Friday, March 26, 1999. 8:45 a.m. West of Disicabo.
I’ve gathered and folded my clothes and, pack on my back, descended the long stairs outside my room. A tersely efficient man, the father of the girl who showed me to my room, stands behind the bar just off the lobby. Without a word he sets my coffee on its shining surface, the two of us reflected countless times in the mirrors that panel this room—so many that to discern between the actual and the image requires vigilance. I’d hate to be drunk and looking for a bathroom in a bar like this one. From one of the vending machines in the foyer I buy a little box of cookies and some cacahuetes—peanuts—vacuum sealed in a foil and plastic wrap that is so tight I can see the shape of the nuts within. I use my army knife to pierce it and air rushes in with a little gasp.
Regarded in the full light of morning—after a night’s sleep—the previous evening’s adventure seems comic, almost. And I’m much encouraged by how dry everything is: shoes and socks and long underwear. Outside, the sun shines, igniting all the wet foliage so that it gleams. The day begins in a pleasant solitude; I see no one ahead of me on the path, and no one follows. As I walk I realize that my insistence on leaving Palas de Rei yesterday had to do with the conviviality of the party of young men I met at Ligonde. They gave me an orange, made broken half-French conversation, called me brave and strong—all of which I enjoyed in the moment—but when they called, as we were leaving, “See you in Palas,” I determined that this wouldn’t happen. I didn’t want to be drawn into a long, raucous dinner, the strain of conversation without fluency, and I didn’t want to have to extricate myself from the inevitable invitation to eat together.
The road, a packed dirt path lined with poplars, recalls paintings by Corot or Sisley; it conveys peace and stillness, straight rather than meandering, without encouraging one to hurry. At 10:30 a.m. I make my first stop, at a tavern in Furelos, over which presides a cantankerous old woman who, after demanding what I want—I say coffee and madeleines—continues a strident argument with another woman who gesticulates hysterically with a loaf a bread, a candle, and a dish of change that she slams down on the counter so that all the coins leap into the air. After a few minutes I stand, having given up on the coffee, and both women turn to me and yell something that begins with an S and which I take to mean “Sit!” Then the owner pours me coffee and the other woman—her sister? her friend?—slams a plate of cakes down next to my cup. I drink the coffee quickly, with both of them scowling at me, their arms folded across their stomachs. In apology for my interrupting them, I ask if I can buy one of the shell pendants that hang in a cluster behind the till. The woman who poured the coffee nods curtly at my pointing finger. She gets one down and writes the cost of it, plus the price of the coffee and cakes, on a slip of paper. Rather than remain any longer, I pay, pocket the cakes, and leave.
The walking is easy, flat and pretty without dramatic scenery, a path through land that seems untroubled. Every so often I see a little structure with a tiled roof and walls made of wood slats, a stone base, with a door at one end. Corncribs, I discover after stopping at one and teasing a husk out from between the slats, but so pretty and quaint that I’d mistaken them for tiny shrines, something with a symbolic rather than practical use.
What do I want of my arrival in Santiago? With fifty kilometers to go, or less, I feel sad and sore—tired enough that only more and more sugar can address my fatigue. As I told Colin during our last call, I feel that I am walking toward him, and I am: toward my home and my family. I wonder if I don’t always feel that way about traveling—that it’s an exercise in setting myself down far from home, and working my way back. This time it’s more onerous, of course, and more literal. I walk each day a little closer to the conclusion of this journey.
I’m wearing the shell, a scallop with a red cross painted on the convex side. I carried it in my hand for an hour before slipping it over my head. Shells are available at many stops along the camino, but it’s taken me six days to acquire this universal sign of the pilgrim to Santiago, and I try to understand my reluctance. Is it akin to my refusing to wear a crucifix, my dislike of outward signifiers? Yesterday, the men in Ligonde asked me where my shell was, and I shrugged, dismissing the question. A matter of pride, I think, of not wanting to identify myself with any group.
The most unexpected aspect of this walk has been the unprecedented peace of it. Wolves and exhibitionists and cross old women aside, the long periods of calm have instructed me in something I’ve had trouble understanding up until now: what genuine Zenlike detachment might be, a state of awareness untrammeled by passion. Not that I don’t feel—I do, intensely—but I feel without being ensnared by the emotion, without the familiar spasms of longing. Paradoxically, I’m deep in my body while experiencing a bird’s-eye view of myself on this road; it’s acceptance, a sense that at last I am coming to accept those things I’ve struggled against. Not only am I happy in my life, but I feel strangely divested of events that have caused me unhappiness, like a vessel tipped out, washed, and at this moment in time, clean and empty. It’s odd and it’s pleasant. It feels good, restful. In contemplating this walk I pictured myself like Lear on the heath, wild weather and a chance to storm with it, far from witnesses, but it’s a step-by-step trudging, stitch by stitch, and not at all dramatic, like a deep, deep pool with an unruffled surface.
The path has become a trench again, but this time it’s lined with violets; they poke out from between the rocks.
2:45 p.m. Arzúa.
I call home from a gas station and the usual chaos tumbles through the line. Walker has just fallen down the stairs; Sarah is tearful; Colin complains that the car’s battery is dead again. I listen and try to console. All the problems are small, and comforting by virtue of their smallness; how easy to address such little woes, even from this distance. I hang up and sit on a low wall to consider my map. In three and a half hours I could reach Brea.
It’s windy and overcast, green hills shadowed by clouds so dense they seem solid. So far west, so near to Santiago, the way markers are less frequent, and the air—can I be imagining this?—smells of the sea. It’s a dark day, and dusk never arrives, blotted out by a wild and beautiful storm, the kind I would relish from beside a fire, indoors and listening to it blow around the eaves and splatter the windows. Outside, however, a ponchotearing wind blows rain sideways into my eyes, slapping me in the face with the ripped poncho while soaking my trousers. The track dissolves into mud so liberally laced with cow dung that the smell burns the insides of my nostrils. Every so often I stumble into an invisible pothole, once down as far as my knee. On either side of the path are cows, huddled and unmoving, their flanks filthy, their tails dripping liquid excrement.
In spite of my map’s encouraging drawing of a friendly clutch of buildings, Brea turns out to be a dripping gray intersection, without hotel or bar, and Salcidos, a few kilometers on, is also deserted, as if the populace had been washed away by the tide of dirty water coursing down the one street. Sitting on a stone wall, wet through to my underwear, I succumb to tears. The road has become so slick and slimy that twice I’ve lost my footing and fallen, wrenching my bad knee and injuring some new part of it. Now, going downhill is excruciating, so bad that I can only manage it by walking backward—an accidental discovery I make while turning helpless circles of woe. Not that it’s easy, because I have to advance a few paces, then stop and turn around to see what lies in my path, but it is possible. After a few hills, I’ve refined the process into a step, step, step, pirouetteto-look, step, step, step, and so I go.
My last day of walking, tomorrow, will include many hills, which I will go up and then down, facing first forward and then backward, prompting a few stares, as if I were accomplishing an eccentric penance.
But it’s not Saturday yet. It’s still Friday night. Soaked and exhausted, I fall prey to the old fear of wolves when I notice, abruptly, that the sheep and the cows have all disappeared by six o’clock, gathered into the safety of barns. Walking west, the day’s dim light fading at my back, I consider the possibility that I may be spending a night outside. I could find shelter, curl under my poncho with my head on my pack. But what about wolves? All around me, the gray landscape seems to tremble with their presence, every bent branch a slender leg, every wet glint a predatory eye. Would it be possible for me to be eaten by a wolf? As I walk west, still hoping for a hotel, a tavern from whose owner I might beg lodging, I keep asking the question. It seems so quaint, so medieval, so anti-postmodern. Too weird, even, to be ironic.
The muddy road sinks again into a trench, and I remind myself that I obsess when I’m tired, and that tomorrow will be an easy day: no more than twenty kilometers until I reach Santiago, where I have a reservation at a good hotel, a reservation guaranteed until six o’clock in the evening. If I got to the holy city by three or four, I’d have time to buy clothes that I could wear to Mass on Sunday, Palm Sunday. Unaccountably, the idea of Mass in a cathedral is a catalyst for tears; perhaps it’s the idea of shelter, the smell of the incense, candle flames.
Do I walk for some time with my eyes half-closed against the rain, my face averted from the wind? When I pause to readjust my pack and poncho, square my shoulders and look ahead of me, I see a cluster of yellow lights and, a few steps farther on, an illuminated sign: “Hotel-Restaurant O’Pino,” a vision so unexpected that I wonder for a moment if I’ve conjured it. But it doesn’t twinkle or tremble like a mirage, and neither does it fade. And Señor Ramón Carril Rial, who presents his business card to me as I step inside the door to his inn, appears quite real and solid, if diminutive. He looks at me, dripping on his clean floor. “¿Habitación?” he asks. “¿Con baño?”
I nod, “Sí. Gracias. Gracias.”
He holds out a key and points, a little sadly it seems, across his clean lobby to a lit corridor. I stand without moving. Should I take off my poncho, or will that precipitate an even larger cascade of dirty water?
“Agua cálida,” Señor Ramón says, as if to spur me on, and so I squelch off, poncho still in place.
Once I’m in the bathtub, a long one filled with water as hot as I can stand, filled to the point that even a deep breath causes it to overflow, it’s only the prospect of missing dinner that tempts me out. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a distinct line across my torso: Above it the skin is white, below, where my body has been submerged in hot water, red. Steam rises off my legs and flanks. Rather than drain the tub, I sort my clothes into piles of almost clean, merely grimy, and filthy, and dump the latter into the water, watching them sink slowly.
In the dining room, I eat alone, served by Señor Ramón, who doesn’t offer me a menu with a choice of entrées, but brings me typical pilgrim fare: a bowl of thick bean soup, a basket of bread, a plate of meat and potatoes, a carafe of red wine. Inside my clothes, my one dry shirt tucked into my damp and dirty trousers—no underwear because all of it was sopped—I feel as if I’m on fire, flushed with food and wine and dry heat. Across the empty room I see myself reflected in the wet black windowpanes. As usual, I’m surprised by my size; I’m smaller than I think of myself as being, smaller and more intent.
The phone in my room rings while I’m wringing out the clothes I left soaking. Señor Ramón wants to know when I plan on leaving, and I realize I haven’t paid for anything, neither room nor dinner, and, perhaps out of consideration for my disheveled and exhausted state, he never requested any passport or credit card when I arrived.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “Mañana. ¿Al desayuno?” At breakfast, I think I’ve suggested.
“Sí, sí,” he answers, sounding satisfied, and he’s waiting for me when I emerge the next morning, dressed and packed, if not exactly dry.
Saturday, March 27, 1999. 8:00 a.m. West of Arzúa.
Outside it’s still raining, and I turn my back on the windows to eat what Señor Ramón brings to the bar: freshly baked bread, still hot, with honey, a pot of coffee and a pitcher of boiled milk. Like dinner, it tastes so good that I’m almost tearful as I thank him. “No,” he says, “too much,” and he pushes back my extravagant tip, looking at my ragged trousers and ruined shoes. The bill for everything—dinner, room, breakfast—is 5,110 pesetas, not even thirty-five dollars.
Everything hurts, my knee especially, but this is the last day, this is the day I will arrive in Santiago and, as if taking its cue from my perfect breakfast and bright mood, the rain stops as I set out. Clouds, dark and gorgeous, purple rimmed with silver, part theatrically to reveal the sun, which in its turn shines on a world that is freshly washed and sparkling. By 10:30 a.m. I’m sitting on a bridge over the River Lavacolla, meaning “wash your collar”—a last chance to spruce up before arrival in the holy city, a mere eleven kilometers away. Sun shines among the moss-covered tree trunks in thick columns of stunning greeny gold, the like of which I’ve never seen in real life, only in the hyper-real, overwrought, and intensely colored emotion of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. All of nature hums with numinous significance.
Just west of the bridge, I walk past a farm, and a man beckons to me. “Hey,” he calls, standing on the bottom rung of a split-rail fence. “Come, señora, see.” In his yard is a cow, pale and beautiful, an enchanted beast with eyelashes as long as my fingers, and thrusting at her udder are two calves, prettier than any I’ve seen before. The farmer smiles as I look. “¿Bonita?” he asks, and I agree.
“¡Sí! Sí! Muy bonita!”
I almost want to clap, but I stand still, my hands folded, and watch as they suckle. The calves are the most wonderful color, like caramel or toffee, a perfect sweet creamy beige that sets off a little avalanche of associations: the Cromwell toffee my grandfather kept in his desk drawer, and which, after he died, melted and wept out of the box, gluing together all his papers, bills, and tax receipts with layers of sweet candy. And aren’t they, too, the color of my mother’s toffee, those pans of it she cooked and cooled and topped with a layer of dark chocolate? She cut the sweet expanse with a knife, arranged the neat squares on a plate, two bites a piece. On the sly I chewed them into syrup and spat them down sink drains, every once in a while miscalculating and having to swallow, because someone caught me in the hall and asked a question. But mostly I got away with the crime, a perversion of having my cake and eating it, my refusal to swallow my mother’s labor, her talent, her gift. I look up at the farmer’s smile, still intact, as he watches his animals.
My entrance to the city is marked by a sudden dramatic downpour, rain strikes the ground hard enough to bounce as I walks through a forest of eucalyptus—a species of tree that seems not just unlikely here, but impossible. Are they not native to Australia? Why introduce them here, in the midst of lush European forests? As I walk, I keep picking up the long leaves and crushing them under my nose to release their distinctive, unmistakable smell. The Santiago airport must be nearby: I can’t see it, but I can hear planes as they taxi and take off, and the noise adds a surreal, even apocalyptic dimension to the already weird atmosphere. The day is one of those in which sun competes with rain and wind. Ominous clouds scud overhead, blotting out the light for brief, disorienting intervals. The wind picks up my poncho and slaps me in the face, over and over with a kind of determination and insult, as if it were chastising me. I keep it on for as long as I can stand it—underneath I am carrying unwrapped bread—but after one particularly wet and stinging assault I succumb to temper and, seeing a garbage can, tear it off and rip it vengefully in half before thrusting it among discarded greasy food wrappers. I have never thrown any object away with greater delight.
It takes time to penetrate the disappointing outskirts of Santiago, but the old city is graceful and lovely, its streets narrow and twisting and cobbled, with bright shop windows revealing all sorts of temptations: chocolates, toys, wine, necklaces, books. Eager as I am to reach the cathedral, I linger at every corner; I see few things that I don’t imagine myself buying.
I reach the stairs to the cathedral door at 2:30 p.m., and pause before I climb them. My knees are shaking with something like fatigue, but also, I suspect, apprehension. Isn’t my destination guaranteed to disappoint me, to make me feel a fool? After all, I’ve seen Europe’s grandest churches: sat among the gargoyles on the roof of Notre-Dame; dizzied my eyes with St. Peter’s baldacchino; happened, one gray afternoon, into Chartres, having taken a detour that delivered me to the cathedral just as someone was rehearsing on the pipe organ, belching clouds of Bach so violently sublime that they paralyzed. A crowd of us were held captive in the nave, missing trains and forgetting tour buses. So what can I find here, after so long a walk?
The Pórtico de la Gloria, a grand arched entrance wreathed with figures carved of stone, forbids as thoroughly as it beckons. Ranged around the door a celestial orchestra plays lutes, lyres, violins, the musicians’ stone faces tipped heavenward in blind ecstasy, their eyes closed, their hands frozen mid-note, their beards curled into stone ringlets as stylized and impossible as treble clefs. I pass beneath them, thinking less of God than of man, of woman, of Lot’s wife, who haunts my every encounter with religious statuary, flesh made into example. How unfair to be punished for looking back, punished for refusing to relinquish affection, memory, horror: the very attributes that make us human.
One in a long queue of grubby, limping pilgrims, I file past the sepulcher of James, kiss the saint’s shell, and receive the anointing touch of a silent priest. Feeling the press of bodies on either side, I look up for the relief of a high ceiling, balm to the claustrophobic, but above me the cathedral dome is decorated with a terrifying Ojo de Dios, a great staring human eye painted with a thick paternal brow. God watches, his pupil, the size of a platter, ringed with golden brown, his lids spiked with lashes and deeply shadowed. Here is an eye that never closes. Alone, in the absence of a mate, it looks aghast and visionary.
I flee the cold sanctuary for the gift shop, where, relieved by the possibility of a simple transaction, I buy a few pious trinkets. Then I am back out in the wet day, hungry and cold. A map from the tourist office reveals that the hotel where I am to stay the night is not nearly as central as I’d hoped, but my reservation is guaranteed—I have the confirmation in my pack—and on the eve of Palm Sunday, during a holy year, I am happy to have any room, on any street. I buy a half kilo of strawberries from a vendor on a street corner, and begin my damp climb up the narrow slippery cobbles. A good dinner, I think, an amazing dinner, as I pass one after another door decorated with Diners Club and American Express stickers, framed menus offering four courses before dessert.
But when the hour to dress for dinner arrives, I am in bed drinking cheap scotch from the minibar and watching CNN. It’s so windy outside that each gust howls like the wolves that have preoccupied me so often at this hour, and how can I get up, how can I put on my wet shoes and damp dirty trousers? Instead I fall asleep, helpless to resist the combined warmth of bed and scotch. When I wake, at eight, the same tape of the same distant war in Bosnia is being broadcast, with commentary by the same anchorwoman. Having spent days living in real time—not writing time or brain time or screen time, but footstep time, time measured by daylight, hunger, the body—I’ve abruptly, in the space of an afternoon, lost touch with all that. Or have I?
I turn off the television and find my reflection in the mirror over the dresser. My usually pale cheeks are flaming red, an effect of the scotch, no doubt, as well as windburn, but together with my extraordinarily tangled hair, they make me look younger, almost like a child. I think of the last hill, the vision of the cathedral’s bell tower rising over the city, the goal in reach. Was that the arrival? The center of Santiago struck me with the same melancholy as that of every historic city center: lovely, graceful, and sad. These places we guard so carefully and proudly against time—they always seem small and vulnerable, less triumphant than compromised. Unbidden, the little calves return, and with them the plate of my mother’s candy.
I want to go to sleep, trapped as I am in this unobjectionable room, unable to dress in my cold clothes, unable to walk a step that isn’t required. I want to sleep and wake at six, allowing me four hours of Palm Sunday, Communion under the eye of God, before I have to pack and make my plane. And, unexpectedly, I do.
Sunday, March 28, 1999. 6:00 a.m. Santiago.
Having woken at the hour I intend, I take a long hot bath and by 7:30 am dressed and sitting at a small table in the dining room. Unlimited café con leche, a basket of hot rolls, muesli and yogurt and fruit: I eat and go on eating, then walk, without my pack, to attend Mass in the cathedral, legs stiff and back light.
During the service it’s my misfortune to sit next to a nun who is offended by my grubby and unfeminine attire, so much so that she cannot bring herself to look at me, not even when the congregants are directed by the priest to offer one another a sign of peace. But the little sting is assuaged by the Mass’s climax: the lighting of the Botafumeiro. Somehow, I walked all this way not knowing enough to expect it, the cathedral’s famed silver censer, so big that it requires eight priests to carry it to the altar. Dressed in red robes, they process from a side chapel, bearing the censer on a thick, polished pole, padded at each end to protect their shoulders. The priests set the censer before the altar, remove its top, and fill the great bowl with incense, which they ignite before hurriedly replacing the top. The black mechanism hanging under the dome’s painted eye is revealed as a winch, from which a rope as thick as a man’s arm dangles; one end of the rope is fixed, by means of a gargantuan knot, to the Botafumeiro, the other end is attached to eight smaller ropes, one for each priest.
Smoke pours from the many perforations in the lid of the censer, obscuring its burnished sides, its decorative shell and crucifix motifs. The priests take and pull their ropes, and it ascends. With the swift economy of long practice, the robed figures pull and release, pull and release, setting the huge burning orb into an arc of motion that swings through the cathedral’s transept, back and forth, wider and wider, trailing smoke and perfume until high over the congregation’s heads it looks like a captured comet: the polished head trails flames, a long tail of smoke, and twinkling orange sparks. A choking sweet cloud envelops its audience. Spectacular and so, so beautiful! Everyone in the church is standing, face tipped up, eyes following the great hypnotic pendulum as it swings as much as a hundred feet back and forth. How wonderful and perfect to be taken by surprise by it.
I spill with the crowd out of the cathedral and down the steps, throat burning and eyes watering. Disoriented, elated, it takes me a moment to recognize the four young men who beckon from the plaza, calling “¡Hola!” and “Hey” and “Señora,” and waving their stamped pilgrim passports. It’s the group of bicyclists I met in Ligonde, with whom I drank bad coffee while we avoided the wind and rain.
“When did you get here?” one asks in French.
“Hier,” I say. Yesterday.
“Where is your certificate?”
I shrug, and the one who gave me the orange laughs. “Her,” he says, “she doesn’t need one.” We laugh at the distance I walked since our meeting. Apparently I beat them by a day.
As I walk back to the hotel, back to my pack and the car reserved to take me to the airport, a woman presses an olive branch in my hand. “Paz,” she says, and then in English. “Peace.”
What will be left? I ask myself as my flight to London departs from the local airport. Through the airplane’s window the city of Santiago shrinks, recedes. What will I remember? I’m happy not to have brought a camera, grateful to have a reason to hold this image of light in my memory: a path worn down into the earth, woods on either side and shafts of gold coming through the tree trunks. Don’t let me forget, I ask. Please make me remember.
In my lap I make a list:
I walked 283 kilometers in seven days.
I limped 100 of those kilometers.
I ended each day in tears.
I fell twice, once on the first day and once on the last.
I went to Mass twice.
I had sun every day and rain for four days.
I was barked at every day.
I worried about wolves.
I kissed a stone cross, and I stole some holy oil, received stamps and stamped myself.
I thought of Colin, Sarah, Walker, my mother and my father, my grandparents and my friends—books I’ve written and those I hope to write. The baby I want to have, not yet even the proverbial twinkle, and yet she exists, exists as desire.
What do I know that my children haven’t taught me? Though it’s not something I can imagine, three years hence I’ll return to this road with my older daughter, and through her eyes see myself. It will require days of walking in step for Sarah to show me that grace humbles as often as it exalts, and always arrives in an unexpected form. This time I traveled in a fever, as if I believed I had wings; the next walk will be this journey’s necessary complement, showing me my feet of clay.
In London, a canceled flight affords me the use of the first-class lounge—the airline’s apology for causing me inconvenience—and I discover with delight that the lounge includes not only food and drink but a suite of showers and dressing rooms, endless hot water and unlimited towels and bottles of shampoo, conditioner, lotion.
Glowing and clean under my grubby clothes, I watch CNN while drinking a glass of red wine, hardly caring that enough time has passed that I’m watching a second replay of a videotaped interview with the widow of a Bosnian freedom fighter. The woman, who had not seen her husband for two years before his death, stressed how lucky she was to have married such a generous man, a supportive and honorable man. “No one can take that from me,” she says. “It is mine.” Listening to this for the third time, I don’t feel my usual irritation with CNN’s endless repetition of tape. Instead it bursts upon me like a revelation. Many times Colin and I have observed my preoccupation with the past, in contrast with his plans for the future, its potential and its freedom.
What hope the future holds. The past has none of these, but, as this stranger from a strange land has just revealed: The past is mine. No one can take it from me. Suddenly all those whom I think of as lost—my mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather—seem equally found. How much I hold within myself, enough that I need never be bereft. Sitting in the lounge, my shoes so filthy they draw stares from the soigné first-class crowd, I close my eyes and see everyone I love, just as I did on the road, luminous and exalted and mine.