Tuesday, July 23, 2002. 7:30 a.m. Paris.
Wan morning light. My daughter and I have just arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport on the night flight from New York City. A sign tells us we’re in Terminal C; our tickets say our connection to Biarritz departs from Terminal F. Two movies, two meals, magazines and chocolate and a scant hour or so of sleep—and still Sarah runs against the flow of an automated walkway. Twelve years old, oblivious to the clots of weary crumpled passengers as they are passively transported from one discomfort to another, blind to the man who watches her long tanned legs just a beat too long, dismissive of airport personnel who broadcast warning frowns, she waves and smiles at me from under her lurching pack. “Non, non!” a woman in a uniform cries, pointing a finger at me, the delinquent mother standing where the ground doesn’t shift, between two long people movers, but I don’t stop my renegade child. Having timed it perfectly, Sarah is mesmerizing, running toward me in slow motion, just exactly as fast as the walkway tries to carry her away. Sneakers and shorts, unbound dark hair, blue eyes that startle with their size and intensity: a sprite delivering a message. Or is she asking a question: What are we doing here? Why have we come?
I step onto the sliding black rubber, and she turns around and takes her place beside me. Having missed a night’s rest, I’ve lost the psychic insulation that protected me just yesterday from the quixotic nature of this trip, one revealed by the gray light of a Paris workday as a romantic absurdity. I’m employing twenty-first-century speed to transport the two of us, as quickly as possible and sleep be damned, to a tiny town in the Pyrenees from which we will begin a journey unaided by even the wheel. From St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, in France, over the mountains to Roncesvalles, in Spain, and on to Pamplona, perhaps even as far as Logroño, we’ll walk west carrying what we need. In a week we’ll cover as much as we can of the ancient pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela.
The road was established during the Crusades, those who walked it impelled by the same motive that lured others to the Holy Land: Here was a means of declaring allegiance to their God. Like all such voyages, the destination of Santiago offered less spiritual reward than the journey itself, which was a protracted penance, a great act of faith composed of many smaller moments of faith, at whose end lay the relics of a martyr—if, in fact, St. James is buried in Spain, because from the beginning of his story desire pushed truth toward romance.
The Gospels tell us that James, son of Zebedee, was in his boat mending his nets with his brother, John, when Christ summoned them, saying, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” James and his brother did follow, and James saw when Christ raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead; he witnessed Jesus’s transfiguration on the Mount, a new order of love supplanting the old of law; and he accompanied his Lord from glory to agony. James was with Christ at Gethsemane, and he asked to share in Christ’s passion, asked for what he could not in his mortality anticipate, to be persecuted, and murdered, for his faith. In A.D. 44, James was beheaded in Jerusalem by Herod. As he had been the most zealous and aggressive of the Apostles, so was he the first to be martyred, and the first around whom legends collected.
Kneeling as he died, James caught his head in his arms and held it tight. Disciples took his corpse and placed it just so, arms still cradling head, in a marble sarcophagus, which they carried to Spain in a rudderless stone boat. The miraculous journey across the Mediterranean and through the Strait of Gibraltar took seven days—seven, like forty, being a charged and mystical number: the time it takes to make, or unmake, history. As the boat approached the shore it was greeted by a bridegroom riding a horse, neatly joining an image of Christ with that of the sea god Poseidon, who sometimes takes the form of a horse or bull. Impatient, the animal plunged into the water and emerged covered with white scallop shells, and so James was given his symbol, borrowed perhaps from Aphrodite, goddess of love.
A suitable burial place lay, however, on the other side of a thicket of trials. The pagan queen Lupa is said to have directed the disciples up a mountain where she expected they would be trampled by wild bulls or, failing that, devoured by a local dragon. But the sign of the cross transformed the bulls into docile guides, who returned the disciples and the saint’s relics to the wicked queen. In the way of fairy tales, Lupa was immediately vanquished by the miracle and became a Christian. She made her palace into St. James’s—or, to use the Spanish, Santiago’s—first church and arranged for the marble sarcophagus to be hidden in a cave, where it remained undisturbed for eight centuries.
A rudderless stone boat crosses rough seas in seven days. Ridiculous. So why does the legend persist, told and retold through the centuries? Why do we cling to it unreasonably, as the saint did his severed head? During a holy year, when St. James’s day, July 25, falls on a Sunday, over one hundred thousand people, children of the twenty-first century, walk the road to Santiago. So even now—when overnight we can exchange one life for another, put aside work to watch movies in midair, fly ahead of the Earth’s turning, conspire with time, collapse the night, hurry the morning, speak across continents through cables bearing light—even now, we walk, making slow progress toward the invisible, the improbable, the ridiculous. No matter our faith, or lack thereof, we must travel away from reason to reach a state we hold in greater esteem: enlightenment.
Sarah and I step off the moving walkway; the linoleum floor jolts our feet. We walk the rest of the way to Terminal F unassisted by technology. Among the promises of Santiago is an altered relationship with time, the attempt to measure it step by step. Not to defeat time, nor to fight against its relentlessness, but to perceive time, one of the faces of God—a face routinely obscured by our modern multitasking lives.
In the ninth century, after the invasion of Spain by the Moors, St. James appeared, to some as a vision, to others as an idea: Could he offer a means of resisting the rising tide of infidels? One night a band of Christian hermits, among them a man named Pelayo, who had settled in Galicia (then called Asturias), saw lights in a forest, a compostela or field of stars. The apparition was accompanied by celestial music, and Pelayo followed the lights and the singing to find an altar raised on a marble sarcophagus and inscribed, “Here lies Santiago, son of Zebedee and Salome, brother of St. John, whom Herod beheaded in Jerusalem.” Pelayo went to his bishop, Teodomiro, who confirmed the auspicious discovery and relayed it to King Alfonso. Now Christian Spain had the means to create a great shrine that might compete with Muslim Córdoba. The relics were moved and a new holy city, Santiago de Compostela, was born. Routes were established from France, from Italy, from Germany, most converging at a point in the Pyrenees, near the mountain pass of Cize. All were blighted by bandits, fraudulent priests, hawkers of indulgences, and horse thieves; such parasites abounded; genuinely Good Samaritans were rare. A twelfth-century French monk, Aymeric Picaud, compiled the first practical guide to the Camino de Santiago, a work that has been recapitulated many times and that is quoted in the literature I carry as I set off with my daughter.
The guidebooks are not light, but a heap of magazines and cheap paperbacks from the airport stores has made our backpacks pounds heavier. Walking through the airport’s punishingly long corridors I realize, as I haven’t before, that for this ascetic exercise I’ve chosen as my companion an adolescent girl, a creature defined by her enthusiasm for acquiring the very things I am trying to leave behind: CDs, magazines, accessories, cosmetics. With the added amusements, the packs barely fit into the connecting flight’s overhead bins.
In Biarritz, I consult with the woman at the tourist information desk, suffering the humiliations of my rusty French, buying unnecessary maps from the stall next door to help me understand her suggestions. From the local airport we must take a bus to Bayonne, and from Bayonne a train to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Finally, we are beginning to slow down. In Bayonne, we have an hour and a half to wait before our train’s departure and spend it looking for trousers for Sarah, who hasn’t packed a single pair of long pants, and whose mother was so flattened by the humidity of July in New York, and so apprehensive of the summer heat of Spain, that she forgot what lay in between—the Pyrenees. Bayonne is cold and wet. Rain slants across the mud-colored Nive River as we walk back over the bridge that separates us from the shopping district, where in one of the many ill-stocked shops we at last find a pair of serviceable wine-colored corduroys.
Back in the train station, Sarah discovers a photo booth that produces astonishingly beautiful pictures, as impossibly beautiful as an enchantment, and only two euros for one large, four small, or sixteen tiny prints. We fill the remaining minutes by reproducing her, and I study the shots as they emerge from the slot. Sarah is lovely anyway, lovely with braces on her teeth, lovely with unbrushed hair, eyes shadowed with fatigue, but something—what? the stark white backdrop? the digital camera? the strobe of the flash?—has produced mechanical alchemy. Each image glows like an icon.
“You try it,” she says, but I don’t want to break the spell.
“Here,” I say, “don’t let them get scratched.” I hold open a guidebook, and we tuck them between its pages.
On the train to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, my daughter falls asleep, and I stare out the window trying to analyze the pleasure of European trains, whose hard third-class seats feel more luxurious to me than a Metroliner’s plush recliners. It must be distance that affords such comfort. At home, I veer between responsibilities and deadlines, track ticking beneath the wheels, the noise of a vast clock. Here, the sound of the ties is soothing.
We disembark and walk into town, a pretty place, if we weren’t too tired to notice. One hotel is full, and then another. It’s nearly six o’clock, and I hope I haven’t blown it—traveling with my child I can’t afford the kind of miscalculations I’ve taught myself to take in stride. I walk up the steep sidewalk without looking at Sarah’s face, avoiding what I might see there: disappointment, exhaustion, anxiety. A night on a bench is not an option, and, luckily, the fates agree. The next hotel has a sign with three stars, a restaurant, cable television, eiderdown duvets with white damask covers, and a vacancy.
I open our room’s wood shutters, look out on quaint cobbles and window boxes filled with red geraniums, with a dramatic backdrop. “Look at the mountains!” I say.
“French MTV!” Sarah answers, ecstatic, waving the remote control. But we both fall asleep without taking off our shoes.
Wednesday, July 24, 2002. 7:30 a.m. St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port.
Sarah sleeps while I jettison. This time, as with the first time I walked the pilgrim road, three years earlier, I am interested to discover what it is I discard en route, what I thought I wanted enough to carry on my back but decide that, in fact, I don’t. I sort through my toiletries and get rid of the extra soap and a leaking bottle of sunscreen. Having come with an abundance of maps and having bought more in the airport, I sacrifice three of the seven, and one of the guidebooks as well. The road is so well marked that a child, pre-literate, could follow the yellow arrows and red stripes across all of Spain, but I’ve forgotten this. I hold onto the security of maps and guides I don’t need and won’t use.
Traditionally, pilgrims carried a staff, both as support for the long, weary walk, and as a means of fending off dogs and thieves. They carried their water in gourds, and announced themselves as pilgrims bound for Santiago by displaying a scallop shell. All of these items, as well as their modern equivalents—graphite poles and canteens and Gortex jackets—are available in one after another store in the town of St.-Jean. After breakfast and a hot shower, we set out under our packs for the Accueil St. Jacques, the pilgrim office at 39, rue de la Citadelle, where we apply for our credenciales, or pilgrim records, which will enable us to use the refugios along the road, should we need them. The credencial, which costs a few euros, is meant to be stamped each day, at a refugio or a church or town hall; at the end of the road it can be presented at the Santiago pilgrim office for a certificate confirming the completion of the pilgrimage. What are the reasons for our undertaking the journey, the document demands. Catholic? Spiritual? Health? Other?
“What do I check?” Sarah asks me, and I shrug.
“Check what you want.” She looks at my pen, hesitating between Catholic and Spiritual before I check both.
“Are you a Catholic?” she says. “Really a Catholic?”
“That would depend on whom you ask. The church has already decided that since Dad and I married in a Quaker Meeting, and since we never had any of you baptized, I am not. But inside, I think I am. At least I’m more Catholic than I am anything else.”
She nods slowly. As she knows, before I joined my mother in a confirmation class and converted, at twelve, to Catholicism, I was raised by Jewish grandparents and thoroughly indoctrinated by ten years of Christian Science Sunday school.
“I’m leaving it blank,” Sarah says.
“Fine.”
More immediately concerned with our physical safety than with the state of our souls, the personnel in the pilgrim office protest that, given the forecast of rain and obliterating fog in the mountains, it is hours too late for us to begin walking today, when the road climbs and descends 1,250 meters through the Pyrenees, and offers no possibility of stopping after the Cize Pass.
“How far is it, exactly, to Roncesvalles?” I ask the woman on the other side of the desk.
“Twenty-seven kilometers. You must begin by seven. Eight at the very latest.” She looks meaningfully at my daughter, telling me what I know, that my traveling companion is a child. Then she crosses her arms like a school marm, inspiring defiance. If we stay in St.-Jean, we’ll be bored; we’ll walk up and down the few streets, poke in and out of little shops; to kill time, inevitably we’ll buy more things to carry; and the next day’s weather may be no better.
“Thank you for your help,” I say to the woman, and I stand and pick up my pack. “Thank you very much.”
Outside the door, I look at the mountains, their peaks invisible in the clouds, and then at Sarah. “What do you think we should do?” I ask her. She scowls at the door to the pilgrim office.
“What a know-it-all. What a grump,” she says. “Let’s start. Let’s go.”
“I think so, too.” We buy plastic ponchos and water and food—the packs are now very heavy—and set off. It is eleven, and I am anxious. Already I’ve done what I promised my husband I wouldn’t: embarked on a day that will keep us walking too long and too late, walking into the dark hours. Already I’ve ceded decision-making power to a twelve-year-old.
On the other hand, she’s a lot more practical than I am.
The road climbs steeply out of town, cleaving to an asphalt track and then diverging through pastures and groves of dripping trees. By all accounts, we miss some spectacular views as we ascend, and yet the fog provides a perfect transition into this life of walking. Luminous and swirling, dissolving the road behind and before us, it erases past and future. To break the unearthly silence, Sarah, who has just the previous week returned from summer camp, recounts a bunkmate’s retelling of an episode of The Twilight Zone. In it, a man sets off on a road alone, encountering the same hitchhiker again and again, even though the driver keeps passing him in his car. Of course it turns out that the man in the car has died, driven into his afterlife without realizing he’s left his old one behind. As I remember the series, it seems that a pet theme of The Twilight Zone was our mortal inability to acknowledge the death we hold within us. We walk, and I picture the black-and-white titles of the show, my grandfather’s cracked leather chair, where I huddled under a blanket when I watched TV in his and my grandmother’s gloomy, shabby den—a room that no longer exists, the house now gone, razed to build another home, the grandparents dead as well.
The road to Santiago heads west, relentlessly west, toward sunset and toward death. Centuries earlier, a pilgrim would sell all his possessions, divesting himself in anticipation of a journey he didn’t necessarily expect to survive or complete. This time, my third experience of the road, I myself won’t get as far as I plan on this first day of walking with my daughter. This particular journey, I’ll discover, will be about discovering the grace to quit.
We’ve stopped talking, and the road has melted into nothing, when abruptly we arrive at the kind of vista I associate with dreams: all of life is spread at our feet, and where we are is cool and lovely and calm, villages and pastures seen from an astonishing height. Can we have walked all this way up? Did we, step by step, purchase this perspective, this shocking beauty? We let our packs slide off our backs, unfold one of the plastic ponchos to protect us from the wet grass where we sit to eat what we’ve bought in the town, a crusty baguette, a Dutch cheese sealed in red wax, pears, oranges, water. Beside a pilgrim’s pump, from which we top off our water bottles, we see our first cairn.
“What is that?” Sarah asks.
“Just rocks. People add them, one by one, as they walk by.”
“For what?”
“For whatever. Different reasons for different rocks, different pilgrims. You can, too, if you like.”
Sarah regards the pile with her signature reserve. She doesn’t hurry to join any crowd. “Maybe,” she says, but she doesn’t add one, and neither do I. Later she’ll point out other heaps of rocks: “There’s one,” she’ll say or, if it’s an ambiguous, tumbledown pile, “Is that one?” Sometimes a cross made of twigs is tucked among the stones, and we stop to consider these, the bright yarn that binds the bits of wood together. We say nothing but I think we arrive separately at the same conclusion: The simplicity of the gesture is a quality neither of us possesses.
The one spectacular vista is the first and last we have, and in fact it disappears before our eyes, leaving us in the fog, not talking as we walk but listening to the eerie music made by bells hung around the necks of invisible goats and cows. Atonal, gonging out of the mist, abruptly near and then very distant, it underscores how solitary is our pursuit. Having been warned many times that July is the height of the pilgrim season, I’d anticipated—dreaded—crowds along the road, even imagining something like a slow motion marathon, but today we’ve seen no one.
“Surreal,” Sarah says at last, and she’s right.
The sun doesn’t penetrate but illuminates the fog, thoroughly enough that we are walking through a weird, ambient cloud of light. Several times I try to identify the general direction of the sun but can’t find any one area of the sky that is brighter than another. Still, we have enough visibility to find the trail markers—two red directional stripes painted on tree trunks, on stones, on any available surface, the occasional red “X” warning of a misstep—and to pick out the outlines of goats and sheep, the flowers underfoot, the grass and the trees. But there are the moments when we have to look, hard, for a marker, and then I remember the cautions of the pilgrim office back in town.
We come to a stone fountain on a hilltop, and a plaque, translated as: HERE ROLAND FELL. On either side is a vast army of tree trunks, frozen and alert, and then the ground drops away into mist. Sometime around A.D. 780, after a successful campaign to subdue the Saracens, Charlemagne returned to France with his foot soldiers. He had liberated Spain from the infidels, following the exhortations of three visions of St. James, who promised him divine assistance if he waged war on the Moors. St. James was as good as his word: the walls of Pamplona fell like those of Jericho, and other impossible victories followed. The vanquished Saracens provided the gold that financed the building of a great cathedral in Santiago. Alas, the subjugation of the Moors was neither complete nor permanent. Charlemagne’s armies were ambushed in the Pyrenees, where Roland fell. There the king picked up and carried the body of the dead hero, his anguished cries echoing forward through the centuries, seeming, like the mournful bells of the animals we cannot see, to rush past me in the fog.
“Roland died in this place,” I tell my daughter, huddled by the water fountain, shrouded in her dripping poncho. She nods. He is a name, no more than that, but the stone bearing his simple epitaph is pitted with age and conveys a heavy grief, enough to prophesy all our ends.
“Let’s go,” she says. “Let’s keep walking.”
The dripping dank weather, the steep climb, the unaccustomed weight of the pack, and the charm of the town we left behind—the hot breakfast we had so many hours ago—all of these encourage our fantasies of the place we are approaching. What will materialize at the end of today’s twenty-seven kilometers? Heading downhill now, we pause at a signpost. Two routes will bring us to Roncesvalles: The shorter one, about three and a half kilometers, cuts through a beech wood; the longer, six kilometers, will take us through pastureland. Sarah lets her pack slide off and sits while I consult various guides: the books I brought from home as well as the more detailed photocopies we were given in the pilgrim office, maps that tempt me to choose the wooded trail, to follow that straight line rather than the winding, less efficient route through open country.
It’s six o’clock; we’ve depleted our provisions and our water; the fog is no longer white but gray and darker gray; the trees drip ominously. In my head I replay the conversation I had with my husband, a less reckless soul than I, the one about how fatigue leads to bad decisions.
“Don’t you think,” I ask Sarah, “that the woods look creepy?” I point at the black trunks and dense wet foliage, tendrils of fog crawling toward us over gnarled roots. “A little lions-and-tigers-and-bears-y?” I joke, alluding, as I will again on this trip, to Dorothy’s pilgrimage to Oz.
She shrugs. “Let’s go the shorter way,” she says.
“I don’t know.” I shake my head slowly, staring, mesmerized. How is it a twelve-year-old is not frightened, when I am seeing every sinister forest ever imagined? The clawing limbs that snatch at poor Snow White, making her panic and bolt further into darkness, the vampire-infested trees of Salem’s Lot, the Inferno’s bleak wood of suicides: Walt Disney, Stephen King, Dante. Turn back, they all warn, and I have to agree.
“Sorry,” I say. “I think we have to go the long way.” We pick up our packs and say hearty things about how short a distance, really, is six kilometers, how the road goes down not up, how soon—no more than an hour—we’ll arrive.
All day we’ve remarked that when the trail has diverged from the narrow mountain road, markers have been placed with wonderful sensitivity to the needs of those who are walking: not so often that they condescend, nor so infrequently that they inspire anxiety. Just exactly when we’ve wanted confirmation that we haven’t strayed from the track, we’ve seen a tree trunk or rock painted with double red stripes. Now, in the gloom, suddenly we lose the trail. We walk in a wide circles over the hill we’re descending, both of us bent over to see a slash of paint on one of the boulders that break through the grass, but find none. As unbearable as it is to backtrack when we’re so tired and eager to arrive at our night’s rest, we turn around to retrace our steps, only to discover ourselves defeated by our own circles.
“Shit,” I say, losing my composure in spite of myself. “Okay,” I say. “Okay. Okay. Let’s just keep ourselves pointed downhill. We’ll hit a road, we have to, and then the road will lead to the town.”
Sarah nods, says nothing. After a few minutes of silent walking we find that we’ve unwittingly stumbled into a farmer’s backyard: a pen filled with goats, a man in coveralls. “Hello,” I say, and the man looks up.
“Pas de pélerins,” he answers.
“I don’t need lodging,” I say, grateful to be able to speak even my clumsy French. “I just want to know if you can point me back onto the road.”
He says nothing.
“Nous sommes perdues,” I add, almost enjoying the drama of such an announcement. We are lost.
He smiles, nods. “Visibilité très mauvaise,” he says, and he directs us, speaking quickly and, to me, unintelligibly.
“Je ne comprends pas,” I interject each time he pauses, feeling humbled, humiliated, stupid. And then he begins again, pointing.
“It’s just that I can’t see where I’m going,” I explain. “Et je suis avec ma fille. Nous sommes fatiguées.” I’m with my daughter and we’re tired. He looks at me for a long moment, then drops his arm and calls to another man, whom I hadn’t noticed leaning against a truck parked by the shed. They speak quickly, low, urgent words I don’t understand, and the man shrugs and gets into the truck. He pulls out onto the track where we’re standing, stops in front of us, and gets out. Then he comes around, opens the passenger door, and shoves aside a heap of clutter.
“Merci,” I say, and I look at Sarah, newly catechized about the evils of the world, cautioned just two days ago in preparation for this trip: “Stick to your mother,” her father said, “and don’t talk to strange men”—warnings made over my protestations: “It’s not like that there. I’ve been on the road before and it’s safe. You know I wouldn’t take her somewhere that wasn’t safe.” Sarah’s face registers a brief look of fear, and in it I see a calculation, an assessment of me, her mother: too trusting, too naive.
“Come on.” I contradict all the years of programming, force her to do the very thing every child is told never to do, get into a stranger’s car. “It’s all right.”
The man slams the door, walks around the front. “I know this is weird, but it’s okay,” I tell Sarah again in the brief moment we’re alone in the car. “I promise.” She nods, curt, her face closed to my scrutiny. I try to imagine the thoughts behind her eyes, none of them reassuring. He gets in and begins to drive. The road leaps up out of the fog and into his headlights. It twists and loops and seems leagues longer than what I guessed from the maps, but each time I try to imagine him as a possible predator, I remind myself that we walked out of the fog and asked for help. He didn’t stalk us but sighed and nodded at our need.
“Roncesvalles,” he announces suddenly, and pulls up short. He gets out to open the passenger door and then, following Sarah, I slip out.
“Merci. Merci. Merci beaucoup beaucoup.” I wring his hand with overwrought gratitude, resist the urge to embrace him for being what I wanted him to be: a kind stranger, the antidote to living in New York City where we must preach suspicion to our children. He nods and looks away, embarrassed by the hot vehemence of my hand.
“Roncesvalles,” he says again, and he points to a meager clutch of buildings.
Having walked today for eleven hours, having seen few travelers and little of the road itself, separately and together, silently and aloud, Sarah and I have fantasized about this town, picturing not a mere refuge, a bed and meal, but a whole mecca of shops and twinkling lights, choices of restaurants and inns, a photo booth as well a phone booth, voice of husband and of father, a fireplace and a glass of red wine, magazines and MTV and a surfeit of hot water and thick towels: an array of comforts to erase the hours of damp and chill. What we find instead is history: an ancient pilgrim hospital where many suffered and many died, a stone church sinking under centuries of petitions, a king’s tomb and another king’s silo, a battlefield, a monastery.
“Why are the signs in Spanish?” Sarah says, looking at a poster advertising a concert of choral music.
“Well,” I say, “we are in Spain.”
“Since when are we in Spain?”
“Since back there somewhere. I think around the time we were trying to decide which path to follow. That signpost by the woods.”
“But,” she says, a child familiar with the effusive state boundary markers: “Welcome to the Keystone State!” Her voice is sharp with disappointment. “But I wanted, for a moment, to stand with a foot in either country.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I guess, well I guess I wasn’t paying attention.” My daughter looks at me, her expression of betrayal making her look suddenly younger. “Besides,” I go on, “you did. At some point you did have a foot in either country.”
“But I didn’t know that I did.” And therefore, her frown tells me, it didn’t really happen. Does anything transpire outside of consciousness?
One disappointment follows another; the worst is dinner. At La Posada, the only hotel in Roncesvalles, with its chilly, stark rooms and surly-staffed restaurant, we have to wait until nine for a table, and then the food we are served is overcooked and highly salted. Sarah, a vegetarian, picks among the lumps on her plate, inspecting each darkly.
“Dessert?” I ask, and she makes a face.
“Let’s just go to bed.”
Thursday, July 25, 2002. 6:00 a.m. Roncesvalles.
I wake in a state of profound alienation and anxiety from a vivid dream in which I attend a conference that takes place in a citadel in the middle of a vast empty landscape. There I encounter a writer who looks exactly like me. We accost one another in a long hallway of closed doors, each of us bearing an armful of books, all of them written by me. At least I see my face on the dust jackets of the ones she carries. As we stare at each other, I lose the ability to determine which of us is the actual me. Having protested to this stranger that I am me, as proved by my carrying books I wrote, I realize that this proves nothing. The books in her arms are mine, too.
Up, scrubbing my face over the sink, I remind myself that one of the things I value about pilgrimage is the psychic violence of an experience that separates us from comfort and familiarity and context, all the habits we didn’t know we held so dear. The act itself is not dramatic—putting one foot in front of the other—but it can wreak inner havoc. I try to quell fears by sorting and folding our clothes, by selecting a few more items to discard. Absurdly, I am carrying my unfinished novel with me, chapters I’ve written and those I’ve sketched out on index cards. I weigh the heavy envelope in my hand. The pages exist at home on disks, both on my computer’s hard drive and on backup floppies, and yet I can’t bring myself to leave the pages behind. What if, on this road, a perfect sentence were to arrive? In fact, isn’t this why I walk the road, one sublime sentence my destination: words I’ve waited for all my life, the ones that in my dreams answer every question, redeem every hurt? I can’t be caught unready, without the right page on which to insert the mystical gift. I replace the big envelope in the pack.
Sarah sleeps, and would sleep longer, but I rouse her. Already, only two days into the trip, a pattern has been established: I wake at six o’clock, fold and refold, pack and pace and stare, sort and repack, and then, when I can wait no longer, I sit beside her on her bed and call her name. Gently, I touch her hands, her feet. “Hi,” I say. “Hello. We have to get going.”
“Where are the pictures?” she asks, yawning, dressed for breakfast.
“Which pictures?”
“The pictures of me. The ones from the photo booth.”
“You had them last night.”
“Yeah, but now I don’t.” She looks under the bed and gets up from the floor, obviously distraught. How can she—we—have lost these priceless photographs? Images that were not merely good, not flattering but right, because in them she recognized herself, saw the self she wanted to see. We search the room thoroughly; I unfold and refold, fan the pages of every book and magazine.
“Maybe we left them in the dining room?” Maybe, last night when we were so tired, she never picked them up after she set them aside to eat.
We leave and lock the room, walk slowly through the dim hall and down the darker stair, scanning every corner. In the dining room we interrogate the waitress, the same who brought us our previous meal, and I even go back to the kitchen, the bar. Using fragments of three languages and a few pantomimes, I tell everyone who works at La Posada that we’ve lost some photographs, that we want very much to find them.
Back at the table, I spread jam on cold toast. “Maybe someone found them, and that person thought they were so pretty, he couldn’t not keep them.” I say this feeling a little ill, imagining too clearly a Spanish Humbert with my daughter’s face caught in his billfold.
Sarah lifts her shoulders. She sips her cocoa and looks away. She won’t allow herself to cry over the loss; crying is not what the invulnerably cool and lovely nymph in the picture would do.
We finish the last of the toast and go back to the room, where she sits on the bed. “I think we really have to leave now,” I say. “I know you feel bad, and I do, too, but we can’t keep looking.”
“I know. I know.”
Once more we walk slowly through the shadowy halls, and then we are outside, where the sun is brilliant, each wet leaf sparkles as if to tell us not to lose perspective: Beauty is in abundance.
Roncesvalles has no shops that sell provisions, so we set off with only peanuts and candy, a bottle of water. Will the next town have a market? How far along the road is the next town? The next pump with potable water? We talk to the man at the tiny tourist office, and to whomever we meet on the road, and the subjects are always the same, information revealing as the currency of greatest value. This is always true, of course, but it’s interesting to have the questions change from what book to read, what stock to watch, what proposition to support, to where can we find water, food, lodging.
The road divides forest from pasture and, worn into the earth by centuries of walkers, dips down so low in places that it becomes a green trench, the surrounding country so high that we cannot see it.
“We’re in sync,” Sarah announces, after a long silence. I am about to ask how, when I look at her and see her eyes trained on our feet. “I didn’t—I was careful not to try to change my walking to fit yours,” she says. “We just gradually came together.” She smiles and I beam back, what pleasure in this tiny convergence, pedestrian in every sense, yet it rings with significance. The path is graveled, with a satisfying crunch that amplifies each step; our two sets of footfalls lose their identification, separate and then realign, a kind of music.
“When I go for a run,” I say, “I like this kind of track the best. I like to hear my feet strike, the rhythm of it.”
“Me, too,” Sarah says. She follows the red way markers, often seeing them before I do and taking pride in her quick eye.
At Burguete, we buy bread and sweets from a bakery, fruit, cheese, yogurt, and a prepaid phone card from a little market. Sarah sits on a bench while I struggle with the public phone. The twenty-euro card doesn’t work—either that, or I can’t make it work—but after a few tries, my credit card is accepted. I hear my husband’s sleepy voice, say hello to the younger children, Walker and Julia, then hand Sarah the phone, curious to hear whether she’ll tell her father about the truck ride, but she doesn’t.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes. I am.”
Am what, I wonder but don’t ask. Having fun? Using the camera? Taking care?
“Today we can either end at Zubiri or at Larrasoaña,” I say as we leave Viscarret. It’s just after noon; according to the guide, we’ve covered twelve kilometers. Zubiri is another nine; Larrasoaña is fourteen more.
“Larrasoaña,” my daughter says, and she says it again when we’re regarding Zubiri across a highway, from a distance of two kilometers. Having walked these two days, we’re converts to the footpath, whenever possible avoiding contact with—and consciousness of—roads with their speeding cars and trucks, a parallel and alien universe.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“I’m sure.”
The day’s remaining kilometers are ugly and uninspiring. Cleaving to a concrete culvert, then an asphalt road, then disappearing into woods, the road to Larrasoaña wends along the southern bank of the River Arga, whose water we hear churning and rushing on our right, but mostly can’t see. We’ve walked ten hours already today, tired enough that we don’t bother to admire Zubiri’s Bridge of Rabies, around whose central pier locals drive their livestock, as they have for centuries. Three revolutions cure or ward off the dread disease, a protection granted by the relics of St. Quiteria, interred in one of the structure’s abutments.
“I think we may have made the wrong decision,” I say to Sarah, who smiles.
“Yes,” she says, cheerful, punch drunk. “We did.” In the distance, across the still visible highway is a bar or a restaurant, and as we walk we try to read the name written on the sign, we imagine the good food it might, but probably doesn’t, serve. But it’s too far for us to make out the letters.
“It can’t be too much farther,” one of us reassures the other every kilometer or so, and we refer back to the guide, picking our way through the text as we trudge up a dry hillside pocked with little stones. Where is the river? Where is the river? Somewhere there is the sound of water—or is that the rustle of wind through dry leaves? That we cannot see what we hear underscores the disorientation of this second long day’s end. Earlier we sacrificed two ponchos, two novels, a map, and a bottle of hand cream, and we’ve drunk all our water, so why do the packs remain so stunningly heavy?
We emerge from foliage to see not only the river but the Bandits’ Bridge (named for those who ambush pilgrims at any such spots that give advantage to thieves), which leads directly into the main street of the town of Larrasoaña, dominated by its church. Just outside the sanctuary door, a young woman sits reading a guide written in English. I drop onto the bench next to her, too tired for any formality, and let the pack slide off. Sarah, by nature reserved—a child who in fact never needed to be cautioned about strangers—stands some five feet away.
“Is there a place to stay?” I ask without preamble.
“There’s the refugio,” the young woman answers.
“Restaurant?”
“A bar.”
I nod. “Which way to the refuge?” There’s only one street, but it goes in two directions, and we haven’t the energy to take the wrong one. She points left. “Thanks,” I say, standing and heaving up the pack. Then I turn around. “It isn’t full, is it?” She shrugs.
The pilgrim refuge of Larrasoaña is run by the mayor of the tiny town, a man whose name is Santiago, and whose saint’s day is, even more improbably, this very night, to be celebrated (we learn from other English-speaking pilgrims, loitering in the entry) with wine and cookies. Perhaps the day accounts for his enthusiasm as he records our names in his ledger, stamps and signs our credenciales with a flourish. As must be obvious by my apologetic head shaking and repeated no comprendo, I can’t converse in Spanish, but Santiago is one of those people who goes at a problem like a cheerful battering ram, hammering away at what he thinks is perhaps stubbornness rather than ignorance, talking and talking, never acknowledging that I cannot be made to understand him.
In his office at the refuge are photographs of Santiago in his earlier, itinerant life. Apparently he has walked the whole road at least three times, as proved by his laminated credenciales displayed under photographs of an ascetic wearing a monk’s robe and carrying a staff. An Old Testament beard makes it hard to connect these images to the clean-shaven, portly, and avuncular man waving from across the room, but it is he. “Camera! Camera!” he insists, and I pull out our pocket flash, thinking he’s offering to take a picture of my daughter and me, but, no, it’s his own image he wants us to record and to send him, once the film is developed. He presses his business card into my hand, folding my fingers around it, and he gives another to Sarah. Perhaps now that he is old and no longer walking the road himself, such mementos have acquired a vicarious power, for the little room is filled with pictures of him and his guests at the refuge. Using my clumsy syllables and signs, I promise to send him what he wants: a copy of each of the two photographs, one taken by Sarah, of Santiago and me standing under his red flag with the gold crown, and one taken by me, of Santiago and Sarah.
As I’m putting away the camera, a man knocks and comes in to ask a question. “Do you speak English?” I ask him as he finishes speaking with Santiago and turns to leave.
“A little.”
“Is there food here in town, a restaurant?”
“A pilgrim menu down the street,” he says, pointing. “There’s only the one bar. You can’t miss it.”
I thank him. “What time do they begin serving?” I think to ask as he’s leaving.
“Eight.”
By chance—by the kind of luck that has protected my every visit to Spain—the two spaces left at the refuge are in a separate room, a private room for just the two of us, so we are spared what Sarah has dreaded, a dormitory filled not with kids, like at camp, but grownup strangers. There’s no private bathroom, no television, no towels, no chairs. Just the floor, and the pallets, and piles of clear plastic garment storage bags filled, unaccountably, with what look like costumes, Halloween or Mardi Gras finery. I stand for some minutes, fascinated by this unexpected trove of disguises tucked in a bare room, on a cobbled street, in the midst of a journey undertaken with an opposite agenda—that of stripping away layers. I stand staring, struck by a fancy: People have passed through this place leaving their false selves behind, taken them off, folded and left them here, a growing pile for the next wayfarer to contemplate.
“Weird,” says Sarah, from one of the pallets.
“Very.”
Above the costumes are a stack of folded blankets and linens, and I make up the little beds, and we lie down to wait for dinner. “I think,” I say on my back, feet in the air, “I think I’m not going to take my shoes off, because then I’ll have to put them back on, and I might not be able to stand it.”
“Uh-huh,” Sarah says absently from behind the tattered cover of a Teen Vogue. Despite their collective weight, and my refusal to share this burden, she’s carrying several junior versions of the standard fashion magazines: Elle Girl, Seventeen, YM, and others. Camp is over; school looms; Sarah is entering the seventh grade, entering into an agony of self-consciousness. She studies glossy ads with the intensity of someone preparing for a critical examination, which isn’t far from the truth.
I get up to look at the garment bags. I’d like to open them, touch the sequins and the bits of velvet trim, the feathers, but the bags are secured against such trespass, each zipper closed with a tiny silver padlock.
Hungry, we enter the tavern at eight o’clock exactly, and find its three long tables already filled, benches crowded with the people staying at our refuge, including the young woman who directed us from outside the church. She moves aside to give Sarah room at the end of her bench, and I take the place opposite. A sign over the little bar offers a pilgrim dinner for ten euros; the meal includes two courses, a drink, and a dessert. If it wasn’t clear last evening in Roncesvalles, it is tonight: Spain is not a land for vegetarians. We navigate the limited menu with help from the young woman, whose name I never ask because she doesn’t offer it, not even after learning ours. Like the man who gave us a lift in his truck, she proves invaluable, convincing the tavern to produce an omelet and fried potatoes for Sarah.
“Do you live in the States?” I ask her. No, she’s from Wisconsin, but she lives in Valladolid, teaching English as a second language.
“To adults, or younger students?”
“Everyone,” she says. “Old people, toddlers. I love it,” she adds, and I nod. She has a face pinched by unhappiness, but her features relax into something like prettiness as she translates among the tablemates, allowing us to share our experiences with each other: the towns where we began our journeys, how much of the road we hope to cover, and our ages. “Doce,” she tells everyone. Sarah is twelve. Everyone nods appreciatively; one woman holds her glass of wine aloft, and Sarah hunches her shoulders in embarrassment. But I’m glad for the toast, happy to see strangers confirm that my daughter is among the very few who might, at twelve, persevere on such a road. As I raise my glass I’m aware, as I wasn’t at home, of my leap of faith in trusting that I knew my daughter well enough to bet that she could and would walk with me along this road, uncomplaining, open to the experience, to the alienation, the reorientation. I hope these are useful to her now, on the cusp of adolescence, the profound realignments required on the journey from child to adult.
Upstairs at the refugio, having avoided Santiago’s wine and cookies and boisterous songs of celebration, we find that in our absence our room has grown cold. I sort once again through the stack of blankets until I find a heavy wool one for each of us. I come upon a clean sheet sewn into a bag, and I give it to Sarah. “Here,” I say, “this will keep the blanket from scratching.” Sarah slips inside the white rectangle, like a letter into an envelope, I think, reminded abruptly of a few lines written by St. Thérèse of Lisieux to her sister Pauline. Apologizing for being secretive about her failing health (she was, at twenty-three, dying of tuberculosis), Thérèse assured her older sister that whatever she may have withheld about the “envelope,” her body, the “letter” within, her soul, belonged to Pauline.
“Do people walk the road backward?” Sarah asks, her eyes closed.
“I don’t know,” I say, misinterpreting the question to imagine a pilgrim headed west while walking literally backward, facing the road he has covered rather than the steps he anticipates. “Maybe someone has, as a form of penance.”
“Why would that be penance?” Sarah asks, after a silence.
“Well, I don’t know—not seeing where you’re going would make it harder.”
She laughs. “Mom,” she says, “I meant starting in Santiago and heading back this way, in the opposite direction as ours.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Curiously, it’s harder for me to imagine walking east, toward sunrise and birth, rather than west with my face averted from sunset and from death, the bright fire of the sun god’s chariot descending into the waves with a hiss.
Overwrought by this long day, I am more than usually attuned to the topic that consumes me: mortality, the impossible and inescapable truth of human life. How can it be that we are souls trapped in flesh, spirits bound to matter? These bodies we have, the same that grant us every pleasure and every perception, fail us; they break down; they age and die. Isn’t that why we walk this road—to rehearse the awful truth we know and yet cannot believe? And I’ve upped the ante this time, I think, watching my firstborn as she sleeps. We weep at the birth of our children, mothers and fathers, too, in part because it’s death we bring into the world—creatures whom we love as we love ourselves, even more, regarding them as purer, innocent, and vulnerable. And yet flesh of our flesh heading inexorably to the same destination.
How often do we, as parents, leap to the last and most dire bargain, even when it’s not required? My life for hers; take me, not my child; take my kidney, my lung, a lobe of my liver—what price could be too high? I watch Sarah turn in her sleep, wind the shroudlike sheet around her legs, but only for as long as I can stand to. Then I unfold and drop the heavy blanket over her body, and change her from prophesy back into a little girl.