Sinning Across Spain

by Ailsa Piper

  That’s it. Roncar.

  It came to me as the ronc-ing from the other room reached a shattering crescendo. I had a feeling it was Dutch-accented.

  No matter. I lay in the darkness, thinking how Mum and Sue would have loved my amigo, the Italians and the crowd in the bar. They were both party girls and would have been in their element. They’d have approved of me living a full day rather than walking in solemn solitude.

  Next morning I got away in darkness, before anyone surfaced. It was Anzac Day in Australia, when we remember those who served in wartime. It was also the day I’d suggested to my supporters they might like to walk with me in solidarity. As the sun rose, my husband phoned—a rare treat. He had driven through a locust plague as big as the area of Spain. It sounded Biblical, nightmarish. He sounded so familiar, so close. Surely he was only in the next pueblo, waiting with coffee?

  But no. The next pueblo was at the end of an eleven-kilometre broadcast of wishes. I imagined myself as an antenna, transmitting at full intensity to my co-walkers and sinners. I recited John Donne’s meditation:

  No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee …

  I remembered how an earthquake shook Chile only a month before I left home. Waves had travelled to Australia at speeds up to seven hundred kilometres per hour. Our days are now shorter by 1.26 microseconds as a result of the planets shifting. We are all connected.

  Leonardo called, as if to verify that.

  ‘Tutti famiglia,’ he said. ‘Todos familia.’

  ‘All family,’ I agreed. In all languages.

  At Valdesalor, with toes freed, I did my morning reading of the sin list as I breakfasted on toast and tomato in a service station on the N-630. Weekend travellers gulped their first hit of caffeine. They looked bleary of eye and vulnerable, smelling of vanilla and coconut, their hair still damp and clothes still pressed. Maybe they were en route to pueblos to attend church with their families, or to lunch and loll.

  I stared into space, letting my mind drift to my husband in his locust-encrusted car, and my sinners who would be coming to the end of their Sundays. It was rare to have the opportunity to dream. Usually I was firmly present, my mind on the next footfall. But here it was, not yet ten—obscenely early by Spanish standards—and I had only twelve kilometres to Cáceres, where I planned to luxuriate in a hermit afternoon. I was spoiled rotten.

  The doors burst open and il Capitano arrived, il Soldato bringing up the rear with badly infected blisters. They mainlined coffee while il Capitano pulled out maps, print outs and phone numbers. If they took a taxi, they could go to the emergency department, the foot could be rested for the afternoon, and they could still walk tomorrow and be on schedule. It was molto importante to stay on schedule. They were a two-man army on the move.

  My amigo arrived. He was looking forward to reaching Cáceres, a city he didn’t know. Another World Heritage site, he informed me, it was founded at the same time as Mérida. As well as Roman relics, it boasted a perfectly preserved mediaeval centre. It also had a thriving Jewish community until 1492.

  That year, Boabdil surrendered to the Catholic kings on 2 January, and on 31 March they ordered all Jews to convert or leave Spain. In the same year they commissioned Christopher Columbus, and he ‘sailed across the ocean blue’ to discover the Americas.

  Certain dates etch themselves into us. September 11, 2001 is the date for our generation, another that tells the story of a clash of ideologies.

  There we were, on a road that celebrated unity and peace. An injured Italian soldier, an Australian remembering the fallen, and a Spaniard speaking of centuries-old conquest as though it happened yesterday.

  A taxi pulled up and the Italians de-camped. I set off with my amigo.

  Just like that.

  We took our time. There were conversations to be had and poetry to be shared. He enjoyed words and stories, and was able to recite favourite poems from memory. He asked me for the poem I loved best, but attempting to translate ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ proved impossible. He was delighted to learn I was a writer, but amused by my attempt to carry the sins of others, saying I needed to make some sins of my own. He laughed, and he made me laugh.

  He taught me the Hymn of the Centenary of the Real Madrid football team, which includes a lyric about a ‘field of stars’. I taught him ‘Waltzing Matilda’, Australia’s unofficial anthem about a sheep thief. I explained that we were like the hero of the song, an itinerant with a swag, or pack, on his back. I didn’t sing the lines that describe the swagman committing suicide. I had no wish to make him do any more crying for his brother.

  If Herr T was characterised by earnestness, then my amigo was his polar opposite. When he talked of his religion, it was connected to family gatherings and tradition. He said he enjoyed the silence of churches, finding them cool respite from the heat of his thoughts. He was going to walk the camino in sections during the Holy Year, in memory of his brother. When I asked him why the Holy Year, he said, ‘Because it is special.’ He never spoke of absolution of sin, but I wondered. Maybe the man of futures trading, iPhones and online market updates couldn’t bring himself to verbalise such hopes.

  A life lived among Catholic ritual, the year defined by saints’ days, and transitions marked by sacraments, would be hard to release. I’d had only a decade of such rites and felt their impression on me still.

  The sun was high when we arrived in Cáceres. We made for the plaza, where I satisfied my craving for spice with falafel. Families were weekend lunching. Children angled for extra dessert and grandparents indulged them while parents scolded. The vast plaza was a stage, and every citizen a player, costumed, coiffed and starring in their own drama.

  My amigo had shared rooms with snorers all the way from Seville. He wanted to catch up on sleep. I wanted to freshen up and explore. We found an albergue and were offered a room with two beds, a balcony and a private bathroom. We didn’t hesitate.

  We were negotiating our way around each other in the room when I began to get uncomfortable. It was intimate. Too intimate. I didn’t say anything, but I felt like I had entered a grey area, morally. An area of ‘ish’.

  Why? Albergues don’t allow for coyness about bodies. Get over it if a flash of flesh is a problem. Deal with the smelly feet or farting of others. Albergues are life at its most basic, and that is both their challenge and their gift.

  I realised that what had always made me feel free in them was the number of people. Being only two in a room implied intimacies of a different kind—sexual and emotional. Domestic even. I caught myself wondering if I should wash my amigo’s smalls when he threw his socks into the bathroom.

  No. The internal voice was loud and clear on that.

  We managed to shower and launder without stressing my moral compass further. We hung our washing on the balcony and it made a very cosy picture. Again, I baulked. What was going on?

  We were adults. We had shared the Roman bathhouse with decorum. He was kind. I was not in danger. The Italians knew where we were. We’d seen them in the square, il Soldato limping, his toes bandaged. I had a telephone. Any sound could be heard through the walls. What was my problem?

  We went out into the town together. I didn’t protest when my amigo joined me, although I thought he wanted to sleep. I didn’t want him to guess my thoughts, and jumping my bones was probably the last thing on his mind, given his reasons for walking.

  Citizens filed into the Cathedral of Santa María, where the high altar was decked with flowers in celebration of the Virgin. Roses, carnations and lilies must have been trucked in from all over Extremadura. The Virgin looked overwhelmed.

  The cathedral is in the old town. A forest of towers rises from within its sandstone walls and there
is no sign of modernity. We had stepped back centuries, until a boy rounded a corner on a skateboard. A lady selling cauliflower-shaped pastries told us that many films are made in Cáceres because it is auténtico y verdad—real and true. The crowd milling through to the cathedral didn’t seem fazed by antiquity. They shouted greetings, kissed cheeks and embraced. In spite of its museum perfection, the old city was jumping. Preservation hadn’t resulted in mummification.

  In the cool dark of the Church of San Mateo, my amigo lit candles for us, then sat beside me and asked me my greatest sin. I answered ‘selfishness’.

  It was true. Had he asked me my greatest fear, I would have had to answer ‘desire’.

  Il Capitano called, crashing the silence, to invite us to dinner with Mijnheer Holland and Señor Smoker.

  I fudged, whispering white lies … maybe, forse, possibly, un momento …

  Being honest, I wanted to rest my head on my amigo’s shoulder and let him make the decisions, let him care for me, be strong for me.

  What was I thinking?

  I crossed myself, wondering if that was a white lie too, and left the church.

  Back at the albergue, I decided to clear the air, even if I had to do it in Spanish. I asked how, on the camino, a married woman and a man can share a room, and it not be a sin.

  He grinned. We haven’t done anything sinful, he said. Why?

  Ah, there it was. We hadn’t done anything sinful, yet clearly I had something on my mind. And that is where it all begins.

  I had thought the sin. I had imagined the possibility.

  He indicated for me to sit, which was in itself tricky, given that the only surfaces were beds. He asked if I’d put the same question to the German woman in the albergue the previous night. She was gay, wasn’t she?

  ‘Era lesbiana?’

  I nodded.

  Why did I not have a problem being sola in the room with a gay woman, and yet I was worrying about sharing the space with him? Was it the bedding configuration? Side by side, as opposed to bunks?

  We both laughed at that.

  Surely the difference was to do with the possibility of desire, he said. I felt no sin sharing a room with a woman, because there was no likelihood of me feeling desire, whereas it’s always a possibility for me to desire a man. He rested his case. Sine qua non.

  I didn’t challenge him about whether I could desire a woman. That seemed destined to invite a conversation that was way too difficult. And while I wasn’t mad about it when he put a protective arm around me, or told me I was guapa, there was no doubt that I could imagine feeling desire for him, at least notionally, in the abstract …

  So the sin, or the risk of it, lay in the temptation—in the mind—and the most perilous moment is the gap between thinking about a sin and acting on it, that moment when there is space to say no, even if the gap is tiny, as it might be in the choice to gossip. Take a breath. Consider. Lengthen the gap.

  My amigo laughed. He smoothed the crease between my brows.

  ‘Hay mucho adentro aquí,’ he said. There’s a lot in here.

  He said we should go out for a drink and murmured a phrase I came to love, a great favourite of both Ricardo and Leonardo: ‘Tranquilo. No te preocupes.’ Be still. Don’t worry yourself.

  And so I didn’t. I let him lead and was grateful he led me out of temptation. We found a café to watch the evening promenade, he ordered the meal, and it was good. Marinated anchovies. Torta del Casar, a regional specialty of oozing sheep’s milk cheese, tasting of earth and musk. Salad with perfect crunch factor. Our waitress flirted with him while I wrote postcards and journalled. Shakespeare visited me, whispering in my ear some words from Hamlet: There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

  Thanks, Will. I’ll try to remember that.

  The other peregrinos joined us. I settled into their company, listened to stories of their days, and in the sultry air of a spring night in Extremadura I was purely and simply happy. Perhaps confession had something going for it.

  Back at the albergue, we tucked in, side by side. Not like innocent children. We were adults, fully aware of the possibilities in traversing the gap between our beds, and clear about our intentions not to. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I enjoyed the whisper of his breathing and the sight of his sleeping face. They were unearned intimacies, making me feel simultaneously closer to home, and far, far away from it.

  17

  Keeping Company

  I read through the sins, trying to skip over ‘gluttony’ as my amigo and I breakfasted on churros, deep-fried pastry strands dusted in sugar. They crunch on the outside and melt on the inside. High in fat and carbs, they launched us into the morning sun, past the bullring and the statue honouring the washerwomen of Cáceres, through the sleeping suburbs.

  We overtook two Spanish peregrinos. It was their first day on the road and a conversation began, the three men chatting at Speedy Gonzales’ rate. Pleading lack of vocab I sped off along the freeway’s shoulder, racing ahead so I could sing at top volume. Wildflowers and wisteria marked the way, and two hours later I’d covered eleven kilometres, had a natter about merinos in Casar de Cáceres (home of the sheep’s milk cheese I’d eaten the previous night), and stocked up on water and juice. I was sitting in a square of shade at the end of the main street, boots off, journalling, when my amigo caught me up. He asked if he could sit with me.

  Yes, of course. Why not?

  He smiled. You don’t want company. I see that.

  He was right. I didn’t. Not his. His company was seductive. I’d had time alone and had owned up to myself fairly and squarely. I didn’t want temptation.

  He also came between the road and me. He stepped in at every café, every meeting, and made introductions, asked questions, did the talking, negotiating and deciding. He was caring for me, but as a result I became a ‘passenger’, and I didn’t like it. Something had been lost by having an intermediary. I was not walking my camino. I was having our holiday.

  Plus, I was working.

  He made it easy for me to forget that I was an employee charged with a task, a pilgrim walking a spiritual road and not a hitchiker along for free rides. I was answerable to my sinners and myself.

  I couldn’t possibly explain all that when sun glinted on the marigolds by my toes, my amigo grinned, and the road shouted that it was running away from me. So I booted up and we walked together.

  Hats off to willpower.

  The temperature rose and my spirits went with it. The sky was new blue and the road was whitest gravel fringed by kilometres of smooth stone walls. Mostly we walked in silence, but when my amigo asked me for a poem, I tried to translate fragments of Rilke:

  My eyes already touch the sunny hill …

  … So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp …

  … but what we feel is the wind in our face.

  He loved the last line, even in my second-rate Spanish, and in return gave me more of Antonio Machado:

  Con el aroma del habar, el viento

  corre en la alegre soledad del campo.

  Carrying the scent of broad beans, the wind

  rushes over the happy solitude of the land.

  When we stopped, there were boulders for backstops and a downy grass carpet. The world opened wide and my Australian blood raced in the heat, reminding me of the poem that first spoke to me as a child:

  I love her far horizons …

  That might have something to do with why I crave solitude, I said to my amigo, as we sat in noonday shade looking to a line of hills. The Australian relationship to space. We have so much, compared to Europeans in their close-quartered communities.

  He’d finished his yoga salutes and I’d written and stared into the distance. He said he too enjoyed solitude, but not too much. I laughed. He was hard-wired for connection. A true extrovert.


  I told him the definition I’d heard on the radio. An extrovertido is fed by company, I said. An introvertido is fed by solitude. They have different comidas for their almas. Different foods for their souls.

  Translation is tricky. Language classes don’t always give me the vocab I want for the conversations I enjoy. My amigo listened as I delved for words like soledad, reflexión, tranquilidad, restauración. I think we got there.

  ‘Sí, sí, entiendo,’ he said, and if the ensuing days were an indication, he really had understood. It made it possible for us to find a rhythm we could both enjoy: separation and reconnection. Like Proserpina, I could surface into company if I had spent time in the solitude of my own underworld.

  The Spanish peregrinos had caught us up, so I set off alone into scorching sun. The heat was dry, like home, and I was in my element. I sang my way past fields of wildflowers, a multitude of tiny faces contrasted against a skyline of giant rocks. Opposites creating balance.

  A farm dam twinkled at me, an oval of brown water in the middle of the Extremadura oven. I didn’t think twice. I threw myself in, emerging among frogs and tadpoles. It was an icy pick-me-up and sped me on my way.

  A walker. A road. Sunshine. Silence. Perfection, when I am that walker.

  People sometimes ask me what I think about when I’m walking.

  The answer is disappointing.

  I don’t think.

  The great relief of walking, for me, is the silence in my mind. It is my meditation. When my feet achieve a regular rhythm, or when I am climbing hard with my pumping heart bursting from my chest, hours can pass without a thought. Days get lost.

  No. Not lost. Never lost.

  Days expand to something beyond self, beyond space. They transform into a kind of grounded timelessness. It’s a conundrum. My walking is both physical and spiritual. It’s through bodily effort that I achieve mental stillness, and that’s rarely possible in company. It’s what had made the walking with my compañero on the Francés so baffling to me. Effortless intimacy had been present in the first steps we took together.