Sunday, March 21, 1999. 9:00 a.m. Oviedo.
After seven years—seven, that magical cycle: seven days for a stone boat to cross the seas—I come back to Spain, leapfrogging ahead on the path, to the province of León. It is March of 1999. Having been ill and only recently recovered, my health seems newly valuable, precious if no longer precarious. It is not the moment, one might judge, to test it, and Colin is anxious about my insistence on this trip. What do I want from it, he wants to know. I can’t answer very well. Trying to explain, I allude to the opening scene of Peter Pan, when Peter implores Wendy to sew his shadow back onto his feet. “That’s what I want—to walk with myself and cast a shadow, to walk my way back into my body.”
But I don’t know, yet, what this means. I’ve followed only the merest middle fraction of the road west of Burgos, infinitesimal, but enough, like a dormant germ, to lie in wait and then, abruptly, burgeon and take hold.
So here I am in an airport in Oviedo, carrying too many maps, too many history books, a surfeit of guides. Not enough socks, a rucksack that fits poorly, and one weak knee, but these are discoveries I’ve yet to make.
At Oviedo’s bus station bar, I’m drinking café con leche as I wait for my bus to Astorga, the point at which I’ll begin the 283 kilometers that will deliver me to Santiago. Overhead, an outsized television plays nine channels at once, its screen divided like a game of tic-tac-toe: newsreel footage of World War II; a golf tournament; a nature program—predator and prey; an aerobics class; a documentary on ancient Chinese burial practices; CNN, etc. There is no linear time, the animate eye of the TV insists; it’s all happening at once. Patrons drink, smoke, wait to depart. Next to me at the bar, a woman plays a handheld computer game of solitaire, her legs crossed, one foot swinging. Exhausted by the loss of a night’s sleep and agitated by the electronic blips of the solitaire, I feel a shiver of disorientation. It’s as if a trapdoor has opened under my bar stool and, in the manner of a cartoon character, I’m suspended in space, conscious that I am about to plummet.
By the time I get to Astorga I’m more optimistic, reassured by the discovery that the road is marked far more clearly than I had imagined, or even hoped. Yellow scallop shells and arrows make losing one’s way seem impossible. It is three o’clock in the afternoon, the hour when I should be finding a room, ensuring a good night’s sleep before the first leg of my long walk, but already I’ve squandered whole days as a passenger, strapped in my seat on two planes and two buses, suffering boredom and leg cramps and spasms of claustrophobia. I must be tired, but I feel too restless to wait for morning to begin, and so, in defiance of all I’ve read in the guides, I set out.
The path runs along a cement sidewalk and then veers off into a dirt track, twisting away from the city past houses and dripping green yards. This is easy, nothing to this test I’ve set for myself, one foot in front of another, but I’m aware of my heartbeat quickening with anxiety as well as exertion. I am nowhere, nowhere I know, and the sun is setting. A few kilometers after the hamlet of Valdeviejas, I come upon a tree hung with mirrors. It is dusk, purple edged with black, and the mirrors twist and flash light. A way to scare off birds, I tell myself, to protect fruit, and yet the tree is terrifying, like some sort of occult sentinel.
I can make out headlamps traveling along the N-VI, the route for pilgrims in cars, and strike off in that direction. What could have possessed me to set out into imminent darkness toward a sinking sun? A highway will offer places to spend the night, I tell myself, willing myself to forget what I know of roads made for cars: One hundred kilometers can pass without offering refuge. Without reflective clothing, I cannot walk on the shoulder, and several times I stumble, once somersaulting into a wet ditch, where I lie cursing myself for being so impulsive—stupid—as to head west into the shadows, without knowing where I might find a place to sleep and wait for the light. But I am on a road, with money in my pocket, the vision of the mirror-hung tree impelling me forward. I’ll land somewhere.
Hostal Restaurante Las Palmeras, in fact, where the proprietor regards me with suspicion. Dirty and wild-eyed, I’m far off the pilgrim track that offers a steady stream of ragged travelers. “Twenty-five hundred pesetas,” he says, and seeing my incomprehension, he writes the number on a piece of paper. I give him the bills, and he hands me a key marked 209, which gives entrée to a tiny room and bath, outfitted with scratchy sheets and rough towels. I lock the door and pull the curtains on the night, the night hung with mirrors.
Monday, March 22, 1999. 7:00 a.m. A roadside inn.
Morning at last, after a night that disappears, eight hours of sleep that feel less like something than nothing, a jump cut. How I hate when that happens; it strikes me as a theft. Somewhere, deep inside myself, I was dreaming—and I missed it. But at least it isn’t Sunday anymore, and for this I’m grateful, that day having never lost the melancholy of my schoolgirl’s attempt to reach God, to sit in a pew, patient, penitent, helpless. Will God arrive? Will God announce Himself?
Is this a reason for my walk, I wonder, drinking my coffee at the bar among the boisterous truck drivers. I find it hard to wait—to hope—in faith, whether that faith be in God, or in providence, or in enlightenment. I would rather walk toward it. Earn it. Suffer for it.
Overtake it.
By 9:30 a.m. I am near Santa Catalina de Somoza. It’s cold—my breath comes in white plumes—but I’ve been walking too briskly to feel chilled. I pass an old factory, fallen into disrepair and taken over by storks. Huge nests, like black boats, wide and deep, balance on the ruined roofs. The birds stand along naked beams like guards, motionless in their vigilance. The scene is beautiful, and unnerving. Cows graze below. I hear the herd before I see the animals, bells hung around their necks ringing as they move their heads to eat. A giant wind chime, I think before I see them. The pastures in March are an intense green I associate with Ireland. I can’t quite believe this green under my feet, green splashed with white and purple flowers.
Just west of Vega de Valcarce, an old man sits on a pasture fence, ensnaring me in one of the half-signed inarticulate dialogues that will come to characterize my passage through Spain.
“Are you all alone?” the exchange always begins. ¿Sola? Completamente sola?
“Sí.”
“¿Por qué?”
I shrug. Why not, I learn to ask. ¿Por qué no?
“Where are you going?”
“A Santiago.”
He nods. “Ah,” he says. The destination explains everything and anything. After all, solitude may be my chosen, my deserved, penance.
You don’t have to carry your water, he lets me know, shaking his head at my filled liter bottle. The water the cows drink is good.
“Thank you,” I say. Lacking words, the medium on which I depend, I execute a respectful little gesture of good-bye, something like the curtsy I made each morning to the headmistress of my elementary school. Without a skirt, I pluck at the air, then smile, wave, and walk on, wondering at myself.
“Se vende miel—Honey for sale.” The signs recur along the road, apiaries often set up on platforms of stone offered by the ruins of an otherwise abandoned building. The hives are silent and still, but curiously they convey a kind of heat and purpose—perhaps by virtue of what I imagine inside: the congestion of workers creating and filling cells, the genius of symmetry filled with gold. I stop to watch as bees leak from one round white hive, like steam curling from under a lid.
“Buenos días,” I say to an old couple I pass. They are sitting on a low stone wall, arms crossed, silent and staring, a common sight, but the calm of these encounters still disturbs me, used as I am to elderly Americans watching a television screen, disguising what is in rural Spain a more naked passage of time, of life. Mortality.
“Buenos días is ‘good morning,’” the man replies. “Buenas tardes is ‘good afternoon.’” He shows me his watch. “Four on the clock,” he says in his heavy accent. The woman asks the obligatory question.
“¿Solita?”
I nod without stopping, “Sí.”
She shakes her head disapprovingly, and I wave with what I hope seems like pluck rather than defiance, and continue walking west. The man—her husband I assume—gets up to follow, and his dog stands, too. I struggle against my irritation. I don’t want this officious companion, not even for a kilometer or two.
“England or America?” he demands, pointing at my chest.
“America.”
He rubs his hands together, conveying delight. “Me, I have a friend in Chicago.”
“New York,” I reply. He rubs his hands again, with even more gusto.
“That’s good, no?”
I make the universal gesture of ambivalence: the head wag of yes and no, comme ci comme ça, and turn up my empty palms. You tell me, the motion says to him, and he answers, “Yes!”
After ten minutes or so, I stop wondering when he’s going to drop back and bid me good-bye, and I stop walking so fast. My companion, a “gentleman tailor,” as he describes himself, is twice my age, bent and wheezing, his relative infirmity a gift, because, as it turns out, when I slow down I see more of what surrounds me, hamlets that might be two or even six hundred years old, stone houses with livestock on the ground floor, white curtains blowing out from the windows above, lanes filled with dogs and chickens and cows and cats. A man splits firewood with an ax; a woman breaks clods of earth with her hoe. The only indication that we all inhabit the same century is the occasional phone wire that penetrates a rooftop, the bright red shine of a car parked in a barn.
Afraid of falling behind the pace I’d set for myself, I had been marching resolutely forward, bent on reaching the day’s destination, and the white-haired tailor strikes me as a little messenger from God, especially when he tells me that O Cebreiro is only eight kilometers away. I’d thought twenty, and was afraid I’d never make it by nightfall.
“We will walk there together,” he announces, and he names the little towns through which we’ll pass.
“¿Solita?” he asks again as we walk, and he returns to the question, pointing at my chest. “Yes,” I say, each time. “I’m alone.” And each time he nods, but not with censure. “Bachelor,” he says of himself.
At La Faba, he stops at a gate and rings a bell, summoning an old woman who opens a garage door, behind which is a bar set up on a cold concrete floor. “¡Cerveza!” The tailor wants a beer, and he wants me to drink one with him. Crestfallen when I refuse, he turns his back on me to talk to the woman, leaving me like a child in the company of only his dog, whose ears and tail have been docked without any attempt at grace or even tidiness. Cut crookedly in half, the ears don’t match, and the hindquarters convey nothing so much as amputation, sacrifice, wagging a hopeful three inches of neither stump nor tail. After a minute, he sees a cat and takes off, and I pace in the doorway, trying to hurry my companion.
A few kilometers on, the tailor asks a question. “How do you say———?” he begins, and he fills in the blank with a gesture, threading the first finger of one hand through a circle formed by the thumb and forefinger of the opposite.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t understand,” and he repeats the gesture, but closer to me, just inches from my crotch.
Surely he can’t mean intercourse. I’m frightened for a moment, then amused. Can this be the subtext of his many announcements that he’s a bachelor? I point to my wedding ring. “No,” I say. “No.”
He smiles and shrugs. “Do you blame me for trying?” the gesture conveys. I remind myself how often we have stopped for him to catch his breath, that he’s told me of his parents’ deaths—infarto and tromboso—words spoken in the dramatic and respectful tones reserved for gods and fates. If need be I could easily outrun him, or push him over the hill we are ascending.
“No,” I say one more time, and I tell him I love my husband, or that my husband is my lover. “Mi esposo es mi amor.” I find it mysterious how many Spanish words I can retrieve, scattered fragments from long-past trips to Mexico, for I have never studied the language.
Another kilometer passes; we ascend another hill. My companion points out the scenery. “Camera! Camera!” he insists, aggrieved and even incredulous when I tell him I have no camera with me. I am not going to take any pictures but keep all I see in my head. I point to my temple, and he makes a Bah! sort of gesture, swatting at such foolishness. But I know I am right. I can imagine the snapshots, their smallness that would deny the majesty of the sky and hills, the colors off, grays missing their purple, greens dull and ordinary. O Cebreiro is at the peak, a mountain pass linking the province of León and the region of Galicia. The gentleman tailor stops to catch his breath. “How do you say,” he says after a moment, and I prepare myself for another awkward advance, “¿titas?”
“No comprendo,” I say, playing dumb as a first strategy. He repeats the word, reaching out as if to touch my breasts.
“No!” I say, pushing his hands away. “Come on!” The tailor laughs. It has become a joke, his predation, by virtue of my youth and strength, my ability to escape or even punish.
He looks at his wristwatch. “Six on the clock,” he says, and then he warns me that between us and the still invisible town of O Cebreiro are owls, bats, and something else that comes out as night falls. “Lobos,” he says again to emphasize, and, I imagine, to convince me of the value of his walking by my side, but no, “It is time I go home,” he concludes.
He asks, in words and pantomime, for writing materials, and I hand him my journal, in which he’s seen me make notes, and a pen. “Here,” I say, opening it to the last page, so as not to interrupt my entries. The old man sits down on the ground, legs crossed as in a fairy-tale illustration of a tailor. He bends over in concentration, producing a few slow strings of letters with exaggerated tails and flourishes: a penmanship that bears witness to the value of literacy, and attests to how infrequently this man engages in the act of writing. He hands the composition book back to me and holds out his hand so that I may pull him to his feet.
Together we consider his work. Amigos del Camino de Santiago, I make out, the uppercase A and C and S enhanced with extra loops and points, and the name of the town where we met, and where he must live, Herrerias de Valcarcel, and the province, León. Below it is his signature and the date: a document that testifies to our brief time together.
I hold out my hand, and he takes it. “Friends of the road,” I translate his words, and we both nod as we shake hands, suddenly formal and awkward.
I watch as he descends the track, moving faster now that gravity is on his side, now that shadows gather and wolves prowl.
How strange this is, how fearsomely beautiful. Snow begins to fall around me as I walk, as I hurry up the steepening hill. Spinning flakes catch the day’s last light, glitter on the thorny brush, and on the pale stones below my feet, their purple shadows. This can’t be the first lonely walk I’ve taken, not the first empty road I’ve followed, and yet I have never felt my solitude so keenly. “No one,” I think as I climb, searching for the next shadowed bend in the track, the first sight of the town. There is no one in sight, and much as I try to stop hearing them, my footfalls repeat the syllables, no one, no one. The dark descends theatrically, inspiring visions of a Red Riding Hood wolf, walking upright and speaking the language of men. Out from behind a boulder or a tree he springs, lecturing before devouring me. “Foolish girl,” he scolds, “who walks through woods alone.” Inside him, squashed against the hot red walls of his lungs and heart, I meet my grandmother, a woman who was easy prey for no creature.
The moon has risen, nearly full. Under its light the night is vast and absolute, the night of nothingness, of annihilation. Wolves: How alive the idea makes me feel, hurrying toward safety, quivering in my own flesh, almost running now under my heavy pack, feet sliding on loose gravel and stones, eyes stinging with snow. The moon has done this: changed the road from gray to silver, carried me from day to magic morbid night. He lied, the lecherous tailor. It was never eight kilometers, and the price for rebuffing him will be—what? Shadows bloom with teeth and tongues and slaver; the shining road is ever steeper; inside my clothes I’m wet with fear, and my thoughts have collapsed into the flat recitations of the doomed. It will be over quickly, I tell myself, not like my mother’s cancer or my grandmother’s failing heart, not like dying by degrees of despair.
Abruptly the dirt track meets paving stones and I am in a tiny and ethereal hamlet, a village seemingly untouched for centuries, medieval stone structures with round thatched roofs, pointed like witches’ hats. Windows splash gold squares of light on the snowy ground. I’ve reached an altitude where the snows haven’t melted, where cars haven’t climbed. Three wires, like those of a puppet master, penetrate the roof of one building, and after looking around myself I head in that direction. There are no signs posted, but the guides mention an inn in O Cebreiro, and phone wires seem as good an announcement as any. But before I’ve walked ten paces, a man in a heavy coat crosses my path. He looks me up and down. “¿Posada?” he asks. “¿Refugio?”
“Posada,” I say, choosing hotel over pilgrim refuge, silence rather than the obligation to share tales of the road. He nods and confirms me in the direction I was walking, pointing toward the building with three wires.
Only one room left, and it is mine. How often will this be true, my luck that feels like grace, like God was there all along, holding off the wolves and saving my bed? The inn looks like a convent. My cell-like room has a tiny window with a single wooden shutter, whitewashed walls adorned by a single crucifix, a bathtub the size of a laundry sink, with a shard of soap and a rough towel. But the water is blessedly hot, and grime rolls off me, turning the white suds gray.
Downstairs, the refectory is furnished by two trestle tables, on whose benches a few people linger, silhouettes before the orange fire, which pops and spits so loudly that it outtalks their murmured conversation. A woman wearing an apron brings me a bowl of soup, a spoon, and a basket of bread. “Gracias,” I say, the only word that passes between us, and she nods, barely. I’ve fallen through one fairy tale into another: escaped the wolf’s jaws and landed in the beast’s castle, where enchanted tables set themselves. From a carafe in the center of the table, hands pour a mug of red wine and leave it at my side. I feel ridiculous, a child rescued from nightmares. My cheeks burn with wind and snow, hot water and red wine. Will each day be like this, a morality play, rehearsals of death, and abrupt gifts of resurrection? I hope so, for isn’t that why I came?