Call of the Camino

11) “Here’s to a good whisky…”

The first thing that I noticed – and it was already apparent on my journey back home – was that I no longer had the least compunction when it came to talking to strangers.  It was of no importance what people might make of my thin, sunburned face and my still somewhat straggly hair and beard.  I was like some prophet, like some ancient mariner addressing whomever he could manage to corner.

      “Don’t worry, friend. I’m not going to ask to borrow any money. I simply want to tell you a story…”

      It was evening by the time I arrived back in Edinburgh.  The sky was overcast, and the familiar smell of the city’s breweries hung in the damp air.  I breathed deeply, as this was the city that had for more than twenty years now been my home, and I had come to cherish just those aspects of the city which, to my mind, marked it out from other cities in which I had lived.  Cork, for instances, in Ireland, had smelled of its peat fires.

A son of Edinburgh.

      No doubt it had ever been the practice of pilgrims to recount their adventures upon their return, and I was no different.  What soon became evident, however, was that it was no easy matter to explain to anyone who had not already experienced the Camino just what was the appeal, or the benefit, of sleeping in oftentimes over-crowded dormitories, of using bushes as lavatories, and of covering from ten to twenty miles a day on foot, day in and day out, regardless of the weather.

      Nevertheless I believed, as a writer, that language provided the ways and the words to describe all that could happen to us in our lives.  I had kept a journal on the walk and I was soon at work editing it, cutting out whatever was pedestrian, predictable, or repetitious.  A good part of writing had always been, for me, re-writing, and less, in my experience, had invariably proved to be more.

      I completed an article for a pilgrim magazine, thinking that this would be the end of it and that my mind would then be clear for moving on.  I set myself the task of describing in the article the events which had, unfailingly, made each day on the Camino memorable, reaching no real conclusion apart from the obvious one – that I had since returned home and was once more walking the streets of Auld Reekie.

The writer's lair.

      I received a note from a fellow pilgrim, marvelling at how much detail had gone into the article.  His own memory of the Camino, he claimed, could have been summed up with just a single sentence:

      “Got up, walked all day, went to bed.”

      I was also reading.  I had arrived back with the pockets of my rucksack stuffed full of books purchased in Santiago.  The Camino was defined by its lore – the myth, the legends, the miracle stories – and the more I read the more obvious it became that the lore and the history of the Camino were in fact inseparable, having been woven, as it were, into a single rich tapestry.  And what was more telling still, the process was by no means complete, the tapestry remained a work in progress.

      There were pilgrims and there were pilgrims.  I dipped into the two books which I had heard mentioned most often on the Camino, one by Shirley MacLaine and the other by Paolo Coehlo.  MacLaine related how, when threatened by feral dogs along the way, she was able to avoid a confrontation by being proactive with love energy.  Coehlo’s book, on the other hand, included a mysterious mentor and a miraculous sword.  There was no canonical text of the Camino, fact and fiction remained everywhere intermingled, and there were as many versions of the pilgrimage, roughly speaking, as there were pilgrims.

      The Camino had in my case left me more alert, more attentive to my surroundings.  I noticed, among other things, that the people of Edinburgh, whom I had previously found to be somewhat reserved, appeared on my return to be more open, even gregarious.  How odd, I thought.  How strange that my going off on the Camino should have had this effect on them.

      Springtime in Scotland became the summer, and I resumed walking in the hills and along the coastal trails.  I was waiting for something, expecting something by way of a sign, something like the yellow arrows which had guided me across Spain, something which would indicate the next turning.

Tough luck. The tide's in.

      After so many years of wandering the streets of Edinburgh I imagined that I knew the city well, but there was a new sharpness to my gaze of late, a new edge to my curiosity.  I chanced upon intriguingly named lanes, preciously unexamined alleyways, and one day discovered, in a small pub that I was visiting for the first time, the following encomium:

                    Here’s to a good whisky,
                        so amber and clear
                    it’s not as sweet as a woman’s lips
                        but it’s a sight more sincere.

      This in my adopted city, a city of writers and of philosophers.  I got out my notebook and I copied it.  This in the city of the Scottish Enlightenment, in the Athens of the North.  This while preparing myself; this while awaiting, with ever keener anticipation, the next way mark.

 [To be continued.]

10) El verdedero Camino empieza cuando llegas al final.

The true Camino begins when you reach the end.  According to the present day lore of the Camino, it truly commences for the pilgrim only where, in the past, it would have been thought to have concluded.  All that has occurred until then, all that has been experienced along the way, has been but a prelude.

       I was again on the move.  I was once more walking through the countryside, through pine and eucalyptus forests, up to altos and then down again into lush valleys.  West of Santiago the land was sparsely populated, and I only very seldom passed, or was passed by, another pilgrim.  Here, in the darkness of the forests, one was almost as likely to encounter a witch as a pilgrim.

A warning for witches.

      New names presented themselves to be conjured with: Negreira, Olveiroa, Corcubión.  In Corcubión the refuge was set high above the town, on a hilltop, and from here it was possible to see around a wide bay to the cape at Finisterre, where the world itself was once thought to have ended.

      A small group of pilgrims sat down that evening to a meal which had been cooked for us by the hospitalero.  There had been no attempt to form a new family: we were no more than casual acquaintances who nodded to each another whenever we happened to meet up on the path.  Our minds were no longer on the present or on what surrounded us; we were once more focused on the future, on ourselves, and on the lives to which we would all within a few days be returning.

Looking forward to Finisterre.

      After all the ground that I had covered since Roncesvalles, the short walk around the bay to Finisterre was little more than a stroll.  I stopped for a coffee on the way.  I stopped on a beach to pick up shells.  I was tanned, I had lost weight, and I was as fit by now, at the age of sixty, as I had ever before been in my life – but fit for what?

      More ancient peoples than the early Christian pilgrims who had continued on from Santiago were in all likelihood the first to have walked to the sea here.  There was evidence to suggest that the Celts had done so, led to the supposed end of the earth by their priests, coming to witness the death of the sun as it was submerged in the waves in the belief that their attention would ensure its rebirth.

      A certain tradition has persisted across time, and across traditions.  Having removed their worn and soiled clothing, and having made a bonfire of it on the beach, pilgrims to Finisterre then enter the sea.  A dip in the waves followed by a fresh set of clothing, and the pilgrim quite naturally considers him or her self to have been renewed, rejuvenated, rebaptized.

      Dipping into the grey Atlantic so early in May was tantamount to plunging into ice water.  I was in and out again in a flash.  Someone had lit a fire which was still smouldering on the beach, but I was not for burning my clothes, which I judged to be not so worn or so soiled as all that.

The fishing fleet, its day's work done.

      In the harbour of the town of Finisterre, fishing boats were bobbing on the swells.  The tinkling of the riggings competed with the cries of gulls.  Outside each of the busy bar-restaurants along the front was a blackboard announcing that day’s fare, which was to say, that day’s catch.

      The sea air was intoxicating, and I relished the platter of shellfish that was set before me.  Time, however, was running out.  Over these past weeks I had been living much more intensely than during any other period of my life, but how, short of becoming a peregrino perpetua, a perpetual pilgrim, could I hope to go on living so intensely now that the journey was reaching an end?

      From the town it was another three kilometres out to the lighthouse.  This entire stretch of coast was called the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death, owing to the number of ships that had been wrecked along its length.  And not only sailors fell prey to the sea along this coast, as from time to time a mere passerby might be snatched from the rocky shoreline.

In memory of a pilgrim claimed by the sea.

      Having walked out to the lighthouse and gazed down for a time at the waves which were that day crashing onto the rocks below, I had then to retrace my steps.  My return journey from Finisterre to Santiago would be by bus, and then another bus would transport me out to the airport.  There, like everyone else, tourists and pilgrims alike, I would be obliged to stand in my stocking feet and wait while my boots were scanned for bombs.

      Los pasos terminan, el Camino permanece.  The walking ends, the way remains.  Every day more pilgrims would be setting off from home, and each day other pilgrims, leaner after days of walking, would be reaching the end of the road, if not the world.  That one had for a time been a part of this procession ought surely to have been a matter for celebration, for congratulation, not regret, not caviling, but all the same…

      We are what we are.  Although I had persisted, although I had covered the necessary ground, in no way could I convince myself that I had brought this latest undertaking to a successful conclusion.  And this was, in my case, all too predictable.  This was so just like me, so very typical of me that were this the whole of the story, it would hardly have been worth telling.

[To be continued.]

A Santiago, nunca se llega; sólo se va.

One only goes to Santiago, this states, one never arrives.  With only ten kilometres left to walk, I reached the suburb of San Lázaro in good time and stopped there long enough for a celebratory breakfast of ham and eggs.  Several other pilgrims soon turned up, they too being under the misapprehension that they were on the point of arriving in Santiago.

      The Camino entered the old city through the Pilgrim Gate, the way still being indicated by yellow arrows.  These brought us to the Plaza de Obradoiro, where pilgrims and tourists alike were posing for photographs against a backdrop of the cathedral.  And was there then another Santiago, distinct from this one, to which the pilgrim, regardless of how far he or she may had walked, would never arrive?

      The woman in the Pilgrim Office was unconcerned by this.  She thumbed through my credencial, decided that all was in order, congratulated me, entered my name into her register, and presented me with a compostela, a document attesting to my completion of the Camino.  Pausing just long enough to thank her, I then raced to the adjacent souvenir shop to get the document plastificado, laminated, before she could change her mind.

A "compostela" for Robertuum.

      Pilgrims were by this time appearing from all directions.  Some would have walked from Andalucía, some from Barcelona or Valencia, others up through Portugal.  Amongst all those sunburned women and bearded men, friends were constantly being reunited with friends, thus the cries of joy and the bear hugs.  And so too, amidst that growing assembly, our own small contingent began to re-form.

      The noon mass in the cathedral was designated as the pilgrim mass.  We ascended an ornate staircase and entered the cathedral as we were entitled to do, through the Pórtico de la Gloria, placing a hand as we passed into a handprint already long worn into one of the columns by the hands of countless pilgrims before us.

Here we are, Santiago.

      We took seats of honour in the nave, our demeanour as we did so becoming somewhat more subdued.  We had certainly gone to Santiago, just as we had each set out to do, but that had now come to an end.  We would soon be scattered to the four winds, and that, in all likelihood, would be that.  Loved ones awaited us at home along with jobs, mortgages, and all of our things.

      It struck me as odd to hear the officiating priest announce from the altar that a pilgrim from Scotland had reached Santiago that day.  From Scotland!  On that very day!  What a coincidence!  Then I realized, with a start, that that pilgrim was me.

      We were in luck.  After the roll call of the nations, and once the mass itself had been celebrated, eight men in robes materialized before us, eight tiraboleiros, whose task it was, on selected occasions, to swing the famous botafumeiro, a giant censor.  The censor was lowered from high above, lit, and then swung to and fro by means of ropes, arching over the heads of those seated in the transepts, trailing clouds of sweet smoke.

The Botafumeiro Experience.

      Some went up behind the altar afterwards to embrace a statue of the saint, and some of us remained where we were.  It was incumbent upon latter day pilgrims to be considerate, to be tolerant of the beliefs and practices of others, which could only be many and various, but two words sprang unbidden into my mind: idolatry and superstition.  A priest had been stationed behind the altar to keep watch, I learned afterwards, and each time that a pilgrim went forward to hug the saint, the priest had clicked a counter.

      We did that afternoon what we had promised that we would do in Santiago, we shared a last meal together.  Thus we commemorated all of the meals that we had previously shared along the way, and when that final meal was done and it was time to say our farewells, it was each other that we embraced, unreservedly and without qualms.

      A common repast was specific to no one creed, but what of our sins?  What of the clean slate promised to those making their way to this city in a spirit of repentance?  Was this in truth the royal road to redemption?  Was the way to Santiago also a path to peace of mind?

      As elsewhere in Spain, Santiago closed down for a few hours in the afternoon and then reopened again in the evening.  The streets quickly filled again with tourists, with pilgrims, with shoppers, and with those whose custom it was to appear in the streets each evening with nothing more on their minds than simply to enjoy life in the company of others.

      Santiago as night fell was a delight, and after weeks of walking as a pilgrim I was happy to walk again unencumbered, having shed my boots and my rucksack.  For weeks now I had been calling myself a pilgrim, and not solely for convenience.  I had hoped, and I still hoped, that I was in some sense a pilgrim.  But certainly I felt much more at home that evening in the bustling streets of the city of the Apostle, than I had felt earlier within the confines of his shrine.

[To be continued.]

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6) ¿Quién es tu hermano?

The next city on our route was León.  I arrived early in the day, checked into a hotel, stepped under the shower, and commenced washing my clothes even as I was removing them.  After eighteen days of walking through mud and through dust, it came as no surprise to see that the water which first ran off me ran brown.

      We had by now logged some five hundred kilometres.  The Meseta was behind us, we would soon be walking in hills again, and the change would be as good as a rest.  I gave my boots a good scrub; I unpacked my rucksack and turned it inside out; I unrolled my sleeping bag and hung it up to air.  What had been a hotel room had by this time been turned into an encampment.

      Cities are busy with the business of cities.  Cities are also expensive and, for the pilgrim, disorienting.  The pilgrim, in the city, in order to avoid being mistaken for a hippie or a down-and-out, would be well advised to put on trainers, wear a clean shirt, and pose as a tourist.

The centrepiece of the city.

      Paolo was not stopping.  Five Euros, in a city, would be gone in no time.  We chatted in the cathedral, as we waited for our sellos.

      “Cities are horrible,” Paolo declared. “They stink and they’re noisy and the women, once they’ve looked once at you, look somewhere else.”

      No one pilgrim could represent all pilgrims.  As a peregrino por promesa, walking to acknowledge a favour received, Paolo displayed two emblems, the usual scallop shell and a dummy, a pacifier, a reference to an infant son whose recovery from a serious illness Paolo attributed to an other than merely medical intervention.

      Once there had also been peregrinos forzados, individuals who had been sentenced to walk the Camino, some to walk it naked, some in chains.  Murderers, thieves, fornicating priests would all once have walked side by side with the faithful, walking not for the redemption of their own corrupt souls but for the sake of the souls of their victims.

      One day after León came Hospital de Órbigo, which could boast of the longest pilgrim bridge in Spain.  On this very bridge a certain lovesick nobleman once sought to cure his affliction by crossing lances with all who sought to pass.  Eventually, having been restored to normality, he himself set off for Santiago with a golden necklace as an offering to the saint, this being emblematic of a deliverance from love.

Where a broken heart was mended.

      One day more and we were in Astorga, where we settled on a pizzería for our evening meal.  We had ceased to worry about what was and what wasn’t an authentic pilgrim experience, no such distinction being possible across time.  If no pilgrim in the Middle Ages would have dreamt of entering a pizza parlour, perhaps that was only because there had been none.

      Authenticity was a mug’s game.  Not long after leaving Rabanal del Camino, where we slept in the spotless refuge run by the Confraternity of Saint James, we ascended to Cruz de Ferro, where an iron cross has been set atop a cairn.  Here, at what was also once a shrine to Mercury, the Roman god of travellers, we followed the ancient Celtic custom of adding stones of our own to those already heaped there.

      The refuge at Molinaseca was heaving on the day that we arrived, with latecomers being assigned sleeping space on the porch.  Another day, another sello, and I was on my way again at dawn.  The number of pilgrims on the road had been growing steadily, and that would continue now, we had been warned, until we reached Santiago, where all of this would reach a crescendo.

      Next came Villafranca del Bierzo, where we had agreed in advance to stay in the Ave Fenix, a refuge which was in the process of rising from the ashes following a devastating fire.  We poured over our maps that evening, studying the long ascent which awaited us.  So arduous was the stage that pilgrims were permitted to have their rucksacks ferried ahead by taxi, but having come this far with our rucksacks on our backs, we were none of us in favour of cutting any corners.

      And we were of one mind with regard to something else.  The pilgrimage may have begun for each of us as a solitary undertaking, but we had not for all this time been walking in a vacuum.  It was essential that we all got up the mountain that awaited us on the morrow, for anyone’s failure to do so would in some unspecified way, we all felt, have diminished the accomplishment for the rest of us.

      In my notes was a passage that I had copied from a pilgrim book a few days earlier:

¿Quién es tu hermano?   Tu vecino más cercano.

Another of those popular rhyming proverbs perhaps, or perhaps it had been lifted from a Spanish catechism:

           Q: Who is your brother?

           A: Your neighbour nearest to hand.

      And who in that case, on the Camino, were your brothers and your sisters?  Whoever was stretched out in the next bunk, whoever else was cooking in the kitchen, whoever was making their notes beside you, brushing their teeth in the next wash basin, queuing up behind you to use the shower…

 [To be continued.]

5) No todo el monte es orégano.

Not all of the mountain, warns the dicho, is oregano.  As regards the Camino, the pilgrim soon enough learns not to expect every day of the pilgrimage to be a day of endless delight.  The pilgrim has not died and gone to heaven, far from it.

      Hontanas, Boadilla del Camino, Carrión de los Condes, Terradillos de los Templares – the names tripped pleasingly off the tongue.  These were stopping places on the Meseta, a vast and largely featureless tableland lying between Burgos and León.  Villages were now few and far between, and a new level of stamina was thus required.  Thirty kilometres a day ceased to be anything to brag about, not when those who set off early enough were able to do forty.

      Now and again the pilgrim on foot would be overtaken by one on a bicycle.

     “¡Buen Camino!” the latter would call out in passing.

      “¡Igualmente!” was the expected reply.

      Pilgrims on bicycles were a different breed.  Bicyclists, in the walker’s scheme of things, were peregrinos descafeinados, decaffeinated pilgrims.  They might cross that plain in a fraction of the time that the rest of us required, but they would experience only a weak, watered-down version of the Camino, not the full-bodied version, and what was more they raised dust.

A minimalist landscape.

      Here was solitude writ large.  The route was perfectly straightforward, the legs did most of the work, and the mind was thus set free for introspection, for self-examination, for exorcizing one’s demons, if one were that way inclined.

      In the evenings we regathered.  Our pilgrim family now included a Belgian gentleman mourning the loss of his sister, a Swiss pilgrim nicknamed Heidi, and an Italian couple who were walking the Camino to mark the husband’s recent retirement.  Unlike the rest of us, the Italian pair made every effort to attend mass each day, and they had brought along their own pillowslips.  Should they not like the look of the pillows provided by a refuge, the husband explained, the pillowslips could instead be stuffed with spare items of clothing.

      “After all,” he added, “this isn’t our first Camino.”

      They had first walked the route some forty years earlier, on their honeymoon.  Their intention had always been to walk it again, but with first children to consider, and then grandchildren, they had not until now found the time.  Their two Caminos would thus be bookends for the many productive years that they had shared.

      Those days of walking on the Meseta were not without their longueurs.  The weather remained changeable, but everything else, for days on end, was of a numbing sameness, and those who no longer made notes in the evenings were amazed by those of us who still did.  What, they were left wondering, could they have missed?

      Here and there we passed the remains of hospitales, where pilgrims of old had been housed, treated for their ills, and if necessary laid to rest in an adjacent pilgrim cemetery.  Tedium would have been the least of their problems.

A traffic jam on the Meseta.

      From time to time I walked with Paolo, a Portuguese pilgrim who was making the Camino in fulfilment of a vow and attempting to do it on a budget of five Euros a day.  He seldom entered a bar, even for a coffee, and he oftentimes slept rough.  He was proud, a little touchy, and no doubt quite correct in ranking himself a notch above the rest of us in terms of authenticity, being the only one amongst us without a credit card tucked away somewhere beneath his clothing.

      Our final evening on the Meseta was spent in the hamlet of Reliegos.  It had been a long stage, we had become well spread out, and there had been violent thunderstorms in the vicinity that afternoon.  Nevertheless, by dusk everyone whom we were expecting had arrived, everyone except Paolo.

      “What could have happened to him?” the Swiss woman began to fret. “Is it possible that he was hit by the lightning? And we are all here meanwhile thinking only of our own stomachs.”

      Paolo was accident-prone.  In the process of hitchhiking from Lisbon to Roncesvalles to begin his pilgrimage, he had mislaid his only warm garment, a jumper which he managed to leave behind in the back seat of someone’s car.  He had since then been lost, had set fire to his boots when trying to dry them, and had had several run-ins with dogs.  At the very least that day, with his luck, he must have been on the receiving end of a good soaking.

      As there was no restaurant in the hamlet, we had cooked up a meal for ourselves in the kitchen of the refuge, and it was afterwards, when we were washing up, that Paolo at last appeared.  At first he said nothing, merely set down his rucksack and put a pot of water on to boil.  Within our pilgrim family, Paolo was a distant cousin, an eccentric outsider whom no one knew quite how to take.

      We sat back down to keep him company.  Someone slipped out to the bar for another bottle of wine.  We were all of us exhausted by now, and talked out, and so we simply waited, enjoying in silence Paolo’s own enjoyment of a huge bowl of pasta topped with a little tomato paste squeezed out of an already much-squeezed tube.

      “The Guardia Civil stopped me today,” Paolo at last remarked. “What idiots! They said that I couldn’t camp out tonight on account of the flash floods.”

      And just where, someone dared to inquire, had he been planning to camp?

      “Under a bridge, of course,” Paolo replied, deadpan. “To be out of the rain.”

      Paolo, I decided, had a sense of humour after all, and was secretly pleased by the looks of alarm that this answer occasioned.  I refilled his glass.  The day had been long, with a fair share of plod, of sheer hard graft, but it had not, in the end, been without its orégano.

[To be continued.]