The Camino

by Eddie Rock

  The taxi driver says they are storks’ nests; some can weigh up to three hundred kilograms and have often been known to topple off buildings, crushing cars and often people.

  After a short journey we arrive at the Church of San Miguel de Escalada, built by a community of monks in the early tenth century.

  They certainly picked a very beautiful spot for it, and you can almost feel the magic in the air. This beautiful church had been built with a very Moorish influence, with fabulous porticos and smooth stone arches. Inside the church it’s quite cool and peaceful, with fantastic marble pillars and a minimal old stone altar. Swiss John is like a child in a sweet shop, hugging each one of the marble pillars and telling me each one is giving off a different kind of positive energy.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he keeps saying and nodding. “I can feel it. Can you feel it?” he asks us all merrily.

  I have to agree this is the best church I’ve ever been in. No fancy altars or retable with spooky statues all over the place. Poor-old Jesus on the cross is nowhere to be seen. The place is filled with a universal peace.

  Back at the hostel, Dr. Andreas won’t take our money or our offer of food. He declines politely and decides on taking his lovely wife to a nice restaurant in the town, and we wish them well. In the kitchen, the amigos prepare the evening meal, and Swiss John loiters loudly as Eva and Alyssa arrive with even more bags of fine food. The large black girl Chantel comes into the kitchen, looking for Rodrigo.

  She’s heard he’s a medic and is asking for inflammation relief. Fair play to Rodrigo, he gets his medic kit out and does the business as she drops her leggings on one side to reveal an arse cheek the size of Luxembourg. Ricardo gives the needle a flick and takes aim.

  “Don’t miss,” I laugh.

  He looks up with a cheeky grin and in it goes. “Bull’s-eye!”

  I can’t honestly imagine the injection will make the blindest bit of difference, but it’s made her happy and given her hope at least.

  Ze tells us that Ricardo would like to say grace. So we adopt the pose and close our eyes for the brief blessing of the table.

  “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.”

  But Ricardo continues to say grace in Portuguese for nearly ten minutes. Halfway through the second half of his sermon, I open my right eye and make left eye contact with Eva as we play footsie under the table until the sermon finally comes to an end.

  “Amen,” says everyone.

  “Hallelujah!” I shout, and I mean it.

  Ricardo looks pleased as I fill each glass with the blood of the pilgrim and we toast. “Buen camino. . . . Über Alles!” I shout out loud.

  God knows where that bit came from, but Eva gives me quite a strange look. Never mind, everybody’s happy, well almost.

  The door bangs loudly and a big grizzly misérable head pops in.

  “We are trying to sleep next door,” he moans, then slams the door behind him. For about ten seconds we keep it down until Swiss John shrieks excitedly about his Moorish church extravaganza.

  Two minutes later, le misérable is banging on the door again, poking his sour face in, looking even blearier eyed.

  “Can you please keep the noise down?” he moans.

  “You should have brought some earplugs, mate; this is dinnertime, not bedtime for Christ’s sakes!” I tell him, and he disappears out of sight.

  At the end of the meal, Ricardo gives us all a special wristband, and Ze explains what we must do. So I tie the blue band around Eva’s strong wrist and tie it tight. She does the same for me, and we all make a wish. Ze explains that we must wear the band until it drops off, otherwise the wish will never come true. We all agree and wish.

  “Be careful what you wish for!” shrieks Swiss John.

  I look across at Eva and raise one eyebrow, and she flashes me a foxy look as she shuts her eyes with a dirty great big grin on her face.

  After dinner I try in vain to coax the amigos out for a few beers, but they are happy to hang around the hostel and be good pilgrims.

  So Eva, Alyssa, Sonja, and I end the night outside the bar opposite the hostel. When it is my round for the beers, I come back to find Eva being chatted up by monotone, überboring, soft-metal enthusiast Günter. I’m not worried, mind you, as he couldn’t charm the pants off a dead chipmunk.

  The taxi traveling, mummified, seat-stealing German erbert.

  I leave them to it for a while and end up drinking with a drunken Benny Hill look-alike German wearing a button-popping safari outfit, with a big cheerful rosy-red freckled face.

  We end the night with an Irish coffee courtesy of Theo, who wants me to sing “The Wild Rover.” After his bidding, I take the harmonica from my pocket and blast out “Dirty Old Town” and the theme to The A-Team, to raucous applause echoing down the narrow streets of Mansilla. I then follow it up by the theme song to my favorite film, The Great Escape.

  We finish up by singing a fitting rendition of the traditional Irish favorite “Seven Drunken Nights,” of which I can only remember three and a half verses. Halfway through the third verse, the window opens from the hostel above and the grayhead misérable from the kitchen shouts down to us: “Can you keep the noise down? We are trying to sleep up here!”

  “But you have plenty of time to sleep when you are dead!” shouts Swiss John as the window slams shut!

  “But he has, hasn’t he? Yes, yes, and yes!” he says excitedly, and we all piss our pants laughing. At one minute to ten, we pile back into the foyer and surprisingly into an even bigger and noisier party. No one has come to lock us in, so we carry on regardless. At one point I find myself dancing salsa with Chantel and doing a knee- and chest-slapping German dance with Benny “On Safari” Hill.

  I can’t remember climbing into bed that night, but the Three Amigos can.

  As my head hit the pillow, I sighed longingly.

  “Buenas noches, señorita”—which they all found most amusing.

  MANSILLA DE LAS MULAS TO LEÓN

  DR. HAROLD

  IF JESUS HAD TURNED UP LAST NIGHT, he would have turned the wine back into water, that’s for sure. Seven drunken nights? It’s more like every drunken night at the moment. I jump down off my bed and my brain rattles in my head like a pea in a tin.

  “Morning, Eddie!” shouts Chantel, the large French girl, as she excitedly banters on about last night’s frivolities.

  “Oh, and thank you for the necklace,” she says, waving a wooden T-shaped cross at me.

  Could have been worse. At least it wasn’t a pearl necklace I gave her, I think to myself.

  “See you in León!” she shouts happily.

  * * * *

  As I wobble out onto the strange road I wonder what the next city has in store for me. León. I like the sound of León, maybe because of the film Léon or the Kings of Leon, a great rock band. I guess it just sounds like a cool place. I join up with Sonja on the outskirts of the city, and we both get lost until Sonja spots minute yellow arrows drawn on a wall with a small crayon, directing us to a monastery in the city center.

  It’s another clinical, crisp building with separate dorms for men and women, lest there be any temptation, I suppose.

  Not that I have that problem, as the man sitting on the bed squashed up next to mine is yet another look-alike—this time for Britain’s most prolific serial killer, Dr. Harold Shipman. Only German.

  On my leisurely stroll into town, I meet Ned “Okily Dokily” Flanders and his tedious buddies.

  “Buen camino, brother pilgrim!” they all shout, waving like fools

  “Hey, come and join us,” says the troublesome trio.

  So I sit with them for a while but find myself being drained of energy yet again, because I tire quickly of their boring chitchat. I feign illness and tell them I need to find the chemist straight away!

  The surge of negative energy from the trio worries me for the future and I feel doomed and depressed all of a sudden. So I phone Powelly in Sa
n Francisco. He’s bound to cheer me up.

  “Eddie Rock, man! When are you coming to see me?” he shouts down the phone like a lunatic.

  “Could be soon, mate,” I tell him.

  “How’s life then? Some Russian gangster has shot me fucking boat and sank the bastard!” he yells down the phone.

  “Life as usual then,” I joke.

  “I fucking need you out here, man.”

  Steve goes on to tell me his latest news, and my depression lifts at his unbelievable stories of lunacy from the States.

  “As soon as I’m finished, I’m there,” I tell him, delighted.

  * * * *

  On the way back to the monastery I see a few familiar faces dotted around but not any of my amigos. I enjoy a simple pilgrim meal alone in a small bar near to the monastery followed by a few large brandies in preparation for bedding down with Dr. Harold.

  LEÓN TO HOSPITAL DE ÓRBIGO

  BUDDHA SHAKAMOONIE

  ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE DREAMS, and I wake with a jolt to find Dr. Harold staring down at me, telling me it’s seven o’clock in the morning.

  Fuck’s sake.

  In my desperation to get back on the road, I manage to get hopelessly lost, right outside the monastery. So I aim for the cathedral spire and pick up some arrows for a while and then find nothing except for a ghostlike pilgrim looking equally lost.

  “Hola. ¿Dónde esta el Camino, por favor, señor?” I ask in perfect Spanish.

  “Oh, you’re English,” he says, unimpressed.

  “Any ideas?” I ask him.

  He looks puzzled and begins pointing at buildings, then at something in his book with his finger to his lip, while mumbling the street names and getting nowhere fast. I get a glimpse of the title of his book.

  The Confraternity of Saint James: Guide to the Camino de Santiago.

  Shit! This guy must be in the same gang as Flanders and Double Trouble. I ought to walk away right now, but we make introductions and then proceed to get incredibly lost. I’ve only just met this guy and already I want to strangle him as he leads me astray. First down one street, then back, then down another, until I feel like pulling the weirdo’s guide out of his hands, punching him in the face, and kicking it onto the roof of the railway station. So I refer to my own professional guide and soon find my bearings. My map says it goes this way and his says it goes that way and my patience has worn thin, so we march off in different directions, meeting up again about a mile down the road. We have breakfast in a small café on the edge of an industrial estate as Dave tells me his story.

  He comes from Marsden in West Yorkshire, but his family is Catholic Irish, so we have a lot in common. Today is his first day on the Camino; I did think he looked a bit fresh.

  Back on the trail, Dave starts translating the political graffiti on all the walls. His Spanish is quite good and much better than mine.

  We eventually part company up the road, as he wants to look in some boring little church in his guide, and I realize I forgot to ask him who or what exactly the Confraternity of Saint James is all about. Maybe it’s like the religious wing of the ramblers’ association or some twisted Camino cult?

  I’ve never been a great fan of organized religion, but I did try Buddhist meditation once. My friend and I decided to go to one of the classes held weekly in an old school building on Rowland Road in Scunthorpe. We figured that smoking a large joint of purple haze on the way there would help the meditation process along. This proved to be our undoing, because we spent most of the session bursting into fits of uncontrollable laughter. When we eventually calmed down, we sat at the back of the lively group and began chatting with other enlightened beings. Then all of a sudden, ping, a loud bell rang and a small Buddhist monkess glided into the room as if on roller skates reminding me of Tripitaka from Monkey.

  Ping went the bell again and the whole group began chanting.

  The only bit of it I remember before crumbling into fits of laughter was the classic line, “In the space before me, is the living Buddha Shakamoonie.”

  “The Buddha Shakamoonie? Where?”

  At this point my friend was laughing so bad she had to leave the room, eventually returning straight-faced five minutes later as the whole group began to meditate.

  OK, here goes. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing . . . in and out, blowing out bad energy . . . and in with the good. Suddenly a car alarm went off in the street, followed by . . . “Fuck this and fuck that,” the sound of a bottle being kicked along the ground, and its inevitable smash as a gang of youths pass by. I opened my eyes, and it looked like everyone got the hang of it all except me, so I closed my eyes and tried again.

  Huuuuuuuchhhh putt. A heavy smoker coughed up his lungs as he passed by the window, propelling them onto the pavement and making me feel sick.

  Ping.

  After the meditation we discussed the reincarnation process, some of which actually made sense. I loved the idea that scum-bags are reincarnated and returned to earth as cockroaches or maggots, enlightened beings go to a heavenlike place and never come back to earth, while others are reincarnated again and come back as people.

  But there was one question that was niggling me.

  “So, where does Jesus come into all this then?” I asked the monkess.

  “Good question,” she said.

  “Jesus himself was a Buddha, just like Shakamoonie,” she answered.

  “Shakamoonie is that Buddha’s last name?” I asked.

  “So, what’s Jesus’s last name?” asked my stoned friend.

  “And when is he coming back?” I asked her.

  “I met an angel once,” I told them, and even the monkess frowns as the session veerstotally off course.

  Ping, ping, ping. She rang the bell herself this time and breathed a sigh of relief.

  End of debate!

  They weren’t a bad lot, really, but that was our first and last time at the class. I never knew that Buddha had a last name. So what is Jesus’s last name? Christ, I suppose?

  * * * *

  Back on track again, and the strange, monotonous song emerges from the depths of my insane brain.

  “Old woman, old woman, are you fond of dancing?”

  “Yes sir, yes sir, I am fond of dancing.”

  Where in the name of Saint James has that lunacy come from?

  The harder I try to banish it from my mind, the louder it becomes, and I begin to wonder if I’m losing my marbles. Never mind, though, I’ll soon be in the U. S. of A. “Yeehar!” I shout, crossing the lovely old bridge of Puente de Órbigo. I stop for a while to rest my aching body against the cool stone to read my guidebook.

  This bridge here has been the scene of many violent confrontations, including a battle between the Swabians and the Visigoths. Sounds more like a punch-up between two indie bands, if you ask me. But most famous is how the bridge gained its nickname, El Passo Honroso, the honorable passage.

  The story goes that Leónese knight Don Suero de Quiñones persuaded nine of his friends to join him in challenging travelers and adventurers who dared cross the bridge to joust against them. The dandy don had declared himself imprisoned by his love for a certain young lady, and calling on Saint James as his witness, he vowed to break three hundred lances as a ransom to escape from his prison of love. Over thirty days, between the tenth of July and ninth of August 1434, the don and his Leónese knights vanquished French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Spanish contenders. When the contest was over, they all went to Santiago de Compostela, and the young lady he loved ditched him for one of his better-looking friends.

  Serves him right, really.

  * * * *

  I arrive in Hospital de Órbigo in a good mood. I can’t stop thinking about an adventure in America. I can’t wait to get this Camino finished and make tracks for San Francisco. It’s gonna be great! I’ll get a Harley-Davidson and meet Californian girls, full of free love! I’m digging it already, as they say.

  I find the medieval pilgr
ims’ hostel at the top of the street and enter into a lovely old courtyard with battered settees and a calm air about the place. Unfortunately the sleeping quarters are authentically medieval too, and now I know how Joseph and Mary must have felt back in Bethlehem all those years ago. All we need is some shepherds and three wise men to turn up and we’re there. The shower is comparable to standing under a toy watering can in a cowshed. I drop my soap and watch it slide out of the shower under the door and into the courtyard to God knows where. So I cut my shower short, as I fear someone might go arse over tit on my soap and another Camino cut short due to injury. After the shower I venture up to the shops and find that the local store sells a fantastic array of medieval costumes. I seriously consider buying one, as anything would be an improvement on the costume I have on today. Maybe I could buy the knight’s suit and Eva a Wench outfit and . . . ?

  Back at the hostel I get talking to a fat American teenager sporting an Abraham Lincoln–style goat beard and wearing a huge American football top. He tells me he just started the Camino today, and he cracks open a bottle of wine to celebrate his good fortune. It’s gone in under three minutes, and JJ, as he likes to be called, is high-fiving and ready for another bottle. The more he tells me about America, the more I want to go. “Everything is bigger in America,” says JJ, and that’s a fact! JJ is the fattest person I’ve met so far, and halfway through the second bottle, the conversation veers totally off course as he starts talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, monster trucks, and Taco Bell. Luckily, Eva and Dave walk in, followed by the three wise amigos and a jolly Frenchman called René. During dinner René shows me a hand-painted book of watercolors from the various stages of the Camino, including lovely pictures of wildflowers, scenery, and the bridge we just crossed today. After the meal, everybody goes for mass in the church next door, with Ninja Dave leading the way doing the wishy-washy-crossy-handy thing while bowing and nodding at strategically placed statues. At the end of the ceremony everyone goes up to the altar for Holy Communion, but I hang back this time. I just don’t get what any of it means. How can people become so brainwashed by it all and believe that their religion is better than someone else’s? I just don’t get it. Not to mention all the wars it causes. Nowadays, poor-old Joseph and Mary would be on Jerry Springer or some other daytime dross, I can just imagine it!