Sinning Across Spain
Page 6
Moclín is a village of about four hundred people. Mid-afternoon on a sweltering April day, there was not a soul to be seen. The square was empty, save for a lone dog stretched on a shaded flagstone by the closed shop. Heavy shutters on all the houses kept the sun out and any signs of life locked in.
It was a big town in the fourteenth century, before the Catholics conquered it in 1486. At least that’s what the lady in the ayuntamiento (town hall) said as she stamped my credencial and congratulated me on my achievement. On day one, I had walked more than thirty kilometres. I had climbed over two hundred metres in the last two kilometres from Los Olivares. Moclín lay at over a thousand metres altitude, she told me as she laughed and touched my cheeks. No wonder they were tomato red. She also said the albergue was closed—not enough pilgrims.
No pasa nada. No worries. There is a hostal.
As I shouldered my mochila for the last time that day, her parting words were ‘Usted es un caracol!’ You are a snail!
I squinted my way through the glare of whitewashed houses, checked in and began my wind down. Day’s end on the camino is a ritual. Everyone does it differently but most do something like this.
On arrival, present your credencial. Once confirmed as the real deal, the credencial is stamped with a sello, and you are given access to the refugio kingdom. My sello from Moclín showed a detailed woodcut-like image of the castle in crimson ink. Its delicacy contrasted with the stark red outline of Santiago’s cross from the nuns in Granada, already a lifetime away.
Next, remove your pack.
Shedding ten kilos in an instant is orgasmic. Stand tall, feeling the spine realign, the head float free and the sweat-soaked back cool. Bend forward—ouch!—and remove boots. Leave them by the door, for obvious reasons. You can return later to douse the insoles with peppermint and ti-tree oils.
Most importantly, find a bed.
Top bunk is my preference, so I can lie with my feet up a wall, stretching, if the snoring from other pilgrims gets too loud. Near a window is a coup. Not too close to toilets, but with an eye to possible navigation difficulties in the dark.
Unpack soap and miniature towel, and head for the showers. A eureka moment ensues if water is hot and plentiful. If not, no matter. Washing hair and body is the ultimate reward for walking.
Apply moisturiser, liniment or olive oil as necessary. Step into clean clothes and sandals or the ubiquitous Crocs. Enjoy a moment of feeling human before heading for the troughs to wash the day’s clothes. Attempt to feel fond connection with female ancestors who beat laundry on rocks. I think of my grandmother at her copper, steam billowing around her as a fire underneath kept the water close to boiling. Relish the sweet smells, and if you’re an Aussie, revel in the absence of water restrictions. Hang clothes in sunshine on the nearest available space, using safety pins or pegs.
Every day. Wash and wear takes on a whole new meaning.
Then comes a moment of choice. What to do? Forage for food in a café or supermercado; have a coffee or beer; write in a journal; engage with others; seek a quiet corner; stretch; massage aches; treat blisters; lie prone; explore the town; find a church or an internet café; write postcards; pore over the guidebook for the road ahead; cook your dinner in the albergue kitchen, if there is one; do nothing …
Whatever combination of these activities is undertaken, most albergues insist on lights out by ten. The Spanish keep late hours but camino towns often provide an early pilgrim menu—salad, main and dessert, with bread, water and wine—for about seven to twelve euros, all delivered without ceremony so the peregrinos can get into their sleeping bags on time.
In the Moclín hostal I had sheets, blankets and privacy. Back into the pilgrim routine as though I’d never left it, I sluiced the day’s dust, hung my washing to dry in the blistering late-afternoon heat and exhaled. The moment of choice.
My calves were throbbing and there was a journal to be filled, but a fortress waited above and the señora at the ayuntamiento had said it dated from the twelfth century when the Nasrid kings of the Alhambra built their strongholds. For those masters of light, water and mystery, I could manage another climb.
I hauled myself up a stone path, singing fragments of Bob Dylan’s ‘Forever Young’. Watching where my throbbing feet fell. Forever young …
Gripping a handrail as my thighs screamed for mercy. Forever young …
Protecting the jelly that was left of my knees. Forever young ...
It’s a favourite walking song, but I’d last heard it less than a fortnight before at Sue’s funeral, my brother’s shoulders shaking as it closed the service. With my breath rasping and eyes blurring, it hit me afresh that Sue of the honey-hair and perennial suntan would never age. She had loved that song, even though she didn’t believe in the god Bob prayed to in its first line. The irony of it as her farewell hit me hard as I climbed. I arrived at a church door, only to find it closed, and irony hit me harder.
I climbed on.
Gusts of cold air swirled as I reached the top. In spite of chirruping birds and commanding views in all directions, the place was a graveyard. Sections of wall, like skeletons, crumbled across the hillside. Dust to dust.
Nature had taken over, grass vanquishing stone. Thistles grew in what was once a courtyard. Pink flowers sprang from the remnants of a lookout tower.
It was like wandering through a painting by a European master, one of those symbol-laden meditations on lost realms. Or a palimpsesto—a favourite word, learned in my second Spanish class when I inherited a textbook from another student and was writing responses over the indents of his previously completed homework. The definition of palimpsest, the equivalent word in English, is:
A manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.
Much of Spain is a palimpsesto, layers of story and life crowding on top of each other in a country that has been imagined and re-imagined, conquered and re-conquered.
The Moors of Moclín managed to hold off the Christians when the Catholic kings ordered an assault in 1485. My brochure told me one thousand infantry and horsemen stood their ground that day, but the following year, the Moors surrendered after another attack.
I looked back, trying to locate my road, but it was only one of many ant-trails. Mountains, villages, watchtowers, hermitages, fields, forests, nearby rooftops and far-off freeways laid themselves out before me. The panorama was endless in the clear light of day’s end.
And those olives. They were like precision battalions, stretching to the horizon. Millions of them, waiting to march.
All was still and silent. It must have been terrifying for the Moclín locals as they watched the armies of Castilian Christians advancing for hours.
Los Reyes Católicos. The Catholic kings.
I was to become familiar with the phrase in the coming weeks. Ferdinand and Isabella were aggressive warlords or unifying innovators, depending on the tale being told. In truth, they were probably like all of us: both saint and sinner. Rather like Santiago himself with his dual incarnations of pilgrim and Moor-slayer. Santiago Matamoros, St James the Moor-slayer, is a knight in armour, actively engaged in lancing and beheading Moors. Was it not a sin if a saint killed in God’s name?
An eagle’s shadow passed over me and the wind whistled a dirge.
Maybe there was blood under the dollhouse roofs of Los Olivares. Dig into those oft-ploughed olive groves and there may be layers of bones of the past fertilising the present. The Romans, the Crusades, the Inquisition, Franco …
Walking the land revealed layers of self, too. Already, at the end of day one, my own history was uncovering. Past selves were emerging through the surface of the present self. The hiker from Australian trails. The sister wanting to do the crying. The actor wanting to inhabit the skin of others.
Palimpsesto.
As the sun set behind the olive-quilted hilltops, I opened my crimson journal in search of the list of sins, wanting to recite them to the air since I couldn’t light a candle in the church. Instead, the book fell open at a poem.
Another layer.
Sent to me by a playwright I met on the Camino Francés, it’s by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of my first rote-learned poem where the wind blew all day long. This time he was writing about France, but it might have been penned for that ruin at Moclín:
We travelled in the print of olden wars;
Yet all the land was green;
And love we found, and peace,
Where fire and war had been.
They pass and smile, the children of the sword—
No more the sword they wield;
And O, how deep the corn
Along the battlefield!
8
Sin Sin
That night, to our mutual amazement, I met another walker at the Moclín café. Children of the pueblo played chasey around our table, while their parents traded stories at the bar and we tucked into roast chicken, potatoes and salad. I wondered about gluttony as I dipped bread into olive oil and sipped vino blanco, but after the day’s mileage I decided it was fuel and not felony.
My fellow pilgrim was German, with a shiny bald head, grey eyes and a clipped white beard. He was certainly over sixty, but I thought it unlikely he had reached seventy. His English, his Spanish and his manners were formal, products of his time and his education. He was a veteran of several caminos and a theologian.
Herr Theologie.
As a young man, he studied under Joseph Ratzinger, the man we know as Pope Benedict XVI. What luck for a pilgrim walking with sin!
Spain. Miracles and portents.
Our conversation was all walking: the condition of our feet, the quality of our guidebooks, and our anticipated arrival in Santiago. He said, in his courtly phrasing, that he hoped we might ‘make some agreeable days’. I said I preferred to walk alone and have conversation at day’s end, but we agreed to begin day two together. I tucked into bed at 9.30, the sky just darkening outside. Sleep came instantly.
Next morning, Moclín was hushed and shrouded in fog as we tiptoed up the main street, our calf muscles reminding us of the previous day’s climb. As we descended from the town, gold light bathed the valley and picked out Moorish watchtowers on nearby hilltops.
Due to the floods of the preceding weeks, much of the track had been washed away, but where it was intact, it exploded with new life. Grass grew high and lush on the narrow shoulder of busy roadways, so even asphalt walking was made tolerable. Herr Theologie covered kilometres with a long springy step. Like many Europeans, he’d spent his life hiking and skiing in serious mountains. Warmed by sun and pace, we were removing outer layers and congratulating each other by nine—just before getting hopelessly lost in a rutted olive plantation on a vicious slope.
Up, down and around we went. Guidebooks proved useless, and eventually, after half an hour of panting and retracing steps, it was the frenzied pointing of a man on a tractor that directed us back to the camino.
‘This was not the path,’ Herr T gasped. ‘Of course, we should have rested on the road.’
I seethed. I wanted to snap at Herr T to use the verb ‘stay’ instead of ‘rest’. I wanted to blame someone, anyone, for the disaster, and he was near to hand.
Disaster?
Well, the ‘one who can’ had failed. Company distracted me, making me lose the way, so company created failure.
Crazy thinking. Irrational and emotional. We both had maps. We were both grown-ups. Never mind that I’d been lost twice the previous day when alone. This time my failure was public, thus intolerable.
Hello again, pride. How thoughtful that you’ve brought anger along with you.
I trudged under a black cloud of resentment as we passed green swathes of farmland and communal lavadoras, the traditional village washing troughs where women still gather to scrub and chat. They weren’t out that morning. The wind was too chill.
Eventually we stopped in the pueblo of Ermita Nueva to rest. We’d walked sixteen kilometres in just over three hours. More like eighteen, if we counted the half-hour of scrambling through olives. A good pace. Cracking, for many.
So why was I agitated? It was a manageable 26-kilometre day.
We located a stone bench out of the wind, removed our boots, nibbled on my apples and Herr T’s cheese and watched locals emerging to greet the proprietor of a travelling shop. The pueblo was too small to have a supermarket, so the inhabitants supplemented their home-grown produce from a van that did a circuit of the countryside.
A group gathered. Heads nodded, hands waved, jaws dropped. Women jockeyed for position, turning from one friend to another to comment, and then back to the vendor for confirmation.
Spanish pueblos are rarely more than fifty kilometres from each other, which is nothing by Australian rural standards, but in Spain, such distances can seem sizeable. Whenever I arrived in a pueblo, I was aware of bringing news from the previous place or the wider world. Television and internet were never going to replace the pleasure of stories from the horse’s mouth.
The van’s owner winked, placing his finger to his lips as he handed over a parcel. He gave stories with small change, connecting the village dots. Women who had strained to walk up the hill, bent double or limping, straightened as they closed in on the action, weaving and dodging to get close to the source. Energy crackled.
Gossip.
The trade of soap powder and scandal made me reflect on how closely I’d guarded the sins I was carrying. I wished I’d always treated information that way. It’s so easy to enjoy the moment of telling, whether good or bad news. When we are given information about someone, we have the goods. By passing on that information, we demonstrate our power and confer a little of it on the recipient. We’re trading kudos, buying cachet by reducing a person to a commodity. We spend a little of one life to purchase a piece of another.
Often it’s impossible to differentiate between news and gossip. ‘Current affairs’ has taken on a whole new meaning. I recalled the people reading magazines in the Barcelona airport, sampling the travails of the famous folk we know by their first names, whose perfect lives are often revealed to be less than the perfection they seem in pictures.
Is that part of it, too? A need to reassure ourselves that our ordinary lives are not so different from the larger-than-life charmed existences we read about. I wondered if that was the temptation for my sinner-gossip, to feel that daily life was less ordinary. And where could the sin be in that?
Presumably, in the reduction of a human being to something as marketable as a designer watch. Like the tins of tuna being unloaded from the van, anyone can become a product, with a good or bad brand. And we can be wrong about anyone, even those we know well, as my other sinner’s confession to envy of my ‘perfect’ life demonstrated.
I shivered. The wind, a-blowing all day long, was piercing my T-shirt, and my first coffee was still ten kilometres away.
We hoisted our packs onto our shoulders. The ladies of the pueblo waved.
‘Ellas tienen hambre,’ Herr Theologie remarked. ‘Oh, I apologise, my dear. I forget. English, not Spanish … They hunger. For company.’
‘Yes,’ I said, facing away as I adjusted my pack.
‘It is normal. The natural thing is for a person to want his own kind.’
I resolved to give myself over to the natural thing, and so we set off together between blossom trees and low stone walls, single file on narrow sections, pairing up as the road widened. We avoided barking dogs and greeted those with wagging tails. We spoke a mash of English and Spanish. He was curious about A
ustralia. He knew of its ‘excellent walking’ and would have liked to visit, but it was ‘so very far’.
I asked about his studies. My time in Rome had hardened me against Pope Benedict, but his student went to great pains to tell me that, once upon a time, il Papa was not so ‘conservative’. He had been a free thinker and an inspiring mentor. Provocativo. Herr T also spoke of his own vocación, of the continuing call to serve God, and described life at the university where he worked.
We were less than an hour from day’s end in the town of Alcalá la Real. I decided it was probably time to own up to my reason for making the walk.
I told him about my curiosity about faith and the idea of walking for others, about gathering the sins, and all the while he nodded, saying, ‘Yes, of course, I see, I see.’
But clearly he didn’t.
Every time I mentioned the sins in my mochila, his brow would furrow.
‘But it is not without,’ he said. ‘Your pack is full.’
I apologised, explaining I was speaking metaphorically. Yes, my mochila was indeed full of my walking necessities, but conceptually, I was carrying a load of sin.
Several times we came to versions of this stumbling block and the conversation tripped itself up. Finally, I decided I had to be impolite.
‘Do you know what sin means?’ Ridiculous question to ask of a theologian.
‘Sin? Yes, of course,’ he said.
‘So can you understand that I am carrying the sins of other people?’
‘No. No, this I cannot understand,’ he said. ‘How can you carry without?’
Now he made no sense to me.
‘Carry without?’
‘Yes. Of course. Sin. Without.’
Finally, the nub!
His English had let him down on the most basic word of a theologian’s toolkit. He was translating the word ‘sin’ into Spanish, where ‘sin’ means ‘without’!
Through our entire conversation, he had assumed I was carrying ‘without’. Did he think I was embarked on a Zen exercise about emptiness?