Sinning Across Spain

by Ailsa Piper

  When I dried off, I picked up my journal. This poem, torn from a magazine in the Melbourne airport four weeks earlier, fell onto my feet.

  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

  there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

  When the soul lies down in that grass

  the world is too full to talk about.

  Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

  doesn’t make any sense.

  — Rumi

  19

  A Swag of Sins

  The road will never swallow you …

  I whispered those words as my amigo and I crept out of Grimaldo under an orange moon that would have made the owl and pussycat pirouette for joy. He repeated them as the moon dropped, twisting his tongue to cope with the difficulty of ‘swallow’.

  The quote is from Ben Okri’s book The Famished Road, which was given to me by a stage manager when we were travelling with a play through rural Australia. As light flooded the Extremadura sky, my amigo asked what it had been like to be an actor. I told him that sometimes, particularly when on tour, it was very like walking a camino.

  Uprooted out of real life, days are geared around show time. No matter where you are, or how far you’ve travelled, in the late afternoon you head for the theatre, community centre or bingo hall that will host the show. You might do a warm-up, test the acoustics or just walk the stage to get the feel of it.

  Eventually, you head backstage, where you find your colleagues. If you haven’t travelled between towns that day, you might discuss what you did with your free hours and if you had news from home.

  You prepare: make-up, hair, costume, inner life. Everyone has their own ritual, some based in practicality and some in superstitions. There’s an order to the process. It might make no sense to anyone else but it’s vital. The rest of the world is discarded as the performance approaches. No matter what the day might have thrown at you—early starts, dodgy motel rooms, long drives, oft-told stories, roadhouse food—there’s energy, focus and commitment.

  I told him that I sometimes saw pilgrims in our camino village as a group of touring players. There were well-known ‘stars’ like il Capitano and his Soldato. They left messages for me, scratched in dirt roads or scrawled in albergue guestbooks, and other pilgrims were quick to relay sightings of them.

  There were rituals, too. The most irritating took place before sunrise, as earnest pilgrims crinkled multiple plastic bags and metal cleats in a rush to be first out the door. It’s not a lie of any colour to note that the majority of these dawn raiders were German.

  There were favoured costumes and talismans. On the camino, as in the theatre, these were often reminiscent of childhood—the miniature pilgrim teddy bear, like Yogi with a scallop shell.

  There were stage managers, those who facilitated for us in the albergues. The yellow arrows gave directions and there was always an audience, often captive. But, I said, the main difference was that on the camino there was no script. We were improvising.

  My amigo reminded me of the three-act structure of the Camino Francés, and said that distance-wise, I was now well into Act Two of this camino.

  The cast grew every day. More and more pilgrims were starting out, while others travelled at different paces, overtaking or catching up. Each night there would be a new face or a reunion. We were forming into a company, with all the associated alliances, curiosities and differences.

  My amigo said that he would like to play out Act Three with me. That he was sorry he had planned to walk into Santiago later in the year. That perhaps he should re-write his story.

  We were standing on a cliff edge, suspended in sky. Hundreds of feet below us, a wide river curved around on itself. Hundreds of feet above, an eagle caught an updraft. We were dots at a swirling centre.

  I said nothing. I no longer knew what I wanted.

  The heat increased, both actual and metaphorical. I thrived with the higher temperatures, but struggled with the growing population on the road and the increasing emotional proximity of my amigo. I repeated my road maps:

  Through hope, through difficult ways, you’ll arrive to the stars.

  … What we feel is the wind in our face …

  … The road will never swallow you …

  I was careering between intense pleasure and guilt about the pleasure. For hours at a time I was just plain joy-filled: when heat, sky and road combined to let me fly; when my amigo made me laugh like a child; when sins would not come to mind, no matter how I tried to focus on them.

  Then I would begin the flagellation, wondering what the hell I was doing pretending I was on some camino cruise—if 35-kilometre days in thirty-degree heat can be called cruising.

  When the guilt struck, I shut down. That’s when I would punish my amigo, something I only recognised as a sin when we stopped for lunch in the walled town of Galisteo.

  The pueblo was in full siesta mode, shutters drawn and doors latched. As we prowled the silence in search of a café, I wondered what was going on behind the closed curtains: eating, talking, laughing, sleeping, making lunchtime love after all other needs of the body were satisfied.

  At Bar Emigrantes, we ordered bocadillos, removed boots and sprawled in the shade. Pilgrims straggled in. Conversation drifted. Could we pass a message to the Polish couple? Had we met the pilgrim who was begging along the road? Did we see the Belgian in the taxi?

  Already uncomfortable with what felt like gossip, I realised that some pilgrims assumed I was ‘with’ my amigo.

  With. Sly little preposition.

  I laughed along. ‘No, no … amigos … just friends.’

  But something shifted because, of course, such assumptions don’t come from air. They’d observed the shared smiles and miles. Could they see my thoughts?

  For the rest of that long, baking afternoon, I withdrew into myself.

  ‘You are like Galisteo,’ my amigo said, as I pounded along scorching tarmac.

  I said nothing, thinking I’d misheard him.

  ‘You have walls all around you.’

  I stopped. Made him repeat what he’d said.

  He was right. I’d built fortifications around myself, and they were there to keep me inside as much as to keep anyone from entering. I was afraid that, just as other sins had defeated me, so desire would triumph. I’d had to watch myself fall to pride, selfishness, lies, anger, even gluttony, if one could be gluttonous about time alone. Was lust next? Desire doesn’t stop just because we make vows.

  There was nothing to say except to apologise and try to normalise the day.

  We walked and walked, past waymarkers and roadworks, off-track and on, and beside the carcass of a newborn calf, half-eaten by the vultures that wheeled over our heads. I tried to describe the concept of collective nouns.

  A wake of vultures.

  A murder of crows.

  An unkindness of ravens.

  In return, my amigo told me the Spanish word for swallow: golondrina. The music of it went some way to erasing the image of the bloody corpse with its staring marble eyes.

  But even language couldn’t lift me. I was a babbling infant surrounded by a sea of deep Spanish water, unable to describe my emotional whirlpool.

  I mentioned a wish to see the Roman arch at Caparra at sunrise, so we kept walking, foolhardy distances, as my amigo did whatever it took to lighten the day. We were both gutted when we staggered into Oliva de Plasencia.

  The albergue was modern, with a television, a sitting room, doona-covered bunks and white-tiled bathrooms. I completed my rituals and fled. In the town square, I spoke with a German pilgrim. Statuesque and cultured, she was journeying alone. A young man had begun walking with her just before Mérida and she said she didn’t have the heart to ask him to leave her.

  ‘That is the camino,’ she said.

  I’d said th
ose same words to another German girl only days before, in a town whose name I couldn’t recall because I was so angry with myself.

  Over and over, lessons repeated.

  ‘You are so stupid,’ I mumbled as I roamed the streets of the pueblo. I felt in real danger of being swallowed by the road and the sins.

  I took out my journal and read poems aloud, all the scraps of verse I’d gathered along the way. I wrote four pages of thanks, to remind myself of all I had, of all my good fortune.

  My eyes kept returning to a sentence I’d translated and copied down in Aljucén, the first night on the Via de la Plata, sitting at the albergue kitchen table with my amigo at my elbow, cutting up the tuber:

  Shadows exist because we have light to illuminate them.

  I don’t think my translation did justice to the original words, but the sentence resonated. I was caught in shadows, when I had so much good light available to me. Why? Because of insinuation and innuendo? Gossip?

  Or because of the fear that there was truth in that gossip?

  After an albergue-cooked dinner for which I had little appetite, I lay on my top bunk, stewing in my own juices.

  I will walk off your sins.

  What kind of lunatic promise was that?

  Who did I think I was? A new saviour?

  I looked down on my near-naked amigo, lying on his bunk in a shaft of light from the street-lamp outside the open window. His sleeping sheet was thrown back, exposing sinewy legs and an almost hairless chest. The coffee-coloured birthmark on his cheek drew my eye. He called it an antojo, which, he said, also means ‘wish’ or ‘craving’. According to Spanish folklore, his mother must have had an unsatisfied desire when she was pregnant with him.

  There was no one else in the upstairs dormitory. Outside, the village slept.

  Perhaps I should just give in and satisfy my own desire. Why not? I was thousands of miles from home. My amigo was free. No one need ever know.

  He rolled over, threw his right arm off the edge of the child-size bunk, arched his back and sighed, before settling into the dip in the centre of the mattress.

  I could climb down the metal ladder, I thought, and curl my body against his. Flesh on flesh. Intimacy.

  But it wasn’t intimacy I wanted. I wasn’t lonely. I didn’t want conversation or even professions of love. And if I simply wanted an orgasm, I knew how to deliver that, up there in top-bunk seclusion.

  But masturbation would blind me, if not damn my eternal soul. Wasn’t that the last word on self-pleasure?

  Hell. Fire. Brimstone.

  I’d forgotten so much. All the important rules.

  I surely didn’t want perpetual damnation and I most certainly didn’t want to be unfaithful, to walk to Santiago with a scarlet letter on my heart. Even if it wouldn’t be visible to others, I would know, and I wouldn’t be able to live with that knowledge.

  I didn’t want to be the lusty queen from the Mérida comedy, or to make of my husband a cuckolded king. I didn’t want to be like the fornicating priest, having to walk pilgrimages to atone for my lascivious nature.

  What on earth did I want, up there in the warm air near the ceiling, watching my dreaming amigo? I felt like a perv, a voyeur of his most private life.

  A fine frown formed. He looked older.

  Then he smiled. Scratched his face. And he was a child again.

  The boy is ever present in the man, just as, conversely, the woman is visible in the girl.

  Good.

  Stay with that thought a while. Expand on the differences between the sexes. Anything to take the mind off the possibility of sliding onto his bunk and touching that dark mark of unsatisfied desire.

  He smelled of lemons and amber. He always did, unlike the majority of pilgrims.

  Pilgrims. We are pilgrims. Remember that. Pilgrims don’t have sex. They are pure. They don’t fantasise about the deadly sin of lust.

  Oh, God!

  Was the fantasy sinful?

  Remember Will Shakespeare: … thinking makes it so …

  Was I committing a sin merely by imagining my hands moving over his body?

  I vaguely recalled words from the confessional: In my thoughts, in my words and in my deeds …

  Thoughts were the first cab off the rank.

  My teal-blue mochila, the sin-swag, slumped in the corner, emptied of iPod, guide book, sins, sleeping bag and toiletries.

  The iPod was another cause for recrimination. All day I’d wondered if it was sinful to wear earplugs, pretending to listen to music, in order to avoid conversation. Was that a white lie?

  My amigo murmured something unintelligible.

  Were I to launch myself onto his olive-skinned muscularity, what of the lies I’d have to tell to cover my actions? Lies that would dwarf iPod dissembling.

  Or worse. Tell the truth. Confess and give pain. Murder something good.

  One sin leading to another. And another. I was drowning in sins.

  Had I imagined I was immune to the urges of my body?

  Why? Because I was the righteous sin-carrier? Or because I love someone, am committed to him? Marriage vows can’t keep our bodies from trying to perform the function for which they’re made, I told myself. Remember your words to Herr T: ‘We have instincts, like animals.’

  My amigo slept the sleep of the innocent, looking for all the world like an advertisement for designer underwear. With each second, my overheated mind transformed him further. He was a slumbering god, a potent lothario. I imagined him attending to every inch of my body, stroking my skin, kissing my neck, sliding down my belly—

  He snored.

  A brief walrus of an inhalation, followed by a rumbling exhale.

  I peered down at him.

  He was flat on his back, his mouth open, with one hand cupping his genitals through the sheet.

  Another snore. A lengthy trumpet blast.

  Desire fled the building.

  Roncar. It even sounds like a turn-off.

  My amigo was a pilgrim again, and I was freed to concentrate on the tightness in my calves and the righteousness in my soul.

  Call it providence or what you will. The road had not swallowed me and I was sin-free for one more night.

  Unless, of course, thinking makes it so …

  20

  Gracias a la Vida

  Watching a full, fat, setting moon, I stood under a Roman triumphal arch in company with my amigo, sin sin. That moon had set over that arch for centuries. Sandalled feet, warrior’s boots, tourist espadrilles and pilgrim soles had walked that path, carved by the might and power of Rome. Stories had been written and rewritten.

  Palimpsesto on an unfathomable scale.

  I celebrated my own triumph as we watched the sun rise over the mountains, two pilgrim friends without the complication of adulterous sex to spoil the view. We inhaled silence as the two celestial bodies saluted each other, then we found a machine dispensing coffee at the nearby visitor’s centre.

  That’s progress for you.

  A day begun in such wonder could slide downhill fast.

  Not us. We rose.

  We talked all the live-long day. Different rhythms and a few rhymes. Out past the arch, into the twenty-first century, onto a long stretch of treed camino, stopping at a bridge for snacks and silence, on down the lavender-lined road, under tutting storks and past two orange-shirted diggers constructing a dry-stone wall. Roman techniques lived on.

  Up to the freeway, over stepping stones, through mud, under scorching sun, along walled lanes, past a big-eyed burro in need of a scratch, through Aldeanueva del Camino, into the mountains, and all the way to a bar in Baños de Montemayor, where we sat with iced drinks, staring at each other, open-mouthed and dizzy.

  We had spoken of devotion—of faith in a God, and of faith in others. About our most
precious memories: for him, the birth of a son, when he said he had matured into manhood. For me, the death of my mother, when I vowed to live, not exist. I was reminded of that vow with every death.

  About regrets. For both of us, moments of adulterio, adultery. In his case, the affair was with his wife’s closest friend.

  That stopped me in my tracks. He had spoken of fidelity with such urgency, and yet when he’d lapsed it was a double betrayal. I could scarcely believe I was walking with someone whose situation exactly mirrored that of my sinner’s. I wished with all my heart that her circumstances were altering and that she was healing.

  I asked my amigo how he could have been so careless of his wife, the woman he loved. As he was answering, I remembered my fantasies of the night before. No casting stones.

  He said he was a different man then.

  Why not? We can change. But we live with the regrets.

  He asked me to tell him the sins I carried, and I said I couldn’t.

  ‘But I don’t know these people,’ he said.

  ‘I made a promise,’ I said. Una promesa.

  We walked on, picking fennel-tops to chew and wild rosemary to sniff.

  He said there was something he had never told anyone, and proceeded to describe events from decades earlier. I listened, but could make no sense. His casual tone didn’t fit the words I was translating. I asked him to repeat. Questioned him. Eight? Yes, eight. Every night? Yes, every night. I had to ask him to show me what he meant, my brain was so unwilling to process the story. Finally, watching the mime I’d requested, I could no longer deny what I was hearing. Under an electricity pylon, I sank to the ground.

  A man of the cloth had forced his penis into the mouth of my amigo’s then eight-year-old brother. Night after night.

  His brother told my amigo one evening after they had been watching their sons play football. Then he swore my amigo to secrecy in order to protect their parents. Una promesa. It was never spoken of again.

  My amigo sat beside me. His citrus scent mixed with the aniseed of fennel. After a long time, he apologised for speaking of his ‘sin’, as he referred to it.