My Camino with Toni

I get to Boadillo.  My heel is no worse, no better. I ponder whether a day of rest will help.

Until yesterday, I have had a charmed Camino. I have watched my younger, sometimes much younger, friends suffer from blisters, twisted ankles, and bad knees, but not me. And, yes, I have been a bit cocky.

Stopping at a bar, I meet Danny from Nashville, whom I met two days earlier in Tardejos. Danny is a hale fellow well met, a proud Tennessean, a Christian.  He and I enjoy some Sopa Castellano, wonderful garlic soup. My heel feels tolerable.

We start walking toward Fromista, walking slowly, carefully. About a half a kilometer outside town, in an instant, I find myself face down on the ground in a puddle of blood. I don’t know how I got there. I don’t remember tripping.  I am surrounded by angels.  A nurse from Korea is only steps behind me when I fall.  She and Danny kneel over me, concerned, caring for me.

They walk me back to the last albergue in Boadillo, supporting my weight and carrying my backpack.  At the albergue an Italian peregrina, who looks way too young, identifies herself as a doctor. Another peregrina is, I think, a physician assistant. Together with the Korean nurse, they patiently and painstakingly clean the gravel from my wounds.

Their ministrations seem to me as expert as anybody could hope for, but, moreover, filled with the spirit of the Camino.

In the meantime Danny and Ana, angel of the Camino, peregrina from Madrid, arrange for a taxi to take me to the consultario in Fromista.  Ana comes to translate, Danny because he is his brother’s keeper.

At the consultario I am tended to and bandaged. I get four butterfly closures, covered with gauze and tape. I ask whether I will lose all my teeth.  I wonder if both my hands are broken.  They assure me, through Ana, that I will be fine.  To believe that at this moment requires some faith. I look like Frankenstein’s monster. Ana goes to the Farmacia for me and brings back prescriptions for my mouth, and for inflammation.

(Ana, not incidentally, turns out to be an impressive young woman, who has worked for years at the Palais des Beaux Artes in Mexico City, and now works at the famous classical theatre in Madrid, home of the works of Lope de Vega. And she has given up a day of her Camino for me.)

Dear reader, before I close, let me say, I will be fine within a week.  My wounds will heal.  But already, I have a good story, better than a bruised heel or a couple of lousy blisters. 

At the albergue, I think people are avoiding me, not wanting to ask what has befallen me, and I cannot blame them. But a young Spanish woman approaches me. She seems genuinely agitated. “Would you be open to a spiritual message?” she asks me. I’m a bit sceptical, but nod assent.

“I have a message from a woman, maybe your partner, maybe your wife.  She says to tell you she loves you, and she is proud of what you are doing.”

Leaving Castrojeriz, I have walked 18 kilometers, and intend to walk 10 more. I am hurrying to reach the top of a steep hill before my walking companion. Near the top, I bruise my heel, and hobble down the other side to the town of Itero de Vega, where there is an albergue, the Hospital San Nicolas. I check in, well short of my intended destination.

The Hospital San Nicolas is in a Templar Church, built in 1174. Other than a Gothic apse from the 13th century and a recent roof, the building appears to be unchanged from its ancient origin. It is cool and dark inside. The single room, maybe 5 meters by 20 meters, has a dozen bunks at one end, a long dining table and the raised apse at the other. There is no electricity, only candles and a gas stove for cooking. It is run by the Italian Confraternity of San Nicolas.

The hospitalaro, Massimo, stamps my Camino credentials and shows me my bed, but will charge me no money for dinner, bed and breakfast. The albergue depends solely on donations.

In addition to the three Italian hospitaleros, there are just five guests, a German, two Russians, a French girl, and myself.

The Hospitalara, Anna, is preparing pasta with fresh tomatoes, green olives, herbs and a lot of fragrant garlic. But before we can eat, we are summoned to the apse, and told to remove our socks. The three hospitaleros, wearing vestments and scapulas with the scallop shell of Santiago, pray in Italian for our safe travel to Santiago, and for the success of our pilgrimage.  Then the assistant hospitalero, Mateo, fills a brass basin with water and holds it while Massimo goes to each of us in turn, washing our feet,  and praying for each of us by name.

The communal dinner begins with pistachios Massimo has brought from Mt. Aetna,  followed by a wonderful Umbrian pasta.  The hospitalara is not eating. She doesn’t like garlic. 

Nobody at the table speaks much English, and the German and Russians don’t speak Spanish, so communication is rudimentary.

Wernher, from southeastern Germany, tells me that he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, but the diagnosis was wrong. Still, he feels depleted, as a man, and needs new life from the Camino. He is older, tired, more complicated, but makes me think of Andreas.

Benjamin and Irena are Russian. He is a big man, blond but somehow dark.  They started out on bicycles, but he had an accident, tearing his thigh open. He says, in very halting German, that the doctor told him he should not walk for three months, but he is walking across Spain anyway. It is painful enough to watch him hobble across the room.

Martine is a gamine, like the French actress Audrey Tautou. She has already walked from Le Puy in France to Santiago, and is now walking the return trip. I ask her what does she do?  She says “Before, I worked in finance, but now I walk the Camino. After? I do not know.”

The place is filled with spirits. After dinner the candles are reduced to three on the walls. Mateo shows me, 2 meters from my bunk, what is believed to be a Visigothic tomb, centuries older than the Hospital. 

I wake in the middle of the night to see the apse with its Italianate tryptich Illuminated by a single flickering candle.  I test my foot against the footboard of the bed.  It still hurts.

Every Camino story I have read has a knee, ankle or foot injury as its complication or crisis. Can’t I do any better than this?

We are awakened at 6:30 for prayers and breakfast.  The moon is a tiny waning crescent over the Hospital. As at every albergue, we must be gone before 8 AM.  I start limping toward Boadillo, 8 kilometers west.

I meet Lisa in Los Arcos.  She is walking the Camino with a big black dog, Aiko. A student from Belgium, a small girl, she is carrying  a 20 kilo backpack, three times the size of mine, including dogfood and dishes. Because the albergues will not admit dogs, she is going from one to another to ask if she and Aiko can sleep in their yard. So far, no.

I catch up with Lisa in Viana, where she is washing out her clothes in the public fountain. Aiko is exhausted, sleeping under a tree.  A sinewy young man from Iowa, Jareb, stops to refill his water bottles at the fountain. He says he is doing a minimum of 60 kilometers a day, running 30 in the morning, and walking 30 in the afternoon. I leave, walking with him, but not for long.

A Korean student, a Japanese and two young Spaniards have found each other on the Camino. Bare chested, fist thumping, head bumping, they have discovered their shared enthusiasms for world music and WWE wrestling. Santiago Peregrino, Santiago Matamoros, why not also Santiago, patron saint of testosterone?

In Logrono I drink a beer with Kristian, a red bearded big bear of a young man from Denmark, also half Mexican.  He is the worse for wear since I saw him: Last night was a huge fiesta, he missed his curfew at the albergue, and had to sleep on a park bench. He tells me that the local kids are into cocaine more than other Europeans, maybe because their future seems so dim.

My voice reminds him of William S. Burroughs, the beat poet who killed his wife trying to shoot an apple off her head. Improbably, I have a Burroughs impersonation prepared, so I perform it for the table.

In Najera I see a man who exudes pain. He is repulsive. I want to stay away from him.

When I check in to the municipal albergue in Azofra, he is there. His boots are much too large, evidently salvaged. I feel stronger now, and filled with the spirit of the Camino, I approach him.  He is Andreas from Germany. His parents died in the Spring. He lost his job, and his girlfriend left him. He has nothing. He is walking the Camino for a miracle. He wants his life back.  I don’t know what to say. I say I am sorry. I wish him Buen Camino.

Entering Santo Domingo, I see him resting by the side of the road.  The sun is warm, the breeze is gentle, his boots are off. He has not had his miracle, but it looks as if he will live, for now.

Felicidad and Marilo are leaving the Camino today.  Like many Spaniards, they walk the Camino in sections, 2 or 3 weeks at a time, resuming where they leave off each year. Felicidad says it is a tradition to give gifts when leaving the Camino, and she has a silver ring each for Marianne and Lena. Her English was better all along than she let me realize.  That may have been her gift to me.

John Brierley, the author of the guide book, has a section on what not to bring: camera, watch, cell phone. He wants you to be here now.

He says, don’t bring your camera because you cannot photograph an inner experience. Really? Any picture worth making is a picture of an inner experience. But any picture worth making  takes effort and time and I have only forty days on the Camino. At seventy-two I don’t need new memories. I need new experiences. So, I leave the camera home, but bring the watch and cell phone.

In St. Jean, packing in the pre-dawn dark, I lose my 5 year old $9 watch. Little harm done, except sunburn to my white skin where the watch had been. In fact, it seems right not to be wearing the hours and minutes on my body.

Now the cell phone is gone too, left behind in some bar in Najera. I’ve done my due diligence to recover it, so now I’m ready to let it go, too. I am here, now.  Or I would be, if not for the tablet I brought before leaving, without which I could not do this blog. Starting with the previous post, the pictures will not be mine.

Anybody in reasonable health can do the Camino. There is a little town every four or five miles along the way, and a bar, and you can just sit, and drink cortadas, and eat pintxos, and make friends all day long, if you like. Not a difficult thing. Last year somebody did it in a wheelchair.

Not everybody will want to do it in August, however.  It has been consistently in the upper 90s every afternoon since I arrived, and above.  Twice fellow walkers noted that the thermometer had reached 40 degrees. I did not do the arithmetic until later: 104 Fahrenheit. Fortunately I’m phototropic. And thermophilic.

Which is a good thing, because I’m just entering the Meseta, Spain’s breadbasket, a high plateau famed for its heat, lack of shade, and days of unchanging landscape. Tonight I am in Hontanas, about 470 kilometers from Santiago.

Traditionally the Camino is divided into three parts — physical, mental and spiritual. Having come 320 kilometers through Navarre and La Rioja, I have finished the physical part, and feel stronger and healthier than I have in years. With the Meseta begins the mental part. I wonder how can the Meseta change me? Is this trip an adventure, a distraction for me?  Or is it a rite of passage into my widowhood, my viduity? And what will that be?

I first meet the twins, las gamelas, in Logrono. Felicidad, well-named, always smiling, with waist length blonde hair, strikingly stylish and impossibly thin, seems to radiate happiness.  Marilo is identical, but with red-auburn hair. They do not appear to speak much English. 

We walk together toward Los Arcos with Gaby, a butcher from Valencia, making our first stop at the famous fuente de vino in Irache, where two spigots freely dispense water and wine.

The twins are school teachers from Bilbao. Gaby is a butcher from Valencia. The correct verb to describe our walking is andar, not caminar. The beetle I notice is un escarabajo, which leads to a discussion of Egyptian art, which leads to the distinctions among antiguo, anciano and viejo. Felicidad is an art teacher, which leads to a discussion of the Spanish education system of escuelas, colegios and facultades. And I’m actually understanding this stuff, kind of!

We stop at a bar. Flushed with my new fluency, I try to strike up a conversation with Gaby.  He doesn’t have the slightest idea of what I am trying to say to him, and I have no idea of what he answers.

By mid afternoon I realize that I can still understand Felicidad’s Spanish walking down hill, but not walking up.  Elizabeth from Ireland comes along, and I decide to walk with her, choosing the comfort of my native tongue. That evening in Los Arcos, I have my picture taken, smiling, sandwiched between Felicidad and Marilo. “The fantasy of every old man!” I say. “Don’t joke about that,” says Elizabeth.  I was joking.

Between Villafranca and Atapuerca I meet seven women traveling together. I know they are from northern Europe, because their English is better than mine. They are from Estonia. Aada teaches Estonian to immigrants. She tells me that there was a contest for the most beautiful language, and that Estonian came in second to Italian. As the women talk amongst themselves, their language sounds like water over stones, and I think it should have placed first.

I ask Aada why they come so far from their beautiful country to walk.  She tells me they come for the mountains.  Spain is the second most mountainous country in Europe, after Switzerland.  Estonia is flat. Right now, flat sounds good to me.

She introduces me to their leader.  MAHR-i-ka, as she corrects my pronunciation: with the accent on the customary penultimate syllable, the word would be a derogatory epithet for a homosexual. Marika has done the Camino ten times, once all the way from Estonia. I ask her why? She tells me the first time she walked from St. Jean she was looking for answers.  She didn’t find her answers, so the next time she walked from Tallinn, 5,000 kilometers to Santiago. “Did you get your answers then?” “No.” “Then why did you do eight more Caminos?” “I just liked it.”

We stop at a bar and Marika introduces me to my now favorite drink, tinto verano, red wine over ice with lemon, aqua con gas, and a splash of sweet vermouth. The Estonian women end their day’s walk at Atapuerca, the site of the oldest human remains in Europe. I continue toward Burgos.

Spanish is not the only language I can’t speak. In the Plaza Mayor in Burgos I am trying to give away my wooden walking stick, which I have just replaced with two metal sticks. I spot two girls speaking German I think must be peregrinos, but now nicely dressed. I ask where are they from, and they tell me Munster. I say there must be many peregrinos from Munster, as I met two just last week. They tell me they are the two I met.

In an effort to recover, I remember a line that Toni sometimes used. In my best schoolboy German I say, “Sie sicher aufraumen gut!” Met with total incomprehension, I try in English, “You sure clean up well!” I am relieved to get a polite laugh. They take the stick.

A few kilometers outside of Burgos I meet Julia.  “De donde?” She’s from Mexico City. “Where did you start your Camino?” I ask. “Roncesvalles.” I feel obliged to correct her Latin American pronunciation: “Ron  thay VIE eth.”

Toni and I struggled with Spanish for years. I got the grammar and vocabulary a bit better than she did, so I thought it unfair that she was the one who could actually talk with people, understand and be understood. Unfair, but not surprising. Note to self: for the next Camino, bring a pocket dictionary.  Or, better, just learn the damned language. 

Apologies to my friends and teachers,  Denise and Lito. Since I have not installed a Spanish keyboard with Spanish characters, of course everything is misspelled.

Elizabeth from Ireland was my roommate in the Albergue in St. Jean Pied-de-Port. For no reason I’d want to explain, I announced, “I’m seventy-two years old!”  She said, “I’m seventy-three.”  As with quite a few I will meet, the is her second Camino. When she overtakes me 130 kilometers later near Los Arcos, I confess to her I lied about my age. I’m only seventy-one and a half. She tells me she lied too.  She is only seventy-two, but timing her walk to arrive in Santiago on her seventy-third birthday.

Leaving Logrono, I am looking for a bar. A bar here sells beer, wine and spirits, but more importantly, coffee and pintxos.  Pintxos are the northern version of tapas. The coffee is most often in the form of a cortado, a very short, intense, blend of espresso and frothy milk.
Greg from Poland, an intense young man, insists I must have un cortado with him. He is in the Polish navy, walking to Santiago because he is unhappy, and wants a different life. We walk together for several kilometers. He asks me what it is in life that makes one happy.  I tell him that I had a good marriage, and that makes me happy still. It turns out that he has been seeking out and stopping old people and asking them all the same question. I commend his search for truth. He says he will go to Nepal, because there the people have nothing, and they are happy.

I met Daniela from Italy when she had the bunk next to mine in Roncevalles. She speaks no English, and I no Italian, so we do the best we can in Spanish.  She is 56, heavy, and not in good health, so she is walking the Camino to regain her strength. Hedging her bets, she also plans a stop in Lourdes on her way home.

I catch up with her 90 kilometers later in the town of Obanos as I stop for una cervesa and she stops for a cigarette. She tells that her hometown is Bergamo, near Milan.  I remark that Bergamo was the hometown of the character Trufaldino from the 14th-15th century improvised Comedia del ‘Arte.  Trufaldino was the clever young servant who played tricks on his master, an old man.  The master might be el Capitano, miles gloriosus, the cowardly braggart warrior from Spain, Dottore, the learned idiot from Bologna, or Pantalone, the ridiculous senex amans from Venice.  I don’t say it, but this reminds me I must be on my guard against becoming Dottore.

Pantalone, on the other hand, I think I have under control. I have had the good fortune to spend the largest part of my time walking with a couple of lovely young women. My current vulnerability feels to me a good match for theirs. They appear to trust me, and it surprises me a bit, they are right to do so.

Maybe it is a rule: the more profound an insight, the more commonplace its expression.

In an earlier post I invoked Douglas Adams’ exhortation to “eff the ineffable.” I’ve always been disappointed with the literature of the Camino. Everybody says walking the Camino  changes one’s  life; nobody says how, other than platitudes. Here’s a commonplace, expressed as a set of rules for life:

Rule #1: Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Rule#2: It’s all small stuff.

It’s one thing to understand this, even to believe it, as an intellectual proposition. It’s something else to experience it as a practical matter.  Walking is a form of meditation. One foot after another, left foot, right foot, at the end of the day there will be a bed, there will be a meal, and nothing else matters much. It is enough, and it is good. .

Small stuff: small is misleading. The flowering dill covered with snails by the side of the path is small stuff, but it is the stuff of life, a thing of beauty.

When our daughter Sam sat at Toni’s bedside, Toni said, “You’re all taking this way too seriously.” Like all of us off the Camino, Toni sometimes did sweat the small stuff. Nobody who knew her would have called her serene. But when it came to — what most of us would call — the big stuff, she loved her life, and accepted her death, as if to say, it was enough, and it was good.

I was thankful to have missed the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, the Running of the Bulls, which turns that city into an international spectacle every July, and equally thankful to witness  the same festival in the smaller Basque town of Los Arcos. Here the Running of the Bulls took on the character of a small town celebration. 

Abuelas and nietos watched from balcony windows as the young men of the town,  alcohol fueled, with white costumes, red bandanas and punk haircuts,  took turns demonstrating their fearlessness. On another street small boys were running with the calves.

Toni was always more adventurous than I. Whether she was climbing the pyramids at Coba, Ek Balaam and Chichen Itza, zip lining in Puerto Vallarta,  or sky diving in Playa, I felt it my duty to stay on the ground, and document her adventures.

Twenty years ago Toni and I went to a bullfight in the Roman amphitheater in Arles.  In the Provencal bullfight, matadors try to snatch a cockade off the horns of the bull. They don’t kill the bull, they just annoy the hell out it. “How French!” observed our friend Kathy Boone. 

We went south into the Camargue, where they were raising bulls for the fight. Young bull calves were being chased down, roped and branded. We were offered the opportunity to run after them.  I said “no, thank you.”  Toni took off after the bulls. In a moment that seemed to define our relationship, I  ran after her breathlessly. “Toni, Toni, do you think this is a good idea?”

In a previous post I wrote “. . . I don’t know much about God, but I know where He lives.”

In this country, so infused with medieval Roman Catholicism, He seems almost everywhere. I interrupted my westward progress to walk back from Puente la Reina to visit Sta. Maria de Eunate, which had been closed when I passed it the previous day.  

A pilgrimage church, possibly Templar, dating from some time in the 12th century, it is surrounded by an unusual colonnade of 32 arches.  The plan is an irregular octagon — three long sides, five short sides — with a semicircular apse.

Wonderful corbels and capitals remind us that evil is more interesting  than good, and that unsaved mortals are grotesque, only a bit higher than the animals.  He lives here.

Where She Lives

From Roncevalles I walked through the Sorginaritzaga oak forest, the home of the Sorginak, Basque priestesses of the Goddess Mari — no relation to Mary.

We know that Mariolatry, the cult of the Virgin, began in the 12th and 13th centuries as an attempt to address the imbalance between animus and anima, or, less charitably, to co-opt the appeal of the witch, and preserve male domination. Catholic attempts to suppress the Sorginak began at least with the Inquisition, and continued through the nineteenth century.

Passing through the village of Arequeta, I came upon the Abbey of Eskirotz and Ilarratz.

Neill le Roux arrived several years ago from South Africa to walk the Camino. His Spanish was so bad, he told us, that in the airport in Madrid they sold him a ticket to Palermo instead of Pamplona. When he got back to Madrid a week later, he asked a Spanish girl for help.  Later they were married, had a daughter, and needed a house.  He tried to rent from the Catholic Church a house attached to the Abbey.  The Bishop  would not rent, but he would sell, but only if Neill bought the church also. The restoration of this church has become his personal mission.

The sixteenth century altar was robbed and vandalized.  Behind, Neill discovered a thirteenth century altar, and behind that, the most remarkable painting.

At the upper left and right, sun symbols, or possibly sun and moon; within a grid, finger painted dots, possibly each representing a person. The shells are not the familiar scallop shells of Santiago, but conch shells, otherwise unknown in Christian iconography. All of this is in a Catholic church, but a church needing to communicate with a pagan peasant population.

Do the pagans become Catholic, or do the Catholics become pagan?  It is very reminiscent of the Mayan followers of the Talking Cross that Toni and I  discovered in the Yucatan.

This is a holy place. Das ewig weibliche zieht uns hinan.

My friend Don Shedd told me the experience of grief is solitary, and it is universal. Perhaps that is why so many grieving people do the Camino, which is at the same time both intensely solitary and intensely social.

Walking by oneself for hours or days, through a beautiful landscape, without the distraction of the radio or the television or the Internet, the dross begins to fall away. Walking with others, for hours or days, sharing this great adventure, can create deep connection with strange rapidity.  I have told my life story, and have heard theirs.  I have told my secrets to people who were strangers yesterday, and I have heard their secrets.

On Tuesday I walked alone. On Wednesday I walked with Ulf from Sweden, on Thursday with Peter from Australia. On Friday and Saturday I walked with Marianne from Canada and Lena from Germany. Today I chose again to walk alone.

I’ve identified three kinds of people on the Camino: those who have trouble going uphill, those who have trouble going down, and damned young people.

Peter from Australia turned up again tonight, and also Elizabeth from Ireland.  Peter and Elizabeth are the only two I’ve met who are my age.

The Albergue 

My room for tonight cost 5 Euros. I have 11 roommates. Evidently I am the only one who doesn’t snore. Loudly. The bathrooms are unisex, which probably bothers the ladies more than it bothers me. The peregrinos are also bound together in common misery by their blisters, some of which appear near fatal. Strangely, I’m also the only one who doesn’t have blisters.  I’d like to tell that to Toni, who always teased me for having tender feet.