by David Lodge
I wasn’t sure how serious she was. When I asked her if she believed St James was really buried in Santiago, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know. We’ll never know for sure, one way or the other.” I said, “Doesn’t it bother you that millions of people may have been coming here for centuries all because of a misprint?” I was showing off a bit of knowledge gleaned from one of my guidebooks: apparently the original association of St James with Spain all goes back to a scribe who wrote mistakenly that the Apostle’s patch was “Hispaniam” instead of “Hierusalem” (i.e., Jerusalem.) “No,” she said. “I think he’s around the place somewhere. With so many people walking to Santiago to pay him homage, he could hardly stay away, could he?” But there was a twinkle in her eye as she spoke of these things, as if it were a private joke or tease, designed to scandalize Protestant sceptics like me.
There was nothing frivolous about her commitment to the pilgrimage, however “It’s absurd, quite absurd,” I remembered Bede saying, but the word had a Kierkegaardian resonance for me which he didn’t intend. In the mediaeval town of Villafranca there’s a church dedicated to St James with a porch known as the Puerta del Perdón, the Doorway of Pardon, and according to tradition if a pilgrim was ill and made it as far as this door, he could turn back and go home with all the graces and blessings of a fully completed pilgrimage. I pointed out this loophole to Maureen when we got to Villafranca, and pressed her to take advantage of it. She laughed at first, but became quite annoyed when I persisted. After that I never attempted to dissuade her from trying to get to Santiago.
To tell the truth, I would have been almost as disappointed as Maureen herself if she had failed to make it. The pilgrimage, even in the bastardized, motorized form in which I was doing it, had begun to lay its spell upon me. I sensed, if only fragmentarily, what Maureen had experienced more deeply and intensely in the course of her long march from Le Puy. “You seem to drop out of time. You pay no attention to the news. The images you see on television in bars and cafés, of politicians and car bombs and bicycle races, don’t hold your attention for more than a few seconds. All that matters are the basics: feeding yourself, not getting dehydrated, healing your blisters, getting to the next stopping-place before it gets too hot, or too cold, or too wet. Surviving. At first you think you’ll go mad with loneliness and fatigue, but after a while you resent the presence of other people, you would rather walk on your own, be alone with your own thoughts, and the pain in your feet.”
“You wish I wasn’t here, then?” I said.
“Oh no, I was almost at the end of my tether when you turned up, Tubby. I’d never have got this far without you.”
I frowned, like Ryan Giggs when he’s made a goal with a perfect cross. But Maureen wiped the frown off my face when she added, “It was like a miracle. St James again.”
In due course she talked about the death of Damien, and how it had led to her making the pilgrimage. “It’s a terrible thing when a child dies before its parents. It seems against nature. You can’t help thinking of all the things he will never experience, like marriage, having children, grandchildren. Fortunately I think Damien knew love. That’s a consolation. He had a girlfriend in Africa, she worked for the same organization. She looked very nice in photographs. She wrote us a beautiful letter after he was killed. I hope they had sex. I should think they would have done, wouldn’t you?”
I said yes, undoubtedly.
“When he was a student at Cambridge he brought a girl home once, not the same one, and he asked if they could sleep together in his room. I said no, not in my house. But I would’ve let him, if I’d known how short his life was going to be.”
I said she mustn’t blame herself for actions that were perfectly reasonable at the time.
“Oh, I don’t blame myself,” she said. “It’s Bede who does that, though he denies it. He thinks he should have tried harder to persuade Damien not to make his career in relief work. Damien did VSO, you see, after graduating. He was going to go back to Cambridge afterwards and do a PhD. But he decided to stay in Africa. He loved the people. He loved the work. He had a full life, a very intense life, though it was short. And he did a lot of good. I kept telling myself that, after he was killed. It didn’t help Bede, though. He became terribly depressed. When he retired he just moped around the house all day, staring into space. I couldn’t stand it. I decided I had to get away somewhere on my own. I read an article about the pilgrimage in a magazine, and it seemed just what I needed. Something quite challenging and clearly defined, something that would occupy your whole self, body and soul, for two or three months. I read a book about the history of it, and was completely fascinated. Literally millions of pilgrims went along this road, when the only way of doing it was on foot or on horseback. They must have got something tremendous out of it, I thought to myself, or people wouldn’t have kept on going. I got myself a guide to the route from the Confraternity of St James, and a rucksack and sleeping-bag and the rest of the kit from the camping shop in Wimbledon High Street. The family thought I was mad, of course, and tried to talk me out of it. Other people presumed I was doing it as a sponsored walk for charity. I said, no, I’ve done things for others all my life, this is for me. I’ve been a nurse, I’m a Samaritan, I’m –”
“Are you really?” I interjected. “A Samaritan? Bede didn’t mention it.”
“Bede never really approved,” said Maureen. “He thought all that misery would leak out of the phone and infect me.”
“I bet you’re good at it,” I said.
“Well, I’ve only lost one client in six years,” she said. “I mean, only one actually topped himself. Not a bad record. Mind you, I found I was less sympathetic after Damien was killed. I didn’t have the same patience with some of the callers, their problems seemed so much more trivial than mine. Do you know what our busiest day of the year is?”
“Christmas Day?”
“No, Christmas is second. Number one is St Valentine’s Day. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
In our slow, looping dawdle along the Camino we were frequently overtaken by younger, fitter, or fresher walkers. The nearer we got to Santiago, the more of them there were. The annual climax of the pilgrimage, the feast of St James on 25th July, was only a couple of weeks away, and everybody was anxious to get there in good time. Sometimes, from a high point on the road, you could look down on the Camino ribboning for miles ahead, with pilgrims in ones and twos and larger clusters strung out along it like beads as far as the horizon, just as it must have looked in the Middle Ages.
At Cebrero we ran into a British television unit making a documentary about the pilgrimage. They were ambushing pilgrims outside the little church and asking them about their motives. Maureen refused point-blank to take part. The director, a big blond chap in shorts and tee-shirt, tried to persuade her to change her mind. “We desperately need an older woman who speaks English,” he said. “We’re up to here in young Spaniards and Belgian cyclists. You’d be perfect.” “No thank you,” Maureen said. “I don’t want to be on television.” The director looked hurt: people in the media can never understand that the rest of the world doesn’t have the same priorities as themselves. He turned to me as a second-best alternative. “I’m not a true pilgrim,” I said.
“Ah! Who is a true pilgrim?” he said, his eyes lighting up.
“Someone for whom it’s an existential act of self-definition,” I said. “A leap into the absurd, in Kierkegaard’s sense. I mean, what could be –”
“Stop!” cried the director “Don’t say any more. I want to film this. Go and get David, Linda,” he added to a freckled, sandy-haired young woman clutching a clipboard. David, it appeared, was the writer-presenter of the programme, but he couldn’t be found. “He’s probably sulking because he had to actually walk a bit this morning,” muttered the director, who was also confusingly called David. “I’ll have to do the interview myself.”
So they set up the camera, and after the usual delay while the director decided w
here to set up the shot, and the cameraman and his focus-puller fiddled about with lenses and filters and reflectors, and the sound man was satisfied about the level of background noise, and the production assistant had stopped people walking in and out of shot behind me, I delivered my existentialist interpretation of the pilgrimage to camera. (Maureen by this time had got bored and wandered off to look at the church.) I described the three stages in personal development according to Kierkegaard – the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious – and suggested that there were three corresponding types of pilgrim. (I had been thinking about this on the road.) The aesthetic type was mainly concerned with having a good time, enjoying the picturesque and cultural pleasures of the Camino. The ethical type saw the pilgrimage as essentially a test of stamina and self-discipline. He (or she) had a strict notion of what was correct pilgrim behaviour (no staying in hotels, for instance) and was very competitive with others on the road. The true pilgrim was the religious pilgrim, religious in the Kierkegaardian sense. To Kierkegaard, Christianity was “absurd”: if it were entirely rational, there would be no merit in believing it. The whole point was that you chose to believe without rational compulsion – you made a leap into the void and in the process chose yourself. Walking a thousand miles to the shrine of Santiago without knowing whether there was anybody actually buried there was such a leap. The aesthetic pilgrim didn’t pretend to be a true pilgrim. The ethical pilgrim was always worrying whether he was a true pilgrim. The true pilgrim just did it.
“Cut! Great. Thanks very much,” said the director. “Get him to sign a release, Linda.”
Linda smiled at me, with pen poised over her clip board. “You’ll get twenty-five pounds if we use it,” she said “What’s your name, please?”
“Laurence Passmore,” I said.
The sound man looked up sharply from his equipment. “Not Tubby Passmore?” I nodded, he slapped his thigh. “I knew I’d seen you somewhere before. It was in the Heartland canteen, a couple of years ago. Hey, David!” he called to the director, who was walking away in search of another victim, “Guess who this is – Tubby Passmore, the writer. The People Next Door.” He turned back to me: “Great show, I never miss it when I’m at home.”
The director turned round slowly. “Oh no,” he said, and mimed shooting himself in the head with his forefinger. “So you were just taking the piss?” He laughed ruefully. “We really fell for it.”
“I wasn’t taking the piss,” I said. But I don’t think he believed me.
The days passed in a slow, regular rhythm. We rose early, so that Maureen could set off in the cool of the early morning. She usually arrived at our rendezvous around noon. After a long, leisurely Spanish lunch we retired for a siesta and slept through the heat of the afternoon, coming to life again in the evening, when we would take the air with the natives, snacking in tapas bars and sampling the local vino. I can’t describe how at ease I felt in Maureen’s company, how quickly we seemed to resume our old familiarity. Although we talked a lot, we were often content to be together in a companionable silence, as if we were enjoying the sunset years of a long happy life together. Other people certainly assumed we were a married couple, or at least a couple; and the hotel staff always looked mildly surprised that we were occupying separate rooms.
One night, after she had been talking at some length about Damien, apparently in good spirits, even laughing as she recalled some childish misadventure he had had, I heard her weeping in the room next to mine, through the thin partition wall of the no-star hotel where we were staying. I tapped on her door and, finding it unlocked, went in. A street-lamp outside the window shed a dim illumination into the room through the curtains. Maureen was a humped shape that stirred and rearranged itself on the bed against one wall. “Is that you, Tubby?” she said.
“I thought I heard you crying,” I said. I groped my way across the room, stumbled over a chair beside the bed, and sat down on it. “Are you alright?”
“It was talking about Damien,” she said. “I keep thinking I’ve got over it, and then I find I haven’t.” She began to cry again. I felt for her hand and held it. She squeezed it gratefully.
“I could hug you, if that would help,” I said.
“No, I’m alright,” she said.
“I’d like to. I’d like to very much,” I said.
“I don’t think it would be a good idea, Tubby.”
“I’m not suggesting we do anything else,” I said. “Just a cuddle. It’ll help you go to sleep.”
I lay down beside her on the bed, outside the blanket and sheet, and put my arm round her waist. She turned over on to her side, with her back to me, and I curled myself around her soft ample bottom. She stopped crying, and her breathing became regular. We both fell asleep.
I woke, I didn’t know how many hours later. The night air had grown cool, and my feet were chilled. I sat up and rubbed them. Maureen stirred. “What is it?” she said.
“Nothing. Just a bit cold. Can I come under the bedclothes?”
She didn’t say no, so I lifted the sheet and blanket and snuggled up to her. She was wearing a thin, sleeveless cotton nightgown. A pleasant warm odour, like the smell of fresh-baked bread, rose from her body. Not surprisingly, I had an erection.
“I think perhaps you’d better go back to your own bed,” Maureen said.
“Why?”
“You might get a nasty shock if you stay here,” she said.
“What do you mean?” She was lying on her back and I was massaging her stomach very gently through her nightgown with my finger-tips – it was something Sally liked me to do when she was pregnant. My head was pillowed on one of Maureen’s big round breasts. Very slowly, holding my breath, I moved my hand up to cup the other one, just as I had done all those years ago, in the damp dark basement area of 94 Treglowan Road.
But it wasn’t there.
“I did warn you,” Maureen said.
It was a shock, of course, like climbing the stairs in the dark and finding there is one step fewer than you expected. I pulled my hand away in a reflex action, but put it back again almost immediately on the plateau of skin and bone. I could trace the erratic line of a scar, like the diagram of a constellation, through the thin fabric of the nightgown.
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“Yes you do,” she said.
“No I don’t,” I said, and I unbuttoned the front of her nightdress and kissed the puckered flesh where her breast had been.
“Oh Tubby,” she said, “that’s the nicest thing anybody ever did to me.
“Would you like to make love?” I said.
“No.”
“Bede will never know.” I seemed to hear the echo of another conversation from the past.
“It wouldn’t be right,” she said. “Not on a pilgrimage.”
I said I took her point, kissed her, and got out of the bed. She sat up, put her arms round me and kissed me again, very warmly on the lips. “Thanks Tubby, you’re a darling,” she said.
I went back to my room and lay awake for some time. I won’t say that the problems and disappointments of my life seemed trivial beside Maureen’s, but they certainly seemed smaller. Not only had she lost a beloved son – she had lost a breast, the part of a woman’s body which defines her sexual identity perhaps more obviously than any other. And although Maureen herself would certainly have said that the former loss was the greater, it was the latter which affected me more, perhaps because I had never known Damien, but I had known that breast, known it and loved it – and written about it. My memoir had turned into an elegy.
I walked the whole of the last stage of the pilgrimage with Maureen. I put a few overnight things in her rucksack, and we shared carrying it. I left the car in Labacolla, a hamlet about twelve kilometres outside Santiago, near the airport, where the pilgrims of old used to wash themselves in preparation for their arrival at the shrine. The name literally means, “wash your bottom”, and the bottoms of the mediaeval pilgrims probably needed a
good scrub by the time they got there.
It was a warm, sunny morning. The first part of the route was through a wood and across some fields with pleasant open country to our left and the grumble of traffic from the main road to our right. Then we came to a village, at the far end of which is the Monte del Gozo, the “Mount of Joy”, where pilgrims get their first view of Santiago. In olden times there used to be a race to the top, amongst each group, to be the first to see the long-desired goal. It’s a bit of an anticlimax nowadays, because the hill has been almost entirely covered with a huge amphitheatre, and from this distance Santiago looks like any other modern city, ringed by motorways, industrial estates and tower blocks. If you look very hard, or have very good eyes, you can just make out the spires of the Cathedral.
Nevertheless, I was very glad I walked into Santiago. I was able to share something of Maureen’s excitement and elation as she reached the finishing line of her marathon; I even felt a modicum of excitement and elation myself. You notice much more on foot than you do in a car, and the slowness of walking itself creates a kind of dramatic tension, delaying the consummation of your journey. Trudging through the ugly modern outskirts of the city only heightens the pleasure and relief of reaching its beautiful old heart, with its crooked, shady streets, odd angles and irregular rooflines. You turn a corner and there, suddenly, you are, in the immense Plaza del Obradoiro, looking up at the twin spires of the great Cathedral.
We arrived on the 24th July, and Santiago was bursting at the seams. The four-day fiiesta was already in progress, with marching bands, huge walking effigies on stilts, and itinerant musicians roving through the streets and squares. The pukka pilgrims like Maureen were swamped by hundreds and thousands of visitors, both secular tourists and pious Catholics, who had arrived by plane or train or bus or car. We were told the crowds were particularly big because it was a Holy Year, when the feast of St James falls on a Sunday, and the blessings and indulgences attached to the shrine are especially potent. I suggested to Maureen that we ought to see about getting accommodation without delay, but she was impatient to visit the Cathedral. I indulged her. It seemed unlikely that we would find anywhere to stay in the old town anyway, and I was resigned to going back to Labacolla for the night.