Sinning Across Spain

by Ailsa Piper

  ‘No es tu pecado,’ I said. It’s not your sin.

  ‘Es mi secreto.’ It’s my secret.

  I pictured that little brother, grown to manhood, and his fears for his sons. I tried to imagine the story my amigo had invented for their parents, and for his brother’s wife and children. I wondered about the weight of all those lies. Lies told to honour his brother’s wishes and to protect those left behind. How could they be a sin?

  What I remember most is the anger. Like a tsunami.

  And I absolutely do not believe that anger was a sin.

  How could I not feel angry with the Pope, the bishops, the cover-up, the refusal to take responsibility for those little people, grown large, blaming themselves in stifling silence? And for those who loved them and were helpless to ease the pain? Anger seems a fitting response when hope is killed. Surely the theft of innocence warrants rage? I thought of Herr T’s God who could foresee everything and I boiled.

  ‘Tranquilo,’ my amigo said. ‘No te preocupes.’ Be calm. Don’t fret.

  It was hard to hold onto calm or rationality. Hard to find compassion or to remember that the perpetrator might have been a victim himself. Hard to have any of those thoughts in the face of my amigo’s loss, his confusion about his own culpability and the Church’s intransigence. It was hard not to wish for vengeance.

  Distant thunder broke the silence.

  My amigo held out a hand to help me up with my pack.

  ‘Vámanos,’ he said. Let’s go.

  No wonder we sat at the side of the road in Baños de Montemayor, nursing lemon drinks and staring into space.

  That’s how il Capitano found us.

  There was laughing, kissing of cheeks, waving of hands, talking at full throttle, planning, directing, arranging. Within moments we had accommodation, dinner plans and an itinerary for the coming days.

  Seeing il Soldato again, pieces of my fragmented internal jigsaw fell into place. He was like the Arch of Caparra. He allowed us all to fuss around him while he remained unruffled by life, or by pilgrims. He nodded when he first saw me, held my hand and touched my cheek. It was like a benediction.

  Then Barcelona called, Leonardo and Ricardo completing my family. I crumpled.

  Leonardo was instantly solicitous, volunteering to come, to help, to fix. I couldn’t make him understand that it was relief and gratitude; that in the face of cruelty and sin, they were my daily reminder that love and compassion existed; that the teachings of prophets and poets, all the writings that urge love and unity, can be embodied in the actions of human beings; that he and Ricardo, two gay men in a relationship the Church would not acknowledge, seemed more Christ-like than many clerics.

  Goodness is not pious. It is practical.

  A Caravaggio painting came to mind, one I’d always wanted to see. The Seven Works of Mercy.

  In it, a woman undertakes two of the Works, feeding the hungry and visiting a captive, by thrusting an exposed breast through the bars of a cell so a prisoner may drink. To some, it could appear a lewd or provocative action.

  Not so. It’s a woman grounded in reality, doing what she can to be useful.

  Life is complicated. Angels do what is necessary.

  A hermitage perched at the top of a hill in the centre of Baños. My amigo and I sat there in the early evening, watching columns of cloud progress around the surrounding mountains. Chestnut flowers drooped over our shoulders. We drooped under them. I asked him his deepest wish.

  ‘Paz,’ he said. Peace. For himself, he meant. Internal peace. Not for the world. Though that would be nice, but probably impossible.

  He asked me.

  ‘To continue to want nothing,’ I said. ‘As I do now.’

  He asked if he could write a favourite poem in my journal. Written by Antonio Machado, it is also the lyric to a famous song, ‘Caminante, no hay camino’

  … Traveller, there is no road.

  The road is made by walking …

  And turning, you look back at a road you will never tread again …

  The sky and the earth spoke to each other in hushed tones. A wagging dog barked at us, rightly possessive of his corner of paradise. The scent of spring blossom mixed with the smell of dry grass and manure. It was a slow night. Slow, slow, in that square above Baños.

  And as lovely as any place I could recall anywhere.

  Places are subjective. That’s never more obvious than on the camino. One person will say they stayed in the most picturesque pueblo on the road and another will say it was a hovel. One person’s Parador is another’s Mouldy Flea. For me, Baños was heaven.

  Clouds continued to rise like purified volcanic ash into the blue. I’d heard nothing more of the Icelandic eruptions, or Poland, or the financial crisis. A week had passed since I’d communicated with my sinners and supporters. I was glad Salamanca was on the horizon. Sin-fatigue was cutting deep. I was no longer sure who owned the pecados in my swag. My distance from them decreased with every kilometre I walked. I was capable of all of them.

  Dinner was a rowdy affair. Il Capitano gathered people to him, and there were more and more pilgrims to gather. We were a dozen at table and everyone had a tale of another traveller who was ahead or behind, sending a message or receiving one. Notes were compared on towns, bars and guidebooks. I was glad when conversation rippled away in German, Czech or Dutch. It gave me an excuse for silence. Perhaps a crowd was not such a bad thing. I could lose myself in it, walk away from it, slip ahead or behind, be alone, and no one would notice.

  The next morning, I breakfasted with my amigo, but we walked apart for much of the thirty-plus kilometres. We were about to enter Castilla y Léon, the largest of the seventeen autonomous communities that make up Spain. It is their language, Castilian Spanish, that is the official language of Spain, though the Basques, Galicians and Catalans might rail at it. I’d traversed the northern section of Castile on the meseta of the Camino Francés, and was now crossing its southern border.

  Another arrival. Another farewell. Extremadura’s landscape and heat had sung to me. I was sad to be walking away from it.

  But what walking.

  As if to announce its importance, Castile turned it on. Under wisps of cloud, I climbed through walled lanes along the banks of the Río Cuerpo de Hombre—the Body of Man River—against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains. Cows, hidden in the woods, jangled their bells like a symphony from some secret orchestra. The sky was striped with jet streams, the ground soft underfoot. The scent from a sprig of wisteria in my hat carried me back to Rome. Each time I turned my head I inhaled the past. Present, past. Present, past. A time machine driven by perfume.

  A thick-coated, erect-eared burro feasted on grass. Her owner said she was twenty-seven years old. She still had plenty of spring in her step.

  A truck driver at the bar in La Calzada de Béjar offered me a lift.

  ‘Venga, Rubia,’ he said. Come on, Blondie.

  What, go in a truck, when I can walk these lush paths? You’re loco!

  On, for another nine kilometres of winding roads, with fields of caramel cows on both sides. On, through Valverde de Valdelacasa—Green Valley of the Valley of the House!—with snow-capped mountains flanking me to the right. On, in the bliss of movement.

  I was relieved, after the intensity of the previous day’s conversations, to be alone and to let my amigo be solo, too. It was as though the intimacy had created a need for separation. We were making our ways to a refugio at Fuenterroble de Salvatierra, where il Capitano had promised to cook dinner. Italian pasta.

  ‘Real pasta,’ he said. ‘Not this stuff that you all eat.’

  I love nothing better than when someone prepares a meal for me.

  My compañero had cooked for me on the Francés, after one of our chance encounters in the town of Hospital de Órbigo, where, in the fifteenth century, a knight is purported
to have taken on all comers in hand-to-hand combat because he was thwarted in love.

  Before we ate, my compañero had recited the words of his favourite song, ‘Gracias a la Vida’. It means ‘Thank You to Life’ and was written by the Chilean poet and artist Violeta Parra. Her death by suicide is inconceivable in the light of the lyrics, which are an anthem of gratitude to her body, her spirit, her friends, her lover, the physical world, the stars and the whole human race.

  I had listened to my compañero whisper the words in the hiatus of evening’s hush, under a timeless sky like that of childhood: Gracias a la vida …

  Now, back on the Via, I was singing the song along the road towards my ‘real’ pasta dinner, when my amigo surprised me. He had stopped for a snack, and heard the song before he saw me. We sang it together, giving me a hit of palimpsesto. I was back on the Francés with my compañero, yet also present with my amigo. And gracias a la vida, thank you to life, his smile was back in place.

  We sang past a tungsten mine, where a siren cut through the chorus.

  We sang to a procession of jaunty burros being led to a fiesta.

  We sang to the sky, our ‘little thing beginning with C’.

  We arrived restored, and an inscription greeted us at the door of the refugio: I have given orders to my angels to guard thee on the way.

  On cue, Leonardo called!

  That night, il Capitano triumphed. The pilgrim train was filling and the pilgrim hordes were filled with chilli pasta. Not to be outdone by Italian hospitality, Don Blas, the parish priest who ran the refugio, threw hunks of pork onto the open fire. They were set upon with gusto, though I can’t report on them. I let others rip meat from bones in a mediaeval frenzy.

  I was surrounded by good men and true.

  To my right, il Capitano, bursting with delight at having fed the multitude on proper pasta.

  To my left, Giovanni, another road-savvy Italian who spoke of the importance of maintaining personal boundaries while remaining available to others, as he topped wine glasses and cleared pilgrim plates.

  Opposite me sat an Australian. Tall, fluent in Spanish, and with a slow-burn grin, Paul was the boss of the tungsten mine. He was staying the night in the refugio and walking to Salamanca the next day, to get a feel for the pilgrim road that circuited his mine.

  A nomad with two-day growth and a Billabong T-shirt, he was irreverent, droll and quick-witted. His sleepy eyes missed nothing and his Aussie twang was music. I detected traces of it in his Spanish and liked the combination. We had spoken for barely ten minutes when he offered me a room in Salamanca, so I could wind down outside the pilgrim world.

  My amigo flirted, laughed and told stories, the Italian contingent played beneficent hosts, and Don Blas opened bottles of lethal spirits to warm the communal cockles. It was a fiesta. Gracias a la vida!

  The sleep that followed was deep, but was broken at 4 a.m. by the raucous rustling of plastic. Po-faced pilgrims, who had ostentatiously shushed us when we’d arrived the previous afternoon, were making their exit a retaliation: re-packing mochilas, stomping boots and waving torches. I drew my sleeping bag over my head and reined in thoughts of bloody vengeance as I re-closed my eyes.

  Seven hours later, I was twelve kilometres down the road in company with my amigo, my Aussie and my Italians. We drifted in and out of pairs, trios and solos, talking of minerals and mushrooms, puppies and black pigs. The sniff of an approaching city and of stage’s end spurred us on.

  Somewhere, under the direction of il Capitano, we diverted from the main camino, and by late afternoon we were the only peregrinos in the picture-pretty but deserted pueblo of Morille, nineteen kilometres from Salamanca. The sello in my passport is from El Bar de Isa, where we stopped for beer and a breather. It shows a busty, long-haired beauty in profile—presumably Isabel, the patron, who was alone save for a near-comatose man in the corner.

  Paul removed his boots to reveal blisters. Serious blisters.

  He had covered over forty kilometres, much of it on dreaded carretera, having lost the trail at one point and been forced to backtrack. There was no way he could press on for three hours to Salamanca. His feet would be raw.

  Paul didn’t strike me as a man who liked to be beaten by a physical challenge, but it was clear that overnighting at the Morille albergue was not going to magically heal his feet so he could walk the next day. He called a friend to come and collect him.

  The Italians walked on. My septuagenarians were not going to let nineteen kilometres stand between them and a restaurant.

  My amigo was torn: to walk on immediately, to stay in Morille and finish the next day, or to come in Paul’s car. He asked what I thought. Knowing the weight he was carrying, I felt he should complete the Salamanca stage solo. He nodded but I’m not sure he was convinced.

  Paul’s car arrived. That decided it for me. I would get out of the way.

  I piled my mochila into the boot, hugged my amigo, and said I’d see him for a drink when he arrived.

  Paul was an unlikely angel, and while he could never be accused of being sanctimonious, I thought him good. In a practical way.

  The road had sharpened my instincts. He proved a generous host who let me find my own place in his modern white apartment. We talked about home, away, and everywhere in between.

  And I was in Salamanca.

  Renowned for architectural beauty, scholarship and a fiesta mind-set, it had to party without me that night. I was happy to sit on Paul’s couch, rub all four of our feet and sip sparkling Cava.

  An indulgence of another kind.

  21

  Salamanca

  Turning back the high-thread-count sheets of the queen-sized bed in my loft room in Paul’s apartment, I remembered my sinner’s warning about ‘the seduction of easefulness’. I gave in to that seduction the minute my head touched the pillow in its pristine cotton casing.

  I dreamed of walking.

  I was with my compañero in pre-dawn darkness. A pale path reflected the light of the stars up at us as we surfed the air’s temperature changes. It was like being in the ocean when you are unexpectedly bathed by a warm current, simultaneously luxurious and unsettling. We chased warmth to the centre of the road then followed it to the edge, trailing it back, forth, here, there.

  I woke.

  A field of stars dotted the square glass skylight above me. I wondered where my compañero would be now. He would have been glad I was remembering. The word ‘remember’ was a favourite of his. ‘Re’—as in ‘do again, repeat’. And ‘member’—as in ‘pieces, parts’.

  ‘It’s all we get,’ he said. ‘Just parts that we put together again.’

  He taught me to love the word igualmente—equally.

  ‘Buen camino,’ a pilgrim would call to him.

  ‘Igualmente,’ he would call back, waving.

  Equality, the wish for the world to be igual, was and is his personal quest.

  Hermoso was my word, he said. Everything I saw was beautiful. My amigo made the same observation. Maybe I just needed more Spanish vocab!

  My amigo taught me ‘no pasa nada’. Doesn’t matter. It’s not important.

  He said it constantly. It became a joke between us. But maybe it was his motif for a reason; how else to live with such memories?

  In the night, in my spotless room, I thought about his brother.

  Abuse. It’s just another word, after all.

  Until someone tells you a direct experience. Then abuse becomes a racing heart and a cold sweat, as you taste the panic of a child, terrified of suffocating because his mouth is filled with an adult penis.

  No pasa nada.

  No wonder my amigo repeated the phrase.

  I rolled over. The sheets smelled like lemons.

  I woke late.

  It was fin de semana. Weekend.

  Camino, like my working
life, doesn’t always acknowledge the idea of a week ending. Days roll along and sometimes it’s hard to remember which is which in the rhythm of the road.

  Paul was on his computer, researching walking, perhaps to ease the sting of his blisters. He told me the greatest walker of all time was Robert Barclay Allardice, known as ‘the celebrated pedestrian’. In 1809, in his most famous exploit, he walked a thousand miles in a thousand hours—one mile every hour for a thousand hours. Without Merrell hiking boots. As I tended Paul’s feet, I gave thanks again to my boots and my New Zealand wool socks for my blister-free state.

  And I gave thanks to Paul for my palace of dreams.

  For a pilgrim, it was paradise. As was his company. He could produce a good story on call but never flaunted his knowledge or his travels. He reminded me that Australians are particular. I forget that when I see how much British tradition we have retained or how much of the American dream we have appropriated. Being with Paul, I saw the ironic, laconic Aussie humour and laid-back approach to life. He worked long hours in a testing job, yet retained a deceptive looseness.

  No pasa nada. No worries, even as I sewed through his blisters to release liquid. I dabbed them with ti-tree and lavender oils, reassuring him this was not new-age mumbo-jumbo because lavender was used as an antiseptic in the trenches of World War I.

  I opened my inbox to read stories from home:

  People had walked with me on Anzac Day to the Aya Sofia in Istanbul, by the river in Perth, on trails in California and around the Manly Dam in Sydney. In Melbourne, they had walked with returned soldiers at the Shrine of Remembrance. They wrote of lessons they had been taught by their bodies, of transcending pain, of the pleasure of toil and the joy of silence.

  I was learning a reverse lesson, I replied. The Via de la Plata has people on it. Strange creatures. Walking thirty-five kilometres in a day is nothing compared to negotiating with another human being.

  Sinners reported in.

  My ‘adulterer’ wrote that she was taking each step with me, clinging on to the strap of your pack. She wrote of the insupportable loss of friendship that had resulted from her actions, and that self-forgiveness seems to be impossible. She saw the walk as a co-creation and was working hard to keep up her mileage.