by Ailsa Piper
I kept on writing as the sky turned from dove to lead outside.
For me, prayer is walking. Every step is a prayer. And if there are sacred places, then the ones I have seen are roads that stretch to the horizon, empty of all save perhaps a fellow traveller, dotted in the distance, walking a separate but connected way.
A saint is a tree beside a road, the branches wide enough to give comfort and solace in equal measure.
A sermon is a story told at sunset, two spirits meeting to pay attention, to listen, and to learn.
Divinity is the moment when heartbeats and footsteps align, find each other, and mark miles together.
Miracles ask little and give much. Like a woman tucking homemade food into a stranger’s pockets, miracles quicken the step, light the way in the early morning dark, and are the first star of the evening cool. Miracles are journeys from emptiness to fullness, from heartbreak to heartache to heartburn to heart’s ease. And back again.
And heaven?
Heaven is a place where good people do bad things and bad people do good things and somewhere out on the miraculous road, good and bad people look into each other’s eyes and realise there is no separation. They are the same.
And ‘buen camino’ is a blessing.
Good road. Good path. Good way.
Perhaps it is the only blessing.
The woman proprietor of the hostal sat down opposite me. Her dark hair was tinged with grey and she moved as though each action gave her pain. She took my hand, saying the pilgrim road was not easy. That I should eat and sleep. There was soup, special soup from Galicia. Caldo gallego. And fish, too. Fish would be good for me. And maybe I should have some cake.
Galicia is soft, she said, but hard too. People are not rich. They have little. They know what it is to work and to be tired. You must rest, she said.
And one more thing. Very important, pilgrim. Muy muy importante.
Remember that you don’t walk the camino. The camino walks you.
I made her repeat it. I wrote it down. I wanted to tell her that that day the camino had walked all over me. I think she knew.
I remembered my shepherd. Life: hard but beautiful.
Was everyone in Spain a philosopher?
We stood, but before I could move into the dining room, she hugged me, squeezing me tight. It was a shock to feel the warmth of her. A relief.
The body is a work of wonder, but it needs care. Basic food and drink, sufficient sleep, and connection. Bodies need it. Feet certainly do.
‘Hold the sole and you hold the soul,’ a lanky Canadian with fierce blisters said to me when I rubbed his feet. I think he was right.
‘You’re the yeast to my dough. You make me rise!’ said an Irish lass with purple bruising at her waist and shoulders from her backpack, as she cried at being touched.
I didn’t want to cry there in Vilavella with those arms around me, so I clamped my jaw and told myself to harness a bit of duende.
When she brought me my soup, steaming and aromatic, the owner said I had only two hundred kilometres to go to Santiago. Más o menos. More or less.
Really? Two hundred? Then I had covered a thousand kilometres!
Some trudging, some flying, some singing, some weeping, some sheer sinful delight. I’d carried sins for a thousand kilometres, and I was in Galicia, a land of mists and mellow fruitfulness, if ever there was one.
Land of tormentas too, if the scene outside the window was anything to go by. Lightning illuminated the bowsers. Gaitas—bagpipes—played on the sound system. I was in Macbeth territory.
A group of men filed past to the next table, all with that scrubbed, just-showered glow. They raised glasses and laughed. Their energy bounced off the walls and off my back, battering me with bonhomie. I finished my celebratory vino tinto and stood to go. I had no energy to party.
My hugger appeared and thrust a plate into my hand.
‘Something sweet. It’s important.’
A slice of the Santiago almond cake, with its cross of Saint James outlined in icing sugar on the top. It’s the traditional cake of the pilgrim, made throughout Galicia. Two friends cooked it for my birthday, before I had even contemplated a camino. None of us viewed it as anything more than a display of their culinary prowess. Hindsight makes me see it as a sign!
As the sky flashed outside, I stood staring at the cake. The men fell silent. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. A man with salt-and-pepper hair raised his glass.
‘Buen camino,’ he said.
I sat back down and polished off every crumb. As I ate, I had a palimpsesto moment, going back in time to the final day of the Francés, when I’d walked—or rather, flown—for fifty-three ecstatic Galician kilometres. I’d bounded down country lanes between dry-stone walls set with rickety wooden gates and benches; along narrow paths lined with chestnuts, sunflowers, pumpkins and pears; through cobbled streets past the inevitable bakery filled with Santiago torta; by bronze cornfields swaying in late afternoon sun and haystacks glowing gold under a rising moon.
Galicia’s granite villages are built to last. They are plain, undecorated. Maybe that’s because the landscape is so dramatic that the inhabitants don’t feel the need to dress them up. Also, landholdings are small and making a living is difícil.
The people, too, are different. They have the pale skin and dark eyes of the Irish. They are elvish and weathered, living with fog all year round. It makes dreamscapes of their land. Stone walls wind across it and spiders’ webs are barriers of filigree across entire fields. The Galician food is hearty and stew-based, their most famous dish being pulpo gallego, a kind of octopus hotpot, pungent and rich red. They have their own language, a re-worked Spanish with a bit of Portuguese flung in for good measure. They say Bom dia instead of Buenos días.
I remembered all that, from a piece of cake.
Palimpsesto.
I was fortified.
I was a pilgrim and I would keep on walking, to the end of the third act.
26
Regalos
Gifts.
Next morning I received my first at breakfast.
Sleep and Santiago cake had worked wonders, and in spite of hormone heaviness and grey skies, I wanted to walk. A Gudiña was fourteen kilometres up the road. Even if I only made it that far, I could check into an albergue and explore a Galician town.
As I was finishing my café, tostada and sin-reading, a familiar face greeted me—the man who had wished me buen camino the previous evening. He wore red and yellow Lycra, and asked where I was going and how far I had come. When he heard my story, he called the others over. They were cycling the camino in a group, their support van loaded with puncture equipment, spare tyres and luggage. They took it in turns to drive, going ahead to find coffee, forage for lunches and track down necessities from pharmacies or lottery agents!
The designated driver invited me to ride for an hour or two in the van with him, saying it would be a pleasure to have some ‘kangaroo company’.
Would I have gone sightseeing with a group of stranger cyclists at home? Undoubtedly no.
But here I was, surrounded by smiling faces insisting I should see more of Galicia than simply the path of the yellow arrows; that they would return me to my road; that it would be a chance to see the camino through cyclist’s eyes.
And so I rode high in the white Transit van, gasping at panoramas that must surely have reached to world’s end at Finisterre. The rain stopped. The sky cleared. The van turned corner after miraculous corner, and the day expanded with the vistas.
Travelling at car pace was an adrenaline rush after walking. Colours blurred and speed made fields merge into one another. Mountains were vast, then nothing, then gone. On foot, there is only the next step. Up high, in the van, I could see the separations, the folds of land, the pueblo hidden behind that hill like a child behind a mother’s skirt. And f
ast. So fast.
Fifty kilometres per hour was Formula One frenzy.
We stopped in Verín, off the walking path, and met the riders for coffee. They ate mammoth bocadillos of cheese and jamón, and skulled coffee like water. I bought them a box of strawberries and they washed them down with grappa. They bought me a lottery ticket so I might come and live in Spain.
I didn’t win, but I kept the ticket—a reminder of their gifts.
The cyclist’s camino is a fiesta, a bonding exercise played out on big roads and in larger towns. I saw why they were always calling to each other on the road. Speed is an intoxicant.
Nonetheless, I was back in my natural habitat when my feet hit the earth. I was way past A Gudiña and so let myself drift, a karma-collecting breeze at my back and cows at my side, snail-walking downhill to Laza, where I checked into my first Galician albergue, its modern steel structure incongruous above the stone buildings of the pueblo.
The Galician government must have spent a fortune upgrading albergues for the Holy Year. This one was built around a central grassed courtyard, its glass walls allowing floods of light to enter. The communal sitting and cooking areas were clean, practical and inviting. It was inhabited by a new village, mostly German.
I collected a key from the office of the Protección Civil. When the officer saw me limping, she led me through to the on-duty doctor, who checked my knee (no problem) and my sore toe (perhaps a small break) and my other vital signs (normal). All free for the pilgrims.
The wiry-haired matriarch at the supermarket told me about her family, saying the young don’t value anything but money now. It’s all that matters. So marriages fall apart and children ignore their history.
Then we talked about mothers. Hers had died only a year before, at the age of eighty. I said that I often walked with mine; that I still felt her loss, after fifteen years. I told her about the death of my sister-in-law. Suddenly, we were both crying, hugging like intimates.
Her sternness and disappointment vanished. She said life is sol y sombra—sun and shadow. Like the camino. And you can’t value one without the other. Then she said the young were not so bad and history was not everything, and we laughed. I walked out into the late afternoon, completely oblivious to the possibly broken bone in my right toe.
Sol y sombra.
I think she was right. We value the sun more when we have known shadow. Why is that? I don’t want to believe that suffering is necessary for happiness but it certainly puts it into sharper relief.
I strolled past a donkey of palest grey. He pottered with me part way to the church. Finding it closed, I investigated the cemetery. Behind a wall, a row of open graves lay ready and waiting, their marble headstones already inscribed with family names. Pedro Perez Serra. Mauricio Jurado Rodriguez. Luisa Barbero Martín.
Long names, each telling a story. The Spanish take two surnames: the first surname of their father and the first surname of their mother. It’s possible to comprehend something of a family’s history through the surnames, which may hail from different corners of the country or even the world. Like Pablo Richter Miramontes!
The impressive names were prepared for death. It was coming. It was part of their lives and must be given its due. Looking into those gaping rectangles, I thought what a curious exercise it is to claim we are immortal.
We are born. We die.
That is it, Brett and Sue would have said. They had no faith in anything other than life, and no expectations beyond the pleasure of the day they were in and the connections they made along the way.
I’d often questioned their certainty about that, just as I’d questioned certainty about an all-knowing god. At Sue’s funeral, overflowing with friends and family, I saw how unnecessary religion is as comfort when there’s an abundance of love. Faith was present, in the eyes of friends as they reassured my brother and his childen. Faith in each other. In the here and now and the goodness that can be done.
There are kinds of immortality.
It may sound morbid, but looking into those open graves, I imagined myself, like Mum, long gone. Particles of me had been eaten by a fish, perhaps, that swam to a distant sea, only to be plucked by a hungry seabird winging to a beach in the north of Spain, where it landed and watched feet trudging along a path to a lighthouse, where people burned things in flames on rocks, and other birds wheeled overhead. I was there, in that bird.
I imagined myself as dust. Clay.
A potter scooped up a handful of me and made me into a bowl, turning it on a wheel, his hands shaping it into something useful, then fired it, fired me, then placed it on a table to hold fruit to feed a hungry child.
Earlier in the day I had stopped under an oak tree. I’d closed my eyes and imagined my feet still walking, crunching seeds from acorns that had been crunched under other feet that had already walked that path before me. I’d imagined those seeds being pushed into the soil, sprouting tendrils and growing down into the earth.
I’d opened my eyes, and by my side a grasshopper sat rubbing its feet together.
Somewhere, a crow called.
As I looked into those graves in Laza, I wondered whether, in hundreds of years, another oak would spread its shade over another pilgrim wandering that same path. By then, I might be in Australian earth, feeding another tree.
Or a crow.
Or even a grasshopper.
These imaginings are types of immortality. They have mystery and beauty aplenty. And if there is more, I will surely discover it in time. But for now, this world, these mysteries, are ample. And accepting mystery, celebrating it, is a kind of faith.
‘Gracias,’ I whispered to the wind as it whipped through the graves, blowing ice off the mountains. ‘Gracias.’
I turned to find il Capitano watching me from a distance.
He was waiting for me to finish my prayers, he said.
They’d arrived earlier in the day. Il Soldato had mild food poisoning, so they checked into a hostal. Also, il Capitano whispered, there had been many snorers in the refuge at A Gudiña, and they hadn’t slept.
We went to dinner. Of course!
I was glad to have a chance to shout him, as he’d insisted on giving me a memory card for my camera the day before. We wolfed down soup, a mixed grill and half of Spain’s potato crop, ice cream, bread and wine. Il Capitano downed his whisky with hot milk and declared that we would meet in the bar at 7.30 next morning, because of course I would be walking with them.
I grinned all the way home.
At the albergue, I met another woman—a German in her early fifties. Elfin and fair, she walked with her tall lean husband. She gathered wildflowers as she walked, pressing them between the pages of a book of poems by Rilke. I told her he was leading me to Santiago, that friends sent me his words. She said Rilke helped her to survive when she stopped menstruating at forty and was told she would never have children. Poetry had lifted her from darkness.
She translated a poem called ‘God Speaks’. I went to bed with her gift of Rilke’s words:
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me …
I didn’t feel I had lost any connection to the divine in the revelations of the previous days. In fact, I had found a new peace. Certainty belonged to childhood, and the acceptance of mystery worked best for me now.
No feeling is final.
The mystery of how some flowers open at night to release their perfume, while others won’t reveal their hearts without sun. The mystery of knowing one’s clan. The mystery of love.
More than enough.
My bunkroom was peopled entirely by men; the snorers who’d wrecked the Italians’ sleep the previous night. It was as though I was inside
the grumbling timpani of a full orchestra. I gave up on the idea of sleep and tried to hold the words of the poem as booming waves of sound crashed around me, making me nervous for a couple of the men when they paused too long before a thundering inhale.
At around three the room began to quiet, save for rhythmic breathing and a few rattles. A rumble. An isolated snort. As though someone was conducting.
Then peace. Minutes passed. Silence.
I was too nervous to move, afraid of disturbing the sleepers.
Then a new sound. A whimper. Small, tender, high-pitched. A cry of pain.
The conductor at work again, making other music.
It rose to a crescendo of loss and sorrow. Cries, mumbles, gasps; the sounds of children, trapped and afraid, like a boarding-school dormitory on the first night of term.
I wondered about the masks worn by men. All that bravado and machismo, is it only a façade? How painful to be inside those minds. I hoped Mr Rilke was right and that no feeling was final. I would have hated the sleepers to remember their night-time grief.
Next morning I navigated downhill through a whiteout to Bar Picota. The tall girl who ran the place had a long thin face and straight dark hair. When I told her I liked her sweet-smelling bar, she produced a pocket notebook for me.
‘Un regalo para usted,’ she said. A gift for you.
I tucked it into the back of my journal, and when I see the smiley faces on the cover, I picture her bar, with the president of Spain warning of cuts to funding for funcionarios and pensionistas. I see two ancianos in the back corner shaking their heads. And I see my Italians bursting through the door, ready for coffee and camino.
We walked in wispy fog, climbing on soft Galician earth. Together, apart, by a river, along a valley, past dogs and chickens, up, up, up. The shuffles, squeaks and growls of the waking landscape evoked the sounds of my Australian bush and the mantra I often repeated to myself when I walked alone through it—the words of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.