Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  The truck is gone. Claudy is sprinting back up the hill to see if we are dead. Ultreya bolts to her feet and stands still. A length of snot fires from her nose. Rattling her head, she stares dead ahead. She reaches deep into her genetic past and summons up her most elegant posture: the picture-perfect equine profile. I drop my pack and whack her in the rear. Taking her bridle in hand, I speak directly to her left eye, a soulful but tentative eye.

  “Listen here, dammit. When I give the command to move left, you move left. Do you understand? I thought we had a deal. Okay, fine, here’s the new deal: You listen to me, or you die.” I cock my foot to kick her in the ribs. But I pull up short. I grab her bridle firmly and rattle her head with considerable force. “Do you understand? That’s the deal.”

  Claudy appears at the top of the hill.

  “And you! I have had enough of your crap.” He stands at attention and speaks not a word. I should kick him in the ribs. “You’re the one who brought this mule on the road, and now you want to run off.”

  “No, no—”

  “Shut up. Here’s the deal for you. You walk in front of us and call out when a car approaches. When we get to Sarria, we’ll work something else out. But for now, your job is up front, looking out for danger.”

  Claudy turns abruptly and takes up his position. The rest of the day is spent in solitude. Claudy does not sing. No one talks. Ultreya is blissfully compliant. Claudy and I may still have to work out some terms, but my mule and I understand each other faithfully.

  “Mules,” said the book, “so nervous from having been ill-treated that it is not safe for anyone ignorant of their nature to go near them, by kind and at the same time firm treatment, as a rule, become perfectly quiet and tractable.”

  My private terror about the road is coagulating into a rich panic. Maybe Karl was right. We should lose Claudy. Maybe I should lose them all and return to the proper image of the road—alone. This companionship, while comforting, is fouling my intent. Instead of freedom of thought and movement, the road has quickly become bogged down in a crude version of the world I left behind—a morass of responsibilities, concerns, people, mules. After I get to Sarria, I have decided to slip away from Claudy, Ultreya, the Welsh, everyone.

  In the midafternoon Sarria rises out of the slanting sunlight like an oasis. The old village winds itself around in circles on a central hill, and modern plaster houses and shops spill down its sides like architectural trash.

  Near the top beneath an oak tree, Rick and Karl cry out from the shade. The two caravans are parked side by side, and a crowd has gathered, shouting in Flemish.

  In our absence, the priest from Rick and Karl’s home of Keerbergen has arrived, along with half a dozen Flemish villagers. For a day there was peace and decorum. But now not even the presence of a man of the cloth can stifle the two filmmakers. A huge dent has appeared in the side of Willie’s van, and the Fat Man is blamed. As Ultreya and I enter the circle of shade, the priest is standing between the two cinematographers, arms outstretched like a traffic cop. To the side their two wives stand a yard apart, bent at the waist. Their faces hang in the air like masks, only their mouths move, and from them issue gruff barking noises—Flemish charges, countercharges, and spittle.

  Rick and Karl run and cling to us as if we were the police. They needn’t say it: Please never leave us again. And there is more disturbing news. The throngs have slowed their pace and bunched up. The towns are brimming with pilgrims, and new ones are showing up on the road all the time.

  At the Brothers of Mercy monastery, which runs a hostel not far from here, a crowd of some fifty pilgrims is hanging around out front. The brothers refuse to open their doors until six o’clock, according to their rules. But the sun is burning, and one of the new pilgrims has one leg. He is lurching about on crutches and shouting obscene Spanish at the monks. He threatens to have them excommunicated.

  In the mob I come upon the British couple, Roderick and Jerri, and later the Welsh family. We all conspire to leave with the Flemish in the early morning to outwalk the rabble. We all wear faces of desperation and fear, as if we were refugees trying to outrun our pursuers.

  That night I sleep in the monastery’s hostel. It is crowded wall to wall with warehoused bodies. At three in the morning one pilgrim gets violently ill and the dead air thickens with the stench of closeted sick. I move to a grass field outside and lie awake until my friends assemble, and we slip away into the coming dawn.

  As we make our way to Portomarín, I hear the lugubrious chords of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen” ringing in my ears. The walk is punctuated by sprays of warm drizzle. On stretches of hard-packed earth, patches of dampness recede almost visibly in the hot sun. The yellow arrows appear haphazardly. One of them is a banana peel, splayed in the mud, pointing into a fuggy tunnel of wet trees. The road is so populated now, the ground is churned into a hot, sloppy muck.

  Portomarín lies at the other end of a long modern bridge over the Miño River. In the early part of this century, the government built a dam upriver. Out of respect for this ancient pilgrim town, the main street’s granite arcades and the fortress-style church were removed to higher ground and rebuilt stone by stone. Because of seasonal droughts (which occur every season in this part of Spain), the Miño is a standing thread of water, a thin line of glass framed between two parched red slopes. The ghostly streets and foundations of the old town visible on the banks give the arriving visitor a phantom sense of place. By the time we climb up to the city itself, we eerily know where to go.

  Behind the church, the pilgrim’s hostel is under construction, an old sunken house with punctured walls and no door. Workers toting Sheetrock and boxes of tools come and go. At the front door of the pilgrim’s hostel, I see the leader of a group of students I had met in Sarria. He grins superiorly, which sets off some suspicions. It is peculiar that he should be here. We woke in the early hours and left long before he could have. I nod a hello.

  In the bunk room, I find Val and Wyn, who arrived a few minutes ahead of me. They pull me over into a conspiratorial huddle. The schoolteacher, it seems, is traveling by car. He motored in this morning and “claimed” all the bunks for his students, who are walking leisurely. He has already claimed the kitchen by placing an empty pot on each eye of the stove.

  This is petty behavior, even for pilgrims.

  The schoolteacher steps into the doorway and crosses his arms. I don’t think he understands that we are traveling with Dionysus himself. Claudy blows past the teacher and scopes out the problem. The invincible Claudy can outpetty any miserable high-school lecturer. Claudy rips apart his pack, brashly laying items on just enough beds to save them for the others who are minutes behind us. He slaps an arm around the schoolteacher and escorts him to the door. When Karl, who has been limping lately, and Rick arrive, Claudy asks the schoolteacher in broken Spanish if he intends to steal bunks from this old man and his crippled companion. Intuiting their role, Rick and Karl assume the faces of the damned.

  The Welsh boys scamper past Claudy.

  “And these little children?”

  The pilgrimage takes on a decidedly different complexion now. Traveling alone is impossible. The operative metaphor of the lonely drudging hermit has given way to the stratagems of Clausewitz. It may be petty, it may be juvenile, but at stake are the basic necessities. So, it’s war.

  That night Claudy hatches a ridiculous scheme. He wants us all —including the two mules—to start walking at two o’clock in the morning for the next day’s trip to Palas del Rei. Everyone but myself, and Roderick and Jerri decide to go. When we awake at a reasonable hour, the neighboring bunks are empty.

  By midmorning a sea of pilgrims oozes out of Portomarín. On top of the occasional hill, the view is medieval. Broken strings of people inch their way forward. When the path veers near a paved road, bicyclists pass by in huffing packs. At a small village the bar is closed, but when word spreads of the sheer number of us, the owner appears and cranks up the espresso ma
chine, breaks out the bread, and opens boxes of magdalenas.

  At the edge of Palas del Rei, we come upon a priest standing in the road. He is directing the traffic of pilgrims.

  “There is no room left in Palas del Rei,” he says as our band approaches. “We are asking if you wouldn’t mind sleeping in the field at the athletic arena. Follow this road down the hill and you will see it on the left.”

  The priest tells us that he has diverted nearly two hundred pilgrims away from Palas del Rei since he was dispatched out here this morning. Forget sacred, pilgrims are now a municipal problem.

  “Did you happen to see a group of pilgrims, one man with a long gray beard?” I ask.

  “The ones with two mules?”

  “Yes, they are the ones.”

  “They just came through, about an hour ago.”

  “An hour ago,” Roderick bleats with glee. “They must have got lost.”

  The athletic arena is a massive building housing a basketball court. On one side is an empty meadow of crabgrass, on the other a soccer field, and then a public swimming pool. Scores of people are flowing from place to place. Encampments are set out. Fires burn. At scattered tubs, men and women and children rinse their socks and shirts in thick, filthy water. Walking sticks have been spiked into the ground with lines stretched between them. Wet clothes flutter in the day’s final blast of heat. Several locals have driven trucks out here and have set up mobile shops, selling food, drink, and trinkets. Before an oil drum set over a fire, an old woman is boiling pulpo, octopus, until they are finely pink Medusan heads. The trucks are surrounded by hagglers, who are claiming that the prices are too high for sacred pilgrims. The locals aren’t moved.

  Coming through the fence is like blending into a world of gypsies. The camp is broken into settlements: The old men from Holland. The five young German men. The man with one leg and his rough gang. A group of school girls from Valladolid. The retarded pilgrims. The two Dutch couples. The Italian man is here, a world until himself. And, of course, our group. We locate Val and Claudy and the others by asking after them in the new nomenclature. Pilgrims’ epithets are useless now; there are too many people. So we go by our tribal names. I ask after the People of the Mules and am directed to the grass field beside the building.

  “Hey, you are not true pilgrims,” Claudy proclaims as we walk up.

  “Really,” says Roderick.

  “Oh, you missed an exciting night. Walking by the light of the moon. It was transforming.”

  “Really.”

  “We had a perfect time. We didn’t have to walk with all these people.”

  “Really.”

  “We got in early and claimed this great spot.”

  Soon, though, the boys start giggling.

  “It was dreadful,” volunteers Val. “Freezing cold, you see. And the first turn we took was the wrong one. We spent the whole night in the forest with one dim flashlight, holding on to one another’s sleeves, trying to find a path where there wasn’t one. We didn’t regain the road until morning. Frankly, we were terrified that you might have passed us.”

  By late afternoon the world of this pilgrim’s camp is settled and circumscribed. Inside the basketball court, groups have taken shape and marked territory. The foul-line key is occupied by the girls of Valladolid, and despite the indoors, they have strung up their tents. Other groups have scattered as symmetrically as cows occupying a pasture, putting in beneath the bleachers or marking a spot along the wall. In the grass outside each door, a fire burns.

  In the bathrooms normally reserved for visiting basketball teams, boys and girls and men and women strip naked, wash, change, and clean. The intense work of the walk has burned off the libido of even the most adolescent among us. Young girls in panties and bras take sponge baths at the sinks. The men spend their time at the urinals. Others are naked, but there is nothing to it.

  I try to peek. Some vestige of my sexual self wants this be an erotic experience. But the image of a young girl in her skivvies scraping crisps of dried mud from her shins or pinching bugs from her hair doesn’t light a spark. One of the old Dutch men is in the middle of some peculiar ministration that requires his pants at his feet. When he suddenly attends to his ankles, he moons the room.

  At our campsite, Val is talking to an old Spanish man of weathered good looks. Augustin is in his sixties, a former merchant marine who had spent his life at sea. Not adjusting well to life on land, he walked out of his house a few weeks ago because he “missed the sea.” His thick mane of white hair is wrapped pirate style in a blue bandanna, set off by a handsome smile of perfect teeth. He wears blue jeans, a green cotton shirt, and a sailor’s pea coat, which he sleeps in. On his arm is a tattoo of a dagger, its sharp edge grown dull with age.

  Out of trash Augustin stokes a magically long-lasting fire to cook dinner. He has thrown his coat on the ground. It’s his way of joining our group. By dinnertime our tribe has grown yet again. Wyn has befriended a young Spanish engineer, his delicate wife, their two young sons, a fifteen-year-old daughter, and a girlfriend.

  Out on the edge of the soccer field, groups are gathered around fires sparking from paper and green wood. Soft songs in Spanish and German and Dutch float from site to site. As I work on supper, I catch bits of Augustin’s early evening ghost story for the kids. It is a horrifying tale that culminates in a woman who eats her young.

  By early evening the fires are dying on our side of the camp. Inside the court, the songs have degenerated into improvisation. Across the cathedral space, homemade lyrics answer back and forth, telling an episodic story of the road, a song about blisters and dogs and weather and loneliness and bad food and wrong directions and dry fountains and heavy packs, and finally, as always, sleep.

  Our sights today rest on Mellid, a mere fourteen kilometers through accommodating terrain. But everyone is heading to Mellid. By the time we pack and set off on the day’s walk, we are cast amid the flowing crowd. Five minutes later we tie our mules to lampposts in front of a hostel and gather inside at a long wooden table for coffee and omelets. We agree to a lengthy breakfast so that the Welsh boy Adam can rest. He was up all night with a stomachache. After an hour and some, Adam descends. He is blanched and tired. His hair is knotted. His walk is tentative. True pilgrim that he is, he has agreed to press on.

  The road out of Palas del Rei dumps us briefly onto an interstate. A yellow arrow at a large highway bar points to the right, indicating a narrow beaten path disappearing into the woods.

  On the interstate, Adam grows dizzy and falls. I suggest Adam ride Ultreya, but he can’t take the bumpiness. Wyn heaves his heavy son into his arms. Exhausted and pathetic, Adam drapes himself across his father’s chest. His head is limp on Wyn’s shoulder, and he is weeping.

  Val insists that we all walk on. She will stay with Adam in Palas del Rei and catch up with us in Mellid. That would certainly have been the solution only a week ago. But not now. We are bound together now—the People of the Mules. So we stand around the parking lot of the last bar in town, debating our options.

  A Mercedes careens around the corner, shooting past the restaurant, and suddenly brakes. It whines into reverse, twisting into the parking lot. Out jumps a tall man, his wife, and a young boy. He walks straight up to me.

  “Hello,” he says to me in unaccented English. “Are you American by any chance?”

  “I am.”

  “Is your name ‘Jack’?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “I have just returned from Santiago. My father is Willem, the Dutchman.”

  “Oh, yes.” This news stings a bit. I know the pilgrimage is not a race, but we’re still a week shy.

  “Willem will be staying there for a few days before taking the train home. He hopes he will see you there. He told me to be on the lookout for a giant red American on the road.” This description of me must disturb Willem’s son, since he towers over me by a good four inches.

  “Tell me,” I ask, “did Willem really walk twenty
-five kilometers a day for three months in your hometown in order to practice for the road?”

  “Yes. My father is very efficient.”

  “He is a true pilgrim,” I add magnanimously.

  I make introductions, and we all step into the bar for more coffee and food. Once Willem’s son understands the difficulty of our situation, he happily agrees to drive Val and Adam ahead to the shelter in Mellid. We ceremoniously put up a fight, but he insists.

  Saint James.

  Henry David Thoreau explained in Walden that he kept three chairs in his house, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Thoreau was wise to keep his idea of society limited to three. Our society numbers fifteen, and if one includes the mules, and we do, the scales tip at seventeen.

  Those days have settled into rituals—stoking fires, cooking meals, handling the animals, corraling the children, dealing with Claudy. And, of course, incidents occur. At Mellid we were turned away from one pilgrim’s hostel, and Augustín exploded in rage at a clergyman. We had to stuff half of us in the single hotel room Val had rented so Adam could sleep off his illness. The rest scattered for the night.

  By suppertime, Augustín disappeared. I found him the following morning sleeping on a park bench. He made some excuses, but I suspect the old mariner sampled some of the local female talent. Despite Augustín’s cantankerousness, he’s one of us, and no one could imagine cutting out of town without him. He can find combustibles where there aren’t any, and he has an enviable talent for coaxing roaring fires from thin air. By night he becomes our storyteller, although his tales always involve elders devouring youngsters.