Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  The next day, when the engineer’s wife turns her ankle, I load her onto Ultreya. By afternoon responsibility for her has drifted to Val, who is steamed. A meeting between Val and me gets ugly. She accuses me of permanently inviting the Spaniards into our group with the offer of Ultreya and then abandoning them to her because she’s a woman. She’s right, of course, so I agree to work more with our wounded, and things are patched up. Throughout such crises, temper tantrums erupt from Claudy with a certain regularity, about every morning, noon, and night, I’d say.

  But the routine tensions within our clan can’t compare to the anarchic competitions among the tribes of pilgrims when we enter a town in the late afternoon. In Arzúa—several days shy of Santiago—the panic is visible. Groups range through the streets, looking for the best quarters. The guidebook lists five pilgrim hostels differing in capacity and amenities. Augustín suggests we set up temporarily at an athletic facility on the edge of town and then send reconnaissance teams throughout the city to see what else is available.

  The Spanish engineer and I are dispatched to one hostel described in the book as having a panoramic view, an open meadow, kitchen, beds, and swimming pool. When we arrive, the loathsome schoolteacher is standing at the front entrance like a gendarme.

  “All taken,” he says brusquely. We both shrug, privately happy because the place is grotesque compared to our gym. It is parked on the side of an interstate. The “meadow” is an overturned bowl of dust. The roots of the snatches of grass are exposed like stuck spiders. The pool is slightly larger than the cab of a pickup truck and has washed so many clothes that it is a brown milky color.

  By the time we return, Augustín has finished a shopping spree and volunteers to cook tonight. We have slabs of steak, eggs, a variety of cheeses, baskets of apples and plums, juices and colas for the children, magnums of wine, and a sack of baguettes. Out back on an unused street facing a forest, Augustín has already built his kitchen and laid in a night’s supply of wood with three chunks of a broken beam, our Yule logs. Our grill is a slotted manhole cover pried out of the gutter.

  By nightfall two new girls and a few other pilgrims have been invited for dinner. Augustín fills the air with the aroma of steak and eggs, lamb, and potatoes wrapped in tinfoil. Every adult has a glass of wine in his hand, and the children are plied with sodas. Augustín passes around the fresh fruits and stuffs a baguette in every fist. The old mariner pronounces a toast before dinner and then recites a poem. The Welsh children sing a song in English, and the Spanish children return the compliment in their language. Augustín has another story for the kids; again the theme is parental cannibalism.

  A truck inches down the back street and stops since our party takes up almost both lanes. Augustín strides to the cab window, cocks an elbow on it, and chats amiably. Presently the truck driver parks, and our missing guest joins us for a plate.

  For a moment, the labor and resentments of the day melt away into wine, darkness, song, and laughter. The night above is clear. The Milky Way, for which this road is also named—the Vía Láctea—stretches a blurred canopy above us. Chances are that some of the pilgrims who preceded us camped right here as well, looked up at the same jet sky spangled with lights, and dined with the same intensity.

  The hard work of our day and the sweat and toil it took to get us into this cul-de-sac makes the intellectual questions of the road—who is a true pilgrim—gloriously irrelevant.

  A pilgrim is out beyond the fields. He is stripped not merely of the accoutrements but of the assumptions of his society. A pilgrim is cast back upon first principles and then forced to make some sense of the lunatic impulse that propelled him down this road. Our little tribe has grown over time, beginning in León. Were we to walk for another year or ten years, I can imagine our rump society metamorphosing into a real one.

  Before I left America, I assembled a file of notes. I had intended somewhere on this road to make some withering comparisons between the vivid metaphors of modern science and the dead language of ancient religion: Our modern theologians are astrophysicists. Saint Thomas Aquinas had his exhaustive explanation of the universe, Summa Theologica, and Stephen Hawking has his “theory of everything.” Even the religious notion of mystery has been translated into the scientific idiom as “complexity.”

  Since the big bang theory gained acceptance, scientists have struggled to conjure bracing metaphors for their new vocabulary. I have in my notes a collection of attempts to describe the universal essence: “cold dark matter”; “a great wall”; “supercluster”; “the Zeldovich pancake”; “superdense loops of matter”; “opaque plasma”; “extremely faint wrinkles”; “subtle broad ripples of wispy matter”; “gigantic bubbles”; “meatballs”; “spongelike topology.” I wonder how many extremely faint wrinkles would fit on the head of a pin.

  In my reading, I found that the mythographer Joseph Campbell believed that the language of science could rescue the desiccated metaphors of religion: “Not the neolithic peasant looking skyward from his hoe, not the old Sumerian priesthood watching planetary courses from the galleries of ziggurats, nor a modern clergyman quoting from a revised version of their book, but our own incredibly wonderful scientists today are the ones to teach us how to see; and if wonder and humility are the best vehicles to bear the soul to its hearth, I should think that a quiet Sunday morning spent at home in controlled meditation on a picture book of the galaxies might be an auspicious start for that voyage.”

  I think my small tribe might advise Mr. Campbell to put down his Time-Life picture book of quasars and buy a pair of boots. Haltingly, uncertainly, we have created something. Were we to try to pin down the fragile sense of ourselves that has emerged, it would be about as useful as defining the amiable laughter that animates our nights (staccato puffs of oscillating air, I believe).

  But perhaps some part of it can be seen in none other than Saint James himself. He has become a new man for us. In the Gospels, he was a toady. In eighth-century Spain, he was a simple reflection of Christ himself, dead and resurrected. By the height of the Moorish conflict, he had taken up sword and shield, an ur-Knight Templar, as cunning and as cruel as any Saracen.

  During the Renaissance, there was an attempt by the backers of the freshly sainted Teresa de Avila to have her named patron saint of Spain. This attempted coup d’état fired the imaginations of James’s supporters, chief among them Spain’s famous writer Francisco de Quevedo. His defense: A Sword for Santiago (still required reading in Spanish grade schools after four hundred years) re-created James as a kind of elder statesman, national patrician, and kindly grandfather. The Age of Reason then reduced him to an addled and quixotic senior citizen, but James survived until he had another revival in the nineteenth century. Not so long ago, Franco straightened the bent arm of our patron into a fascist salute.

  Our Saint James is a reimagined man, and vastly different from the stoic Romanesque statues or the bloodcurdling Gothic icons. Saint James has always been the protector of pilgrims, and this James is on our side, too—an impish fellow, capable of sly laughter. Were we to carve him in marble, our James would have the cocky posture of Michelangelo’s David and a slim Caravaggian smile with a hint somewhere, possibly in the eyes, of the ambiguity of this undertaking. In short, a modern James, willing to wink at our ruses and praise our occasional virtue.

  Were we to walk ten thousand miles more, our inchoate world might cohere into a lasting one. We have our own songs and dances, our inside jokes, our stories. A simple hierarchy of responsibility and set of daily chores have already taken shape. I imagine Augustín’s tale of cannibalism told over and over again, getting mixed up with our opinion of Madame Debril, who in our new story gets eaten. In time we would have our creation myth, a tale of conflict with an older generation, then death, consumption, and rebirth.

  We would find a language, always inadequate, to revive these moments in ceremony. The image of two mules might become to our descendants as significant as cows to a Hindu or as l
ambs to Jews and Christians. Our robes would be simple, and at the neck would be a shell. Each costume might feature a dark tunic that fits over the head and flows down the back. Theologians would explain that it is a symbolic representation of a backpack. The oral readings would tell a story of hardship overcome by common action. Or there might be a parable of a confidence man hoodwinking strangers. The exegetes would interpret it as paradox and fill it with meaning. This story, they would say, uses irony to inspire readers to virtue, just as Buddha’s mischievous smile actually signifies solemnity. The young in the tribe would question the elders for clarification. And the old men and women would explain, in a language not yet written, that this ceremony, these robes, these sacred words, point back to a time when their ancestors set off on a long journey, and after suffering and hazards and quarrels, they found in a thing as plain as an apple or a piece of bread, awe, humility, and mystery.

  The word tourist comes from the French word meaning “circuit.” It is among our chief insults on the road. I’ve leveled it at others and had it heaped on myself. In the language at large, it is a mild word, yet nearly all its shadings are vaguely insulting. Even as an admission, the sense is humiliating: “Oh, I’m just here as a tourist.” The tourist lacks something vital in travel—a sense of caprice, spontaneit

  y, adventure, the open-endedness of life without a schedule. The tourist has none of those. He’s treading on t he circuit.

  On the spectrum of travel, the safe and tedious tourist anchors the far end. At the other end is the true traveler, the one who first blazes the trail—Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, James Cook. In the path maker’s wake come others who are nearly audacious. They are still considered true travelers. After Columbus opened the transoceanic route, the names of Cortés, Balboa, and Magellan followed, although maybe we can’t remember precisely what their specific accomplishments were. Over time, though, a journey that once was difficult and audacious becomes routine. The anonymous merchants come. And the trail becomes more well known than the travelers. Not long after the fifth-grade quiz on Balboa and Cortés, I believe I was required to memorize “major trade routes.” More people follow until the pleasure seekers set sail in luxury vessels. And finally the discount fares kick in, and the great unwashed swarm the route on package tours with specified hotels and guided visits to famous monuments, many of which commemorate the first person who did in suffering what the tourist is doing in comfort.

  We pilgrims want to believe that we are not tourists. But by whatever definition you want to use, pilgrims are tourists. Pilgrims are the lowest of lowbrow travelers, a subspecies of tourist, the most degraded hybrid there is. Our itinerary is a thousand years old. Our route has been walked millions of times. Far from being the first, a pilgrim is in fact the opposite. With each step, we are precisely the last person to cover that patch of ground. And a few minutes later even that lame distinction will vanish, our footprint trampled by a crowd of schoolchildren, or a mule, or robust senior citizens from Holland.

  Trying to romance the road to Santiago is a lost cause, and all efforts to attempt any such thing ended provinces ago. A pilgrimage resembles nothing so much as a forced march. We have resigned ourselves to it and are relieved only by the comedy of our burden and the relaxation that comes with each evening. Daytime is work and sweat, and a whole morning or afternoon can pass without a word. It’s the quiet familiarity of friends at work, like old pals on the assembly line. Daytime meals pass amid the grunting communications of a family, and our duties are carried out by rote.

  The morning after Arzúa, we resume our daily ritual—a train of wounded pilgrims, beat mules, grousing children, and sullen men who are scarcely disturbed when we encounter an enormous problem. Not far out of town, the Spanish government has cut the initial gorge of an interstate straight through a hill, probably to accommodate tourists.

  We pull up at the edge. Far below is a red muddy canyon. A set of jerry-built stairs—scrap lumber bound with nails and bale wire—drop straight down before us. Across the way, another set snakes up the other side and leads to the continuing path. Normally such a disaster would require a half hour of theories and solutions, a vote, and then a moment to assuage Augustín or Claudy or whoever’s idea was vetoed.

  But this afternoon we barely pause. Everyone knows what each must do and performs his or her (or its) task without comment. Wyn and Claudy walk the compliant mules laterally through the woods until the slope affords easy passage for the animals. The Spanish engineer, Augustín, and I carry down the packs. We clamber back up and help the others down.

  By the time our band reconvenes on the other side, we have what now passes for conversation.

  “Whoo, shit,” says Claudy.

  “Yeeeoooo,” says Augustín.

  “Hooooo,” I say.

  “Heee-haaw,” says Ultreya.

  “Okay,” says Val.

  And we walk on.

  Arca is the last stop on the road, a mere nineteen kilometers shy of Santiago. The small hostel there is an abandoned house with no running water, airless despite shattered windows, and no furniture or beds. At the front door is the schoolteacher. He has become a regular apparition at day’s end, a combination of grim reaper or camp guard. An unctuous greeting is his way of saying that the place is “claimed.” We tie up the mules in a nearby yard and push past him without the slightest courtesy or concern.

  Within hours the house is overflowing with pilgrims. Since it is a warm and pleasant night, we bail out for a neighboring meadow, along with sixty or so others, and unfurl our sleeping bags on the ground.

  This evening is nearly silent. Tomorrow all this will end. The air is slightly regretful. No one bothers with a fire. Meals are eaten from pried-open tins, and chunks of baguette are passed around. There is anxiety about arrival in Santiago. Will it all become blindingly clear tomorrow?

  Three medieval musicologists from Belgium named Peter, Martina, and I didn’t catch the third one’s name melt into the crowd at the hostel. They have studied the road and its medieval music. In English and Spanish they explain the significance of their work and their instruments. The hurdy-gurdy is the centerpiece, an instrument that is to the medieval road to Santiago what a lute is to college Shakespeare productions. The hurdy-gurdy is a fat violin whose bridge is a cylinder of sounding board that is cranked while the other hand fingers a set of keys that press the appropriate strings. It is a complicated Rube Goldbergian instrument, and to look at one is to understand why it died out. The hurdy-gurdy sound is a sad, enduring drone. Throughout the night the trio sings pilgrim ditties in Latin, French, and Spanish, occasionally harmonizing the hurdy-gurdy’s groans with the sighs of a small pipe or the muffled skirl of a miniature bagpipe.

  The lead musician, Peter, is a serious man. He wears sandals and has an array of crystals and turquoise dangling at his neck. When he introduces the music, he speaks solemnly, assuring us that the simple melodies are rich in texture and meaning. He sings an ancient pilgrim hymn and then loosely translates the words:

  Herru Sanctiagu

  Got Sanctiagu

  E ultreia

  E suseia

  Deus adiuva nos

  Señor Santiago

  Great Santiago

  Come on, let us head west.

  Come on, let us keep moving.

  God help us.

  Peter says these words with such respect, in the crisp enunciation of a scholar, that the pilgrims erupt in laughter. There is a rarefied, exquisite hilarity to that last line, and we pilgrims are rolling around on the ground venting it. We can’t explain it, except that we’ve spent so many days in bowed solemnity that we no longer refrain from shattering someone else’s piety with our laughter. We’re certain that pilgrims laughed at that line when it was written a thousand years ago. We know we’re on to something. Maybe it’s taken all this time to achieve this small moment. It’s a strange sound that undulates across the meadow, a paradoxical and complex guffaw. There is suffering in it, like the
suppressed laughter heard at a funeral. But it’s a fresh laugh, and new—our laugh. The musicians are annoyed as the hilarity infects its way through the crowd, across the gulf of languages, a guess-you-had-to-be-there laughter, and Peter and his friends haven’t been there.

  The next morning the herd arises and moves out. Through the woods, onto highways, then along a treacherous stretch of interstate near an airport, back among trees, across a small brook, we march—E ultreia! E suseia!—into Lavacola.

  This last village before Santiago has its own rich tradition. Here, in the old days, the pilgrim washed himself to prepare for the appearance at the cathedral. Actually the guidebooks are quite circumspect about this ablution. In the footnotes of the more scholarly books, though, the truth is revealed. In Lavacola the pilgrim went to the river and scrubbed his behind. In the crude hygiene of the Middle Ages, this act constituted the highest honor one could pay. But we cannot find a river, and Lavacola has lost all its medieval charm, being nothing more than a knot of bars and fast-food restaurants. All that remains of this old tradition is the town’s fine name, blunt in that medieval way. Lava means wash (as in lavatory) and cola means tail (as in colon), literally “ass-wipe.”

  A few kilometers farther along the road, the path works it way upward and then opens onto a broad hill. From its height the pilgrim can see for the first time the city of Santiago—the glorious skyline dominated by the twin Baroque towers of the cathedral. This hill is called Mons gaudii in Latin, Monjoie in French, Monxoi in Gallegan, Monte del Gozo in Spanish, and, in English, Mount Joy. Santiago is a mere gambol away.

  According to tradition, whoever is first to arrive here is called “king” of the pilgrimage. When Guillaume Manier arrived here in 1726, he wrote: “I advanced on ahead by a league, all alone, so that I could be the first to see the towers of Santiago.... Upon seeing them, I threw my hat in the air, making known to my companions, who arrived after me, that I had seen the tower. All, upon arrival, had to agree that I was the king.”