Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  Villages that should be far away suddenly appear. And landmarks allegedly close at hand show up late, unexpectedly, or not at all. A map is a reduction in scale, and a pilgrimage is about just the opposite, a sort of airing things out to an original measure. A map takes the rambunctious chaos of man’s roads and nature’s formations and then straightens it all into an efficient line that fits on a page. I bought mine near Madame Debril’s house, and it is more about convenience than accuracy. My pilgrimage has been crammed onto pages measuring four by sixteen inches, made to fit my back pocket. On each tall page, a red line worms up from the bottom—wriggling a bit to retain the look of “roadness”—past ruined castles, small villages, and peculiar outcroppings. Each page takes about a day to walk. So I’ll be arriving in Santiago, including the preface, by page seventy-three.

  Much to my relief, the yellow arrows are now appearing with warm regularity. It is this other map splashed in secret places at every intersection on which I will primarily depend. I pull the book out for color commentary on the pilgrimage. The pages tell me, for example, that just now I will ascend a peak known to the Basques as Itchasheguy, then one called Hostateguy, and then Urdenarri. But I am guided by the arrows, and I’ve gotten better at spotting them. If the road turns near a pole or diverges by a misshapen boulder or splits at a fence, I anticipate the comforting confirmation of the arrow. I am beginning to think like an arrow painter and have a sense of where to look before I get there.

  Compared with earlier pilgrims, I have it easy. In the late Middle Ages, there were no maps. Each intersection was marked by a small pyramid of stones called a montjoie. A 1425 English itinerary noted: “Here beginneth the way that is marked and made with Mont Joiez from the land of Engelond unto Sent Jamez.” Half a century later, a French pilgrim walked this part of the road and explained in his diary a difficulty I can only imagine: “We used to stab our staffs repeatedly in the snow in order to see if there were any montjoies; when we didn’t find any, we recommended ourselves to God and we continued walking; when we heard that our stick had hit, we were more at ease because we had found a montjoie.”

  Deep into the Pyrenees, the road narrows into a rugged single lane of worn macadam, no more than six feet across, just enough to fit the buzzing Citroens of the Basque shepherds who speed by en route to a flock. At this height and distance in the mountains, I am far from any village, far from a simple house. At Untto (six houses and a water spigot), the map says, “You will not find another inhabited dwelling until Spain.”

  To my right, there is nothing but meadows slanting upward. To the left is a fatal drop so acute the trees grow nearly parallel to the ground in their stretch toward the sun. From time to time I tiptoe through a herd of cows plopped on the road who follow me with blank sad stares, or I approach a flock of sheep who scatter amid a cacophony of ludicrous bleats. At last I am on the very path cut through the mountains by proto-Spaniards, the Celtiberians. Later the Romans improved it to accommodate their strip-mining of precious metals in Spain. This is the same road taken by Charlemagne to avenge the murder of his nephew Roland, a homicide that inspired the French national epic. And this is the road that millions of pilgrims have followed into Spain.

  But is it really? I wonder if I am on the true road. Did the Celtiberians, the Romans, Charlemagne, and the pilgrims really walk on this very dirt, through these same meadows, or have I been hoodwinked by my long thin guidebook, local folk brimming with color, and their confederate, history?

  Only yesterday it wouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t expect to ask these questions. Is this the true road? But my conversation with Madame Debril has preyed on my mind. I have spent the day reliving every line, every assertion, every blank silence, and every awkward pause. This tape loop plays over and over. By late afternoon I have reentered Madame Debril’s door a thousand times. In one fantasy, I argue with the brevity and wit of Socrates. In another, I swagger through her foyer in full pilgrim drag, cape and floppy hat, mugging like José Ferrer. In yet another, I stumble to the door, covered in sweat, my visage the very stamp of pilgrim suffering.

  My encounter with Madame Debril has left me rethinking the beginning of this pilgrimage. And let me say that if I had to do it all over again, I’d do everything differently. I’d contact the proper authorities. I’d find a monastery deep inside France and perhaps contact a group. I’d look into broad-brimmed hat sales. My entire effort feels corrupt, maybe ruined. All those oh-so-arch schemes, ranging from the Cloisters to the taxi, don’t really sit well with purists like Madame Debril. Or me.

  By late afternoon I am heaving up the Pyrenees, sweating in a poncho. The thunderheads still squirt fine rain, blasted into nettlesome pellets by a mountain gust. I haven’t eaten all day because I never did find a store that was open. I fear to touch the few provisions in my bag. A strange lightness cushions my brain. I occasionally burst into laughter for no reason. The steep defile always on my left advertises a warm lush valley far, far below. How quickly I could get there if I wanted.

  I mull over the origin of the word I have adopted. “Pilgrim” comes from the Latin phrase per agrum, or “through the fields.” Peregrinus was used by Romans in more or less the sense we use “alien” or “stranger.” To be a peregrinus was to be the fool who left the security of the village and wandered off, literally through the fields, into the wilderness.

  Yet even here, on the windy edge of the Pyrenees, the road doesn’t seem to lead me away from civilization. My medieval predecessors were in a much more frightening wilderness. They walked a road literally built for walking. They were days away from the next town, the next meal, first aid, the warmth of a fire.

  Today’s road is different. This thin macadam strip doesn’t lead me into the wilderness. Every half hour or so, a Basque shepherd or a truck or a tourist passes by, reminding me that modern roads are civilization. They are corridors of culture connecting one town to another. I am always a short jaunt from help, and I am always connected to the world I left. This morning’s breakfast in Saint-Jean was bought with my American Express credit card.

  My exile is not geographical because I am never really all that far away, as much as I (and Madame Debril) want to think that way. The modern road makes everything within reach. The Roman road, Charlemagne’s road, the pilgrim’s road—built for them and their purposes—no longer exists for me and mine. It has been paved over, yielding to the demands of trucker and tourist.

  As a pilgrim, I am an anachronism. Fittingly I can’t even make myself walk on the road. The strong winds roaring up from the valley have the same Doppler effect of a car approaching from behind. I instinctively find myself hugging the side of the road. Even the architecture of the modern road, slightly buckled at the median for rain off-flow, makes the pilgrim list toward the edge. A pilgrim can no longer walk in the center. He’s forced to walk just off the road.

  By nine p.m. the slanting yellow light is thin and pale. The temperature drops considerably—it’s nearly freezing—and the clouds open with a gushing rain. A Basque shepherd stops to tell me that Roncesvalles is just down a dirt road through a forest. After he drives away, I come upon the boundary of France and Spain. A simple metal gate bears the word España painted above another yellow arrow. My map marks this spot, which gives me enough of a bearing to realize that I am still five or six hours’ walk to the next town. Roncesvalles is just over there, the shepherd said. Of course it is. By car.

  I have been walking on the more dangerous edge of the road near the cliffs. My head is extremely light from lack of food, so I shift to the other side to keep from slipping off the mountain. Several times I find myself staggering and simply sit down in the rain and mud to gather my ebbing faculties. I wonder if I shouldn’t retreat to the paved road and beg the next shepherd to take me somewhere, anywhere. But human instinct doesn’t acknowledge danger until it sweeps over you. So I push on into the deep dark forest.

  The road in the woods is normally damp dirt. Wheel tracks show the frequent
passage of shepherds. With the rain, the damp ruts become gushing canals of mud. Getting twenty feet down the road is becoming difficult. When the sun pops behind a mountain, darkness sets in as quickly as hitting a light switch.

  I find the least damp hummock on the side of the road among a dense knot of trees. There has been some logging farther up the mountain, so the mud is shifting around my little hill. But this spot seems safe enough. The decision, however mournfully taken, is to make camp rather than to walk on in the dark. I hang my shell on a nearby tree to claim my place. Of the hundreds of millions of pilgrims who may have passed this way, maybe one of them had to camp in this spot in the rain as well, wrapped in his cape, his head on his crip, his broad-brimmed hat resting on his face.

  I feel a boyish excitement amid the cold and suffering. Those tent poles snap into position as effortlessly as advertised.

  Madame Debril floats into view. “You are not a true pilgrim.” Shivers consume me, yet my doubts about being a true pilgrim and worrying about my clothes, my shell, and my convictions are easier to assuage after a day of such intense labor. The historical pilgrimage shouldn’t be the model, as it is for Madame Debril. No pilgrim can make sense of the road if he reduces it to mere reenactment. I can’t be a medieval pilgrim.

  I can’t consider myself an exile in the etymological sense of the word pilgrim because that meaning, like the etymological meanings of so many other words, has become quaint and out-of-date. I haven’t left the village, walked through the fields, and wandered far from my home because the road is always an outpost of the place I have just left behind. I have my American Express card. Even here, were I to succumb to hypothermia, I would be found the next morning by a passing shepherd—curled into a large blue fetus. I would be choppered out and taken to Madrid. Eventually I would wind up back home. A little brain damage, they would tell my mother. And I would assume my destiny as one of Charleston’s glorious eccentrics, a supernumerary from a Tennessee Williams play.

  What the modern pilgrim is exiled from is not a place but velocity. I haven’t left the world of the city; I have left the realm of the car. What distinguishes me is not that I am out of town but that I am on foot. My predecessors were outcasts because they left the security of the village. I have left the world of technology and speed. I can’t pretend to be that other pilgrim. Nor can I try to breathe sense into the meanings we’ve inherited from the people who were. I can’t wear the cape any more than I can believe in the contents of the shrine. I am a pilgrim on the road to Santiago or, rather, a pilgrim just off the road. I am more like Thor Heyerdahl, the man who sailed the Atlantic in a prehistoric raft of sticks. I too am trying out a neglected conveyance, not to reexamine the old meanings that have trickled down to us, but to see if I can’t recover one or two that we’ve lost.

  The temperature outside is plummeting. Inside the tent, inside my sleeping bag, inside my coat, inside all my clothes, I arrange my small supply of goods and examine my pantry: one orange, one five-inch chunk of baguette, a jar of mustard, and a tube of condensed milk. The rain sounds like a shower of marbles. Despite having trouble focusing on objects, I feel a child’s sense of safety in this tent. I peel the orange and savor each wedge. A twelfth-century chronicler, after arriving more or less to this same spot, wrote: “How many thousands of pilgrims have died [here], some lost in snow storms, others, more numerous still, devoured by the ferocity of the wolves.” The orange is the most delicious one I have ever eaten.

  The baguette smeared with mounds of mustard flares my nostrils until they hurt. But the pain reawakens my senses, and I feel my equilibrium ebbing back. The questions of where to begin and how officially to get started now seem serenely irrelevant. I feel as if I have been on this road half my life. Madame Debril drifts away. I have other things on my mind just now—the likely sound of approaching wolves, the final thoughts of snowbound pilgrims, the symptoms of hypothermia, and the width of Spain. I grip the tube of condensed milk with my fist, put the aluminum teat in my mouth, and squeeze with all my strength.

  On a bend in the last mountain of the Pyrenees, a slight dip in the road leads up a hump until a hazy green valley lowers into view l

  ike a card on a stereopticon. All appears peaceful in Spain today. The chimneys from the scattered farms feed thin columns of gray smoke into a blanket of drifting white mist. I feel restored this morning and ready for my descent into Roncesvalles.

  A marker tops the ridge, with a dozen wooden arms pointing chaotically in all directions. I expect to read outrageous distances—New York, 8,000 kilometers; Buenos Aires 11,000 k; Tokyo, 16,500 k. But I am entering Navarra, the land of the Spanish Basques. They are not a people famous for irony. This sign is just a sign pointing to nearby hamlets with long, unpronounceable names. All of them should be within view, but I see nothing except boulders spilling down a deep gorge into the valley.

  Roncesvalles is a famously mysterious place and has been since the eighth century, just before the pilgrimage began, when it became the most notorious killing field of the Middle Ages. At the time, the giant armies of Islam had come to Christian Europe, so the scene was set for a cataclysmic encounter. The Moors had invaded Spain in 711 and by the end of that century were in control of all but the ribbon of desolation in the north that would become the road. Meanwhile, in Europe, Charlemagne was uniting the continent. This era would culminate on Christmas Day a.d. 800, when the pope crowned Charlemagne the first Holy Roman Emperor.

  But Charlemagne’s reunification of the Roman Empire and of Europe would come at a cost, paid at Roncesvalles in 778 and hymned forever in the greatest medieval epic, the Chanson de Roland. So the story goes, Charlemagne had entered Spain to liberate the local Christians but after some time had decided to make a prudent peace with the Arabs. As the poem opens, he is trying to settle a dispute between his nephew Roland and his brother-in-law Ganelon (also Roland’s stepfather). Both are vying to be the king’s emissary to win peace from the Arabs.

  Ganelon won the argument, but his jealousy over Charlemagne’s apparent preference for Roland drove him to treachery. While sitting in the silken tents of the Arabs (known as Saracens in poetry), Ganelon betrayed Charlemagne’s route back into France as Roncesvalles. He explained to them that the rear guard, led by Roland, would be most vulnerable when it began to file into the narrow gorge that cuts into the Pyrenees, where I now stand.

  High are the hills, the valleys dark and deep,

  Grisly the rocks, and wondrous grim the steep.

  On the late afternoon of August 15, 778, Roland and the rear guard were ambushed here. As the fighting spilled into the valley, Roland’s best friend, Oliver, begged him to call Charlemagne for help by sounding his horn. All manly symbols in the Chanson de Roland have names; the horn’s is Olifant. But rather than blow Olifant, Roland cried out for immediate battle. He goaded his men to fight at once and claim their honor. In the early exchange, no Saracen was safe from Roland and his mighty sword (Durendal by name). Roland’s dispatch of the Saracen dandy Chernuble, whose “unshorn hair hangs trailing to his feet,” is horrific even by our standards of violence:

  He spurs his horse and goes against Chernuble:

  he breaks the helmet on which rubies gleam;

  he slices downward through the coif and hair

  and cuts between the eyes, down through his face,

  the shiny hauberk made of fine-linked mail,

  entirely through the torso to the groin,

  and through the saddle trimmed with beaten gold.

  The body of the horse slows down the sword,

  which, seeking out no joint, divides the spine:

  both fall down dead upon the field’s thick grass.

  As the battle raged, Oliver pleaded with Roland to call Charlemagne, until it was too late. When the fighting turned against his men, Roland gave a blast on Olifant so powerful that his temples burst. In his death throes Roland cracked Durendal on a stone so no Saracen could carry it in triumph, and then he fell. After
Charlemagne hastened to this ridge, he saw red pastures below, drenched in his men’s gore. The enemy had vanished. Charlemagne sank to his knees and so moved the heavens with his plea for revenge that the late afternoon sun, it is said, held its place in the sky and lit the Spanish plains until Charlemagne caught the Saracens and carried out a final furious slaughter.

  For pilgrims, the story was important, and vice versa. Along the road the song was performed by itinerant musicians called jugglers, and it became enormously popular. The pilgrimage and the song also introduced new ideas into Christian thinking at this time. The constant skirmishes with the Moors just off the road to Santiago had put the pilgrims, and subsequently Europe, in contact with a novel Arab concept—the jihad, or holy war.

  After three hundred years of pilgrimage and fighting Moors, the lessons were learned. This new idea tried on different accommodating theologies until it became a Christian virtue. The Arab jihad was Europeanized into the Christian Crusade. In 1095, Pope Urban II called on Christians to retake the Holy Land from infidels. Four years later Rome’s flag flew in Jerusalem.

  On the field in the valley, a stone marker announces the spot where Roland and his men engaged the Saracens. A nearby highway provides a short walk into Roncesvalles. This little village —no more than a hundred people—is a few houses, two bars, and an Augustinian monastery. A knock at a door of the chapterhouse puts me in the orbit of Brother Don Jesús. A short bald man with a quick chaotic air, he is in constant motion.

  “Pilgrim. Pilgrim. What a surprise. How good this is,” he says in fast, clipped Spanish. He herds me into his private office and eases me into a comfy chair. From somewhere he produces a clipboard and shoves a questionnaire in my lap. I am being polled. The monastery wants to know about the pilgrims who pass through. I am asked where I am from, where I started, how I heard of the road. The critical, final question asks my “motive” for walking the road. I am provided four possible answers: