings of pilgrims, statuettes of Saint James, maybe a decapitated Moor. Such items are now priceless. Even the execrable Franco gave money to Santiago at the end of the civil war and twisted the revitalization of the road into a victory campaign.

  I remember a casual remark by Francisco Beruete, the head of the arrow-painting group in Estella. I had stopped by his house to talk. He asked me my motive for walking the road, and I told him I didn’t know. He appreciated my honesty and said, “It doesn’t matter, really. Pilgrims start the road for all kinds of reasons—history, outdoors, religion, culture, architecture. They may fight it all they want, but when the pilgrims arrive, they realize they have all taken the same trip.”

  “Dreek,” I say, “let me give you some free advice.”

  “Shoot,” he says, and winks.

  “Your plan will fail.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” he says with practiced confidence.

  “Trust me, Dreek. I am an American. Public relations is my second language.”

  I translate myself into Dreek-speak.

  “The bottom line is this. Your plan is good, decent. But it has its down side. We live in an age of image and celebrity. This is a draw more powerful than amusements and capitalism. You are not going to attract great numbers of pilgrims by offering cartoon characters and inexpensive baubles. The key is celebrity.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What I am saying is nothing new, really. The road has been walked by a number of famous people, either in legend or in fact —Charlemagne, William the duke of Aquitaine, King Louis the Seventh of France, Saint Francis of Assisi, the Cid, Saint Brigid, the painter Jan van Eyck, Ferdinand and Isabella, even Pope John the Twenty-third in 1954.”

  “Yes, so what you are saying is—”

  “What I am saying, Dreek, is Julio Iglesias.”

  “To walk the road.”

  “Precisely. I would wager that, historically speaking, the road was jammed not long after each of those famous people walked to Santiago.”

  “What a great idea! I will make a list.”

  “Try for some political heavyweights, Dreek, preferably non-Spaniards. It will broaden your reach. I think Maggie Thatcher could use a good pilgrimage, maybe two. How about that inexplicably popular band, Abba? That will attract the youngsters. And you might get a fallen angel. Are there any famous criminals in Europe who have recently finished their sentences? A penitent criminal would be ideal. And don’t confine yourself to Catholicism, Dreek. Drive the road and you will discover that it is covered with atheists and Protestants, Jews and Asians. Broaden your broad-based plan, Dreek, and television coverage will come without even trying.”

  “This is genuinely exciting. What is your name again? Can I get your address? I would like to correspond with you later.” Dreek gives me the button of Peregrín, which I pin to the strap of my pack.

  When I meet up with the Flemish and tell them of my conversation, they accuse me of selling out the pilgrimage. I don’t know. The road has been manhandled by everyone from Charlemagne to Archbishop Gelmirez to Queen Isabella to the generalissimo. The cons and schemes come and go. I’m with Beruete. No one who endures months of walking through northern Spain will mistake the trip for a visit to Euro Disney. The road can take care of itself.

  Had I brought along my seer to read the entrails of a chicken, I suspect the auspices would be gloomy. As if Dreek weren’t an ominous enough introduction, the Triacastelans have a dark history. The three castles of their name vanished inexplicably a thousand years ago. I suspect the culprits were the locals, who have plagued pilgrims since our history was first written.

  The Santiago “tradition” associated with Triacastela, thankfully in decline, was to force each pilgrim to carry a huge chunk of limestone on his back ninety kilometers to Arzúa. There it was smelted into lime for use as cement in the twelfth-century construction of the cathedral of Santiago. One author of the history of the road speaks of the cathedral being held together as much by the sweat of pilgrims as with mortar.

  Literature from the 1400s shows that the Triacastelans charged pilgrims a toll—strictly forbidden by a succession of Spanish kings.

  By 1682 the Triacastelan hospital (now gone, not a trace) took up the practice of charging two reales for pilgrim funerals. I suspect a lot of pilgrims died here since they were worth more dead than alive.

  The only “historical” building that survives in Triacastela is a four-hundred-year-old pilgrim jail. It seems too Freudian that the locals would take such care to preserve this building. On the wooden planks forming the doors are the pathetic carvings of French names, no doubt belonging to pilgrims waiting for someone, anyone, to loan them some bail money. Also among the names are crude depictions of a gamecock, apparently an old French symbol for “yearning liberty.” Triacastela is a medieval speed trap.

  By the time I join Rick and Karl at an outdoor café, the soap opera has turned violent. This afternoon Willie returned to his caravan after shopping in Triacastela and found it kneeling like a dying elephant, two of its tires slashed. Willie suspected Claudy, decked him with a punch to the jaw, and threatened to kill him. Karl had to intervene. Claudy peaceably withdrew to cope with the better-tempered Ultreya and find some free pasture. Later Willie also called the fat man an “amateur” and shoved him to the ground.

  Even Karl is upset by day’s end and has ordered Willie not to leave the area of his beached caravan. We are sitting out on the main street at a cafe table. So from time to time Willie emerges and bellows curses down the street but never crosses the invisible line drawn by the bearish pilgrim.

  Karl is worried because he and Rick are slated for their weekly phone call home this evening and an interview on the radio. Rick explains that they will have to discuss Willie and the Fat Man and are concerned about what to say. They are politicians, after all. So we huddle and discuss “spin control,” Flemish city council style.

  Rick and Karl figure out a convincing ruse to avoid the topic, but Karl wants me to do him a favor, in the name of Santiago: take Claudy away from them for a few days so he can try to cool things off. The road does temporarily split in two at Triacastela and rejoins two days on. One way leads into pure wilderness broken only by a sixth-century Benedictine monastery at Samos. The other follows the rural road. We flip. I am going to Samos.

  When we discuss Willie’s slashed tires, none of us believes that Claudy could have done it since he has been with us throughout the day. That leaves the Fat Man, conclude Karl and Rick. But I have my own theory, and I tell them the history of Triacastela.

  The waiter is a hatchet-faced man with an aspiring mustache, who whines that he has to balance his books and wants payment now. He presents us with a bill for several rounds of coffee and a couple of plates of food. It’s for ei
ghty-six dollars.

  Morning in Triacastela arrives not upon rosy fingers or amid dew-dappled grasses, but on a wind so foul that Claudy and I awaken in our hostel amid coughs. Have a thousand sheep been flogged into convulsive flatulence? Is an errant pilgrim being burned at the stake? Perhaps Willie is behind it. Claudy and I make no investigations but strap on our packs, untether our mule, and head off to Samos.

  On the way out, I see a poster plastered to a wall that declares Triacastela to be “the pearl of the Oribio.” The Oribio is a cloacal rivulet that barely trickles beyond the parish line. Triacastela’s epithet seems as parochial as any I’ve seen, and I’m from South Carolina, “home of the first lampshade.”

  Shaking off the dust of the pearl of the Oribio, the road winds up and down among tranquil hills. Ultreya takes no time in detecting the absence of the strong hand and yodel of Karl. It behaves like a child set loose from its parents and placed into the care of a frightened baby-sitter. Our mule zigzags back and forth across the road. Ultreya brays and drools and runs at the nose intolerably when we suggest walking straight. To Ultreya, the road is not a linear passage but wild temptation. Long turgid stalks of something that smells like licorice, a species of anise, grows in the ditches. It is the asinine equivalent of catnip. The two- or three-hour trip to Samos takes up most of the day.

  Claudy is in no mood to help. My polite and restrained requests for assistance are met with a lounge-lizard descant:

  When I was just a little baby.

  I didn’t have many toys

  But my mamma used to say,

  Son, you got more than other boys.

  You may not be good looking,

  And you may not be too rich,

  But you’ll never ever be alone

  ’Cause you got lucky lips.

  Lucky lips are always kissing

  Lucky lips are never blue

  Lucky lips can always find a pair of lips or two.

  Ultreya seems nonplussed, possibly offended at the mention of said lips. I laugh mildly at first, which Claudy mistakes for appreciation and seizes upon with the tenacity of a child. By the time we amble into the valley of Samos and the top of the monastery appears amid the trees, I am in a brown study of regret: I should be walking alone.

  I trundle into Samos with Ultreya’s lead line hoisted over my shoulder sailor style. I pull her into town like dead weight. Several once blank synapses have been permanently branded with the opening stanza of “Lucky Lips.”

  Claudy is depressed, possibly at the forced exile from his Flemish friends or because of my own dark disapproval. His solution is to drink the rest of the day. The village is in the middle of seasonal fiestas, and at early evening everyone assembles on a field beside the ancient monastery for a traveling fair. A wretched imitation of an American rock band has taken the stage. The lead singer is an obese man misshapened by decades of Spanish cuisine. His costume is knickers, a sawed-off T-shirt, and a psychedelic tam-o’-shanter. Swags of shamelessly visible fat rock ’n’ roll to the beat of “Eleanor Rigby,” “Satisfaction,” and “MacArthur Park.”

  Claudy follows me like a dog as I use every trick I know to lose myself in this crowd. He is staggering drunk by the time the band begins. With the help of shots of Carlos Primero, the morning’s song has become to him a multilayered joke so dense with strata of humor that he can barely blurt out a line before being engulfed by hilarity. To me, the song has broken down into linguistic phonemes, atomic packets of sound unmoored from their meaning like a single word repeated to the point of senselessness. Even here, the words cut through the cacophony of the fair and hammer on my eardrums like nails. I remember reading of laboratory orangutans subjected to repetitive sounds over a period of time. Eventually they ate their fingers.

  At one of the food booths, I strike up a conversation with a man on vacation. He is a professor of American literature at a university in Barcelona.

  “I specialize in modern American fiction,” the professor says, “specifically Jewish and southern writers.”

  “Who does that leave out, Joan Didion?”

  A face lurches beside us and bellows, “I didn’t have many toys,” before crumpling away in the darkness.

  “Right now,” he says, “I am teaching a course on Bret Easton Ellis. His novel American Psycho.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the most talked about subject in America.”

  “It’s just one of New York’s periodic publishing scandals,” I argue. “Dime a dozen. We have a couple every year.”

  “Precisely,” he says. And he explains that while Europeans hold to some fraudulent standard of “greatness,” only Americans have revealed the true arbiter of the sublime: PR, scandal, hype.

  The band strikes up its version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” The obese man sings. As I try to argue with the professor, the troupe of retarded pilgrims appears beside me. The young girl who yesterday stuck her tongue out at me has motioned me to dance. How can I decline? I start pitching back and forth in that sad WASPy gyration that is to dance what Spam is to smoked Virginia ham. And the professor shouts on.

  I want to attempt a rebuttal, but his view sounds oddly convincing way out here. American culture is a Walpurgisnacht at this fair. The band’s rendition of the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” is unnaturally loud and riddled with head-banging electric guitar riffs. If Dante were to consign all of American culture to one circle of hell, our circle would resemble this scene with a third-rate Spanish band playing America’s worst music.

  A lumbering figure crashes between me and my dance partner. “I may not be good looking...” Two bloodshot eyes sink to the ground and crawl away.

  I turn my attention to the only redemption at hand, my dance partner. I whip myself into a dancing machine, and she responds in kind. Her friends and then others join in the erupting chaos. We become a band of howling, drooling, gyrating maniacs. The keening vocalist competes with the roars from our twisting throng. Some are retarded, some are pilgrims, all momentarily indistinguishable.

  The evening before, Claudy and I had discovered a bit of paradise for Ultreya. Behind an abandoned house was a modest glade of anise sprouts on the banks of a flowing river. This morning the sound of our approach is recognizable. Ultreya stirs from a couchant position and stands for our arrival. Our mule trumpets hee-haw blasts crackling with excitement. The banks are shorn of anise, a flat terrain of stubble. When I untie Ultreya to begin the day’s walk, the mule nuzzles several of its dampest orifices into the nape my neck.

  By coincidence I came across a book yesterday afternoon during a discussion of mules with one of the monastery’s laymen. Horses, Asses, Zebras, Mules, and Mule Breeding was written a hundred years ago by two British military men, W. B. Tegetmeier and C. L. Sutherland, “late of the War Office.” In its pages the authors proclaim the mule’s greatness: “Sure of foot, hard of hide, strong in constitution, frugal in diet, a first-rate weight carrier, indifferent to heat and cold, he combines the best, if the most homely, characteristics of both the noble houses from which he is descended. He fails in beauty, and his infertility is a reproach, but even ugliness has its advantages.”

  Mules, I had forgotten, were man’s first attempt at genetic engineering—a mix of the European horse and the African ass. Although ridiculed as a beast with “no ancestry and no hope of posterity,” the mule has certainly worked out better than some of our other hybrids—the toy poodle or baby corn, for instance. But the mule was, in fact, a dangerous creation. Its unnatural endurance turned war from a local phenomenon to a regional one. On the other hand, it made food production more efficient. Leisure may owe its origin to the mule.

  A mule requires work and effort, and I am slowly coming to understand her. (Today Ultreya assumes a gender.) She is a little society all unto herself. Ultreya wants to eat and rest as often as possible. And I don’t want her to. So we gradually work out the fundamentals of a social compact.

  As we leave Samos, Claudy t
eaches me by his own thoughtless error. He takes the lead line and walks twenty feet ahead, leaving her to meander from side to side in a zagging wake. When the mule slows down, which is often, Claudy barks orders at me from the front.

  “Beat her, eh? You’re not helping.”

  “Claudy, I don’t think we can just pull her. We have to walk with her.”

  “Uhh. You fucking Americans always want to tell everyone everything.” He yanks the rope and jerks her head forward.

  I resign myself to my position. I walk alongside Ultreya, whispering apologies for Claudy’s behavior. When a car approaches, I nudge her closer to the side of the road. And she responds. There is a twinkle of understanding in her eye.

  Every hour or so I suggest we let her take a few minutes to feed on roadside dandelions, buttercups, or the wheat that grows through the fences. At a river I let her drink. In exchange for this privilege, I walk beside her, pulling her bridle when she speeds up and slapping her rump when she slows down.

  Eventually we do come to terms and work out a language. I carry a long thin stick balanced in my left hand. It runs the length of her body. When a car approaches or she speeds up, I rattle the stick in front of her face, a sign to move to the left and slow down. If she starts to flag, I twist the stick the other way and give her a good switch on the rump, speeding her up. This contract works so well that Claudy disappears up the road, thrilled to be free of his duty.

  At the top of a hill, where the road curves sharply, a rolling wave of thunder peels through the trees. I snap Ultreya sharply in the face, but she is so startled by the roar, she freezes. A truck rumbling at fifty miles per hour is taking the bend recklessly and hugging the curve tight. Instinct lays out my options in a half second: I am stuck between a mule and a moving truck, and I must move one of them. I throw a low body block into Ultreya. My shoulder digs into her belly, and I push off the edge of a ditch with all my strength. As the truck blasts through, its horn a piercing siren, Ultreya tips sideways down into the ditch. The weight of my pack propels me over her back and to the other side of a thin trickle of oily water.