Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  Another time, James and his brother pull Christ aside from the other apostles. Quietly they ask if they can occupy the most important seats in heaven—at his side, one on the right, the other on the left. Even in the King James version, Jesus’ annoyance survives the shellacking of a high-minded translation. According to Mark (10:38), Christ says, “Ye know not what ye ask.” Jesus goes on to say that they cannot expect to sit beside the throne. “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” he asks. James and John, never quick to take a hint, immediately answer, “We can.” Jesus stumbles at their audacity but gets out of this uncomfortable situation by saying, it “is not mine to give.”

  The other apostles were jealous of James and John for several reasons—the two were cousins of Jesus’, their mother had money, and they were incorrigible lickspittles. When word got around that the twosome had asked for the prime seats in heaven, the other apostles fell into a dark mood, according to Mark (10:41): “And when the ten heard it, they began to be much displeased with James and John.” What is interesting about this story is not that James is once again revealed to be an apple-polisher, but it would appear that Jesus had really grown to dislike James and his brother. Applying the methods of investigative journalism to the Bible might not be fair, but consider: Who leaked the brothers’ secret request so that the other ten apostles would be unhappy? Chances are it wasn’t James or John.

  Yet James served his leader unfailingly to the end. After proselytizing around the Holy Land, the last we hear of James (Book of Acts) is his return to the realm of King Herod, who welcomed him home with martyrdom. And that’s the end. It’s a pretty good story but inadequate to the demands of pilgrimage. Ironically, that’s what made him perfect for the job of patron. James was as highly ranked as Peter or John, yet he was merely an outline, a skeletal character. There was a lot of room for embellishment. In the ninth century in northern Spain, one began to hear some extra-biblical tales.

  One story explains that James had come to Spain just after the crucifixion of Christ to convert the Roman citizens of Hispania. He utterly failed, winning over fewer than a dozen new believers. James then returned to the Holy Land where King Herod beheaded him and threw his parts outside the city wall to be eaten by wild dogs.

  Devotees of James collected his head and corpse and carried them to the beach. Two of the associates placed the body on an empty boat, and miraculously it set sail, piloted only, it is said, by the love of the Virgin Mary. The ship navigated eastward to Gibraltar and then north along the Portuguese coast to the end of the world, Finisterre. When James’s disciples landed, they tied the bowline to a stone stele, which still stands on the shore. For centuries, the diaries of pilgrims who visited Finisterre mentioned a stone boat marooned on the beach. (A Flemish pilgrim named Jean Taccouen, who walked the road in 1512, reports that he saw it resting on its side. The locals told him that only a Christian who had attained a state of grace could move it. Mr. Taccouen adds wryly, “I have not spoken to anyone who has budged it.”)

  The disciples brought the body ashore and laid it on a stone slab, which went soft like wet clay, leaving a bas-relief of the apostle. The ruler of this area, a vicious pagan queen named Lupa, greeted her visitors in a diplomatic way and sent them to see a man named Beleth, whom she knew would kill them. When Beleth jailed the disciples, an angel released them. When Beleth’s knights chased them across a river, the bridge collapsed and drowned the pursuers. Queen Lupa then dispatched them to a mountain range she knew to be inhabited by dragons and wild bulls. When the disciples arrived, a dragon spit fire and charged, but a quick sign of the cross split him in two. The wild bulls charged, but another sign of the cross reduced them to complacent beasts of burden. When the disciples returned with the wild bulls pulling their cart, Queen Lupa awakened to the inadequacy of her creed and converted at once. The bulls slowly dragged their heavy load another few miles and suddenly stopped at a temple to Bacchus. The pagan statue immediately disintegrated. The disciples mixed the dust with water to make the cement for a shrine. They called this place Santiago de Compostela—the city to which I am headed.

  In death, though, James had no better luck in Spain than in life. The conversions still numbered no more than Queen Lupa and a few others. After these and the disciples died, the body was left in a cave and forgotten for nearly eight centuries.

  In a.d. 814 a hermit named Pelayo lived in the northwest corner of Spain, eating insects and scavaging for honey. One evening he looked into the night sky and saw a series of strange lights near the river Sar. They seemed to be indicating a direction, growing smaller and smaller as they approached earth until they were nothing more than spangles of light dancing in the brush. Pelayo followed them and heard the singing of angels. He informed the bishop, Theodomir, who dispatched a crew of men to hack through the dense undergrowth. They came upon a cave. Inside was a sepulcher and papers declaring that it contained the body of Saint James. Theodomir told the pope, and soon Rome declared an official pilgrimage to the site. The apostle was instantly elevated to a new status.

  For the Catholic Church, the discovery of James’s body was conspicuously timely. In the previous century, invading Moors had conquered all but the hardscrabble northern strip of Spain —precisely where the pilgrimage route is located. Arab soldiers stood poised to breach the Pyrenees and take Christendom. They had already crossed the mountains a few times, most famously repelled in 732 by Charles the Hammer at Poitiers, France.

  The Church, which had no army and had a divine commandment forbidding killing, found the site a good way to lure men, money, and arms into northern Spain. But the pilgrim’s trail turned out to be much more useful than just a boot camp for a holy war. Without knowing it, the Church had also stumbled upon a new way of generating great wealth. The continual ebb and flow of skilled and unskilled people created what residents of Florida or California would recognize as a tourist economy. For the next five centuries, Santiago would draw enough men and goods into Spain not only to defeat the Moors but also to power the Spanish Empire’s economy until New World gold could take over.

  James, once a clumsy yes-man, was now a poster boy who was always changing costumes to meet the changing needs of a medieval Catholic bureaucracy. His earliest images were of a simple pilgrim. The first polychromatic statues show an earnest fellow in a cloak and hat. He is almost always depicted as a man on foot, eternally about to take that next step. But as the pilgrimage drew millions of people, the road developed different meanings and uses. And so did James.

  In the early ninth century, for example, the Christians were routinely being slaughtered. The Moors had all the physical advantages of men, horses, and arms. But they also had the arm of Mohammed, said to be in a vault in the south of Spain. One of the benefits of such a divine possession was that their messiah appeared in the sky on a charger and led them into combat. Mohammed would not be alone up there for long.

  At the battle of Clavijo in 845, James appeared in his first major conflict. He was now a giant in the sky, riding upon a horse and swinging a sword. He killed sixty thousand Arabs that afternoon, according to reports. James’s appearances as a fighter against infidels became so common that it earned his new image a nickname. Always mounted—sword in one hand and a bearded head dripping gore in the other—he was simply Santiago Matamoros: Saint James, Moor-killer.

  It was a remarkable transformation. None of the other roads has adapted itself so nakedly and so successfully to changing times. Despite the pilgrimage’s status as the most tired of clichés, the traditions of Santiago have quite effectively subverted and survived them all. That, too, is why I wanted to follow this road.

  In the heyday of religious peripeteia, the three great routes to Santiago, Rome, and Jerusalem bound the world of Christendom with a belt of serene traffic—Santiago to the west, Jerusalem to the east, and Rome in the center. In some ways, they were competitive. Each had its own emblem. Santiago promoted the scallop or cockle shell. Pilgrims to Rome wore a small key on
their cloaks and were called romers. Those going to Jerusalem laced a swatch of palm in their clothes and were called palmers.

  But even among the big three, Santiago was distinct. Pilgrims to Rome or Jerusalem could go for any number of reasons. Jerusalem had prestige and Rome was a political center, so any pilgrimage there was practically a junket. But Santiago had little appeal beyond that plain idea of a long walk.

  Dante Alighieri favored Santiago’s simple clarity. “In the wider sense,” he wrote in La Vita Nuova, a pilgrim is “whoever is outside his fatherland,” but “in the narrow sense, none is called a pilgrim save he who is journeying toward the sanctuary of Saint James of Compostella.” Among lesser routes, pilgrimage typically had to provide some other draw, such as supernaturalism. Pilgrims to Lourdes in France expected a miracle and were disappointed if they didn’t get one. Although miracles were associated with Santiago, this was never the only attraction. Most pilgrims of St. James came and went without any cures, or with the standard minimum (at that time) of signs and wonders.

  I don’t hold myself out as much of a pilgrim, what with my cloudy motives and facile past. But even as I sat reading at my desk in New York, my failings became encouragement. Among the ancient documents that survive are reports that during the Middle Ages many “others” walked the road, including Moors, then the very stamp of libidinal mustachioed infidel. A twelfth-century document from the pilgrims’ shelter in Roncesvalles declares: “Its doors are open to all, well and ill, not only to Catholics, but to pagans, jews and heretics, the idler and the vagabond and, to put it shortly, the good and the wicked.” I believe I can find myself in that list somewhere.

  Where does the road to Santiago begin? It was a question my med

  ieval predecessors never had to consider. In those days, a pilgrim simply stepped out of his hut and declared his intention. Then he might report to a cloister and receive a signed letter to serve as proof of intent. Afterward, the pilgrim walked west until he picked up any of the established routes in Europe. From the east and south, the pilgrim followed any of four established roads that fanned like fingers across France and converged at the palm of Spain. A few miles inside the Pyrenees, they formed a single unified road shooting straight across the breadth of the country.

  I lived a few doors off Washington Square Park in New York City and an ocean away from my destination. I couldn’t just walk out my door. For reasons of symmetry and authenticity, this bothered me. I thought I would toss a coin onto a map of France and proceed from there, but this seemed too haphazard. It felt wrong to begin this trip with such an American sense of abandon. I studied a map of France to see if any of the cities had a personal significance. I checked my family’s records to see if any ancestors a few centuries back might have had some interaction in this part of Europe, but according to all available information, one branch was too busy fleeing Prussian law while the other was stuffing a sheep’s stomach for a weekend of haggis. Arles, Montpellier, Carcasonne, and Toulouse were not likely vacation spots for Teutonic horse thieves or Scottish presbyters.

  One Saturday I happened upon a brochure that offered a solution. Not only could I walk out my front door, I could take the New York subway. I boarded the A train, immortalized by Duke Ellington, and took it almost to the end, where the Metropolitan Museum of Art maintains a branch called the Cloisters. The museum is an assemblage of ruins from four medieval cloisters, dating from the Romanesque and Gothic periods, and once located on the road to Santiago. I resolved to spend a quiet afternoon among the weathered columns and begin there.

  The most beautiful—the cloister of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert —is covered by a plastic dome. Fat gobs of New York City rain fell the afternoon I visited, making a bass-drum thump that left me feeling strangely dry. Instead of the customary central garden, there is a marble floor, giving the space the linoleum acoustics of a grade school cafeteria. My attempt at meaningful silence was carefully monitored by a suspicious security guard who understood museum policy and the slight reach of his power only too well. At one point he chased a camera-toting teenager in a ludicrous race around the columns after a disagreement over competing interpretations of the flash-attachment policy. Packs of schoolchildren snickered and laughed at the often lewd capital carvings, and the guard’s echoing shouts of “Quiet!” were louder still. In a moment of pure museum irony, a man who had been there quite a while was asked to leave because he was loitering.

  After the rain broke, I went out back where a stone porch opened to a view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. It all fell into place: I would begin here, fly to Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert in France, visit the original site, and take up the walk from there.

  The cloister is, like a pilgrimage, the literal representation of the same idea. On a pilgrimage and in a cloister, the longer journey of three score and ten is reduced symbolically to something much smaller—a few months of walking or a stroll around the cloister’s four-sided garden. Both have a beginning, middle, and end. Both force upon the visitor a number of encounters— on the road, these are random events; in the cloister, these are sculpture. And both offer a finale of redemption. On the road, it is the physical exhilaration of arrival. At the cloister, it’s the walk into the direct center, a place the monks called paradeisos. So I thought a visit to a monastery cloister would be appropriate.

  The idea of a monastery grew out of the thinking of a hermit named Benedict who lived in the sixth century during the declining days of the Roman Empire. He had committed himself to the reigning idea of his day—a life of utter solitude in the wilderness. This idea had been imported from the Holy Land, where hermits pursued different fashions of isolation. The stylites sat on the top of a pole. The dendrites carved a hole in a tree and lived inside. For his effort, Benedict isolated himself in Italy at the mouth of a cave not far from Nero’s summer house. He clothed himself in animal skins, which his biographer reports frightened the local shepherds. He ate berries.

  But the call of the hermit’s life was not attracting too many Europeans. It was a bad time to be alone in the woods. The sixth century saw the continuing collapse of Roman order, opening the door to the invading Huns, Visigoths, and Longobards. From time to time, the barbarians would drop down to cut the tongues from women and disembowel the men. This was the era when the famously airy architecture of Roman atriums and columned porticoes closed up. Castles were built, moats were dug, drawbridges were engineered. It would not be long before the religious orders sought a similar kind of protection. Benedict is credited with solving these problems. His innovation offered isolated monks a sliver of companionship and physical protection: a monastery.

  Like all good ideas, Benedict’s was not immediately embraced. His first collective of monks didn’t appreciate his harsh rules and tried to murder him. But others liked the idea, and eventually Benedict wrote a strict code of monastic living called Benedict’s Rule, which is still observed today. Reading Benedict’s Rule, though, one can sense a yearning for utter solitude—not the minimal society of the monastery, but the pure singularity of the desert, far from the corruption of man, alone in nature. To stand in a cloister, even skylighted in plastic and teeming with riotous schoolchildren, is to feel the architectural memory of Benedict’s original idea. The cloister is a patch of that wilderness, imported and modified to the demands of society. It is a bit of desert, open directly to the original skyward view of the hermit, secreted away in the center of the monastery. The cloister is not the perfection of an idea, but rather a constant reminder of its compromise. The cloister is nostalgia. It is an original plan fallen short, a vestige of an older and purer sense of purpose. Like my own effort, the cloister is somewhat corrupt, an acknowledgment of failure.

  As I began to read up on these particular cloisters in New York, I marveled at how perfect they were for my beginning. The reason they’re in Manhattan and not on the road to Santiago is because of a desperate American sculptor. At the turn of the century, Robert Barnard made his rent money
by buying medieval artworks from guileless French rustics and selling them for impressive profits. He began with small statues but eventually was buying entire monasteries. When the French government found out that the nation’s patrimony was being shipped off to serve as lawn ornaments in the front yards of American millionaires, a huzzah went up in Paris. Just days before December 31, 1913—when the French parliament outlawed Barnard’s hobby —he packed 116 crates of his precious cargo, each numbered and cataloged, and sailed for New York on the next boat.

  For a while, Barnard ran his own museum in Manhattan, but when money problems arose again, he offered to sell his medieval cloisters to some Californians for use in an amusement park. A cry went up among the Fifth Avenue set in New York, and the call for a white knight was heard.

  John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a curious savior from West Coast tastelessness. Among his architectural achievements, he had spent millions erecting his idea of “colonial America” in Williamsburg, Virginia, where women in Betsy Ross dresses and men in breeches escorted tourists to the town stockades for a wry photo opportunity.

  With his new cloisters, Rockefeller ran through a number of plans. At one point he wanted to create a feeling of lost grandeur he associated with abandoned castles and King Arthur, but the most sophisticated architects of the day cautiously explained the logistical difficulty of using religious carvings from France to construct a secular castle from England. Rockefeller caught on and soon realized that what he had purchased was the emblem of the solitary search, that desire for monkish isolation, Benedict’s idea. Rockefeller grew obsessed with the Cloisters and demanded daily briefings. He had notions of his own.