Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  I am exhausted from the day and the heat. Back in the pilgrims’ room, I unroll my bedding, read half a sentence in a book, and disappear. An hour of turbulent dreams ends when the bad guys suspend me across a slim canyon. My head and feet bridge a six-foot-wide abyss. Below me, certain death. Tied around my hips is a rope from which dangles a great weight. I struggle to keep this heaviness from tugging me downward to my death when I awaken in a cold sweat of extreme urgency. I skittle about on all fours, searching for Ramon’s gift, and bolt out the door.

  In Ramon’s backyard, I discover why his house could keep so cool in the cruel midday heat. Almost all of this mansion, except for the elegant facade, has collapsed into itself. As I venture farther and farther toward the rear, I stumble upon an old underground bodega, whose ground cover has crashed through. The front rooms are as cold as a cave because, in a sense, that is what they are, buried beneath stone and beams and walls. I can see the hose from the bathroom snaking out a cardboarded window and across piles of rubble to a well. The house has no plumbing. Outside one second-story window, an antenna, strangely reminiscent of Ramón, pokes ludicrously in all directions.

  In a corner of the yard amid a thicket of bushes and weeds, I find a tidy private corner, somewhat hidden from view. I would guess that I am standing in what might have been a kitchen nook. The sun is blazing hot. Sweat is streaming down my face and arms. Decorum and nature battle mightily here. Decorum, needless to say, surrenders. From a window, Ramon’s silhouette passes by several times. He and his friend are hooting now. And the hilarity won’t end. She tells a joke and he honks with laughter. He speaks and a witch’s cackle explodes. There’s something disconcerting about these sounds, but I can’t quite finger it. Suddenly weird howls of hysteria fill the air.

  As I prepare to leave for my late afternoon walk, Ramón appears downstairs and again offers the only real thing he has: water. He would be pleased if I would let him ink my passport with his very own “Ramón” stamp. He walks me down the street and sends me on my way. Saying good-bye to the miracle of Ramón, I am suddenly awakened by a revelation that would have been obvious long ago to someone not suffering early onset of sunstroke. Ramón and his girlfriend had different voices but came from the same source. There is no friend. The Amazing Ramón seems gently, benevolently, but, in the end, completely insane.

  Most of the recorded miracles that took place on this road aren’t all that different from finding Ramon’s address in my pocket or feeling the magical breeze in his foyer. They are often modest stories, such as the tale of the five knights, that show good pilgrims being rewarded or evil innkeepers being punished.

  The most famous miracle of the road happened at a spot three days’ walk from El Ramón in the town of Santo Domingo de la Calzada. The town is named for a monk who devoted his life to building pilgrim roads and means, literally, Saint Dominick of the Highway.

  The miracle of this area occurred in the fourteenth century. One day, a pilgrim family—father, mother, and son—arrived in Santo Domingo. At the inn where they stayed, the owner’s daughter developed a crush on the boy or, in the words of the sixteenth-century Englishman Andrew Boorde, “for ther was a wenche the whych wolde haue had hym to medyll with her carnally.” But the boy’s virtue could not be compromised while he walked. (Which is a miracle itself; one of the oldest sayings of the road—Ir romero y volver ramera—translates “Start out a pilgrim, return a whore.”) Angry at being scorned, the girl slipped a silver cup in the boy’s rucksack. When the family was leaving town, she informed the local authorities of the theft. Chased down, the boy proclaimed his innocence, but he was sentenced to death and hanged from a tree at the edge of town.

  The grieving parents walked on to Santiago to fulfill their pledge. On their return trip, as they approached Santo Domingo, they could still see the silhouette of their son’s body dangling from a branch. (In some parts of Europe, the indignity of a death sentence was rounded out by leaving the body to rot out of the rope.) As they neared the tree, though, they could see their son moving. He spoke right up, explaining that their dutiful journey to Santiago had won James’s heart. The saint had returned the boy’s life and then held him up by the arms until their return. To us, perhaps, a pretty serious miracle. But in the Middle Ages, various states of unconsciousness were thought to be “death,” so resurrection was actually common. The story continues.

  The parents ran to the town mayor and insisted that he come and see what had happened. The mayor, always depicted in paintings as a portly, well-fed bureaucrat, was seated at his dinner table, ready to cut into two hot roasted chickens. He dismissed the parents as insane and complained that their crying was interrupting his meal. Annoyed at their persistence, he finally shouted, “Your boy can no more be alive than these chickens could get up and crow!”

  Immediately, the main course stirred. The roasters kicked away the garnishes and vegetables. They stretched their plucked brown wings. They squawked and danced across the table. The boy was cut down and the miracle proclaimed. The story of resurrected chickens had a profound tug on the medieval mind. Hundreds of versions of the miracle—dead and dancing fowl— can be found throughout Europe, and paintings of Santo Domingo’s chickens can been seen as far east as Überlingen and Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

  We moderns have a hard time enjoying miracles. Whenever a miracle makes a public splash nowadays, it suffers from a comical absence of gravitas. Just before I left America, crowds were gathering near an Atlanta franchise of Jiffy Lube, where a Pizza Hut billboard depicted an uplifted forkful of spaghetti and meat sauce. Some said the mouthful of spaghetti looked like the postcard image of Jesus.

  The miracles of the road are simple tales in which pilgrims best those out to harm them. The meaning of the story of the dancing chickens is not difficult to figure out. Another miracle tells of a pilgrim who asks a woman if he can share her bread which was baking beneath a hot stone. She lies and says there isn’t any, and after the pilgrim departs, she upends the stone to find that her loaf has disappeared. The miracles of the early history of the road and those that predated the pilgrimage throughout Europe are charming tales of what we might call coincidence, like the constant appearance of the stranger on the road who gives me directions. Miracles were those occasions when circumstances conspired to shatter one’s preconceptions. They were times of joyful surprise, moments of pleasure. The word miracle comes from the Latin mirari, which means to look upon in wonder. In its etymology lies the warmer meaning of this word. Mirari also came into English as “smile.”

  The earliest understanding of miracles was quite simple. St. Augustine, writing five hundred years before the pilgrimage, said there was only one miracle—creation. Every other extraordinary occurrence we encounter is merely a ripple emanating from this original miracle. At times, Augustine’s thinking sounds modern. “All natural things are filled with the miraculous,” he once wrote. His commentary would make excellent poster copy for contemporary environmentalists: “For consider changes of day and night, the very constant order of heavenly bodies, the fourfold change of the seasons, the fall of leaves and their return to the trees the following spring, the infinite power in seeds, the beauty of light, and the varieties of colors, sounds, smells, and tastes; and then give me a man who sees and experiences these things for the first time, with whom we can still talk—he is amazed and overwhelmed at these miracles.”

  Miracles were small epiphanies that confounded our expectation of nature and creation. Augustine lists dozens of them: there is the magnet that “by some insensible power of suction attracts iron, though it will not stir a straw.” Isn’t that a miracle? How about fire, which burns a stone white yet blackens almost everything else? Or the chaff of grain that, when piled on something cold such as snow, keeps it cold yet also holds in warmth?

  Augustine tries to convince his readers that miracles are delightful, even humorous, moments of surprise that open up a new way of looking at things. His account of the miracle healing of
Innocentius, the modern reader suspects, is written as much for laughs as for awe.

  Innocentius was a well-off man in Carthage, Augustine explains, who “was under treatment for fistulas [a kind of abscess], having a number of them intertwined in the rectum, and others more deep-seated.” The doctors had already performed “surgery”—a word whose exact meaning in fourth-century North Africa I am not sure can even be imagined. The doctors said that they hadn’t cut out all the fistulas and would have to return with the knife. Innocentius called together all the holy men of the area, including the bishop of Hippo, for a prayer meeting. In deadpan prose, St. Augustine reports the occasion:

  Then we betook ourselves to prayers; and when we knelt down, in the usual way, and bent toward the ground, Innocentius hurled himself forward, as if someone had pushed him flat on his face; and he began to pray. It is beyond the power of words to express the manner of his prayer, his passion, his agitation, his flood of tears, his groans, and the sobs which shook his whole frame and almost stifled his breath. Whether the others were praying, whether they could take their attention from him, I could not tell; for my part, I was utterly unable to utter a prayer, all I could do was to say this brief sentence in my heart, “Lord, what prayers of your people do you hear, if you do not hear these?”

  When the doctors examined the patient before cutting, the fistulas had miraculously disappeared. There were celebrations all around.

  Augustine’s broad, even sentimental view of miracles makes sense if you don’t think about it too much. Strict analysis of miracles leads to difficult questions. What about the miracles in the Bible? Those were not gentle surprises or moments of serendipity. They were specific actions conjured up by holy men. Augustine explained these better than average miracles by arguing that they were intended to get people’s attention in the early days. When pressed on one occasion, Augustine replied, almost with irritation: “Why, you ask, do such things not occur now? Because they would not move people, unless they were miraculous, and, if they were customary, they would not be miraculous.”

  So Augustine identified the contradiction of imposing too much meaning on simple coincidence. He strove to keep wonders and signs from being so burdened. He worried about those who became too enthusiastic over miracles. “They worship every bit of dust from the Holy Land,” he sneered. But miracles had the power to excite the public mind. If they were meaningful actions by the divine, then they conveniently confirmed a worldview that was powerfully different from the pagan’s. Life was not just a whirlwind of chaos in which the best hope was to appease the anger of the gods. Rather, the world was a harmony, with a just god at the center dispensing miracles as gifts to the good.

  The public desperately believed in miracles. But once you’ve leapt to the belief that miracles are intentional acts meant to convey a specific meaning, it is not difficult to pass on to an assumption with more serious implications: miracles did not happen spontaneously, they could be summoned by those on really good terms with the divine. This belief gradually overtook everyone, even Augustine.

  One day a sick man approached the bishop of Hippo and begged for a touch to heal some serious ailments. Augustine demurred with a joke. “If I had the gift you say I have,” he said, “I would be the first to try it on myself.” But when the man failed to laugh, Augustine could no longer refuse. He laid his hands upon the old man.

  Perhaps that moment was a turning point. If better than average miracles helped found the church during the earliest days, Augustine now reasoned, then maybe miracles in his day were meant to expand the numbers of the faithful. What he had once tenderly described as a private joy, an intimate delight between a believer and nature, became a public affair. As it happened, this shift occurred just at the time the organized church was pondering a different problem.

  Before the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century, it was easy to identify a saint. They were martyrs—the ones who bravely proclaimed their faith when they knew it meant suicide. Obviously these were special people. After Constantine converted, though, the imposition of death on Christians was lifted. Martyrdoms declined precipitously. Without hideous suffering and death as the sign of a saint, what would become the standard? This vacuum appeared at practically the same time that miracles were becoming more public and more accepted as purposeful signs. The two trends merged perfectly, the one becoming the measure of the other. Did the potential saint have a special relationship with the divine? Well, could he perform miracles?

  At first, this ad hoc solution seemed tidy. But the dynamic caused problems. Originally there were no rules. Miracles just happened—they were spontaneous events at the local level. Yet for precisely that reason, they presented a problem to a centralized organization. In Rome, the task of controlling the outbreak of miracles and streamlining their meaning became a thousand-year nightmare.

  The central authorities tried several remedies. They appointed the local bishops to take responsibility for affirming the authenticity of miracles. Over time, this system grew more strict. Several papal initiatives eventually pushed the final authority all the way to the top. In 993, Pope John XV declared Ulric of Augsburg the first papal saint.

  Clearly, this process was going to require a lot more work. Miracles would have to be reported in certain ways. There would need to be witnesses who would have to be interviewed by proper authorities. Depositions would have to be consistent. Paperwork and clerks were needed in Rome. Reports of miracles assumed the tone of legal briefs. The confirmation of miracles became an official proceeding. A devil’s advocate was appointed to make the opposing case. Committees screened at the local level, and loftier commissions in Rome screened the committee’s work, until the confirmation of miracles meant the pope had to sit down before a file of position papers. This institutionalization began to resemble any human bureaucracy, and thus the formality of adding someone to the list or canon of saints became a process, still called to this day by its bureaucratic name: canonization.

  In this century, the paperwork required to consider Pope John XXIII for sainthood filled twenty-five, three-hundred-page volumes.

  But problems still remained with the locals. Rome wanted miracles to serve as Sunday school lessons or examples of personal piety. But the masses longed for big, vulgar miracles. They wanted their crops to grow, their child’s withered arm to heal, maybe some money. On the local level miracles exploded all over Europe, despite the best efforts of the authorities to rein them in. Many of the miracles recorded during the Middle Ages continue to echo the charming innocence first noted by Augustine. Saint Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian, was renowned for levitating about two cubits (three feet) off the floor. There were kings who could rub the heads of serfs and cure scrofula—the origin of “the royal touch.” A group of nuns once prayed on their heads. Miraculously, their skirts clung tastefully about their ankles.

  But the proliferation meant miracles became increasingly weird and grotesque. In effect, each generation of them had to be more outrageous and bizarre than the last in order to sustain attention.

  Peter Martyr was confronted by a woman whose son was born without any features or limbs. He was described as a breathing piece of meat. By the touch of Peter’s hand, the child assumed the shape of a human being.

  St. Bernard of Clairvaux once excommunicated flies from a church.

  A man named Withbert went to Conques. Both of his eyeballs had tumbled out of their sockets, and before Withbert could retrieve them, two birds swooped down and plucked them away. Several years later the birds returned and popped them into Withbert’s eye sockets. His sight was restored.

  Adelheid of Katharinental saw Christ appear one day, tear the palm from his hand and present it as a eucharist.

  Lukardis of Oberweimar pounded his middle finger against the palm of his other hand, making a hammering noise, until he had driven through it and miraculously produced stigmata.

  When Beatrice of Ornacieux did the
same thing with an iron nail, the stigmata did not bleed but ran with clear water.

  A nun named Angela of Foligno sipped the open wounds of lepers and found the drink “as sweet as communion.”

  A teenager named Christina was said to be so poor she had nothing to give up except food. She lived in the desert on nothing. Miraculously her “dry virgin breasts” filled with milk, and she fed off them.

  Giovanni Colombini had a chamber pot that issued a lovely fragrance upon his death. Many locals believed that the contents would work wonders. One woman rubbed the odoriferous feces on a facial disfigurement and prayed for a cure. Strangely, the miraculous perfume was swept away and was replaced by its customary aroma. The church elders explained that this occurred because the woman’s intentions were born out of vanity. Colombini’s chamber pot was a miracle with dual lessons.

  Some miracles were meant to reveal a divine sense of humor, perhaps a vestige of those early wonders. These miracles were called the joca sanctorum, jokes of the saints, which put on display the medieval virtue of hilaritas. Like most humor writing, it doesn’t age well. One miracle concerned some children who hid a block of cheese, lost it, prayed, and found it. Guess you had to be there. Yet given the intense solemnity of most miracles, these jokes found their audiences. Odo of Cluny was the class clown of the Middle Ages whose miraculous joca sanctorum could make other clergy “laugh until [they] cried, and were unable to speak to one another.”

  Throughout the Middle Ages, the clergy knew that they had backed themselves into a corner. They realized that the expectation of miracles was so high that their absence could pose problems. In eleventh-century Fleury, a mason working on a new church fell and seriously injured himself. The monks began to pray excitedly because, as one wrote, “We were afraid that if he died, the whole building program would be interrupted as a result of a sudden fall in contributions to the building fund.”