by Hitt, Jack
“I have many children,” Rick says by way of explanation. After introductions, the encounter is awkward. The tidy world we had created is over. Our time together has become something else now, something with a beginning, a middle, and now an end. It is fragmenting, and it is strange to feel it do so. We are sorry, almost ashamed, when we see one another. In the broad daylight and normalcy of Santiago, the past season recedes quickly and seems almost a hallucination. We are strangers again and have little to say. The pilgrimage is being broken down, packed up in the boxes of our little stories for safe transport back home, either to the world we left behind or, more likely, the next one we will inexorably begin making.
By the third day, Rick and Karl are gone. Javier has returned to his bank in Pamplona. Wyn, Val, and the two kids sold their mule and have left for St. David’s, Wales. Ultreya has taken up residence on a farm at the edge of town. Claudy is scarce, having hooked up with a Spanish girl. I see him briefly on the street one day, and he tells me he’s moving to León to live with her. It becomes increasingly difficult to spot the other pilgrims. New clothes have been bought. We have shaved and gotten our hair cut. Several days of warm showers, comfortable sleep, good food, Rioja wine, long conversation, television programs, and newspaper dispatches are turning us back into ourselves.
I stayed a week in Santiago, and by the end I didn’t know a soul.
Before my noon train to Madrid and a plane to America, I spend a final morning in the cathedral. At the Portico, the twenty-four men of the Apocalypse have remained as I had left them. Which is surprising because this orchestra is carved unlike any other sculpture I saw on the road. Most Romanesque and Gothic sculptures of this theme always depict the men sitting formally and seriously. But Santiago’s men, scheduled to play the final symphony, seemed strangely unconcerned with their momentous task. They are chatting and joking and laughing with one another. Even the more sober statues on the columns don’t seem so sober. A tall life-size statue of Daniel is grinning at somebody—no wait, Daniel is clearly ogling Esther across an archway.
Master Mateo’s work is beautifully subversive. Among the musicians, groups of two or three have their heads tilted toward another, whispering. Others are rosining their strings. Still others are tuning their instruments. According to the traditions of religious iconography, these men are about to begin the melodies that signal the end of the world. This is the grand theme, noble and solemn, yet Mateo has carved a private human moment. The men are smiling, laughing, as if they were on to something, cracking private jokes. The guild of musicians captured here casually fooling around is set not merely to end the world, but to start a new one.
When Master Mateo carved this sculpture, he used as his inspiration a story from the Revelation of St. John. The critical verse (5:9) reads: “And they sang a new song.” Man invents his truths and then clings to them so stubbornly that he will shape the world around him to conform to them. The tenacity to believe is the greatest folly, said Erasmus. Yet he concluded that it was our only hope.
For a long time god was this belief, and we furiously confirmed his existence. On every mile of this road, the proofs still stand, although sustained now mainly with government funding. A thousand years ago, from this belief but also from crude political calculation, financial desperation, and military necessity, the pilgrimage emerged as a journey to truth. What one finds on the road may not be what god wrought, but it is what man wrought, and, for a time, it was the best we could do.
At the statue of James, a short line of tourists and Spanish widows wait to take up the special place before it. Ever since the journeymen who hoisted this stone in the 1170s set it straight with a plumb line, the pilgrims have knelt here and with their flat hand touched the column beneath James’s bare feet. So many have done so that the marble seems to have gone soft. The old stone is worn smooth in one place, about an inch deep, in the perfect shape of a human hand. With my new pants and shirt and fresh-washed face, I have no privileges now. No one notices me. So I take a place in line. One cannot make literature here. When my time comes, I put my hand into the stone and pray.
a note on the type
The text of this book was set in Sabon. It is based on designs of Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561). The modern form was designed by the German typographer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974). Because it was designed in Frankfurt, it was named after the Frankfurt type founder Jacques Sabon who died in 1580.
Content
Introduction
one Saint-Jean Pied de Port
two The Pyrenees
three Estella
four Torres del Río
five Frómista
six León
seven Ponferrada
eight Villafranca
nine O Cebreiro
ten Arzúa
eleven Santiago