Off the Road

by Hitt, Jack

  “A pilgrim has to live off the land,” Javier says. Others are listening. “He has to accept the kindness presented to him. He has to carry his goods on his back. A pilgrim is poor and must suffer.”

  Frankly, I don’t feel so good. Renting the parador was done without any thought. I had heard of paradors and had long wanted to try one out. But only now I realize I had surrendered momentarily to the temptations of a tourist.

  “Javier, I’m just staying there one night.”

  The German in the corner pipes up, in English, “Then why not stay at a parador in every town?”

  I never learned the German’s real name. It is irrelevant. He is a remote fellow and doesn’t talk much, so his pilgrim epithet never earned any specificity. He was simply the German. He is a big round-faced Teuton with a meaty nose and arrogant cleft chin. He hasn’t liked me since we first met. When anyone attempts to speak of the road in language he finds inappropriate, he makes a production of eye rolling and chin scratching. I should have seen it coming. The undertow tugging at our casual conversations is about our pilgrim motive, and it’s beginning to seem tangible. It was only a matter of time before it burst through the veneer of aimless banter about history and backpacks and water bottles. Ideas about proper pilgrimage are losing their abstractness and shaping into coherent concepts—and judgments.

  “You are missing my point,” I say, not only to the German, but to everyone, it seems. “I’m not saying that you should stay in a parador every day. But the road is hard. Makes us into pilgrims. It is hard—and long.”

  Huh? The words are not coming. I am being crushed. My ideas about the pilgrimage, albeit crudely formed, arrive in my mouth like cotton and come out damp.

  The German slices the air with a knife and says, rightly so, “Pahhh.” His eyes tighten, and his face assumes the rectitude of Torquemada. This is a man born for auto-da-fé. He shovels a few more faggots beneath my stake.

  “Why not take a car and drive to Santiago?”

  “But I am not driving a car, now am I?” I am furious, upset, and, quite obviously, wrong. I return to Javier, whose grimace continues to upset me. I try one more time.

  “Should a pilgrim dress himself as a beggar even when he isn’t? Do we honor the poor by imitating them? That is not piety.” I begin to find my voice. “It is...” And I search for the right Spanish word for “mockery.” I guess travestía, and thankfully, I find that it is a word. Javier does not look convinced.

  “Only an American would rent a parador,” interrupts Torquemada.

  The German has no shame. And his nationalistic dig is subtly suggesting: Why is an American here? Why aren’t I walking the Appalachian Trail? Rafting down the Mississippi? Hitchhiking the blue highways? I needn’t answer. Ad hominem and xenophobia don’t play well among international pilgrims.

  “Pahhh,” I say. I have scored a point.

  The German tears into a lamp chop, stripping off a large chunk of charred flesh. His cheeks bulge with meat.

  The bicyclist Miguel rises to my defense. He asks, What is the difference between eating in a decent restaurant (which all of us have done) and sleeping in a hotel? No one answers him, and in that silence a nasty judgment is voiced: Who the hell are you, bicycle punk, to talk to those of us on foot?

  Bicyclists are dicey allies. I might as well side with Willie the Filmmaker, who is traveling by mobile home. I turn away from Miguel to listen to Javier.

  “What about the Barefoot Priest with the Blanket? Isn’t he the true pilgrim?” Javier asks. He is referring to a priest said to be walking the road barefoot with nothing but a blanket. He has no money and begs for food from town to town. I have not run across him, and I have never spoken to anyone who has actually met him. I have long suspected he was the pilgrim equivalent of an urban legend: if he doesn’t exist, we would need to invent him. I would wager that a rumor of such a priest floats across northern Spain every summer.

  “Javier, do you really think he is a truer pilgrim than you?” I ask.

  “He is true to the tradition. He comes with nothing.”

  “I respect what he is doing. But it strikes me as extreme to say that the only way to be a true pilgrim is to imitate what we like to think a true pilgrim is. The tradition of the ascetic pilgrim, the beggar, the mendicant, is only one version of what can happen on this walk.”

  “What else is there?”

  I feel as though I’m stepping on solid ground at last. And talking on this level is clarifying, even though we speak different languages. I converse in Spanish with Javier and English with the German, which ought to make our discussion more difficult yet has the opposite effect. The Tower of Babel is not a good place for vagueness or subterfuge. It is extremely difficult to hide out among nuances. Each of us is forced to trim our remarks into brief clear statements. Babel is a fine editor.

  “I am saying that a pilgrim must accept the hardship that the road imposes on him. The difficulty of the walk is inherent in walking. We needn’t artificially add more hardship than is already there. That, in my thinking, is being a false pilgrim. We all eat at restaurants. We all have used the telephone. We all have stayed at hotels. I don’t believe pilgrims ignored the creature comforts of the road five hundred years ago any more than we should. Each of us assumes the hardship that the road demands of us. That is enough.”

  A central dichotomy takes shape: suffering versus labor. According to my theory, anyone who follows the road on foot, bike, or horse, but accepts the hardship it imposes, is a true pilgrim. But for Torquemada, additional suffering is essential. My theory has a certain appeal, but it also is shot full of holes. The German finds one of them and plunges his dagger in.

  “Can anyone who drives a car be called a true pilgrim?”

  “It depends,” I answer. Pathetic. The problem with my idea is that it’s too expansive and liberal. It allows everyone to be a pilgrim. The German is right. Why shouldn’t people in cars, possessed of the right attitude (or whatever I just said), be counted as pilgrims? Yet the German’s definition is so narrow that no one is included except, possibly, himself.

  I feel trapped and attempt to extract myself by playing to the audience.

  “Aren’t these bicyclists here true pilgrims?” Miguel and his friends are physically present. It’s easy to exclude drivers of cars since there is not one here. Will the German dare to deny the bicyclists even as they sit right next to him?

  “They are children, out for a fresh breeze.” He lacerates the air with his knife again.

  I underestimate this man.

  “Are people on horseback true pilgrims?” I ask.

  My afflatus returns, however tardy.

  “There is a tradition of riding horses,” says the German.

  “But isn’t sitting in the comfort of a saddle a bit more luxurious than biking? It requires less ‘suffering’ and less ‘work.’ Why can someone ride a horse but not a bike?”

  Jesús’s daughter puts a plate of food before me. I cut a large piece of meat from a lamb’s bone. It tastes delicious.

  “But that is the tradition,” says the German, standing his ground.

  Expressions of support come my way. Claudy takes up a position behind me. He has nothing to say (this is not his kind of conversation), but he physically lines up on my side. Rick winks at me and puts his clenched fist over his chest. “We know we are pilgrims,” he means to tell me.

  The debate continues into the night and past many bottles of wine. The distinctions drawn widen and narrow as my fellow pilgrims struggle to determine just what it is we are up to. Occasionally schisms erupt over the most unpredictable arcana. The bicyclists, it seems, have their own private heresies. On one issue they descend into their own bitter differences and ridicule one another. Some of the bicyclists ride mountain bikes with thick rugged tires and few gears. They actually travel on the tough pilgrim’s road, pumping up and down the same stony, stumbly paths we foot pilgrims do. Others are on racing bikes with thin elegant tires and ten ge
ars. They are forced by their superior technology to follow the parallel road of the paved highway.

  A dozen standards and distinctions emerge. After a while I escape into the bathroom and jot down a Homeric catalog:

  all others v. cars

  walkers v. bicyclists

  mountain bikers v. racing bikers

  short-distance walkers v. long-distance walkers

  imposing suffering v. accepting suffering

  not spending money v. spending money

  tradition v. improvisation past v. present

  walking alone v. walking in a group

  Catholic absolutism v. non-Catholic relativism

  knowledge v. doubt

  certainty v. ambiguity

  solemnity v. hilarity

  Sitting in the solar john, I run my finger down the list. I am on the right-hand side of every “v” and the German is on the left. The road is honing its distinctions. That first question—Who is a true pilgrim?—is demanding its answer. In past centuries, it was easy: Do you believe that the bones beneath the altar of the cathedral in Santiago are the true body of James the Apostle? No one on the road believes that today. So our walk and our quarrels are about developing a new standard for inclusion, a new kind of faith, if you will. Tonight has focused this question considerably. Is this pilgrimage a sacred task or is it trumped-up tourism?

  By the time I return, the conversation has pacified. Here and there is the familiar patter of arguments coming to a close.

  “But that’s all I have been trying to say all night...

  “Exactly. That really is the point.”

  Jesús pulls up in his truck, exploding to a halt just outside the tent. He is back from his enterprises (probably balancing the books at his investment brokerage agency). He hugs his daughters, who clamor for his generous affection. He pats the younger ones on the head and then shoos them all away.

  “Es la hora para el Rito de la Quemada!” he proclaims. The Ritual of the Burning, he seems to be saying. How fitting.

  We are directed to an ornate doorway of Iglesia de Santiago, a twelfth-century Romanesque chapel up a slight incline from the tent. This church had achieved a moderate fame during the pilgrimage’s heyday. It is said that if a pilgrim were ill but made it as far as the Puerta del Perdón (Doorway of Pardon) of this church, then he could legitimately turn back and depart with all the privileges of a true pilgrim. Is this pure “tradition,” as the German might say, or is there in it an element of medieval Chamber of Commerce improvisation to put a few maravedis in the town coffers?

  The ceremony begins in the blank darkness at the side entrance to the chapel. The moon is obscured by a bowl of clouds, studded at the edges with a few stars. The only other source of illumination is the nearby tent, a giant Japanese lantern. By flashlight Jesús takes his place on the steps at the doorway. We all gather around as if at a campfire. Into a large tureen, Jesús pours streams of colored alcohol from an exaggerated height like a clowning bartender. He speaks about the significance of the pilgrimage with the easy aplomb of a toastmaster at an Elks luncheon. Platitudes follow one on another until he holds up a mason jar filled with a dark, unappealing liquid.

  “Every night come the pilgrims,” he says, affecting a biblical grammar, “and the quemada is prepared. All drink from the same bowl, the same quemada. And at the end of each night, always, what is left in the bowl is kept in a jar and poured into the next night’s mixture, as it always has been. All pilgrims drink from the same quemada.”

  At the end of this intonation, Jesús withdraws a pocket lighter. After failing on the first, second, and third tries, he finally puts the flame at the appropriate distance from the bowl’s contents. Like an amateur backyard grill master, Jesús jerks back as a column of fire hisses to life.

  “Quemada!” the children shout. Jesús takes a long-handled ladle and parcels the fiery drink into his collection of mismatched cups. Each pilgrim clutches his own small flame. Jesús utters a short paean to pilgrim community. He raises his cup and swallows the burning liquor. Some attempt drinking around the fire. The more cautious blow it out. We all drink together, as the night’s question lingers even here. Is the quemada the continuation of a tradition or the invention of one?

  And later on, the conversation initiated today sporadically breaks out again. I catch the German and Miguel arguing over, of all things, the etymology of Santiago de Compostela’s last name. Miguel says that Compostela is a contraction of the Latin phrase campus stellae, literally “the field of the star.” The German, after boasting that he has university credentials, says the name derives from the Latin compostum, meaning “burial place.”

  Even in this recondite discussion, one can make out the themes of the evening’s debate. For the German, Compostela is buried, a grave, a dark, closed place to be dug out and discovered. For Miguel, the possibilities of Santiago are visible, shimmering with light, open-ended.

  The fragile theology in this tent is at its crudest when it centers on who’s in and who’s out. But it’s also about the language of discovery versus improvisation. It’s the difference between looking for what you know is there and making it up. The German stands clearly on the far side of tradition, of order, of knowing. On the other extreme of the spectrum, I think, stands Claudy, our Dionysian clown. Lie is too busy plowing through the hilarity and inebriety of each day to give a jot about history.

  I want to say that those of us who are troubled by doubt are somehow superior to the German and his allies. I want to make a case for Claudy and drunk pilgrims and bicyclists and eaters of fine meals and sleepers in comfortable beds. But the German will always win these arguments because he has so much material to draw on for support—the reservoir of tradition. The rest of us have only the nub of our developing and feeble tale with few uninspiring details. We’ve only just started. I want to say that ours is the riskier proposition because we are out beyond what is taken for granted. Per agrum. Out past the fields. Pilgrims.

  And it sounds good. But in these conversations the German is more often right. Even in this final debate on etymology, I want to jump in to help Miguel. But I don’t. I get up and mosey out of the tent. As it happens, I know the German is correct. “The field of the star” is what linguists call a folk etymology. In other words, it was invented. Somebody just made it up because it sounded good.

  I want no more arguments tonight. Unnoticed, I slip away from the infinite rhythms of Jesus’s artificial rain. The German will be with all the other pilgrims tonight. I will be alone. I have to follow the road I am walking, and tonight it winds just past this tent, through a dark alley, and into the air-conditioned dead end of my parador.

  The soothing rumble of the thermostat kicks on, and waves of freon-treated parador air drift across my face. I scissor my legs back and forth under crisp, hard sheets. In a morning daze I dream I am among loafing conventioneers with name tags attending seminars. I am back in America, with nothing awaiting me but food and pointless chatter in

  the amniotic security of a Hyatt Regency atrium. I clench my fat pillow, release it, and stretch into Leonard o’s image of noble man. My toes nuzzle into the taut corners of the bed. So comfortable this is, so yummy, so —krong—a plunging dagger impales me, and a gob of morning spittle clots my throat.

  My feet land inside my boots. I race to the bathroom and stumble over my shoestrings. I pack my kits and instinctively steal a minibar of soap. I stuff papers and notebooks, small bags, and yesterday’s stinking shirt into their familiar nooks in my rucksack. I toss it on my back, lace myself in, and race to the front desk. Here is a brand-new emotion, fresh and undifferentiated remorse. Pilgrim guilt. I gotta get out of here.

  The morning clerk settles my account, taking his time with credit card checks in New York.

  “A complimentary breakfast comes with the room,” he says in hotel lobby English. “All you can eat.” New guilt is no match for old hunger.

  The morning’s board is a familiar movable feast. Every con
ventioneer in Pocatello, Flagstaff, and Lubbock is peering over the same selection. Chunks of cantaloupe and honeydew. Scrambled eggs floating in stainless steel tins heated by a blue Sterno flame. Corrugated fingers of sausage. Paper-thin slices of ham. Bowls filled with plums and pears. Toast! Small boxes of cornflakes. Strips of undercooked bacon marbled with thick veins of fat.

  I pile it on, taking two trips to set my table. I untangle an apricot-colored napkin folded into an upright lily blossom. I slurp and clink at a bowl of cereal. I smack my way through a pile of melon balls, sucking the riper chunks straight through my teeth like Jell-O. By the time I notice my neighbors, two tourist families looking at me in disgust, I can’t close my mouth. I’ve slid three sausage links in the pouch of my cheek and presently am stuffing a jellied triangle of toast topped with bacon into the maw. So the road has changed me in some ways.

  Out through the plate-glass view of the parking lot, I spy the Flemish, Willie the Filmmaker, his wife, and the owner of the tent, Jesus, trudging with a mule among the Citroëns and Mercedeses. A panic seizes me. I’d rather not be seen among Sterno flamettes and melon balls. I snag an origami lily from another table and rush to the banquet table. I pile a small volcano of meats and bread and plums and oranges into the napkin and cram it into the top of the pack. One German couple has made me an object lesson of American barbarism for the children. Glad to be of service.

  “Big trip today, yes,” Rick says as I walk up.

  My map points us to O Cebreiro, a ninth-century village, still intact, high in the Galician mountains. The road is uphill all the way, following the new interstate cut through the old mountain pass.

  “I know the mountains,” Jesús says in Spanish with the assured confidence of a local. “The old road has been abandoned since they built the interstate. Today we will find the original route, and mark it for future pilgrims.” On Jesús’s mule is a homemade wooden saddle, built of busted two-by-fours and broken pieces of plywood—the same style as the tent. Tied to it are torn lengths of yellow plastic fertilizer bags. Jesus says the mountain brush won’t accommodate arrows, so we will tie plastic strips into the bush to indicate the direction of the reclaimed road.