by Ailsa Piper
No courage had been needed to move me through the landscape that morning. I had my own road, even if it was noisy and the elements taunted me. I had space and time. I was both selfish and self-ish. Pilgrim-ish. Getting back on form. A good reason to keep walking. The next pueblo was another fourteen kilometres, but even with the wind it felt do-able after my rest day.
Leaving, I spied the first of a series of terracotta marker plinths, erected by the Friends of the Camino from Zamora, the next major town. Each gave a snippet of history and reflected on the pilgrim journey. El Cubo’s said that Hannibal visited with his elephants in 220bc. I pictured the parade of pachyderms and the Carthaginian conqueror.
Was there anyone who had not tried to take Spain?
My first few kilometres ran along a small-gauge railway line, through scrubby growth and past discarded sofas. The vines nearby were scraggly and stunted. The recovery I’d heard of was not apparent.
Then a turn and a hill.
Open country. Wide open. A shaggy brown pony trotted up. I ate an apple and gave him the core. His mane and tail streamed in the icy blasts as he nuzzled my palm and walked with me a while, a moving windbreak.
Cresting the next hill made the whole morning worthwhile. Sprawling to eternity were fields of brown, green and yellow. I clicked photos, my fingers like ice, and as I was replacing my camera in its holster I experienced an odd palimpsesto shiver.
My vantage point gave a mirror image of a vista I remembered from the meseta of the Camino Francés. In both places I was at the top of a hill, with a road before me winding east then west then east. The difference in palette was stark. The Francés shots are golden, while the Mozárabe meseta was in its springtime show-coat.
I was looking across the valley of the Río Douro, a river that flows for almost nine hundred kilometres from its source in north-central Spain, carving a path through striated greens and ploughed red. It forms more than a hundred kilometres of the border with Portugal, before emptying into the sea at Porto. I would have stood and stared, burning the image of the valley into my mind’s eye, but windchill made movement imperative.
The land rose and fell, and the pueblo of Villanueva de Campeán appeared and disappeared. Arriving at last, I walked the streets, trying to locate someone, anyone, who could open the door in the stone portico of the albergue. I could find not one of the inhabitants. Even the bar was shuttered against the cold. It was 4 p.m., usually a time when a couple of ancianos could be found nursing their spirits. On the marker plinth, I read Villanueva’s message to pilgrims:
This town is an embrace of history … Walker, make of your life an embrace. In the embracing of history is tolerance. Tolerance is the peaceable fruit of love.
I turned to find Isadora watching me.
She was short, dark of hair and complexion, and smiling. She had the keys to the albergue, and perhaps the entire town. Wind beat into our faces as we walked back up the main street, past her bar, where she said I could have dinner. She opened the albergue door and left me to it.
It was recently built, with shiny taps and all mod cons. In the kitchen, a guest book held a message from il Capitano, urging me to hurry up and catch them. I’d covered thirty-four kilometres against fierce wind. Although Zamora was just under twenty, there was no way I was pushing on, even for them. Besides, I had a ten-bed dormitory to myself. The mattresses were thick and firm, a primary-coloured blanket was folded on each, and plump pillows waited for me to choose where I would lay my head.
I laundered in steaming water and rubbed my back and feet. I arranged my nest with three blankets over my sleeping bag, two pillows for my head and another under my knees. I clicked a photo of myself grinning in the bathroom mirror. It was the third in a series that began in the Villaharta polideportivo before the storm and continued at the railway station in Campanario. Pilgrim bliss.
I rugged myself up in all my layers and scarves, took my journal and camera, and went out into the town.
And very quickly into the bar.
It was just after six. Way too early to eat, but way too glacial to explore. Isadora gave me a newspaper, turned on the TV, brought me a vino tinto and spicy olives, and left me to write. Outside, wind thrashed and the temperature plummeted. The olives took me back to the first day’s walking out of Granada, the heat and the river crossing. Far, far away.
I thought how very good it was to be warm and safe.
I was the only pilgrim in the village. I had the bar to myself. I had the albergue to myself. And I had had the road to myself.
As Will Shakespeare wrote, good in everything.
On the television, a talk show wound itself up. Someone famous had deserted her husband for a younger man. She was embarazada, which I took to mean embarrassed but which, I discovered from Isadora, actually means pregnant!
Hands flapped and voices tumbled over each other as the commentators jockeyed to know the most or have the last word. There was mucho make-up for the women, gold jewellery for the men, and scandalised intakes of breath all round.
Gossip. That industry built on the travails of others.
Isadora appeared with food. She had fashioned a salad for me from every conceivable vegetable as well as the ubiquitous tuna. She had fried potatoes and spiced lentils. A pilgrim must have fuel.
I wondered about gluttony as I grazed. I was eating for Australia on the camino! Coffee and pastry at breakfast, a bocadillo at lunch, fruit between meals and usually two courses at night. And let’s not forget the dried figs … But I wasn’t gaining weight.
The difference between fuelling and feasting is growing. Despite our ‘great outdoors’ reputation in Australia, the more we’ve learned about nutrition, heart disease and diabetes and their relationship to exercise and calories, the fatter we’ve got. In Spain, that seemed less of an issue. Yes, many people looked sleek and well fed, but I rarely saw the muffin-tops that are common at home. I re-read my sinner’s meditation on apathy and food miles. Were Spaniards closer to their produce? I’d seen few fast-food chains in the cities.
News headlines cut in.
The ocean, slick with oil. Turtles and fish coated in oozing black. Angry men in fishing boats. Suited executives hiding their faces from cameras.
There had been a disaster of epic proportions in the Gulf of Mexico: an explosion at an oil well. I couldn’t tell how long the black gold had been gushing into the sea but there were reports of people dying. I remembered that the Vatican’s list of modern sins had included environmental pollution. Would they be taking to task the company responsible? The effects of this sin would last lifetimes. The screen showed pelicans flapping sticky black wings and dolphins unable to remove smears of toxicity. I pushed my plate away, all appetite gone.
Leonardo called, his timing always perfect. He and Ricardo had decided I must come to Barcelona after Santiago, so they could care for me. You will be tired. The world will be big and noisy. Our home is quiet, tranquilo. You can rest.
They’d given so much, but I didn’t know them. I didn’t know how it would be to be in their house. We were strangers. Constructions in each other’s minds and hearts.
And yet …
Another voice said, ‘You know them. They’ve always been known.’
I couldn’t imagine camino’s end. I slipped into my sleeping bag and arranged the pillow under my knees and the blankets above. It was still light outside.
O wind, a-blowing all day long.
I slept.
I woke to blackness and listened.
O wind that sings so loud a song.
I slept again.
I woke at six, before the roosters.
Silence. No wind.
Zamora, a town of nearly seventy thousand people, was only twenty kilometres away.
23
The Walking Village
Sun and frost. Crops and cornflowers. Birdsong.<
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Spain’s mornings are all chirrups and twitters compared to the vehement crow-squawks and magpie-chortles of home.
I breakfasted at a pensioners’ club opposite the church in San Marcial, where the barman made me his first coffee of the day, hot and syrupy, with a gingerbread biscuit to dunk. Then I slid over kilometres like oil across water.
Approaching Zamora, I met a shepherd.
Who was I? Was I lost?
I showed him my guidebook, with its abbreviations: KSO, //, veer L, XR.
He scratched his stubbly chin, and shook his head.
‘Flechas amarillas,’ I said. Yellow arrows.
‘Ah! Peregrina!’ He removed a fingerless glove and pumped my hand.
‘Dónde está tu hombre?’ Where is your man?
I’m alone. Yes, I like it. No, not lonely.
He shook his head. ‘Vaya con Dios, Rubia,’ he murmured. Go with God, Blondie.
Barely a hundred metres further, a ewe lay on her side, her guts spilled in the dirt. I turned, but the shepherd had moved on. Death was routine. Vultures would take care of her.
The Río Douro raced under Zamora’s bridge as I crossed over towards sunwashed stone—now that’s blonde! Mediaeval fortified walls, an uphill alley, a shaded square, a library, a plaza, a palace, a convent, a bench, a view, a promenade, another plaza, another bench. Zamora was made for strolling and sitting, and I’d made it in before midday.
Citizens carried bags from the library, where an exhibition featured advertising posters from the fifties and sixties, in a town that goes back to Roman times. Zamora’s heyday was the twelfth century. It has more Romanesque churches than any other city in Europe.
It also had fruit stalls, a post office, and a phone box where I could use a phone card to try, repeatedly, to call my brother. Brett had emailed that he was going through old letters from Sue and ‘doing it a bit tough’. A master of emotional understatement, that meant he was struggling, and I wanted to hear his voice even if he did crack hearty. There was no answer.
I rarely experience loneliness, but it claimed me there in Zamora’s main square, as I fretted in case my brother needed some crying done.
My feet led me to the cathedral. It had a dome surrounded by smaller domes, towers and flags. It had galleries and a museum space. It had a Santiago Peregrino statue, colonnades and buttresses, but it didn’t have anything to relieve the ache in my chest. I wandered to the eleventh-century castle, with its ramparts and walkways, crumbling walls and staircases. High in an open turret, as I looked out over the town’s gold towers, a breeze took my anxiety and lifted it from my shoulders.
Brett would come through. He was doing what was necessary to heal. My melancholia was for myself, unable to do his crying. The true sorrow was for Brett to navigate. My job was to stay focused and press on for my sinners. To ‘get on with living’.
At the albergue, a two-year-old splendour built into the old town’s walls, lines were inscribed on a column by the door:
The value of camino, and of life, is not in the walking, or the discoveries, or what you are given. The value of camino is in the love you offer by walking.
Point taken!
Inside, I was glad to see Eva and Heike, who were the only other women there. All but one of the thirty-two places had been filled. From where had all these pilgrims appeared?
My Fräuleins had caught a bus. The wind and the distances between refugios were proving tough for them. We were allocated a room to ourselves, so we could avoid the snores and smells of the bloke brigade. I don’t wish to sound unkind about the male of the species—God knows, I’m partial!—but after long days of walking, and without women around, men often reverted to a pack of stinky ferals.
Eva, Heike and I went out on the town. Two local chicas had given me a list of their favourite tapas bars, so we sampled mussels and patatas bravas, eels, whitebait and spices. Eva flirted, with the Spanish and with us. She told me she had lived all over the world, that she loved men, loved bodies, loved flesh, loved food. Eva loved, full stop. And she laughed. Zamora was lit up by her pleasure, and just knowing she was in the bunk below made me smile as my eyes closed.
Next morning, I was the last to leave the albergue, but by 11.30 I was twenty kilometres down the road in a café and had overtaken everyone.
It wasn’t intentional, but nature was dancing her most seductive moves and the sky was criss-crossed with caminos of jet trails. A black-and-white bird came and went with me for at least five kilometres, twittering and wagging his tail, always three metres ahead, landing and lifting off. I was not going to be left behind and before we finished our conversation I was in Montamarta, a run-down pueblo, grey from the fumes of the passing trucks on the N-630 and coated with a thick film of resignation.
I had gone too fast. But when the road opens, the skies lift and a bird sings … well, what’s a pilgrim to do?
I removed my boots and made myself known to a bocadillo with an oozing omelette centre. I journalled and consulted maps. A Swiss pilgrim stopped at my table and told me I walked ‘too fast, too fast’. Others straggled in, greeting each other like prodigals, taking their café con leche, planning destinations and catching up.
‘Where did you last see …?’
‘They caught a bus with that dark-haired …’
‘He said he was stopping in …’
Camino gossip or, as a friend would say, details. She always said she didn’t like gossip, but loved a detail.
The crowd grew. The word count increased. Time to head out.
Opposite the café was a phone box where I got through to Brett. It was dinnertime in Australia and he was cooking. With the roar of road trains in my ears, I managed to hear him say he was coping, but couldn’t deal with things in his normal way.
‘This isn’t normal,’ I shouted over a belching truck.
He said it was good to read those early letters from Sue; they confirmed his memories were accurate, not rose-tinted. That was comfort. He was following me on a map and liked to imagine where I was walking. I wished he could have been with me.
It was a long call, over half an hour before my credit ran out, but I didn’t need to do any crying for him. He was strong.
The Swiss pilgrim bowled up, saying he couldn’t find a way out of town.
‘The camino is gone. Which way do you go?’
A chica in a floral dress explained that, with the rains, the track was flooded and we had to go over the freeway bridge. Eva and Heike appeared and said they were coming too. No one wanted to spend all afternoon watching Spain’s groceries thunder down a highway.
The girls fell behind but my Swiss sidekick accelerated with me. I wanted to be alone, and said as much, but I mustn’t have made myself clear. Herr Stalker had clearly decided I meant ‘alone with only you’.
I walked faster. He increased his pace. I put on my headphones. He kept time beside me. I sang. He smiled.
He was either insane or smitten if my singing pleased him.
We were approaching a sweeping embalse, its surface glinting in the sun. I put my pedal to the metal and zoomed, but at the shoreline Herr Stalker was still with me, red of face and panting. I had to stop or I’d be responsible for his death. Then I would have a sin to carry!
I said I needed time alone. He said, of course, he too wanted that, and headed off around the lake. I sat, sipped water and wondered at the perversity of humans. Herr Stalker’s figure got smaller. I inhaled dry heat.
It was swimming weather, a day to plunge in and laugh at snakes and turtles. A day to picnic or play I Spy. Something beginning with A.
Amigo …
On the opposite bank stood Castrotorafe. More ruin than castle, its crumbling gold walls appeared to hover above the water. Camelot and Rivendell. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. It had been a stronghold for the Knights of Santiago, an order of warri
or monks set up to protect pilgrims and to keep the camino paths firmly Christian. Their tapering red cross was the symbol on the first sello I’d been given by that nun of few words way back in Granada.
The track took me close to the ruins, which appeared to have pushed themselves up through a mound of turf. Wildflowers lined my path, the sun had the sky to itself, and I had the road. My phone rang.
‘Hola!’ I answered, singing it as the Spanish do when they are glad. Two syllables, two notes that can express delight, surprise, joy, love.
‘Hola, mi peregrina preferida!’
My amigo!
I told him I’d been thinking of him, of swimming, heat and poems. He sounded happy. We talked. Little things. No sadness. No pasa nada.
I thanked him for making my day. He asked if he had called before Leonardo and Ricardo. When I said yes, I made his day!
I whizzed along the gravel road, oblivious to the heat. Shaggy goats bleated a welcome to Fontanillas de Castro. A horse neighed farewell. Kilometres disappeared under my swollen feet as mountains began to beckon up ahead and the landscapes morphed into scenic backdrops, less and less plausible.
Too green. Too blue. Too bright. Too clear.
After thirty-five kilometres, I was glad to reach Riego del Camino.
Sad little pueblo. Grey. What had happened here? It felt leached of love.
It was late in the day. The next town was another seven kilometres and its albergue small. I might not get a bed. Be sensible. Stay and rest.
But who can explain a feeling? I had to go.
Later, down the road, Eva and Heike said they stayed there and had fun, laughed with Herr Stalker and scraped together a meal. But I sensed sorrow in the walls of the village, so I booted up and propelled myself on burning feet back out into the heat, to the seven unbending kilometres of gravel leading to Granja de Moreruela.
Oh, the contast between the day’s first kilometres, when all is fresh, and a final stint when the day has been long. My legs threatened mutiny and my shoulders went out in solidarity. There was no flying down that road, but we got there, me, my feet and I. And to a welcome, most welcome sight: a one-room, ten-bed albergue. The last free bed was mine, a top bunk, beside the bathroom, above an Australian!