Call of the Camino

52) A cada cerdo su San Martín.

Little in the field of human endeavour  goes quite the way that we have planned, and we ought also to be alert to the fact that only seldom, as we inhabit a round planet, is the shortest distance  between two points necessarily a straight line.

Getting from Edinburgh to northern Spain this time entailed flying on the first day to Stansted Airport and then on to Oviedo, the capital city of Asturias.  A six hour bus trip on the second day took me from Oviedo to La Coruña, in Galicia, followed on the third day by a shorter journey on a two carriage local train to the town of Parga.  Six miles more, on foot, remained before I reached my destination – the village of Santiago de Miraz and the pilgrim refuge in which I have for some years worked as a hospitalero, a position still more or less as described in a medieval poem:

Clothe the pilgrim’s nakedness,
and wish him well at parting.

But this was no longer the Middle Ages, not even in rural Galicia. The refuge had recently been fitted with central heating, which had been discovered not to be functioning as it was intended to function. Nor were the new automated showers working properly.  Nor could the sensors which were meant to regulate the lighting be relied upon.  Nor had the chlorination of the refuge water supply yet been carried out.

“I hope that you didn’t come here hoping for a rest,” said my predecessor apologetically.

There had been no such upheaval in the bar Miraz, and my first drink was, as was usual on my arrival, on the house.

“La casa invita, Roberto.”

What had changed in the village itself, had changed slowly.  With every return to Miraz, more doors were opening to me and I was being told things that I would not have been told previously.  After
being filled in on the two funerals which had taken place in the village during my absence, I was told that Pepe, who worked in the nearby granite quarry, had been diagnosed with silicosis, and that José Manuel, the taxista from Friol, could no longer make ends meet with his taxi alone and so was working evenings in a bar.

“He came in earlier for a coffee,” someone remarked. “He’s killing his pig tomorrow.”

Of course.  Pigs were butchered in November, after Saint Martin’s Day, with the onset of cooler weather.  And thus the proverb: A cada cerdo su San Martín.  To every pig its day of reckoning, its comeuppance.

At the pig market.

My plan had been to spend a couple of hours writing each day while I was there, but in fact I wrote nothing apart from the notes which I jotted down each evening after the last pilgrim had gone to bed.  I had brought with me a work in progress, a second book on the Camino picking up where my first book had left off.  The true Camino, according to its modern-day lore, begins only when the pilgrim reaches the end, and the true story, the full story, so becomes the story of what happened next.

That story, I have thus to report, has yet to be completed.  I am still learning, and a story in which one remains immersed is a delicate one to tell.  Only now that I am back in Edinburgh has the work resumed, and further updates will be forthcoming.

A final observation.  There’s a joke that the Galicians tell on themselves.  You can meet a Galician on a staircase and converse with him for half an hour, the joke goes, without ever finding out whether he was on his way up or on his way down.  Which is not to say that you would never find out, but only that it takes longer than thirty minutes.

[Hasta la próxima.]

51) A Writer’s Progress

Some months have now elapsed since my last posting, but I have been far from idle.  Five years of working on and off as a hospitalero in Galicia – in Miraz and in Corcubión – have provided me with a wealth of material, and the first step has been to try and organize this material, pulling out what promises to be useful, putting together what belongs together, and setting to one side what has as yet to find its place.  Then the question of research arises: what further research is necessary and, more crucially, at what point can the research be declared to have been completed?

      Where would I have been without a computer?  Whole days have had to be spent cutting and pasting, but what would have been the alternative?  The distribution and manipulation of such a volume of notes using three-by-five cards would have required the floor space of a basketball court.

      When not engaged in marshalling my notes, I have continued my explorations of the Scottish countryside, and thus the illustrations accompanying this posting.

A shepherd shepherding his flock.

      Material, whether on the floor or on the hard drive of a computer, is still a far cry from literature.  The material has been rendered, trimmed, concentrated, and what is repetitive or irrelevant has been removed.  What is now required is to envision how this material might be put together to produce a whole which exceeds the sum of its parts.

      Linkages must be made, always with an eye to what might take the narrative forward, provide a useful example, or alert the reader as to what is yet to come.  This will never be a science, nor can it be mechanized, nor will those who succeed at it necessarily understand afterwards how they came to do so.

A heron on the prowl.

      It’s like this.  One day, and perhaps when you’re all but ready to give up, things will suddenly fall into place.  The Greeks, so wise in so many ways, were reduced to attributing this to the gods, to the Muses.  One day, after for so long being bogged down in the details, you suddenly see the full picture, get a glimpse of what you must have been moving towards all along.

      It’s not, of course, a gift from the gods.  Common sense should convince you that it’s not.  You’ve worked hard for it.  And even now the work is far from finished.  It’s a long way still from the conception to the completion, with many a possible pitfall in between.

Snake!

      For those interested in the nuts and the bolts of it, the actual writing process can be described as just one thing after another – writing and rewriting.  For Thoreau, it may be recalled, writing was conversation folded many times thick.  The difference, for Thoreau, between conversation and writing, was that writing is worked.

      And this blog?  It’s been a practice run, a sketch for something a good deal larger.  I have now received my marching orders and will be leaving for Miraz again soon, remaining there until December.  Nevertheless I hope by the new year to have completed a draft of what I see as a second book on the Camino, and that will be the occasion for my next posting.

      The preparations, then, have been completed, and I can proceed to stretch my canvas.

A Scottish Palette.

      And one more thought.  “Blog” is not a word that Thoreau would have recognized, but he would no doubt have understood the difference between a blog and a book.  A book, following on from Thoreau, is a blog folded a few times more.

[Hasta la próxima.]

50) Miraz (2011)

Some five years after my first visit to the refuge, and after spending the best part of four winters there, I returned in the spring of this year to find that it was once more a building site.  Accompanying me this time was a colleague, Barbara Koester, who since her own first visit to the refuge as a pilgrim had returned to serve as a hospitalera.  The tranquil setting and the slow pace of life in the Galician countryside had struck a chord with her as well.

The garden as we found it.

      Although work on the refuge was already a month behind schedule, there was but a single workman on the premises, a painter.  So where, I asked him, was everyone else?

      “Ni idea,” he replied. “I was told to come and paint this room, and here I am.”

      We surveyed the scene.  The new bathrooms had been completed, but there was no running water.  A new fuse box was mounted on the wall, and fluorescent lights had been installed throughout, but the wiring for the switches and the outlets was still exposed.  And the kitchen, the state of the art kitchen which the architect had designed, as yet existed only on his drawing board.

The kitchen - theoretically.

      We conferred.  The room closest to being finished was the refuge office, so we set to work cleaning it.  We would, we agreed, simply move in, as what was needed now was a little pressure, a little supervision.  We had brought along some bread, cheese, sausage, and tomatoes, and somewhere amidst the boxes stacked in the dining room there was an electric kettle.  Water we could carry from the washhouse, and wine was available, in whatever quantities were required, from the bar.

      It took little time for the message to reach the various contractors and sub-contractors, and the refuge, from early the following morning, suddenly became a hive of activity.  The electrician, the plumbers, the architect, the architect’s technical assistant, and the kitchen fitter all appeared, along with a tanker driver with a load of fuel oil for the new central heating system.

The kitchen begins to materialize.

      The building contractor explained that the delays were down to the plumbers and the electrician; the plumbers and the electrician blamed the adverse winter weather and too many national holidays.  The architect pointed out that the specifications had had to be altered at several stages owing to what he considered to be ill-judged decisions taken in London.  I knew nothing of the ins and outs of this, but I seized upon the opportunity to ingratiate myself.

      “Yes. Where I live, in Scotland, we’re well acquainted with ill-judged decisions taken in London.”

      “Just like here,” the architect concurred. “Just like Galicia and Madrid.”

And then there were pilgrims.

      It wasn’t long before word of the presence of hospitaleros in the refuge was spreading via the pilgrim grapevine.  We took stock, weighed things up, and decided to open.  We were still awaiting the delivery of a stove and new furniture for the dining room, but there was running water in the refuge again, hot as well as cold, and the electrics had been made safe.

      There was also a microwave.  We brought it down from the attic, dusted it off, and plugged it in.  So the pilgrims at least had a microwave, at least until the evening when an elderly French pilgrim, who had never previously used a microwave, tried to cook an egg in it.

      A tourist demanded, a pilgrim was grateful.  A roof over one’s head, as well as a bed with a pillow and a blanket after a hard day’s walk, was luxury enough, and a meal of cold cuts was a sight better than no meal at all.

Five Star fellowship.

      As of this writing, the refuge in Miraz remains a work in progress, with the landscaping of the garden being the next big project.  Further developments at the refuge can be followed on the Miraz Facebook Page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Refugio-de-miraz/116993575028581

More of Barbara’s photos of the refuge have been posted in a new photo album on the Call of the Camino Facebook Page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Call-of-the-Camino/305593327556?v=wall

      This blog, too, remains a work in progress.  The blog, at least until the autumn, will be only occasional.  There are five years’ worth of diaries and research notes to be gone through before a decision can be reached as to what form any future literary activities will take.  Whatever is decided, subscribers to the blog will, of course, be the first to know.

48) Despedida.

My dreams since I had been in Miraz, although not always pleasant, had been unusually vivid.  As the night sky revealed itself more clearly here, beyond the few streetlights, so, in the absence of any other entertainment or distraction, my own night-time imaginings were brought to the fore.

      My first dream, shortly after reaching Miraz, was of arriving at the refuge and finding it full of squatters, full of hippies who had turned the place into a pigsty and were refusing to move out.  In fact I had found the refuge thick with dust and full of building rubble, not that this in any way discredited the dream.  It was not of the world beyond that the dream had been speaking, it was of the dreamer.

      The hospitaleros who would be relieving us had arrived, and Alison was showing them around, which left me free to begin saying my goodbyes.  I found Domingo just up the road, watching over his two remaining cows as they grazed on a small plot of land which he kept planted with grass.

      “You’re leaving tomorrow, Roberto? So soon? But you’ll be coming back, won’t you?”

      “Of course. I’ll be back before you even miss me.”

      “Maybe so, Roberto. Maybe so.”

      Rocky, that day, seemed uncharacteristically subdued.  Normally he ran ahead through the fields and the trees during our walks, covering many times the distance that I did, but today he loped along sedately, even solemnly, at my side.

      “Cheer up, old man,” I chided him. “It’s not as bad as all that.”

      Yes, I frequently conversed with Rocky, and was often able to divine his reply.

      “Easy for you to say, jefe. But try living in the backroom of a bar, and having to share your water dish with a cat.”

      Our walk took us, as it always did, past the old mill.  That small stone structure with its moss covered roof was as deeply rooted in the landscape here as was the stream which ran beside it and the trees which shaded it.  Here, once upon a time, nature and human industry had managed to live side by side, and more or less in harmony.

An all but natural landscape.

      Jesús had asked me to call on him before I left.  The door to his house opened directly into his kitchen, where he directed me to the wooden bench beside the stove, insisting that I use the cushion that had been placed there.

      “¡Yap! ¡Yap! ¡Yap!”

       The little dog which followed him everywhere, apart from into the church, was roughly as old, in dog reckoning, as was the sacristán himself.  It kept edging towards me, but backed off again each time that I turned to face it.

      Jesús, meanwhile, had taken down an egg carton from atop the kitchen cabinets, a carton designed to hold a dozen eggs.

      “Hombre, ¡no! Por favor. It’s too much.”

      He paid no attention.  The eggs which his hens produced formed a good part of his own diet, but he had obviously, for the past several days, been putting a few eggs aside.  Once the carton was full, he wrapped it with several thicknesses of newspaper and then tied the bundle securely with binder twine.

      “It’s nothing, Roberto. And they’re not all for you.”

      The eggs were to take back with me to Scotland.  They were to be shared with María and Elena, with my wife Mary and my niece Helen, whom he had met earlier in the year when they spent a week in the village on a visit.

       “Be very careful with them,” Jesús warned me, meaning the eggs. “Put them onto the airplane yourself so that they won’t get broken.”

Jesús keeping an eye on the world from his doorway.

      My rucksack was already packed.  I would need to be up early the following day in order to catch the early morning bus.  I sat down to a meal that evening with the pilgrims, helped to wash up, and then headed for the bar, and a last drink.  This one, Pilar informed me, was on the house.

      “La casa te invita, Roberto.”

      I had my drink, and then continued with my goodbyes.  I exchanged handshakes along the length of the bar.  I saluted the card players.  Pilar came out from behind the counter to see me off with an abrazo.  I would be returning to the village, I promised her, just as I had promised Domingo, at the earliest possible opportunity.

      “But your wife comes first,” Pilar pronounced, not asking but telling me.

      The village had yet to come back to life the following morning when I slipped away.  The Bar Miraz, with its yellow post box on the wall and the Coca Cola sign above the front door, was not likely to be opening for several hours yet.  Here and there, where a light had been turned on in one of the houses, it would be because a child was being readied to catch the school bus.

      It was just a matter then of retracing my steps: Friol, Lugo, Santiago de Compostela, London, Edinburgh.  The rucksack on my back was noticeably heavier than on my arrival in Miraz, stuffed as it was with books which I had accumulated, a cheese, some homemade chorizos, and a jar of homemade honey.

      But the rucksack was only hold luggage.  It could be left to look after itself.  There was also that other, meticulously wrapped parcel, which I carried by hand…

[To be continued.]

46) En el Camino hay de todo.

Dogen, a thirteenth century Japanese Zen master and abbot of a Buddhist monastery, compiled a book of instructions for his monks, including in it advice also relevant to such institutions as a twenty-first century pilgrim refuge.  As a host, said Dogen, put yourself in the place of the guest, and as a guest put yourself in the place of the host.  Equally as apropos for the pilgrim as for the monk was his golden rule of table manners: when one eats, the food should be brought to one’s mouth, not one’s mouth to the food.

      A pilgrim refuge was not a hotel.  Those pilgrims who had stayed the night were given their breakfast early, in plenty of time for them to be on their way again at dawn.  The refuge had to be cleaned each day, a certain amount of washing had to be done, and a certain amount of cooking, and all in order to prepare for a so far unknown number of guests.

      En el Camino hay de todo.  The script, by and large, was the same each day, but the cast was constantly changing.  When walking as a pilgrim, one became part of a stream, a stream which, as hospitalero, one observed, as it were, from the bank.

"En el Camino hay de todo."

      The first person to show up one day arrived in the company of a donkey.  The man was on foot, the donkey was pulling a small but fully loaded cart.  Atop the load, sitting upright and alert, as if in charge, was a small terrier-like dog.

      “You seem to have brought along your entire household,” I remarked as I waited for the man to produce his credenciál.

      “Not quite. My wife and my other donkeys are still in Cadiz.”

      As well as a much-stamped pilgrim passport, he handed over some photos of himself and his entourage clipped from various newspapers.  He had by this time been on the road for months, having begun his pilgrimage in Rome on New Year’s Day, and we were by now well into April.

      He saw to his animals first, tethering the donkey in the adjacent field, where there was abundant grass, and taking it over a bucket of water.  The dog, diminutive though it was, could not be allowed into the refuge, but would have to sleep in an orange crate in the woodshed.

      “She won’t mind,” said the man, examining the crate for any exposed nails. “She’ll be fine just so long as I go out to visit her a few times during the night.”

      That day’s only other pilgrims were also from the south of Spain.  They were a married couple in their fifties, and veterans of many a previous pilgrimage.  The woman was a cook, employed by a very important family, and her husband was a gardener on the same estate.

      “And I need to warn you,” said the woman. “He snores like a demon.”

      Earlier in his life, her husband had been a boxer, and he had on one occasion sustained a severely fractured nose.  The nose, they suspected, had not been set properly afterwards.  After all, she added, he was not exactly a world champion.

      The gardener was a man of few words, the cook a woman of many.  Since the time of their marriage, they had walked the Camino together every year, although always in short stretches, for a week or at most two weeks at a time.  Each year, on their holidays, they picked up where they had left off the year before.

      “We’re simple people. Country people. We’d be bored to death lying on a beach.”

      The snoring that night, once it had commenced, never ceased, nor could the walls of the dormitory contain it.  The snoring, if not of a demon, was no joke, and most certainly not simply a ploy which the couple had come up with as a means of securing a room all to themselves.

      The poor wife, the following morning, could not have been more apologetic.

      “We’ve tried everything, believe me. I’ve even thought, at times, of suffocating him.”

      The couple had their breakfast, hoisted their rucksacks, and were already on their way by the time that the gaditano, the long distance pilgrim from Cadiz, reappeared in the kitchen.  He had seen to his animals first.  The donkey was once more hitched to the cart, and the little dog was back on her perch.

      “If it’s no inconvenience, I wouldn’t refuse a small coffee…”

      The only one inconvenienced was Rocky, who had turned up as usual hoping for walk.  Instead of coming into the yard, he was lying on the porch regarding the donkey from a safe distance, and with what could only be described as a look of intense distaste.

Rocky surveying the scene.

      After two cups of coffee and half a dozen biscuits, the gaditano was ready to set off on the next stage.  It had been a pleasure, he assured us, but he wouldn’t be staying in an albergue again any time soon.  He and his animals, after this, would be camping out.

      “I’ll tell you something,” said the man from Cadiz. “I’ve slept out in terrible blizzards, and I’ve slept out in thunderstorms, but I hope that I never again have to try to sleep through a night like last night.”

[To be continued.]

43) Como unha muller debe ser.

Easter was fast approaching, and all of Spain – apart from pilgrim refuges – would soon be shutting up shop.  Supplies needed to be got in while there was still time, there were bills to be paid at the bank, and some news parts were needed for the lawn mower.  While waiting for the taxi that had been ordered to arrive, we consulted a large picture dictionary, the most useful tome in the refuge library, as Spanish words could be located even for things for which we hadn’t previously known the word in English.

      José Manuel, the taxista, hailed from Friol, the county town.  In addition to driving a taxi, he also drove the local school bus, and his taxi, when necessary, could double as an ambulance.  Through his many connections, he could also arrange for car rentals, flat rentals, and the meeting of flights at the Santiago or La Coruña airports.

      “Roberto, ¿qué tal? Ya tienes una colega.”

      Yes, I now had a colleague, and one who, having been a language teacher, was able to speak with the pilgrims in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and even Norwegian.  All that was left for me to do was to keep the stove lit and pour the wine.

      “Which he does very conscientiously,” Alison added.

      We made the rounds of Friol on foot, calling first at the post office, the bank, and the stationary store to do some photocopying.  We next dropped in at the Ayuntamiento, to speak to the woman in charge of culture about the problems caused by our not having a telephone.  We were reassured on one point: that in Galicia the affairs of the Camino were still being addressed under the rubric of Cultura, and not Turismo.

      At the ferretería, in addition to the parts for the lawn mower, we stocked up on paint, cleaning supplies, light bulbs, soup bowls, fly spray, and plastic gloves.  Our purchases, once we had paid for them, could then be left behind to be picked up by José Manuel before the store closed for lunch.

A veritable prince amongst cabbies.

      We had agreed the night before that the signature dish of the refuge, while it was in our charge, would be caldo gallego, a soup which could be prepared in large quantities, which was cheap and nutritious, and which kept well.  Our purchases at the supermercado more than filled a trolley, but they could once more be left behind for the taxista to retrieve, thus allowing us to continue on our way unencumbered.

      Our last stop was at a restaurant, Casa Benigno.  The menú del día, as recited to us by the waitress, included jábali, wild boar, which I seized upon at once, but for Alison, who was a vegetarian, there was no option apart from egg and chips.  What might have sounded like vegetable dishes, her travels in Spain had taught her, inevitably turned out to include ham, sausage, bacon, or amorphous bits of fat.

      José Manuel was waiting outside at the agreed time in order to drive us back to Miraz.  In his dealings with foreigners, he adhered to la hora inglés, English time, according to which two o’clock meant two o’clock on the dot, and not two-fifteen or two-thirty.

      The day, after a typically misty start, had turned sunny.  Back at the refuge there was soon washing hung out on the wash lines, and cheerful pilgrims were picnicking in the garden, the trials of that day’s stage having already been forgotten.

Pilgrims at their leisure.

      The shopping had been unpacked, a pot of soup was simmering on the stove, and Alison had changed into a pair of overalls that someone on the work party had left behind.  The legs were rolled up, the sleeves were rolled up, and safety pins had replaced the broken zipper.

      One of the pilgrims came over to watch me fitting the new parts to the lawnmower.  He was a farmer from Austria who had recently changed over to organic farming, a subject on which he spoke enthusiastically, with all the zeal of a convert.  Organic farming, he was inviting me to believe, was the next big thing that would save the world.

      “That’s a fine woman over there,” he remarked after a time, indicating Alison, who had taken out one of the windows and was painting it. “She has hands just like a farmer.”

      In the village, I told him, they thought along similar lines.  Here in Galicia women were admired for being strong, and the word most often employed when praising a woman was trabajadora, hard-working.  A woman ought to be ready and willing to turn her hand to anything – to running a bar, to herding animals, or even to ploughing a field, if necessary, with a team of oxen.  This, to the Galician way of thinking, was como unha muller debe ser, as a woman was meant to be.

      The soup which we premiered that evening was a great success, but even then the day wasn’t complete.  Any day which passed without her having learned something new, Alison would have counted as a day wasted, and by the time that we got up from the table she had gleaned, amongst other things, from a couple from Valladolid, that people who came from that city were referred to, in Spanish, as vallisoletanos.

[To be continued.]