Sinning Across Spain

by Ailsa Piper

  About the author

  Ailsa Piper is a writer, director, teacher and actor. She has been nominated for Green Room Awards as both an actor and director. Her play, Small Mercies, was joint winner of the Patrick White Playwrights Award in 2001. She is director of LuminoUS, which investigates and illuminates classic texts through detailed work with actors and light. She is yet to win an award for walking.

  Sinning across Spain

  A walker’s journey from Granada to Galicia

  AILSA PIPER

  For Peter

  My true north

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1 Indulgences

  2 Doing the Crying

  3 Flying Sola

  4 Sin City

  5 Coincidences

  6 Granada

  ACT ONE

  7 Moor, Moor, Moorish

  8 Sin Sin

  9 Rehab

  10 Road Testing

  11 Córdoba

  12 Weathering Storms

  13 Peregrina Sola

  INTERVAL

  14 Mérida

  ACT TWO

  15 Pilgrims

  16 Tentación

  17 Keeping Company

  18 Making Sense

  19 A Swag of Sins

  20 Gracias a la Vida

  INTERVAL

  21 Salamanca

  ACT THREE

  22 Into the Wind

  23 The Walking Village

  24 By Heart

  25 Return to Galicia

  26 Regalos

  27 Rising

  28 Three’s Company

  29 Sunny Santiago Sunday

  CURTAIN CALLS

  After Words

  The Stuff in the Swag

  Sinners, Saints, Guardian Angels …

  Prologue

  I WILL WALK OFF YOUR SINS

  Pilgrim seeks sinners for mutually beneficial arrangement.

  Proven track record.

  Tireless. Result-oriented. Reliable.

  Seven Deadlies a specialty.

  That’s what started it.

  Words on a page.

  Less than a month later I found myself hiking through olive groves and under translucent pink blossom on a road called the Mozárabe, making my way north from the legendary Spanish city of Granada, towards the cliffs at Finisterre in the far north-west.

  Springtime in Spain.

  It wasn’t all flores and fiestas.

  One afternoon, after eight hours of incessant rain, I was trudging along a flooded dirt road in waterlogged boots and drenched khakis, feeling far from home and even farther from reason. What on earth had made me imagine I could skip across a country carrying other people’s sins on my back, let alone abstain from committing any of them myself?

  Only that morning I’d given in to the sin of anger when I tripped into a ditch. I stood ankle deep in tadpoles and shouted profanities at the drizzling sky.

  Pride fled as I knelt beside a freeway scrabbling to find my map, which had blown into a pile of mouldering rubbish.

  Lust was yet to claim me, but it was waiting, choosing its moment to transform me into a stew of heat and confusion. Thankfully, that afternoon, I was unaware it was planning an assault.

  ‘Just get on with it,’ I instructed myself, hoicking my pack higher. ‘The road won’t walk itself.’

  I kicked sloth into the Spanish sludge and sped up. One foot then the other. Eventually I had to get somewhere.

  The icy wind persisted, but the rain gradually eased to silvery mist. Sun peered through bullet-grey clouds. The path was still a quagmire, but to my right, a rainbow’s arc began to form and young corn swayed like seaweed in a warm current.

  ‘Hola, peregrina!’ I heard a voice shout. Hello, pilgrim!

  To my left was a shepherd with his flock. He waved his wooden staff to beckon me over, then watched as I navigated my way through the mud to his side. He asked how my walk had been.

  ‘Duro,’ I said. ‘Pero hermoso.’ Hard. But beautiful.

  The shepherd grinned to reveal toothless gums.

  ‘Como la vida,’ he said. Like life.

  This is the story of that hard but beautiful walk.

  1

  Indulgences

  Walking twelve hundred kilometres from Granada to Galicia with a swag full of sins was never going to be easy, but I didn’t embark on the quest lightly. Over the years, I’d hiked a variety of Australian miles, whether along bayside tracks in Melbourne, Swan River paths in Perth, harbour circuits in Sydney, inland trails through central Victoria, the Overland Track’s wilderness in Tasmania, or the desert sand of Uluru and the Larapinta.

  I’d also walked in Spain.

  Only seven months before, I had undertaken the 780-kilometre Camino Francés, a pilgrim trail that crosses Spain from east to west, finishing at the cathedral in the mediaeval city of Santiago de Compostela. It was late September. Northern autumn. The days were breezy and the skies clear. Villages were spaced along the track as evenly as beads on a Spanish matron’s rosary, and each offered the possibility of a hot café con leche, a stone seat under a shady tree, or an encounter with a local, smiling and wishing me ‘Buen camino’.

  Buen camino. Good road. Good path. Good walking.

  The Camino Francés is best known because the Catholic Church grants indulgences—forgiveness—to those who walk it for religious reasons. When I considered setting out on it, friends quizzed me about my reasons.

  ‘Is this some spiritual endurance test, with a few bedbugs for good measure?’

  ‘What is it you’re looking for? El Dorado?’

  ‘You’re not going off to find God, are you?’

  Undoubtedly, I liked the idea of time and space for reflection, coupled with physical challenge and immersion in a different culture, but the indulgence I was seeking was definitely not religious. I wanted more. More of what I access in my walking. When I hear long-time meditators talk of their experiences, they might be describing the way I feel when I walk, particularly if I’m alone and in nature.

  Empty. Peaceful.

  Finally, though, what made me embark on the Camino Francés was a poem called ‘The Summer Day’, by the American poet Mary Oliver. In it she muses on creation, prayer, death and a grasshopper, but it was the last two lines that changed my life. Mary demanded to know what I was going to do with my time on the planet. Her poem called me to walk out into the world’s wonders.

  After completing the Camino Francés, I came home to Australia knowing I was changed, but uncertain of what that meant. I longed for the fractured Esperanto that is the language of that road. I craved figs, sunflowers and dusty tracks leading ever west, but most of all I yearned for the journeys I had taken outside my body.

  I’m a fairly earthed creature, raised in rural Western Australia and shaped by loss as much as by luck. I’m sometimes sentimental, but I’m not prone to flights of fancy or hallucination. Nevertheless, something strange happened on the Francés. Daily, along the camino, a part of me hovered above myself, observing the steps, sweat and smiles, but not feeling them. Out of body, but wholly embodied. I was entirely functional, crossing busy roads, monitoring water intake, observing muscular twinges and ensuring I had plenty of nutrients by way of peaches and blackberries, but I was flying, without wings and wide awake, tracking the pilgrim-snail below.

  I told myself it was endorphins or an overdose of vino tinto, until I returned to my normal life and found myself aching to lift off to the end of that kite string, to f
ly away.

  I live in Melbourne, in the bottom right-hand corner of Australia. It’s a city of boulevards and alleys, contemporary chic and conservative ritual. It’s a UNESCO City of Literature, and the home of Aussie Rules football. It has the third-largest Greek-speaking population of any city in the world, a Chinatown that bustles day and night, and a coffee culture that was imported by our Italians. There’s even a small Spanish quarter.

  Melbourne is also where I locate my personal village.

  I have a tribe made up of all ages and creeds, a multitude of friends with mighty hearts and minds. My two sisters relocated to Melbourne from the west, and are my touchstones and cheer squad.

  Melbourne gave me my husband. I was a touring actor and he came backstage to compliment the cast. I long ago lost my urge to perform, but thankfully I have never lost him. We’ve crafted a marriage that’s a haven, encompassing our mutual need to follow distinct and sometimes separate paths. Base camp, as he calls it.

  So it wasn’t a desire to be somewhere else that unsettled me, driving me to research the history of pilgrimage. I wanted to understand what had happened as I flew above myself and perhaps, more importantly, to rationalise the connection I’d made with one particular compañero on the road.

  Compañero. One with whom you break bread.

  He had been my on-and-off companion on the Francés. We walked together effortlessly, which was odd because we were both seeking solitude. We established immediately that even if the road brought us together, we would separate if either needed space. Ironically, the freedom to part made it easier to keep company. Like my experience of marriage, time together has more value when it’s a conscious choice.

  My compañero practises Chinese medicine, working in places where other angels fear to tread. It was he who treated my body when it threatened to give out on me, and it was he who reminded me, in English and in Spanish, that there is beauty in the sedate progress of a snail. Geographical distance and cultural differences don’t lessen my conviction that he is mine. Clan and kin. When I met him on the Francés I felt we’d been reunited after a long separation. It was a home-coming. It felt fated.

  I can say that now. I wouldn’t have dared to back then, because I was still seeking logical answers to the questions posed by my flights and by our time walking together.

  In my search for answers, I trawled through accounts by long-distance walkers and mystics. I quizzed Buddhists, priests and yogis about other lives, past or parallel. I interviewed shamans and shysters. Among a pile of historical material, I found information about pilgrim traditions through the ages. None of them could explain my flying, or my conviction that my compañero was clan, but one bizarre notion struck me: the belief, in mediaeval times, that a person could be paid to carry the sins of another to Santiago, and by doing so, could absolve the ‘sinner’ from punishment. It sounded like a scam, cooked up by the church and some rich, lazy philanderers as an occupation for unemployed serfs. Nonetheless, I was intrigued.

  I found myself wondering about indulgences, hellfire and damnation. They had never featured in my thinking, though I am drawn to the idea of communal responsibility. I’ve always believed we can help each other to heal; that, when necessary, we can walk in the shoes of another. Here was a way to do it literally.

  Sin is a kick-to-the-stomach word. Hard. Two consonants separated by a thin, hungry vowel. Even though there are less challenging terms, like crime, transgression or offence, ‘sin’ persists, and not just inside churches. It’s a favourite of advertisers and comedy writers as well as preachers, because it packs a punch. Everyone reacts to it. I certainly did.

  But I was not sure I believed in it as a concept, let alone in carrying it. I was not even sure if I believed in a god. Faith eluded me.

  Research told me that the coming year was a Holy Year, meaning pilgrims arriving in Santiago de Compostela would receive what the Catholic Church called a ‘plenary indulgence’—the removal of all punishment for sins committed up to that point. A quarter of a million were expected to walk the Camino Francés, more than double the norm. Presumably only faith and the idea of absolution would make anyone choose to be part of such a pilgrim traffic jam.

  Trying to understand, I probed the differences between societal codes of behaviour and the ‘flaunting of divine authority’ that categorised a sin. Often they overlapped, but sometimes a sin was not even an action. It could be a thought or an emotion. And there was punishment for these sins, tough punishment, to be meted out in a life beyond this one. An afterlife.

  I wasn’t sure where I stood on afterlives. In spite of my Catholic education, I was more inclined to read poems than gospels, but there were many people, from different religions and cultures, who had no doubt there were second and even multiple lives, or another world beyond this.

  ‘What’s it like to believe in a hereafter with a resident rule-making parent?’ I asked anyone who would listen. ‘What’s it like to be sure?’

  I drew plenty of blanks and headshakes but the questions persisted, and I couldn’t let go of the possibility that walking, the thing I love to do, could be of service.

  I tried to be realistic. Even if it was possible to believe in walking as communal caring or of my footsteps having heavenly consequences, I’d barely returned from one gruelling walk. As much as it had been transformative, it had also involved blood, sweat, knee pain and tears, and I was in no rush to take that on again. Plus, my coffers weren’t exactly overflowing, nor was my husband doing cartwheels at the prospect of another separation hard on the heels of the Francés.

  But the fascination held. The compulsion grew.

  I woke at night, stumbling to the dictionary to clarify the difference between gluttony and greed. I sweated the subtleties of sins, misdemeanours, misdeeds and crime. I wrecked a couple of dinners by asking people to cough up sins, and I couldn’t tear myself from the theology aisles of the local library.

  As Catholic schoolgirls, we were instructed to pray for God to send us a vocation. I waited, but it never came. No insistent banging on the door of my soul.

  Until this.

  Despite that Catholic education, I hadn’t been able to hold onto faith as an adult. I recollect a sensation from childhood, when God felt like a hug from my favourite nun; like being enveloped in layers of ironed cotton that smelled of Palmolive soap. As I grew that was replaced by the prickles of rational thought and the itches of lived experience.

  ‘So what am I meant to do with this call now that it has come?’ I asked my sister. ‘Should I stand on a corner and hold up a placard? Set up a makeshift confessional?’

  She laughed, told me not to whine, and reminded me of a story my mother used to tell about me as a four-year-old.

  My little brother was inconsolable, sobbing over some calamity. I rushed to comfort him, repeating over and over, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry. Let me do the crying.’ It became a family joke.

  Now the surrogate-weeper was morphing into the sin-carrier, and eventually, after my husband urged me to ‘do what you have to do’, I gave in. I would take to another pilgrim road, one with almost no foot traffic, and approach the journey as a writing project, to give me a framework. I sold two paintings, bought in memory of my mother when she died, to pay for the air ticket, and I blanked out six weeks in my calendar. Decision made.

  But I still had no sins to carry.

  Nineteen days before leaving I sent a letter to colleagues, sponsors and friends.

  Words on a page. A bit like a poem that changes your life.

  This is what I wrote.

  I WILL WALK OFF YOUR SINS

  Pilgrim seeks sinners for mutually beneficial arrangement.

  Proven track record.

  Tireless. Result-oriented. Reliable.

  Seven Deadlies a specialty.

  I WILL WALK OFF YOUR SINS will be a monologue for performance, the first draft o
f which will be written along a 1200-kilometre pilgrim trail called the Camino Mozárabe that stretches from Granada via Córdoba and Salamanca, to Santiago de Compostela, in the north-west corner of Spain.

  The Mozárabe is a solitary road, steeped in the history of the period of co-existence and collaboration between Jews, Muslims and Christians in mediaeval Spain, and the wars that ripped the peace apart.

  My project springs from research I’ve been doing into mediaeval pilgrimage, including the curious notion that a person could be paid to carry another’s sins. Some mediaeval Christians believed that by paying someone to walk to a designated sacred place on their behalf, they could gain absolution from sin.

  I will examine the consequences of just such an undertaking as I walk the Mozárabe with the ‘sins’ of my contemporary community for company. I will explore personal and global responsibility, faith, walking and weather—but hopefully not the Spanish medical system.

  And how can you help?

  Well, I’m hoping you might consider paying for me to carry a sin. It can be on your behalf, or for the wider world. These sins will form the focus for my walk and my work. In effect, you’ll be a co-writer.

  I’ll spend Easter in Rome for the rituals, then two days in Granada at the Alhambra, before beginning to walk north to Santiago on the Camino Mozárabe. I’ve allowed a Biblical forty days to walk in the wilderness, with a day of research in Córdoba. That requires me to average thirty kilometres per day, something I know, after walking the 780-kilometre Camino Francés in northern Spain last year, is achievable if somewhat daunting—but walking off sins is not meant to be a picnic!

  I draw the line at mortal sins. My shoulders and psyche can’t carry violence or brutality. I’m interested in behavioural sins, sins of omission or violations of a moral code. And of course, consider the Seven Deadlies: anger, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony.

  In terms of payment, please evaluate what you think your sin is worth: its weight to the pilgrim; the benefit in having it erased; the benefit of focusing on it for forty days. Think of it as buying indulgences.