Sinning Across Spain

by Ailsa Piper

  One day, we were part of a pilgrim train on a stretch of Roman road. We had been walking in silence for kilometres when we both stopped, registering that for the first time the road was empty. We looked at each other.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Your friend,’ I said, though we were barely acquaintances.

  Who are you?

  A big question, like the ones in Mary Oliver’s poem that had first made me set out to walk. Why am I here on the planet? What do I want to do with my allotment of time?

  I want to live my life consciously, I told my compañero. To be awake for all of it.

  As I am when I walk.

  I remember the smell of thyme-like grass in the hot afternoon by a dry river bed, and telling him the story of my mother’s death: of waiting for her to complete every relationship; of watching her uncertainty and eventual release; and of her promise that she would be with me whenever I saw a pink rose against a stone wall.

  I remember how my compañero smiled when we walked past such a rose.

  I remember silences measured by footsteps on gravel.

  I remember sharing a sweet orange and salty green olives.

  I remember hearing my compañero alternate between flawless Spanish and English, and feeling envy at his doubled capacity for understanding the lives of others.

  I remember another day of walking in step for hours and hours—almost twelve by day’s end. I don’t remember much of what we talked about. Things that mattered. Some trivia. He saw a snake. We sang a couple of little songs to each other. We laughed.

  I remember the days when I walked alone on that road. There were more of those, because we both craved solitude, but when the road threw us together again, I recall the joy, and that inexplicable familiarity.

  Mystifying, but pleasurable to contemplate when I stopped walking at 4 p.m. after nearly thirty kilometres and found that I was walking on the Via de la Plata and not the Francés!

  I could sniff day’s end on the other side of a glittering embalse. It was an even bigger dam than Proserpina’s and had been seducing me with glimpses for over an hour. I’d stopped to photograph the sun reflected in its surface when my amigo caught up with me and insisted we make a ‘peek-neek’.

  We were on the shoulder of a highway, our bodies sweaty and our water supplies exhausted. I wanted to get to the albergue, get washed and get into the water for another swim. We had four kilometres of road walking on the N-630 before I could achieve that dream and the temperature was soaring.

  My amigo insisted. Please. Por favor.

  He saw me waver.

  ‘No eres egoísta, mi amiga?’ You’re not selfish, my friend?

  He had me on a technicality.

  We clambered down a rubbish-strewn bank. There was no grassy knoll, no spreading willow, but he urged me to have faith. Sure enough, we found flat rocks in the shade of a small tree and clear, sweet-smelling dam water. Its scent was too strong for an over-heated pilgrim. I threw off all but my undies and into the water I plunged.

  Yikes! A turtle. And oh my Lord, now a snake!

  ‘No pasa nada,’ my amigo called from the bank. ‘Es muy pequeño.’

  It might have looked small from where he was, but to me it resembled the Loch Ness Monster. I swam in to shore, ostensibly to see what he was doing, but mostly to leave behind the serpientes.

  Waiting for me was fresh sheep’s milk cheese beside a hunk of crusty bread, almond cakes and fruit. A half bottle of vino tinto was cooling in the shallows. He had carried our peek-neek twenty kilometres in all that heat.

  Icy water tickled our toes, hawks circled, turtles stuck out their necks to gawp, and a cluster of poppies lorded it over the pastel daisies around them. The world was sharp focus. Every blade of grass appeared individually etched.

  My amigo reclined in the shade.

  ‘Bueno,’ he said. And it was.

  Words sank to the dam’s bottom, down to where Pluto lived. Proserpina’s spring carpet stretched for miles. In the land of duende, silence ruled.

  Eventually we moved, and eventually my need for speed resurfaced. I sprinted the final kilometres of sticky asphalt, stopping only to accept water from roadworkers who had seen my red cheeks coming. I flung myself under a shower, my clothes into an actual washing machine, and my heart into my journal, giving thanks for unearned rewards from my day.

  At dinner that night we were eight: Canadian twin brothers, an erudite Berliner, an Oxbridge gent, and two Dutch lady veterans. The conversation was in English, leaving my amigo in need of translation for once.

  Only the Canadians were walking all the way to Santiago. The others were travelling the camino in stages.

  Because it’s not difficult for Europeans to get to a starting point, walkers from neighbouring countries often tackle caminos over several seasons or even years. Some repeat sections. My amigo had walked for a week from Cádiz to Seville in early March. He then did some consulting work for his old firm before commencing the Via de la Plata in Seville in mid April. He planned to stop at Salamanca before completing the leg to Santiago in autumn, arriving on his brother’s birthday in October.

  Although the pilgrim numbers challenged me after the Mozárabe, they were still low. Most days, it was rare to meet more than a handful of others on the road. For anyone seeking company, it probably seemed a lonely trail, particularly if they’d enjoyed the stimulation of the pilgrim numbers along the Francés. My amigo had spoken of the party-camino he’d walked there. He would probably stay with me to Salamanca, I thought. Even reluctant company was better than none.

  And in fairness, we were managing each other, learning each other. I was not the grumpy peregrina who had battled for space from Herr T without ever being truly honest with him about my needs. Neither was I the peaceful peregrina taking synchronised steps on the Francés with my compañero. My amigo was another teacher, I suspected, but I was yet to grasp his lesson. At least I was trying to be frank with him.

  He was watching me. I had drifted away from the conversation at the table, forgetting to translate the peculiarities of English for him. He was momentarily stranded, without connection, and in his blue eyes I could see something that might have been fear.

  Perhaps company was the thing that took his mind away from the loss of his brother. Maybe it was his solace in just the way that solitude was mine.

  Salamanca was less than a week away.

  Surely I could be in company until then, with grace.

  18

  Making Sense

  The next day’s path wound up and down hills, through lavender and jara, the heat intensifying their fragrances. The jara was particularly potent. It’s a rock rose, with papery white petals, maroon spots at its base, and yellow stamens. I later learned they’re something of a weed and that the perfume actually comes from the leaves. To me, they were the scent of spring in the Sierras, replacing the neroli of Andalucía.

  We walked and talked steadily.

  Conversation shifted from the personal to the global, as our attention went from roadside lavender to the hills of the horizon. We spoke of the imperative of learning to be alone before forging a relationship. He had been married as a very young man but had not been ‘ready’. They met at university, both studying law, but when the financial world claimed him, they split. Different priorities. They were, he said, still friends. They just needed to walk different paths.

  We talked about the camino itself. He said that his ex-wife would never have walked one with him. Too hard. I heard myself saying, or trying to say, that camino is not hard, but rather, life is hard. Vida real. Vida casera. Real life. Home life. He looked perplexed, saying this was hard, this was hot, exhausting and lacked comfort.

  For me, I said, camino is easier than real life because it’s possible to be anyone you like on the road. You are the story you tell people. I knew nothi
ng of him, really. He may never have been married. He may have been rich or poor. He may have been a psychopath. All I had was his story and my sense that it was true. Instinct and a few pieces of information.

  Also, I said, because there is no prospect of a future with most peregrinos, there is nothing owed, nothing required. Not even truth, perhaps.

  Home, on the other hand, is the real camino. To walk thirty kilometres is not as difficult as to stay with someone for another week, a month, a year, when the days are normal, when there is grief, illness or loss, or in the test of ongoing honesty. Keeping a promesa is the real camino.

  As we puffed our way up a steep incline towards a pine forest, I tried to explain the promises that underpin my marriage: to encourage each other to expand; and to allow each other to have individual, sometimes separate, lives within the framework of union. I think I managed to explain that I’d never looked for my husband to make me feel complete, because I don’t believe we can ever be complete. We are works in progress. Pilgrims.

  Finding a man who encouraged me to follow my own path was a gift. But it isn’t easy. It’s never easy to let the other go or to be left behind.

  I struggled, inhaling hot jara and pine, to say that I believed pilgrimage to be selfish in both good and bad ways. It is for the self and it expands the self, but the only legitimate test is when we go home and discover how much camino lives on in us. Camino is not the big challenge because it is not forever. It can’t be real. Or complete. Verdad, auténtico … true, authentic …

  My amigo had listened, speaking only to help me find words, our feet in crunching synchronicity. I pondered what waited for me at home, in that real life. Family, friendships, commitment, routine, history.

  Hard perhaps, but always beautiful.

  Maybe that was why the ancianos asked if my camino was a promesa. They understood the importance of a pledge and the demands of it.

  My amigo’s words wrenched me into the present.

  ‘Pero te quiero, amiga,’ he said. ‘Para siempre.’

  But I love you, friend. For always.

  Despite the body blow of the words, I managed to reply.

  I said that we didn’t know each other, that we were friends for today; that tomorrow might be different. I said that he was my teacher, instructing me how to be less selfish. He asked what I was teaching him.

  ‘No sé,’ I said. I don’t know.

  ‘You teach me about love,’ he said. ‘But love that is not easy.’

  ‘Estoy dura,’ I said. I am hard.

  It was not right. We both knew it.

  ‘Soy difícil.’ I am difficult, I said, using the other version of ‘I am’.

  Spanish is tricky. They have two verbs that mean ‘to be’. One is for permanent things like name and occupation, nationality and hair colour. The other is for temporal states. If I were to use the wrong verb, I could say that I am a cold person instead of that I am feeling cold. Initially, I had implied that I was being hard at that moment and then I’d said that I was always difficult.

  Neither was what I meant.

  Both were attempts to get around his use of the verb ‘to love’. The Spanish say ‘te quiero’, which can mean both ‘I love you’ and ‘I want you’. I had no idea what my amigo meant, though I decided that ‘for always’ probably implied that he loved me, although in what way I couldn’t be sure. Certainly, the notion of him desiring me for always seemed pretty far-fetched!

  The silence stretched.

  ‘Es difícil.’ I said. It’s difficult. Permanent use of the verb. Always difficult.

  He said nothing, just walked ahead as I slowed to take in the fairytale meadow around me, emerald green and studded with encinas, where cows with flighty calves ambled through streaming golden light.

  I’d meant that our conversation was difficult, but I’m not sure he understood.

  To try to speak of feelings in a language not your own is thorny, but I was wrong in saying it was always difficult. Domingo had taught me that. Lucia had taught me, too. The language of the body can make the leap. Words create the problems. They’re false friends.

  Earlier, I’d had a baffling experience with language.

  I was walking sola when I caught up to another loner.

  ‘Hola!’ I called.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he replied, grinning from under a battered straw hat.

  Jean-Yves kept pace with me and we drifted into conversation in French. We chatted about pre-conceptions of nationalities (he said the French deserve their reputation for being well-pleased with themselves—after all, there is much to be pleased about!), colonialism, village life, industrialisation and the historical effect of the feminine on French political life.

  We must have talked for half an hour.

  He wanted to break for lunch, but my legs were still pumping so I bid him au revoir. It was only when I was down the road a way that I realised what had happened. I had not once struggled to find a word or asked how to say something or resorted to Franglais. We’d just talked, about things for which I didn’t know I had a vocabulary.

  What made that possible? I spoke the best French of my life, using vocabulary I’m convinced I’d never learned.

  It was rather like the poems that surfaced, unbidden yet intact, when I walked alone. It was as if a parade of my nearest and dearest was striding towards me, confident I would recognise and welcome them.

  The arrival of the poems and the French epiphany must have been side effects of walking. Perhaps hours of marking out beats with feet and walking poles triggered it, since poems are so linked to rhythm. Perhaps my brain was shaken up by the repeated footfall and all my under-used Gallic neurons fired. Perhaps it was just that my mind was not crammed with the usual day-to-day junk.

  My amigo was waiting for me at a stream below the pueblo of Grimaldo. He watched me approach, his features unmoving, and I found myself clowning for him, dancing across stepping stones and pretending to fall in. When his smile re-appeared and he stepped across to join me, I was relieved. We strode uphill to the village through daisy-studded grass.

  ‘You are happy to see me?’ he asked.

  Yes, yes, very happy.

  ‘Then I am happy,’ he said.

  We installed ourselves in the cramped, overcrowded, sweat-smelling albergue, grimacing at the prospect of a night with the great unwashed.

  Showered, laundered and late-lunched, we sat on a wall beside the bar for that moment of pause. What to do? The stream where we’d reconnected was about a kilometre below the village. The day was still hot. Water called.

  We gathered his sleeping mat and my sarong, journals, iPods and unguents, and wandered downhill through orchards in blossom. When we reached the stream, my amigo stood under one of the trees and shook a branch. White petals cascaded to the grass.

  ‘Now we sit on flowers,’ he said.

  We spread ourselves under the tree. Water tinkled. Birds chirruped. The world exhaled. We swapped playlists, clicked photos of insects and clouds, and translated fragments of the Miguel Hernández poems I’d copied way back in Córdoba:

  of blood in blood

  I come like the sea

  wave by wave …

  They were like Haiku, scrawls on scraps of paper.

  The vocation of seeing

  What else matters?

  My sister had texted me titles of U2 songs to sing. They were a poem in themselves:

  Beautiful Day

  The Ground Beneath Her Feet

  In God’s Country

  Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World

  My amigo knew the songs, but the lyrics meant nothing to him, just as Anglos hear ‘one-tonne banana’ when someone sings ‘Guantanamera’. As I copied them into my journal, my amigo noticed the words my compañero had sent to me: I will walk with you and sing your spirit home.


  He asked me to translate them. I said it was difícil, but in truth I didn’t want to try to explain my compañero. I wasn’t sure I could. He’d belonged to me long before he’d even mentioned acupuncture, but that belonging was never confused with desire. He was a restoration of something lost.

  Perhaps my amigo had been trying to express a sentiment like that earlier. Had I demeaned his offering? The vagaries of language meant I would never know.

  He lay on the grass, his eyes closed.

  I looked at the birthmark on his cheek. In conversation, I tried not to let my eyes linger on it, not wanting to embarrass him by drawing attention to it. And yet it was the part of him I liked best. His obvious flaw.

  Like my sinners, whose decision to expose their flaws made me admire them more. I even loved the sins themselves, sometimes. Yes, they gave pain. But they had also forced the sinners to try to better themselves. To expand.

  Sins ignored might be ugly, but sins addressed can have such beauty, I wrote in my journal.

  So where did that leave my sins? My pride? My selfishness?

  My amigo seemed to want nothing more than to walk and laugh with me. To love me, in his way. My first instinct had been to bat away his offering, to deflect and reduce it.

  ‘Estoy dura,’ I had said.

  Was I hard? Herr T might say so.

  I looked at the words I’d copied in the salon de thé in Córdoba: Love is my creed and my faith.

  If I really wanted to live that, then perhaps I had to allow others to feel about me as they chose.

  I headed for the creek, overcome with a need to get into the gush of water and wash away thoughts. I stripped down to knickers and T-shirt and tiptoed across the stepping stones until I was mid-stream, where I lowered myself into the torrent, letting icy prickles of water pound my flesh.

  My amigo clicked photos and one shows me, back arched, hair almost touching the water’s surface, with a grin wider than Andalucía.

  Grimaldo.

  Tiny pueblo. Bubbling stream. Endless sky. Happiness diluted to essence.