The priest at Carrión de los Condes blessed every pilgrim individually, which, with the numbers in the thousands, was a staggering commitment, but people were immensely grateful and he was famous along the Camino for the love and kindness in his eyes.
One evening, I heard a strange sound in a hedge. It was a litter of four starving kittens, hungry and cold, cheeping like baby birds. A woman nearby, who spoke better Spanish than I did, stopped a passing car to ask if the owners of the house knew about the kittens. He was young, pissed and smoking a spliff.
– No, the guy said. It’s a holiday home. The mother cat’s gone, the kittens’ll die.
He scooped them up in an old shirt and put them on the back seat of his car.
– I can’t look after them. I’ve already got four cats. But I’ll look after them.
He drove off.
– And he will, said the woman, you could see it in his face.
If you’re the kind of man who doesn’t like women mentioning periods, you should skip this paragraph. If you’re a woman who has walked the Camino, though, you will understand exactly the situation. Getting my period was bad enough, because although about two hundred thousand people walk the Camino every year, there are almost no toilets on the path itself, unless you’re passing through a town. Worse, the Camino seems to make women’s menstruation impossibly heavy: several women told me they had had the equivalent of two periods in one go – one person I met on the Camino had been hospitalized because her blood loss had been so great. For myself, I couldn’t physically walk further.
I stumbled into a hostel, where a young, tough-looking German guy looked at me with something close to contempt for my physical weakness. (I wish that had been the last time I would meet him, but it wasn’t to be.) The following day, I took a train for thirty minutes into León, found somewhere to stay and spent an entire day not doing anything much. Except crying. Tediously, endlessly, hopelessly, boringly. That was when I dug my antidepressants out of my bag and started taking them again. I simply couldn’t have carried on. The self-pity, for starters, was killing me, and self-pity isn’t even funny. I hadn’t heard a good joke in weeks, and couldn’t come up with one. Then I met one.
I ran into a bogus monk. He was Hungarian and said he belonged to an order called the Brotherhood of Mother Teresa. He was obsessive about which supermarkets had the cheapest food and was always trying to get food and lodgings for free. He was completely incurious about anyone else and seemed entirely unconcerned with any spiritual aspect of the Camino. He complained about sleeping in the dormitories ‘with people snoring and –’ he broke off and made farting sounds with his lips: ‘And doing pee-pee. I don’t like it.’ He piqued my curiosity, because I was fairly sure he was not for real. One day, we happened to check into a hostel at the same time. He told me he had had a massage the previous night – which, on the Camino, was not necessarily the monkish impropriety it might seem, and many hostels offer massages to pilgrims. But then he leant towards me, lowered his voice and said suggestively: ‘And then I gave two ladies a massage. Hey?’
His English was pretty good, but when I asked him why he had wanted to become a monk, he didn’t know the word. ‘What is this word “monk”?’ Learning any new language, one learns early the vocabulary for one’s own job or vocation. That he knew ‘massage’ and not ‘monk’ said it all. Two young Czech women had clocked him by instinct alone.
– Weird man. Fake-monk, said one, shaking her head.
– Look at his eyes. Whoooeer.
Their light-hearted grimaces made me giggle for the first time on the Camino, and I was sorry that they were walking so much faster than me and I probably wouldn’t ever catch up with them. Later, I met a young English guy who had an infinitely foilable plan to become a monk. He said the Hungarian was fake and he knew why: he could tell from the way the Hungarian wore the cords around his waist.
– He didn’t tie his knots properly.
The English guy, incidentally, went on to meet a woman on the Camino, fell in love and instantly revoked all his monkish plans. (Bless.)
By this point, I was two thirds through the journey. I’d gone back to baccy, beer and pills and was phoning my friends fairly regularly. One friend of mine decided to come and meet me in Santiago, my longed-for destination. For the first time on the Camino, I felt a real, if momentary, sense of happiness.
I spent a night in the hostel run by the English confraternity of St James at Rabanal del Camino. They organized afternoon tea for the pilgrims and checked everyone for bedbugs. It seemed to be the only hostel that deliberately woke everyone up in the morning and got them out of bed (by playing Vivaldi at full volume). It was also the only hostel to have worked out how not to run out of toilet paper. It was nannying, good-hearted, bossy and hilarious.
At that hostel, I met a young English guy, a student at Cambridge, while we washed our socks at the laundry sinks. He was, he said, trying to learn to be happy.
– How do you do that? I asked: I really, really want to know. I’ve been a bit crap at being happy recently.
His answers were those of a sweet teenage sage.
– Just four things, he said: Live in the present moment. Have no expectations. And accept yourself and others, accept all your feelings. Feel gratitude for everything which happens.
I thought I was rubbish at all of those things.
– Do you ever read poetry? I asked.
– I’d love to, but I’m an engineer. I’m not allowed to, if you know what I mean.
I gave him the poem I’d read the previous day, Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’, perfect for our conversation in this guest house and also for its subject of acceptance:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
• • •
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
As I walked, I began to feel that at least I would be able to finish the Camino; and I was desperate to meet my friend in Santiago. I also felt for the first time that it was not such a stupid idea to do this walk, after all; to have tried to leave illness behind, to undertake a poem-strewn practice of parting, to break the hold of depression’s paralysis. I was also getting physically stronger each day and, thinking back to the beginning of the walk, I was amazed at the difference.
For several days, I walked with a seven-foot truck driver from Denmark who wore fluorescent pink and green clothes and piled pipe-cleaners in her bright blonde hair. She was a walking anti-depressant and seemed a total stranger to sadness. I gave her a poem by ee cummings, one which splashes its infinite blessing for the stout joy of the green world and, to my shock, she broke down in tears for its beauty and told me some of the secret stories of her heart. A friend of mine had given me Rumi’s ‘The Force of Friendship’, which includes the lines ‘Anyone who feeds on majesty/becomes eloquent,’ and I gave her that poem, too, because she walked in majesty and talked in majesty and, even when she wept, she wept in majesty.
I tried to learn from the splendour of her strength. Her energy was infectious and vitalizing; her spirit was stupendous. But she was running out of time and had to break off the Camino and go home to her children. I walked on alone, missing her sorely but holding to what I’d felt in the dawns we had seen together, each day’s sun a giant apple, slowly ripening over the day.
But nothing comes simple and I knew I was still far from well. It disappointed me bitterly to know that my idea had not worked, that even walking across Spain I could not outpace depression, I could not outwalk it. ‘The meaning is in the waiting,’ writes R. S. Thomas, and I had to hold on to someone else’s wisdom with a patience which is not naturally mine.
Depression still hung in shadows, it gurned in my solitude, it waylaid me if anything difficult happened. And, of
course, something difficult did happen. I had a horrible moment when a group of pilgrims had deliberately pushed me out of their way to get into a crowded hostel with a limited number of beds. I was disproportionately upset and tried to get my place back in the queue. The contemptuous young German man I had met before was there. He had seen me move ahead but had not seen the group jostle me out of the way. Suddenly, he sheered round on me, screaming and berserk.
– I know you, I’ve seen you on the Camino, I saw you nearly faint on two different days, there is no way, no fucking way, you have walked this, he said.
His face was six inches from mine, livid with a self-righteous hatred and snarling with the particular contempt that strong people can feel for the weak or weakened.
– I know you haven’t done this on your own. I’ve seen you crawl.
At this point he started shrieking.
– You must have fucking cheated, you must have caught fucking buses and trains and taxis and FUCK knows what else . . .
I was trembling but furious, and determined to stand my ground. I hate being bullied.
– Who are you, the Camino fucking Gestapo? I wanted to say but didn’t. I dredged up a residue of grace.
– Yes, I caught a train for thirty minutes on one day. And yes, I’ve been ill. And yes, apart from that one day, I have walked every step of the Camino. And I wish you a buen Camino.
And then I walked away, but I was shaking uncontrollably. I went into a café, and the barman gave me a cigarette and a glass of water and asked if he could help. I couldn’t eat. I could only walk, sick, trembling, angry and frightened that I would re-meet the German guy, because one of the features of the Camino is that one re-meets many people along the way. I walked till late that evening, bought and smoked a packet of cigarettes, rested a few hours and began walking again at 3 a.m. In twenty-four hours, I walked thirty-six kilometres, almost all of it overnight, to outwalk him, to get a day ahead. When I walked in the dark I had often seen shooting stars and, during the small hours of that night, I saw seventeen of them and made seventeen wishes (all for the same thing).
In the morning, to my absolute delight, I re-met the two young Czech women who’d made me giggle. They were sitting at a café having a late breakfast, high on coffee and sunshine and croissants. There was something about their simple, straightforward appetite for life which I adored: an appetite for language, beer, people, knowledge, food and ice cream – always ice cream.
I told them about the screaming German.
– What a wanker, one said, bluntly.
– Walk with us. We missed you, we were just talking about you, we were hoping we’d see you again, walk with us.
So all the last few days of the Camino I spent with them, eating, drinking and making merry. They were enjoying their Camino as much as I wasn’t. They were as unwilling to reach Santiago as I was keen, but since they could walk about twice as fast as I could, their unwillingness slowed them down to the speed of my willingness and it was an ideal pace for us all. We slept out one night, and I read them lines from St Francis of Assisi’s ‘Canticle of the Creatures’, addressed to ‘Brother Sun . . . Sister Moon . . . Sister Water and Brother Fire, through whom You light the night; and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong’. As they were themselves.
We fell in with a French-Canadian social worker, and the three of them decided to take off their boots and walk barefoot the last six kilometres. They asked me if I’d do the same, and the idea made me laugh out loud. The Camino had forced me to my limit, and burning my feet on boiling tarmac in a Spanish heatwave was just not part of my plan.
Bagpipes played us in to Santiago and we got lost fifty metres before the cathedral. When we finally found it, we went together to the Pilgrim’s Mass, watched the vast censer swing, and said goodbye. I was sorry to see them go, but their plan was to walk on to Finisterre, and mine was to get drunk with my friend. When I saw her at the airport, I cried with gratitude and relief and all I could say for an hour and a half was ‘Thank fuck it’s over.’ The ordeal had been endured; all my stumbling, exhausted, aghast month was done.
We spent five days talking, eating, drinking, smoking and sleeping.
– We’re surrounded, she said at one point, by unemployed angels.
I desperately wanted to go home: everything in me was yearning for my Ithaca, my cottage, my own patch of garden, my friends, my cats, my woodstove. But I had promised to go to Australia for my book’s publication.
I remember little of the trip, except conversations with a few writers and, most importantly, one of my editors, kind and erudite, who saw how fragile I was. Mostly, though, I stayed in bed in my hotel room, getting out only to do talks or for specific interviews or meetings. It seemed a terrible waste of a trip, but I was keening with nostalgia, the aching longing for home. As far from home as it is possible to be, I was horribly homesick. I called the trip short and changed my flights so I could go home sooner. But, in the meantime, it was only in Australia, at that enormous geographical distance from the Camino, that I really began to get a sense of perspective on what ‘pilgrimage’ really means.
Pilgrimage is an ancient form of travelling for healing, when ‘travelling’ kept its etymological roots of ‘travail’ – it is a suffering cure. It is an ordeal to be endured. Perhaps this seems counterintuitive, for illness craves comfort, ease, tranquillity and gentleness, while pilgrimage shoves you into hardship and struggle. Yet to have survived an ordeal makes one feel strong. The relief which comes when the journey is over is more precious for the difficulties of the road, as drinking saltwater makes sweetwater more craved.
There is an automatic lift in the spirits when a difficult time is over, and it reminded me of that kids’ game of standing in a doorway, pressing your hands outwards against the door posts for a minute, then walking away and feeling your hands rise on their own. So my spirits seemed to lift of their own accord once I’d finished the punishing pilgrimage. Day after day, I had driven myself onwards, weighed down with a rucksack full of psychological rocks, carrying almost more than I could bear and then, suddenly, in a blink, I could put it down and the lightness streamed through me, weightless in sunlight and I – Heidi.
There is more, though, in the relationship between Path and Pilgrim. The harder I had found walking the Camino, the more I had to mirror it in myself, forced to find rocks of determination to counter the stony paths. I had to become the path, so when it led uphill in a gruelling ascent, I needed to find an equally steep tangent rising within me. In 36-degree heat, I had to match the burning sun on the burning road with my own fire. My obdurate perseverance had to be as relentless as the hours and days trudging through the meseta.
The path is laid within us – while we are also inlaid into the path. All the pilgrims who have ever walked the Camino have created it of themselves; our feet have made the paths, our hands have touched the rocks, our boots have carved the holloways deeper into the earth. How much does the pilgrim make the path and the path the pilgrim? It’s like Flann O’Brien’s story of the postman and his bicycle, which over the years swap molecules in the friction of their journeying. How much of the bicycle is made of postman, or the postman made of bicycle?
A pilgrimage is also curative in creating a pause in one’s life, a hiatus, a time when one is exempt from one’s own familiar days. It offers an alibi-time, breaking patterns and habits. It gives sickness a chance either to slink away or be held in remission or abeyance. It is a temenos, a sacred space, not in place but in time, a set-aside time in which the ordinary is suspended and each day is a holy-day.
On a pilgrimage, the Way heals and so does the Destination. But where exactly is the destination? They say it is Santiago or Finisterre but, for me, my deepest destination was home. I was in Australia when I fully realized this, right on the other side of the world. My homesickness was not created by the distance so much as symbolized by it.
We are, all of us, on the ‘Hero’s Journey’, in the term popular
ized by mythologist Joseph Campbell. It is an ancient story and a universal one, a public myth and an individual narrative. The hero – he or she – must both leave and return and, sometimes, the homecoming is more important than the leaving. I had ‘left’ myself, psychologically, in a terrible withdrawal from sanity, and then I’d physically withdrawn to walk the Camino, so I needed to return, to come home to myself in all senses.
I flew back, stopping a night with my nephews, and found that my Camino was to be book-ended by them when the elder one said he wanted to spend a few days with me. So we returned to my house together. He delights me with the clarity and fierceness of his insight, the gentleness of his nature and the depth of his soul. Having him to stay is like having a dolphin in the house. Because I’d come home earlier than planned, no one was expecting me and I had no commitments or obligations. They were days of grace.
And, in these days of grace, I finally began to know that my month-long walking prayer had been answered; the Camino reconstituted me, but it was only afterwards that I could really feel it.
People who were made to learn poetry at school often speak of how, although they might have resented it at the time, sometimes, many years later, it yields its garlands of flowers. After I’d finished the Camino, the poems I had taken with me were flowering ever more abundantly inside me, my own personal anthology never so beautiful. (An ‘anthology’ is, etymologically, a garland of flowers.)
One friend of mine had given me Rumi’s ‘In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo: In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad’. It hints at the sweetest wisdom:
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