A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

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  OUR GOAL for the next few days is to make it to Santhià—about twenty-two miles away, with an overnight somewhere in the middle. To get there by train from Ivrea would involve rerouting through Milan or Turin, a real detour off the V.F. The only choice from here is to hoof it. We fortify ourselves with cappuccini and follow the well-signed route out of town, up a long gradual hill, past a small lake and the stately homes of Piemonte. The mountains are still in view through a morning haze. I feel the downward pull of the Po, which flows from the Alps to the Adriatic, bringing water of life to Italy’s breadbasket. We just left the Dora Baltea, the stream we followed from Aosta to Ivrea. It heads south to join the big river. We angle toward the east, parallel to the Po but about ten miles above it. I feel something else as well: mosquitoes. We’re approaching the rice fields of the Vercelli plain, and it’s both muggy and buggy. They like Sophie’s youthful blood more than mine.

  In a few days, I plan to shake myself of Saint Augustine. Not that any Catholic, lapsed or otherwise, is ever rid of him. He’s a founding father and doctor of the faith, inescapable. He steered the church he had once shunned over to his complicated worldview. And the written words from his prolific output are still marshaled in debates about the nature of faith and the duty of those who believe. In Pavia, farther down the V.F., is a cathedral that holds his remains, among the most sanctified relics in Christianity. That seems like a fitting place to part. But before I do, I want to engage him one last time and see if I can’t come to some resolution. He’s a nag; he knows how to get under my skin, skillful fourth-century polemicist that he is, particularly that line about great travelers who “pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.” The only way to be rid of him is to give him a full airing.

  Augustine influenced Anselmo, Calvin, Luther, people from across the theological spectrum. But he’s such a contradictory character. He wasn’t even baptized until he’d lived a full life, by the longevity standards of the late Roman Empire. He was thirty-three years old in 387 when he renounced his former self and formally joined the Catholic Church. Remember, this was after getting his fill of life’s sensual pleasures, including food and sex, art and sex, philosophy and sex, theater and sex. “My sin was this,” he wrote, “I looked for pleasure, beauty and truth not in Him but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me to pain, confusion and error.” The young Augustine was “inflamed with desire for a surfeit of Hell’s pleasures.”

  His initial “error” in his search was embracing a philosophy of dualism—the idea that everything is either good or bad, spiritual or material. Surely he could see the flaw in that. For life is not black or white, but with many shades. The spirit-lifting forest we walked through in the Alps was aflame with fire and terror just a month earlier, when Lucifer raged. Each of us is capable of acts of compassion, just as we can turn intolerant and cold on the same day.

  As he moved toward Christianity, Augustine tightened his focus on the issue that bothered those worshippers back at Saint Martin’s in Canterbury, and continues to bother me. It’s a question he was determined to answer: How can an all-knowing, all-loving God allow so much evil to exist? Augustine doesn’t mention the evil done in God’s name, but it’s part of the same scheme. You can see why people shun a supposedly beneficent creator who presided over the slaughter of the Wars of Religion, the African slave trade, the butchery of the Great War, Stalin’s mass executions, genocide in Germany and Uganda and Cambodia. And why did upward of 90 percent of the native populations of Australia and the Americas die for no other reason than they lacked immunity to the diseases of European Christians advancing on their shores? What higher power dreamed up these towering crimes against innocent humanity? Augustine’s response was to give God a pass. It’s us. God foresees it, then allows our choices to unfold. You can be part of the inevitable bad thing, or opt for good. God knows the outcome, either way. You do not. For many Christians, this explanation is enough.

  Sophie is not in my morning ruminations. She has gone ahead, scouting for a place to eat lunch. Her reconnaissance leads to a small bar on the quiet main street of Bollengo, a village without much movement on this humid day. A woman runs the counter, cooks the food, refills the wineglasses of two silent older men who might as well be statuary. We sit outside in the shade and rest. I bring Sophie into the Augustinian conversation and she gives me a quizzical look. My daughter, unlike me, never rushes to judgment. She’s also in a bit of pain herself. Her pack has been pressing into her shoulders.

  After a half hour or so, an enormous plate of pappardelle is brought to our table. The wide ribbons of pasta are silky with ragù and furry with fresh-grated Parmigiano. Steam rises from the pile. The owner brings us chilled watermelon slices. It’s damn near impossible to get back out under the hot sun again after such a repast. The sensible thing would be to take a siesta, as most living creatures in Italy are doing just now. The imperative is to push on. As we pass a little church at the edge of town, I stop and take off my pack. After rummaging around, I find my old down coat, my weather-resistant pants, a fleece.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Dropping weight.”

  I leave my little donation in the church, feeling at least four pounds lighter, and a pound more righteous. I’m like those wagon train settlers on the Oregon Trail who rid themselves of furniture, books, and other heirlooms as they made their way west and struggled to get over the mountains. Arriving at the Columbia River and a new life, they had shed a sizable amount of their material past.

  “Hold on,” says Sophie. “I have something for you.”

  She produces a bag of chocolate caffeine bombs—“cold brew coffee bites.” I take a handful. It doesn’t take long for the stimulant to kick in. I want to jump, sprint, dance, skip along the Via Francigena. And look at the sky now, with just a beard of clouds near the foothills, and here’s an abandoned villa, must be five centuries old, huh, Soph, and OMG, the grapes, a perfect pitch of purple! I switch to Italian and talk another blue streak, throwing my hands out ahead of me and rolling them over, clearing rhetorical brush. I sound like Vince Vaughn in manic mode.

  “Basta, Babbo,” says Soph.

  With the rucksack readjustment, and the jolt from the coffee bites, we’re both in less pain as we struggle through the hardest part of the day. The route finally leaves pavement for a grass-and-stone byway through vineyards. We are walking along the best place on the planet to grow nebbiolo, the black grape used to make barolo—the wine of kings and the king of wines. Harvest, la vendemmia, is just days away, for the grapes are ripe. We nibble at little bunches of juice-fat fruit. The vines are thought to be indigenous to Piemonte, and the winemaking dates to early Roman times. The name stems from the word nebbia, the fog that hugs this land on harvest mornings.

  Just off the trail, surrounded by rows of wrinkled and thick-armed vines, is an open-air chapel of some sort: a Romanesque ruin without its roof. We go inside, looking back through the intact entrance arch framing the countryside. The floor is grass, wildflowers, and runaway vines. The frescoes inside what is left of the vault are still visible. The overall picture is stunning, with the open sky in the background, all of it wrapped in rows of nebbiolo. Sophie warns me not to get too comfortable.

  The farmers keep dogs, and they are active, even in this heat. Signs along the way warn: Attenti al cane! Back on the trail, we ignore the yaps until a pair of growling guards are in our face. The dogs move ahead to block the path, directly in front of us, ready to pounce. We can go no farther. We’re boxed in by ten-foot rock walls on either side of us. We cry out for an owner to call the dogs off. Ten minutes into our standoff, a woman appears out of the vines, apologizes, and summons one animal. The other, the more ferocious-looking one, remains. It moves closer, a menace of barks.

  “È un vagabondo,” says the woman.

  “Vagabondo?”

  “
Sì, sì, mi dispiace.”

  It’s not hers. She’s sorry. Sophie stands, trembling while trying to hold her ground, her hands down to show no aggression. The dog leaps at her, just missing. I shout and stomp. The dog comes again, and this time tries to bite her just above the heel. I kick at the stray. Sophie backpedals, checks her leg. The skin has not been broken, but she’s got some scratches.

  “Walk fast,” I tell her. “Straight ahead. Don’t look at him.”

  We do this, and the vagabond starts to trail off, still barking, no doubt feeling victorious. Sophie says she’s O.K. But she’s clearly upset.

  It takes forever to crest Piverone. My blistered toes are begging for relief, a pulse of pain with every step. On another day, in another mood, this hilltop hamlet would be charming. Now it’s a gauntlet. We walk under an arched clock tower on a road barely wide enough for a mule. We have not run into another person since the dog owner. But in the post-siesta part of late afternoon, we stride past three elderly women sitting on a bench in the shade. The look they give us is . . . how to describe? Not quite disgust or sympathy, but more like, well, here it is, from the mouth of one:

  “Pazzi.”

  “What did you say?” I stop in my tracks, glare, my sweat dripping on their feet.

  “Pazzi.”

  “You think we’re crazy? Non siamo pazzi. Siamo pellegrini.”

  “Ah, pellegrini. A Roma?”

  “Sì, sì.”

  “Bravo, signore! Brava, signorina!”

  Now they couldn’t be nicer, answering our questions about how far it is to overnight accommodations: another five kilometers to the lake and a hotel.

  Lake, hotel—a thought-bubble carrot for incentive to carry on. A few blocks later, when I sit and remove my boot and sock, what I see is a shock: a bloody mess of skin, gauze, blood, and pus. My makeshift medical dressing has slipped and is mangled together, exposing fresh skin, and causing blistered skin to bleed. I strip it off and wash my toes under a public fountain, one of the relief valves of the Via Francigena.

  “I’m done,” I tell Sophie.

  “No!”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t go any farther.”

  She brightens. “Uber!” God bless millennials.

  Would that violate the pilgrim spirit? I’m sure there’s an app for enlightenment, but I still think you should have to earn it. My goal has been to follow the entirety of the Via Francigena, but not by any single conveyance. So long as I stay on the ground, tracing Sigeric’s route to Rome. I imagine, after a long day in the year 990, that if a fresh horse came along, and Sigeric was just few kilometers shy of an inn, he would hop on.

  I power up my phone, see that I’ve got two bars, and go to the Uber app. The little radar circles and searches, circles and searches. There is nothing nearby. The closest car is Milan, or thereabouts—a hundred kilometers away. We’re stuck. Sophie has another idea. She searches her phone, tells me to wait, wait, wait. She finds a farmacia on Google Maps, about fifteen minutes away.

  “Hold on, Dad. I’ll go fast.”

  She returns with Euro-power ibuprofen, 500 milligrams a pop, antiseptic, fresh gauze, blister lubricant, tape, and a bottle of barbera from a second stop along the way. Her act of kindness nearly brings me to tears as I limp toward our destination.

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  LAKE VIVERONE IS A PANE of Piemonte freshwater, sailboats at anchor in the foreground, mountains in the distance. Immersing for a swim, just at sunset, is a baptism all over again. The hotel is old-school, the kind of meals-and-a-bed place favored by German pensioners. And in fact, it’s packed with Germans of a certain age, who waited until the less-crowded month of September to go on holiday. At dinner outside the waiter opens time in a bottle, our barbera from a winery a few miles away. We eat four kinds of bruschetta, pork in a pesto sauce, lake trout in a butter cream (common in this dairy-loving part of the north), and a mountainous plate of grilled squash topped with pine nuts.

  I have a question about the dog that went after Sophie: Was that little act of aggression predestined, and known by God, per Augustine’s view? Well, yes, by logic and extension of his argument. As an omniscient being, God knew the dog would nip at Sophie’s heels. O.K. Fine. Predestined and known by God. Though not an act of evil, it certainly wasn’t a good thing for the vagabondo to go after Sophie. What if the scratch had been deep, and the dog had some disease? She suffered, albeit mildly, for what reason? There was no free will involved. The attacking dog was no fault of her own. She didn’t make the wrong choice. She made no choice at all. She was a victim of a random small cruelty known by God. Augustine asserts that God is blameless for evil because evil is a consequence of human choice. But Sophie was not presented with options. My sister-in-law’s cancer is not punishment for doing the wrong thing. The millions of indigenous people who fell to the disease of foreigners invading their homeland did not select one fork in the road of free will, and face genocidal carnage for doing so. The philosophy of shit happens cannot, then, hold God blameless, if he sees it all unspooling in advance.

  And in other abominations where free will is not involved—the black plagues of medieval Europe, the body tortures of typhus or AIDS, the slow-motion erasure of the memory of love through Alzheimer’s—what moral equation is at work there? Augustine would argue that illness and accidents are all tests on the way to salvation. Some make it through. Many do not. “Oh, Lord, you teach us by inflicting pain,” he wrote. God allows evil to exist because good comes from it. I find this argument unsettling and not very convincing, but that’s been the explanation since the old theologian went to his grave in the year 430, leaving behind volumes of ruminations, which scholars of the faith have whittled into truths.

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  WE RISE IN DARKNESS. First light over Lake Viverone is worth an early wake-up. As the sun touches the evaporating mist off the still water, we’re the only people at the breakfast buffet. I soooooo want to walk today. Movement is a pilgrim’s oxygen. It takes me almost thirty minutes, with Sophie’s help, to dress the toes on my right foot. She winces when I wince, backing off with the tape application because she doesn’t want to hurt me.

  “Your feet are gross.”

  “That’s not helpful.”

  What good is a master’s degree in public health if you can’t improve the health of one member of the public? When she’s done, I shoulder my pack and try to move forward. I take a few steps, but it’s painful. To hike the nine miles to Santhià would be risking infection. The hotel has a driver for hire.

  Santhià is named for Saint Agatha, another of the virgin martyrs of the faith, who died sometime in the mid-third century. Like the miller’s daughter from Ivrea, she put up a fight when harassed by a sexual tormentor. Agatha was from Sicily, a gorgeous and well-spoken woman by mythic lore, and a Christian just before the Empire adopted the religion as its own. The Roman governor had his eye on her. When she resisted his advances, he ordered her imprisoned in a brothel—ostensibly, for the crime of being Christian. There, she continued to fight off predators. This infuriated the spurned governor. He had her tortured; his method of cruelty was specific to his initial intentions: both of Agatha’s breasts were cut off. Badly wounded, she was thrown in prison and left to die. In her cell, an apparition appeared. Her wounds were made whole, her breasts returned. This further angered the governor. He had her stretched out on the rack and prodded with burning metal hooks. Still, she would not die. He ordered that she be rolled naked over hot coals. That’s what finally killed her—getting grilled alive. Agatha is held in such prominence that her name is in the Eucharistic prayer of the Mass, the centerpiece of Catholic ritual. She’s one of the seven most prominent women in the church canon, the patron saint of breast cancer survivors and victims of sexual assault.

  In Santhià, inside the church named for Agatha, is a frescoed apse that tells her story.
It’s a thousand-year-old church in an otherwise forgettable town, and I have to go in. I’m enthralled by Agatha, as represented in the illustrated narrative over the altar. Agatha is a #MeToo saint, one of the first to the cause, more than seventeen hundred years ago. If you want to pray to her, you are told to say these words: “Help heal all those who are survivors of sexual assault, and protect those who are in danger.” When Sophie asks what’s inside, I tell her it’s one of the better tributes to the tortured.

  Santhià has train service, a sleepy local line. Also, they love the V.F. Along the route are life-sized cutouts of the yellow-robed pilgrim with his bindle and staff. People stop and ask if we want our pictures taken. Restaurants offer pellegrino specials. A man in the doorway of a forno beckons us inside to try the day’s baked treats. We order two pieces of focaccia topped with tomatoes for lunch on the train. The baker insists we try something he calls pane con farina di canapa. Neither of us has heard of it. Canapa? He ducks under the counter and fetches a jar of the canapa pesto used on the bread: the label is a marijuana leaf. After putting up minimal resistance, we each try a sample.

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  PAVIA IS A REVELATION. I didn’t know what to expect. A university town, set on the banks of the Ticino just before it flows into the Po, it presents the rarest of sights in an Italian town: young people. Residents are aging in place throughout Italy, a nation with one of the lowest birthrates in the world, and one that keeps breaking records in its bend toward depopulation. Nearly one in four citizens is older than sixty-five. And with its broken economy, it’s no place for people just out of college. Pavia defies the trend. It’s medieval and modern, solemn and talkative, a hive of Italy’s tomorrow. We duck into the University of Pavia for iced coffee in the shade of stone first stacked to frame studious purpose in 1361. The open-air corridors, the tight courtyards, the library with a large globe from the sixteenth century showing a vague nothingness in the part of North America where I live. Who wouldn’t be inclined to knuckle under to Dante in such a setting? After asking around, we check into a hotel off the main piazza.