Sinning Across Spain

by Ailsa Piper

  Her computer tinged and she checked it. Sure enough there was mail for me. Three more ‘sinners’. One nominated sloth, saying she didn’t walk enough. Two others, both of them walkers whose energy I was grateful to have winging my way, separately nominated selfishness.

  I stared at the word.

  Selfishness. Selfish. Self-ish.

  How exactly was it a sin? Did it give hurt? Was it a species of Deadly, or more common-or-garden? I knew I’d committed it frequently, but had no idea how to categorise it.

  The word swirled. I could make no sense of it.

  ‘You’re just nervous,’ Susan said.

  ‘I’m not ready,’ I heard myself say. ‘I feel like I’m in that actor’s nightmare where I’m being forced to go onstage with no script and no rehearsal.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your costume. Just improvise.’

  5

  Coincidences

  I first saw Leonardo and Ricardo when I stood behind them at the check-in counter in Rome, eavesdropping and trying to decide if they were Italian or Spanish. They were tall, lean and dark of eye and hair; model-beautiful; and both wore sweaters in shades of grey. Their bodies inclined towards each other like compass needles seeking true north. They had a pile of shrink-wrapped luggage that dwarfed my backpack as we inched forward in the queue. Leonardo wore a cream cap, and smiled when our eyes met. Ricardo, in designer stubble and gold hoop earrings, didn’t turn around.

  I was seated beside them on Flight VY6103 to Barcelona.

  At take-off, Leonardo’s breathing was shallow and rapid, and he gripped Ricardo’s arm. I found my eucalyptus oil, opened it, and the scent of Australia wafted about the cabin. I held the bottle out to him.

  ‘Respira,’ I said. Breathe.

  I was back in the goldfields, kookaburras laughing at me. Leonardo calmed.

  ‘Usted es un koala,’ I said. You are a koala.

  He wore a bracelet engraved with the name ‘Ricardo’.

  ‘Is that you?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s him.’

  Ricardo turned from the window and looked into my eyes, his features unmoving for what seemed the longest time. Then he smiled. Another world. I had passed the test.

  Leonardo and I chatted in a mix of Italian and Spanish. When I told him I was planning to walk alone across Spain, his dark eyes widened. He took my hand, leaned in to me, and whispered, ‘No sei nervosa?’

  When I admitted that yes, I was nervous, he reassured me, speaking of the heart—corazón—and of the spirit, of the miracle of nature. Your walk will be beautiful, hermoso, bello, he kept repeating, over and over like a mantra. He was as changeable as the Melbourne sky on a spring day, joking one moment and concerned the next. No te preocupes. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.

  Ricardo reached across and touched my forearm.

  ‘Mira,’ he said. Look.

  He took a plasticised holy picture from his wallet, and gave it to me. I had not held anything like it since primary school, when I’d collected such cards, each shielding me from some evil or giving me a particular strength.

  ‘He is a patron of pilgrims,’ Ricardo said in slow, deliberate Spanish.

  It was an image of a long-haired child wearing a pilgrim hat and holding the pilgrim’s gourd and staff. A scallop shell was pinned to his cloak. At his feet were pink roses, and in one hand he held a Red Riding Hood-style basket.

  Santo Niño de Atocha. The holy child of Atocha.

  ‘He is my patron,’ Ricardo said. ‘For you.’

  The Santo Niño is an incarnation of the Christ child. Legend has it that he smuggled food to Spanish prisoners of the Moors in the town of Atocha in the thirteenth century. It was a precursor to the stories that lay ahead of me in Andalucía, where Christian armies conquered the Moors after eight hundred years of co-existence.

  It was a coincidence that Ricardo should have an image of a pilgrim saint. But then ‘coincidence’ is the way of the camino.

  After less than ninety minutes, we were landing in Barcelona. Leonardo insisted I take their phone numbers.

  ‘If you need anything, cara; if anything goes wrong—nothing will go wrong, nothing—but if anything does—it is very important—muy muy importante—that someone in Spain knows where you are.’

  They waited with me for my backpack, and made me promise to text when I had a phone in Granada.

  ‘Una promesa, sí?’

  Yes. I promised.

  They kissed me farewell, hugging me like I was their own, before walking away, hand in hand. Lovers. Of each other, and of nervous pilgrims.

  My chest hurt. I’m not sure if it was envy—they were going home together to a familiar domestic life—or if it was a memory of some much earlier farewell. Because it felt like I had found them after a very long separation.

  ‘Spiritual gobbledygook,’ I murmured, as I rode the escalator to find my connecting flight for Granada. ‘They’re just two kind strangers.’

  And yet I knew such things were possible.

  My thoughts shifted to a man in South America, healing with acupuncture and reflexology. My compañero, taking his skills to the dispossessed. He makes me glad to know there are such people, and simultaneously aware of my own timidity.

  I had met him at the opening of the second act of my Camino Francés.

  Pilgrim lore says the Francés is like a traditional play, dividing into three acts.

  Act One is Basque country, from the mountains of the Pyrenees to the elegant city of Burgos. It’s said to relate to the physical: feet, terrain, weather, equipment. During this stage the pilgrim is taught lessons by the body.

  Act Two, the meseta from Burgos to León, is an open tableland that many pilgrims describe as relentless. That is the province of the mind. Some avoid it altogether, taking a train between the cities that bookend it. Others go loco on its scorching plains, with nothing but thoughts to distract them.

  The final act, up through the mountains and mists of Galicia, is said to be the realm of the spirit, where pilgrims reap the rewards of their struggles with body and mind, and may get to understand something of the thinker behind the thoughts.

  As it transpired, that was almost exactly how my Francés panned out.

  Act One was behind me when I met my compañero. It was my first day on the meseta and I was nursing my knee, fearful of the shooting pain that had forced me to stop for two days in Burgos, pain that kept reminding me to slow down. Learning to walk at snail’s pace was the lesson of my first act, but it was never going to be easy for me.

  I crested a hill and there it was—the meseta—stretching away from me, bleached and endless; dove-grey sky, sand-coloured wheat stubble, and the faint whisper of the north wind. A lone shepherd with his puffball sheep inched across the foreground, his whistles merging with the tinkle of their bells.

  I grew up in equally panoramic vistas, but was accustomed to flocks spread over miles and mustering on horseback or motorbikes. That image of the shepherd and his charges drifting across baked fields was a perfect blend of landscape and activity. Their world appeared unified and peaceful.

  The meseta holds all the beauty of solitude. One mound of earth can dance before the eyes for miles. A wild rose will thrust out of the soil and produce a bloom in defiance of all the forces of nature. Trees are twisted into mangled, sculptural shapes by the scented wind from Africa.

  Sirocco.

  What a word. I rolled it around as I walked, reminding myself that the hot winds in Spain come from the south, whereas in Australia we speak with dread of the northerlies that bring scorching heat and firestorms.

  There was no Sirocco that day. It was cool. Light rain fell. I was simultaneously in Spain and in the west of Australia, remembering the water-starved regions where I grew up, and remembering my mother. Thinking how she would have l
oved the meseta. Talking to her. Wondering if there was something left of her to hear me. Before I knew it, I was out of my body, flying through the shimmer.

  My knee jabbed, reminding me I had to stay grounded and walk like a snail if I wanted to reach Santiago. A yellow arrow pointed to a building with a domed roof and a scallop shell painted on its wall. This was San Bol, a ramshackle construction with no water, electricity or toilet. I’d been told by other pilgrims there was nothing there but ‘dirt’. Why turn in? The body would cope. Go another five kilometres at snail-rate to the next village with its multiple refugios.

  But something about the place called, so I hobbled down the road, castigating the camino gods for landing me in a place with no Chinese medicine. One acupuncture treatment, I thought, and I’d be free.

  On arrival, the room was dark, but there were candles lit and flowers on the table. A brown-eyed man leaned into the light and said he was an acupuncturist and could treat my knee if I felt comfortable with the idea.

  Comfortable? Only the coincidence was unnerving.

  He took needles from his backpack and inserted them into my head, legs and wrists. My breathing slowed as I relived the meseta walk. I sat a long time.

  My next clear memory is of the eyes of the acupuncturist as he kneeled in front of me and asked if I was ‘doing okay?’ I nodded. He stayed a while, watching me, and I remember saying I thought we’d met before. From his first appearance he’d felt familiar. I said I must have seen him on the road earlier.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’d remember.’

  That night I lay in my bunk with acupuncture seeds in my ears, listening to the breathing of other pilgrims and watching stars through a window above my healer, who spoke a full sentence aloud from his dreams. I wanted to answer, but wasn’t sure about the etiquette of holding a conversation with a sleeper.

  Next morning, though, we talked. In the half-light, we walked out to look at a sliver of moon still visible through the trees. Camino legend says the spring at San Bol has healing properties, but I’d found my own miracle-worker. My compañero. We passed his coffee mug back and forth to warm our hands, and spoke of dreams and possibilities and snails. He left before me and I remember thinking that if our paths didn’t cross down the road, it was okay, because at least I had found him again.

  Back in the Barcelona airport, I waited for my flight to Granada. Meeting Ricardo and Leonardo had braced me, and I decided it was time to commit to the sins. Make them ordinary, I told myself. Normalise them.

  So I opened my journal to the first blank page and wrote, in the terminal, on my knees and with no ceremony:

  THE SINS I CARRY

  Sloth

  Sloth is the sin of not doing. I carried several versions of it for different people, one of whom categorised his as accidie: ‘a state of restlessness and inability either to work or to pray’. My sinner wrote of his expectations of himself, and of his inadequacies; of expecting too much and falling short; and of the arrogance and stupidity in trusting that things will go well.

  Another described his sloth in terms of shallowness. He felt deep regret for action, or actions, not taken, before a friend committed suicide. Had he intervened, he wrote, might he have made a difference? The question haunted him decades later, and he included neglect, insensitivity, undue regard to what other people would think, and distraction in his confession.

  Another wrote of procrastination, a sin that is not so much about doing or not doing, but about putting off what must inevitably get done. Rather like me and the writing up of the sins!

  Another wrote a meditation on sloth as apathy:

  So many things in our lives are automatic, instant, pre-programmed, plug and play. It’s easy for us not to think; to press a button for heating or cooling, turn on the TV and turn off our brains, to buy convenience foods because it’s too effortful to cook properly.

  In food terms, people today talk about food miles—the distance between the produce and the plate. It’s generally a reference to the amount of fossil fuels used in food production and transportation, but it also has a moral dimension. It is so easy for us not to face the consequences of our purchases. You buy a hamburger—you’re not the one who has to raise or kill the animal. There is a vast distance between the eater and the producer, between the eater and the animal, and this is a fertile breeding ground for apathy, for not caring …

  It’s not all that long ago that many people raised and killed their own chickens. It was hard, bloody work, often done by women. It’s likely no one enjoyed it. But they had to do it. I think there is something of salvation in ‘having’ to do things. As someone who tends to laziness, I have often felt the pull of apathy, the seduction of easefulness.

  I pushed on, not wanting to fall victim to another sin I was carrying.

  Anger

  I had been given a lot of anger to carry, in different forms. One perplexed me:

  I still carry anger towards John Howard and Philip Ruddock for the damage they did to refugees and to Australia’s soul. I would like to know that I am funding part of your pilgrimage as an attempt to walk off some of this damage …

  Is there such a thing as justifiable anger?

  Australia’s previous prime minister and immigration minister had implemented refugee policies that I too found abhorrent. I transcribed the ‘sin’, but felt it was really a badge of honour.

  I empathised with another sinner’s wish to dip into an endless stream of comforting understanding. She had flashes of shocking anger at her aged and infirm parents, and was battling guilt about feeling resentment toward those she loved.

  There were the confessions to adultery, vengeance and white lies from my first days, and the admissions of selfishness from Rome. There was a lengthy acknowledgement of the sin of envy, mostly directed at me. The sinner had a perception that my life was lived free of fear, sadness or doubt. That ‘good things’ came to me unbidden. To me, awash in fear, it seemed the words were written about another person. It had been risky for my sinner to admit to envy, knowing it could perhaps compromise our friendship. I did notice the confession irritated me. I felt misunderstood, that assumptions had been made about me that were far from the truth as I experienced it.

  There was also a mea culpa about the sin of gossip, which amused me when I looked up to see people flicking through glossy mags, lapping up the dirt on airbrushed celebrities. No doubt many of the famous felt misunderstood, too! The sinner gave no indication of whether they enjoyed gossip, or had damaged anyone with it.

  Gluttony was the final sin, along with the admission that the sinner felt little remorse for committing it, so expected little to change. Was it sinful not to feel remorse for a sin? There was very little guilt in evidence in the airport as travellers carb-loaded or sugar-burst on pastries and chocolates before one-hour flights!

  Sinners. All around. Looking just like me.

  And in my journal, more sinners. My benefactors and co-creators.

  I studied what they’d given me, their insights into what it is to be human, and I thanked them, as they slept on the dark side of the earth. Out on the tarmac, planes taxied through a heat haze that obscured the mountains beyond. Somewhere there was the home of my knights in grey sweaters. I turned over the holy picture. Santo Niño de Atocha regarded me with steady eyes from under the plastic protective cover. A red-haired woman beside me leaned closer to inspect the card.

  ‘Es bueno,’ she said. It’s good.

  ‘Sí. Muy bueno.’ I wished I could tell her just how good.

  She patted my arm and I lost all vocabulary. She wore a chunky silver bracelet and the one charm hanging from it was a silver snail.

  Signs and portents.

  Coincidences.

  I must be in Spain.

  6

  Granada

  Granada glittered. Fruiting orange trees lined the streets. Gargoyles squint
ed at my blonde hair. Sun sparkled on the ring of mountains surrounding the city.

  The Sierra Nevada.

  They looked impossibly high and were blanketed with snow.

  Granada. The word means both ‘pomegranate’ and ‘grenade’.

  I had jobs to do. I bought a Spanish SIM card, and it didn’t work, then it did, so I panicked then relaxed. Ironically, the network I chose was called Happy.

  I texted my Barcelona angels and Leonardo phoned immediately, insisting that if I needed anything, I must call. No! Text, don’t call! Calling is caro—expensive. Just text, and Ricardo or I will call you.

  Next I needed the precious credencial, which identifies the holder as a genuine pilgrim, a peregrino. As such, we are offered assistance from police, town halls and camino associations along the path, and entry to refugios and albergues where they exist.

  At the cathedral office, where credenciales were issued, the clerk had trouble locating them. It was clearly not an everyday occurrence.

  She asked where I was starting my walk.

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘in Granada.’

  ‘Granada?’ she said, black eyes widening.

  ‘Sí,’ I said. ‘Aquí.’ Yes. Here. No doubt about it. Here.

  She shook her head, rolled her eyes, and said, ‘Madre de Dios!’

  Handing over my passport, she wished me ‘Buen camino’.

  I was a pilgrim. Hearing those two words, it felt real.

  Outside, in the orange-scented air, I inspected my treasure.

  On the cover was a woodcut of a pilgrim staff leaning against an antique wood door. A scallop shell and a gourd dangled from the staff. Inside was the crest of the Archbishop of Granada, with my details underneath it in the woman’s curlicue print. She had stamped and dated it with the Archbishop’s seal, and confirmed I was going to Santiago ‘a pie’—on foot.

  To the right of the seal was a photo of a white road cutting through green fields, overlaid by the pilgrim’s prayer to the Apóstol Santiago, with a colour photo of the apostle himself to inspire me. Or at least, a photo of a statue!