We found a room right away, and we kept it for four days while we had a look around Zaragoza. The room seemed perfectly fine, but as one day led seamlessly into the next, we began to notice, bit by bit, just how filthy that particular room was. The place was a sty, and it took us all that time to realize it, at which point we got the hell out of Zaragoza.
CHEATING
By the time we left Zaragoza—a perfectly pleasant city, our accommodations notwithstanding—we had come to realize the wisdom of hooking up with the traditional route, the famous Camino de Santiago. While we didn’t regret crossing Andorra or walking through Catalonia, it was time for us to get with the program.
So we cheated.
And not for the first time. You’ll recall that we hitched a ride into Zaragoza. And I’ve neglected to mention another ride we took, just a couple of miles, en route from Aix-les-Thermes to the Andorran border. (That was before Lynne was able to believe that walking would get easier; when a car pulled up and the driver offered us a ride, it would have taken a harder man than I to wave him off.)
This time what we did was catch a northbound train out of Zaragoza. I’d worked it out that our best bet was to join the Camino at Puente la Reina, in Navarre, and we could take the train to a town along the way that boasted a parador, one of a group of inns housed in historic properties and operated by the Spanish government. After that pigpen in Zaragoza, we were ready for something a little nicer.
But we were riding a train, and that was cheating.
When I thought about it, it struck me that the whole idea of cheating on a pilgrimage by choosing a faster or easier form of locomotion than walking was wildly anachronistic. A thousand years earlier, when pilgrims from all parts of Europe made their way to Compostela, they didn’t choose a deliberately slow and antiquated method of getting there. On the contrary, they covered the ground as quickly and as comfortably as they could. Most of them walked, not because it was good for the soul but for lack of a horse to ride or a carriage to ride in. The object, after all, was to arrive at the sacred destination and get their sins expunged, not to wear out as many pairs of sandals as possible in the process.
But that was then, alas, and things were different by the time we took off on foot. You could still go to any holy site and call your journey a pilgrimage, and how you get there doesn’t necessarily enter into the equation. The hadjis who make their way to Mecca every year don’t walk there from Indonesia or Pakistan or Dubai. They don’t even ride camels. They take airplanes instead.
For us, though, and for every peregrino we encountered along the route, the destination was the least of it. Santiago de Compostela is a beautiful city, and well worth a visit. But subtract the ordeal, take the long walk out of the picture, and we’d have had no reason to go. Getting there wasn’t just half the fun; for us, it was the whole point.
The train made sense; if we walked from Zaragoza, we’d have a long walk through uninteresting terrain and be unable to find places to stay along the way. Still, it wasn’t what we’d set out to do. It was, well, cheating.
And, from the time we got off that train, we never went anywhere other than on foot until our pilgrimage was complete. Then and only then did we board another train that carried us south from Santiago de Compostela, first to Vigo and then, a day later, to Lisbon.
When the Camino led us to Logrono, for example, we walked in one end of that town and out the other. When we stayed in a city for a few days, as we did in Burgos and León, we passed up cabs and local buses and toured the place on foot. When we were ready to move on, we picked up our packs and walked. Trains, buses, cars, trucks, ox carts—we saw them all, and waved, and kept on walking.
And we never mentioned the cars or the train, not to our fellow peregrinos, nor to our friends and family back home. “You walked all the way?” they’d marvel. “On foot? All the way?”
“Every step of the way,” we agreed.
It was just simpler that way. Why launch into a tedious story of our passage into and out of Zaragoza? All in all, we covered more miles on foot than we would have if we’d started out at Roncesvalles, as most people do, and walked right on through to Compostela. We had all those extra miles from Toulouse, and the great detour through Andorra and Catalonia. All told, we covered something like 650 pedestrian miles. That was plenty, so why bother putting an asterisk in the record book?
But it must have bothered us. Otherwise why would I be writing about it now?
SIGHTS
The cathedrals at Burgos and León were quite spectacular, though I can’t begin to remember anything specific about them. We gave them a long look at the time, and spent at least a few minutes in virtually all of the churches we encountered along the way.
Early on, every village church had a stork’s nest on its top. Sometimes we’d see the birds visiting the nests, but at the very least we’d spot the big nest, crowning the steeple. All through Catalonia and Aragon, all through Navarre—
And then, somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing either the birds or their nests. And we never could figure out why.
Had the storks, for presumably sound reasons of their own, never nested atop the churches of Castile and León? Or had some human agency contrived to drive them away? Had the municipal or ecclesiastic authorities dispatched men with brooms to sweep the nests away? Were chemical pesticides at the root of the problem? Or—and here’s a thought that never occurred to us at the time, but seems inescapable now—could it be global warming?
The birth rate in Spain, as in much of Western Europe, has been declining in recent years. But that has to be a coincidence, don’t you think?
I’m sure the trip would have been a birder’s delight, not least because we did so much of our walking in the early morning hours when early birds are loading up on tardy worms. But we didn’t pay much attention to the birds, except when they were impossible to miss. Like the storks, which we saw all the time until we stopped seeing them at all, and like the eagles.
We only saw eagles once, but they made an impression. We were walking on a road through a field, somewhere in Navarre, when we saw a flight of enormous birds hovering over a flock of sheep. The Basque shepherd was scurrying around, brandishing his staff, flailing at the birds with it. They were eagles, though it took us a moment to realize that; they lacked the white heads of the American Bald Eagle, and they looked too large to be eagles, although they could hardly have been anything else. We didn’t count them, but their number clearly ran to more than a dozen, and there may have been as many as twenty of them, all swooping around in a manner that was so graceful it took you a minute to realize how menacing they were.
They wanted a lamb or two, and the poor shepherd clearly wanted an AK-47. All he had was his shepherd’s crook, and all he could do was wave it around while his dog did all it could do, which was bark. It seemed to work, at least for the moment; the eagles soared off, leaving him with his sheep. And we walked on, by no means convinced he and the sheep had seen the last of those birds.
We had, however. Never spotted them again. More recently, we saw quite a few bald eagles in the Aleutians, and they’re spectacular birds. But I think the species we encountered in Spain ran larger.
It was poppy season when we began our walk, and the fields of Catalonia and Aragon were a vast sea of scarlet. They took us entirely by surprise. I knew they had poppies in Europe, and specifically in Belgium. I remembered the John McCrae poem:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours t
o hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
So I knew there were poppies in World War I cemeteries, but I guess I figured someone planted them there. And when we saw the poppy fields in Spain, I assumed someone must have planted them, too—but why? As far as I knew, there was no large-scale cultivation of opium in Spain.
Well, duh, nobody plants those poppies. They plant themselves, self-seeding year after year, like dandelions in the United States, but if there are places back home where dandelions turn a whole hillside blindingly yellow, I’ve never seen them.
I’d never seen anything like those poppy fields. I wonder if the people who live among them pay any attention to them. Probably not. When something’s always there, you stop noticing it.
And what other sights did we see? One that made an indelible impression upon me was, in a sense, nothing at all remarkable. It was, in point of fact, something that happens everywhere, every day of the year. Yet it was fair to say we’d never seen anything like it.
I don’t remember the name of the town, but I happen to know the date when it occurred. It was June 25th, and I know that because the night before we were walking back to the refugio after our evening meal when we fell into conversation with a trio of teenage Spanish girls. They heard us talking and initiated the conversation, thinking it would be a fine opportunity for them to practice their English. And indeed it might have been, if they’d had any English to practice. Alas, they didn’t, so I seized the opportunity to practice my Spanish, and groped around for something to say.
“Hoy es mi cumpleaños,” I managed. How I remembered cumpleaños, which is Spanish for birthday, is beyond me; I’m pretty sure I’d never even spoken the word aloud before. The three little maids from school—las tres niñas de la escuela?—thought this was a wonderful thing—that it was my birthday, not that I’d managed to come up with the word for it—and they wished me well, and we wished them well, and that was about as far as either language would take us, so we left it at that.
They were in town, and speaking with strangers, because it was indeed a feast day, St. John’s Day, the festival of John the Baptist, who was the patron saint of the village. Back at the refugio, we went to sleep while the party was just getting started, and it was still dark, and some of the revelers still partying, when we woke up and got dressed and on our way.
We found our way out of town and resumed walking the Camino, and we hadn’t gone too far before we found ourselves with a mountain to climb. It wasn’t a mountain the way Kilimanjaro is a mountain, and I suppose I might more properly refer to it as a big hill, but there was a lot of it and it was fairly steep, and it took an effort to scale it, especially with heavy packs on our backs.
But we kept going, and eventually we stood at the top, and something prompted us to turn around and look back toward where we’d been. And just at that moment the sun broke the horizon, and we stood on that mountain peak—okay, hilltop—and watched it come all the way up.
As I said, it’s the sort of thing that happens all over the world, every day of the year. But right then and right there, it was one of the most wonderful sights either of us had ever seen.
LANGUAGE
The Boy Scout Jamboree in 1953 had got me interested in Spanish, and I’d taken to it in high school like a pato to agua. Given the opportunity, I’d have continued with it in college, but Antioch had ceased to offer it by the time I got there, and that was that.
Two years of high school Spanish had penetrated more deeply than one might have supposed, and all it ever took was a week or two in a Spanish-speaking country for much of my Spanish to return to me. I was a long way from fluent, however. My vocabulary was limited—though it amazed me how words would keep coming back to me like golondrinas to Capistrano, just popping back into my consciousness from some chamber of memory. I was pretty much confined to the present tense, if I’d ever learned the other tenses they hadn’t stayed with me, but you can conduct whole conversations in the present tense. Or write whole books, if you’re Damon Runyon, say, or some poseur from Iowa City.
From time to time I would get the urge to improve my Spanish, and now and then I would buy some book in Spanish, pick up an English-Spanish dictionary, and try to work my way through the thing. I could browse Garcia Lorca’s poetry with some enjoyment, but I never got anywhere with the fiction I attempted, possibly because I didn’t stay with it long enough. I’d give it up, and then a few days in Mexico or Spain would bring back a flood of half-remembered vocabulary, and stir up old longings.
I always assumed that a few weeks or a month in a Spanish-speaking country would leave me with a command of the language, and so I took it pretty much for granted that I’d achieve that in the course of three months spent walking through Spain. Nor would I have the option of retreating into English, as I might in the more cosmopolitan areas of Madrid and Barcelona. The folks living along the route of the pilgrimage hadn’t been spending a lot of time studying English as a second language. They had one language, and that’s all they needed to talk with one another, and they evidently figured that was plenty.
No problem. I’d do just fine in the old Español. Right?
Well, not exactly.
The first problem was that nobody was speaking the sort of Spanish I’d been taught. I should have realized I was in trouble three years earlier in Gijón, where all of the locals sounded to me as though they were speaking through a mouthful of broken teeth. The one person I could almost understand was the Russian writer (and putative ex-KGB agent) Julian Semyonov, who addressed the assembly one afternoon in my idea of perfect Spanish. He was speaking Castilian, and I established later that he’d been taught by an American woman from the Midwest. That’s why he sounded just like Miss Sherman back at Bennett High.
That’s not the way they talked in Catalonia or Aragon or La Rioja or Navarre. In Catalonia they didn’t even use the same words, in that they were speaking not Spanish but Catalan. Some of the words were almost the same, and others weren’t even close. Open is abierto in Spanish, obert in Catalan. It’s not hard to work that one out. Closed, on the other hand, is cerrado in Spanish and tancat in Catalan.
Tancat became a part of our working vocabulary, and remains the one word of Catalan we know. I’m not sure how it’s pronounced, because we never heard anyone say it, but we read it often enough for it to be deeply imprinted upon us. A sign bearing that single word hung in the door of one shop after another as we made our way through Catalonia. It didn’t take us long to work out its meaning.
And, all these years later, we’ll still find ourselves using the word now and then. “Did you pick up the Sunday Times?” “No, I’ll get it tomorrow. The fucking deli was tancat.”
In the Basque areas they speak Basque, understandably enough. (Well, it’s understandable that they speak it, but what they speak is understandable to no one but another Basque. And, from what I know about the language, it’s remarkable that they can understand one another.) And in each region where Spanish is nominally the language, the vowels and consonants do things very different from the Castilian Spanish I was taught.
Even if they’d spoken what I was used to, I’d have been in trouble. See, I could speak the language (after a fashion, and only in the present tense). But I couldn’t understand it. I could formulate a question and phrase it rather neatly, especially if I had a minute or two to go over it in my mind first. And, regional accents aside, the person to whom I addressed my question was almost invariably able to understand it.
Then he’d answer me, and I wouldn’t have a clue what he was saying.
Well, I could work it out if he said sí or no. And if I asked where the men’s room was, there was almost always a gesture to accompany the reply. But if he came back with a whole sentence, I would stand there trying to recall what he’d just said and trying to puzzle out what the words meant.
By the time I bega
n to get used to a particular accent, we would have walked far enough to reach a place where people were speaking something discernibly different—though discernibly may not be quite le mot juste here. We managed to make do, we bought what we needed and found our way to the bathroom, but I was not finding the ease with the language for which I’d hoped.
In Castile, finally, they spoke something I was used to, if not with the clear Western New York accent of Miss Sherman. But all that really meant was that they had a little less trouble understanding me. I still couldn’t catch what they were saying, because my ears, alas, were far slower than my lips. I could speak Spanish okay. I just couldn’t understand it.
Lynne was the reverse. She had a sort of cavalier attitude toward languages other than her own, feeling that a close approximation of the requisite word damn well ought to suffice. Mark Twain, you’ll recall, once observed that the difference between the right word and the almost-right word was the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, to which Lynne would likely reply that the person you were addressing ought to be able to make out what you were getting at. “‘Oh, look, thunder and lightning bugs!’ Yeah, right.”