Sinning Across Spain

by Ailsa Piper

  Pilgrim alert two!

  I explained that I wasn’t a fluent Spanish-speaker, so he fell into step beside me and we began a conversation at foreigner pace.

  My amigo had a treasure—one of the tubers. Scooter-man had shown him where to search for them and he’d found a beauty. It was wrapped in a tissue and secreted in his vest pocket. For later. Wink. Nudge.

  His age could have been anywhere from late twenties to late forties. He smiled so readily it was impossible to tell. He had a brown birthmark on his right cheekbone and black curls framed his surprisingly blue eyes. He worked in the financial sector, but the economic crisis had upended his world and he was giving himself six months to reassess his priorities. As part of that, he was walking the camino. He was delighted at the prospect of company and, in spite of my reservations, we walked together through flowering paths into El Carrascalejo …

  And out again …

  At a wayside cross honouring Santiago, we met the turbaned peregrino. My amigo whispered that he was a moro—a Moor. He was sitting on the base of the cross and smiled when I greeted him. A cautious smile. I’d have liked to ask what made him walk a Christian pilgrim trail, but I recognised his reticence to chat. He carried all he needed so he could sleep in the fields; the ‘drum’ was his tent.

  We left him there. Perhaps he would make camp under the cross.

  It was then, on the downhill into our destination, Aljucén, that my amigo confessed it was he who had made the image of the skull and shell. He thought it amusing that I’d been frightened, quoting a favourite poet, Antonio Machado:

  Late, corazón … No todo

  se lo ha tragado la tierra …

  Beat, heart … Not everything

  has been swallowed by the earth …

  My amigo told me the words were from a poem that had been written after the death of Machado’s wife. They took me to my brother. Blunt and emphatic, they were like the skull my amigo had placed so precisely within his etching of a shell. It was a physical depiction of what I sometimes felt: that death was right in the centre of the camino.

  But there was no time for philosophy. My amigo’s phone rang. The woman who ran the Aljucén bathhouse was on the line. Would my amigo still like to keep his massage appointment?

  Aljucén is a pueblo of two hundred and fifty people. There are two bars, a church and a refugio for pilgrims. How could they possibly sustain a Roman bathhouse? Apparently, it operates as a casa rural, or what we call a B&B. Aljucén was a popular weekend get-away for the burghers of Mérida.

  It was lunchtime. The pueblo dozed. When the bathhouse owner said pilgrims could take the waters for five euros, all hesitation vanished. There followed an hour of plunging from icy water into steaming water, with a tepid bath to restore equilibrium. Those Romans had life sorted.

  My amigo appeared, so we averted eyes and folded tissue towels around ourselves as we moved through the silence from one pool to another. My bruises made an impressive abstract of purples and browns, but I figured the water could only help and my feet loved me like never before. Oil burners flickered. The watery soundscape was soporific.

  Eventually I hauled myself out and dried off. There, waiting for me at the entrance, was my lemon-smelling amigo. We wound our way up deserted streets to the three-bedroom, twelve-bed albergue. Basic but clean, it was run by the same people who owned the baths. Yellow arrows, a Santiago cross, and a shell or three decorated the exterior. Chairs and tables filled the concrete back garden and sitting on them were pilgrims.

  A Spaniard. Lean, fortyish and smoking.

  Two Italian men. The white-haired Capitano talked like a bullet train, detailing how much rain he had walked through in the two hundred kilometres from Seville, oblivious to the fact that the others had sloshed through the same rain. His friend, il Soldato, listened in silence, a smile lifting one corner of his mouth. It would be difficult to surprise that old soldier, my amigo said.

  The albergue world was instantly familiar, and just as I’d done on the Camino Francés, I offered foot rubs to the others after the day’s chores were done. My amigo’s hand shot up. As I massaged, I reminisced with the Italians about a hermitage albergue we all knew at San Nicolas on the Francés. Each night, for the blessed few who get to sleep there, the Italian volunteers who run the refuge perform an extraordinary ritual.

  Pilgrims sit in a semi-circle on a candle-lit altar as prayers are read aloud, wishing everyone a camino of humility, the Contrary Virtue to pride. A metal pan is placed at the feet of each pilgrim in turn. One volunteer bathes the feet, one dries, and when it is done, a kiss is planted on each arch.

  I’d been seated at the end of the semi-circle and by the time my turn came tears were falling. Only days before, when I’d had to stop with knee problems in Burgos, I’d visited the cathedral, where I’d seen a painting depicting a Magdalene of lush beauty with long curls hanging in ringlets around her naked body. As my feet were bathed, I thought of Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet with her tears then drying them with her hair, and understood the grace of her action as never before.

  After that ritual, I offered foot massages daily. It seemed a small thing in return for the safe lodging, kindness and knowledge that was gifted to me along the way. It was also a privilege to feel the surrender of bodies that were working so hard in service of the spirit; to feel skin on skin, communication without words. If my amigo’s reaction was anything to go by, I would be rubbing feet all along the Via!

  A German couple arrived later, when socks, jocks and a pair of women’s knickers were drying on the lines. He was wiry and jovial. She was silent and weary. They moved in with me and we accommodated each other, despite having not a word of shared language.

  The smoking Spaniard asked if I was English, and when I said no, he said he knew it because English girls have no teeth! He called me guapa, a word I came to regard with mixed emotions. It’s used for men and women, and can mean ‘handsome’ or ‘pretty’ or ‘sexy’, depending on the tone. I hated it from Señor Smoker, blew hot and cold when my amigo used it, and adored it from the Barcelona boys. Perhaps it was a good indicator for my feelings about someone.

  My amigo produced the tuber. They were called ‘criadillas de tierra’. We cut into it and nibbled it raw: earth, mushroom and nut flavours. Señor Smoker said they were an aphrodisiac and winked. There was a lot of laughing and nodding. Later I learned that criadilla translates as ‘testicle’. No wonder a blonde woman nibbling on it was hilarious!

  Up at the church, opened for us by the caretaker in the last rays of light, six baby Jesuses played in six cribs, and a life-size crucified Christ lay encased in glass. Señor Smoker demanded to be photographed delivering a sermon from the altar and then again as Jesus on the cross. I wanted wilderness and a garden of olives.

  Back at the albergue, a mother cat had moved her kittens to my top bunk. I scooped them up and found another nest for them, then made up my bed. For our ten-euro tariff, we were given a sheet, pillowcase and towel made of the same tissue fabric I’d encountered at the bathhouse. Having seen bedbug bites on the Francés, I was grateful for every barrier.

  I rolled out my sleeping bag, found my earplugs, arranged my belongings for a quick escape in the morning, and by 9.15 I was tucked into my top bunk writing my journal, marvelling at how far I had come from the Parador.

  The Italians chatted in the next room. Or at least, il Capitano did. Before going to bed, the old soldier had told me he was looking forward to the coming walk through Extremadura, because he’d loved the silence of the meseta. Il Capitano went a bit mad out there, he said. Pazzo.

  Señor Smoker and the Germans headed for the nearest bar. My amigo was relocating kittens, after the mother cat had resettled them deep inside his sleeping bag.

  Day one of the Via de la Plata. And now we were seven.

  Six too many, I wrote. Selfish pilgrim.

 
Selfish.

  The first entry for it in my thesaurus is egocentric. It continues with egotistic, egomaniacal, self-centred, self-absorbed. Then it segues to inconsiderate, thoughtless, uncharitable. It really gets up some steam with mean, miserly, grasping, acquisitive, opportunistic.

  I remembered my first response to the word, back in Rome.

  Selfishness. Selfish. Self-ish.

  If we say something is yellowish, we mean it’s a version of yellow. If we say a person is tallish, we mean they are ‘kind of tall’. Did selfish imply that a person is only a version of their true self?

  A Swiss student of English once asked me about colloquialisms. She was baffled by our use of ‘fourish’ and ‘sixish’. What was this ‘ish’?

  I said it means ‘roughly’. Like when we say we’ll meet for dinner ‘at eight-ish’.

  She tilted her head and thought for a moment.

  Then she replied, ‘We don’t have this “ish” in Switzerland.’

  Maybe that’s a good thing. A land with no ‘ish’.

  My amigo popped his head in to check if we might set out together next day.

  ‘Depende,’ I answered. I didn’t want to push my luck.

  ‘No pasa nada,’ he said, full-force smile at maximum wattage. No worries. ‘Hasta mañana.’

  See you tomorrow.

  16

  TentacIÓn

  In dense, headily perfumed fog, my phone rang. Barcelona calling.

  I have an amigo, I told Leonardo and Ricardo. He is here with me.

  Good, they said. Now you will be safe.

  Every day they ring, I told my amigo. I said they were llenos de fe—full of faith—because I didn’t know the Spanish for faithful.

  Yes, I was in company. When I crept into the kitchen area of the albergue, snores thundering on all sides, my amigo was waiting for me, grin in place.

  It was my mother’s birthday. Had she lived, she’d have been seventy-three. I’d wanted to spend a solitary day remembering her and Sue. Not to be.

  We loaded our packs with extra water because it was twenty kilometres to the next settlement. Visibility was almost zero as we picked our way along what we hoped was the path. As the fog lifted, I discovered why the perfume was so potent. We’d been walking between banks of rock roses—jaras—and wild lavender.

  My amigo taught me new words.

  Pájaros carpinteros. Carpenter birds. Woodpeckers!

  They tapped furiously on the cork trees—the alcornoques. I repeated that word as I walked. Alcornoque. Alcornoque. Like percussion. My amigo cautioned me against singing my song in public because the Spanish also translate alcornoque as ‘idiot’. ‘Bruto como el alcornoque,’ they say. As stupid as the cork tree. I felt sorry for the maligned alcornoques. Our yellow arrows were painted on their trunks, and they proved totally reliable.

  We played the Spanish version of a favourite childhood game, I Spy!

  Veo veo. I see. I see.

  Que ves? What do you see?

  Veo una cosita. I see a little thing.

  Que cosita ves? What little thing do you see?

  Veo una cosita que comienza con … I see a little thing that begins with …

  Little things. Walking triggers pleasure in things like language and rhyme. Poems don’t have to be grown-up and games don’t have to be complex, because landscape fills in the gaps. My amigo spent a good twenty minutes trying to guess my cosita that started with C. When I told him the answer was cielo, he protested.

  ‘The sky is not a little thing,’ he said.

  And he was right. Not out there. Not that day.

  The fog was gone. Mystery had been replaced by white light and true blue. Bells rang out from nearby sheep and cows. Distant hills called us on and the fields were a carpet of wildflowers sprouting from Extremadura’s red earth.

  Extremadura could be translated as ‘extremely hard’ but it gave me ‘extremely sweet’ walking along picturesque paths, which were made even more memorable by the fact that we had them to ourselves. Just two pilgrims, bright sun and a dirt track.

  We stopped after fifteen kilometres at a wayside memorial to a boy who, according to the story, was eaten by a wolf while on his way to a fiesta for St John the Baptist.

  El Cruz del Niño Muerto, the guide said. The cross of the dead boy. I pictured my postcard John the Baptist, with only his red robe to protect him from wolves.

  When I told my amigo it would have been my mother’s birthday, he offered me licorice, saying it was his younger brother’s favourite treat.

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Muerto,’ he said. ‘Suicidio.’ Suicide.

  He looked away to the hills, but his voice remained steady. He told me he had found his brother after a bullet ripped off the top of his head. My amigo said he could still see the traces of tears on the cheeks of his brother when he arrived, too late. And he still asked the same question, ten years later.

  ‘Fue este un pecado?’ Was this a sin?

  I watched his back as he chewed his licorice. The sun went behind a cloud.

  ‘This was no sin,’ I said. No pecado.

  He turned to look at me.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This was war.’

  I shook my head, thinking I had misunderstood. He continued.

  ‘Una guerra con desesperación.’ A war with despair.

  He said it was good to remember his brother, there in the sun.

  And my mother. And my sister-in-law.

  ‘To remember is to love,’ he said, and for a second the smile slipped.

  I thought of my sinner who had experienced decades of regret for not intervening to save his friend. I wanted to tell my amigo that failing to rescue this brother was not a sin either, but I’m not sure he’d have believed me.

  The day got hotter. We walked faster.

  The higher the temperature, the happier I walk. On through Alcuéscar where, in a refugio run by a religious order, pilgrims are offered food and Mass with their bed. It was tempting to stay in the cool, to sit with those kind men, but the day was a religious experience of another kind and I was going on.

  My amigo came too.

  We walked apart so as not to trample each other’s songs. He played air guitar to Latina rock while I danced with my walking poles to Joni Mitchell. Eagles soared and storks hunted tadpoles in puddles. We picnicked by the road, eating bread, cheese and dried figs, and harvesting a side dish of wild asparagus.

  I learned the word for soul. Alma.

  I’d been taught it before, but sitting with my back pressed against warm stone, collecting salad from the earth, it lodged. That’s a language class.

  We stepped in time down a Roman road, across a Roman bridge, the distance measured by Roman distance markers, milarios. We clicked photos of each other, and when I looked at them, I saw faces lit with laughter. There was no trace of the grumpy peregrina who didn’t want company.

  After almost thirty-eight kilometres and a full day together, our conversation was of fidelidad. Fidelity.

  Yes, I was married. Yes, I was faithful. Yes, it was sometimes challenging to be apart. Yes, I feel desire for others. Yes, I take the vows seriously.

  Good questions to answer, in the light of such a day.

  Separations have always been part of my marriage and have never seemed odd to me, or to my husband. Some people are dubious about how it works. Have we remained faithful? Do we suspect each other of infidelity? In every language, my answer would be the same: I trust him. My world is built around that trust. Equally, I’ve never given him reason to doubt me.

  Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. That’s what Rainer Maria Rilke has to say on the subject of love.

  I’m with Rainer!

  My amigo and I walked straight into a wedding in Al
dea del Cano. Squeezing to the back row through lace and satin, we listened to vows of eternal love and fidelidad. A small girl hoiked her red party dress over her head and danced. We dragged our sweaty bodies to the six-bed albergue.

  The Italians were waiting on the front step, showered and fresh, and wondering what had taken us so long. Decades older than us, they walked thirty or forty kilometres per day. Easy, they said. Forza Italia!

  Inside, a bare-chested Nederlander smoked and upended a bottle of red. With him was a tall German woman sporting a shaved head. She pointed me to a double room off the kitchen, where she had the top bunk and the Italians had claimed the lower one for me. I removed my boots, rummaged for soap, and slipped through to the shower as Mijnheer Holland opened another bottle.

  My roommate was resting when I returned. She’d been walking for eight weeks and was over it, she said. She was gay and found Spanish men confronting. They were not spiritual, she said. They watch too much TV, they are too noisy, too social and eat the wrong foods. In Germany, she said, she could close the door and get away from people. She just wanted to be alone.

  I heard myself say, ‘Why are you here, then? That is the camino.’

  Take your own advice, peregrina australiana.

  I offered to rub her feet, her shoulders, but no, she said, she did not like to be touched. But thank you. She rolled over and faced the wall, her feet dangling off the end of her bunk.

  At the bar, the entire village watched football as we ate dinner. A full house of kids, families and visitors played cards, smoked, argued and laughed.

  How not to love it? How not to feel happy when every chair is yours, every face is welcoming, every answer is yes. Sí, sí, sí. Even Mijnheer Holland couldn’t get our waitress offside. She smiled and joked, never wilting under ‘too many people’. I ate my salad, drank my wine, cheered for a team, and contributed stories in pidgin Eurospeak.

  In the middle of the night, I had another visceral Spanish lesson, as I scanned my memory bank for the verb ‘to snore’.