Spanish Steps
Table of Contents
Cover Page
By the same author
Spanish Steps
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
By the same author
FRENCH REVOLUTIONS
DO NOT PASS GO
SPANISH STEPS
One Man and his Ass on the
Pilgrim Way to Santiago
Tim Moore
JONATHAN CAPE
LONDON
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Epub ISBN: 9781409000921
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Published by Jonathan Cape 2004
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Copyright © Tim Moore 2004
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First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Jonathan Cape
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to: Jon Bryant, John Perring, Hanno and Marie-Christine, the Donkey Sanctuary, the Confraternity of St James, the Weed Science Society, Jessamy, Per, Brigitta, Simon, St John of Bedford, Jon Bjornsson, and Birna, Snáó, Spons and Olbus Hispanicus. Also to most of my fellow pilgrims, and nearly all the people of northern Spain.
Prologue
Iwas on a small boat in Norway when I first heard about it. ‘Now I am going to do the Camino de Santiago,’ said Per, and for a heady moment seemed primed to leap to his deck-shoed feet and perform a vigorously sensual one-man tango up and down the galley. When this moment had ended – and with Per being a bald and precise teacher of languages I couldn’t say it was a long one – he explained that the camino was a path or way in Spain, or in true accuracy across Spain, a path or way with a most particular historic and religious tradition, a . . . a . . .
‘A pilgrimage?’
Just so, said Per. A pilgrimitch. In the next summer. He looked through the porthole beside my shoulder and nodded distantly at the bobbing horizon.
It was the sort of revelation that made me glad we were puttering up a sunny fjord beneath a merry deckful of day-tripping divorcees, rather than alone together on a vast and wild ocean. The pilgrims I’d mumbled about in hymns and seen in Monty Python films wore pus-crusted hoods and hair shirts. They crawled across continents on bare and bleeding knees, fuelled by turnips and raw zeal towards that distant shrine where divine deliverance awaited those who pressed their blistered lips to the shrivelled gall-bladder of St Pancras.
I stole a surreptitious look at Per and saw him cowled in a filthy felt cloak, chanting Latin and smacking himself in the teeth with a stout plank. Eyes ablaze with fundamentalist fervour; clawed hands ready to force some sarky heathen’s face through a porthole of slightly inadequate diameter. Perhaps I heard the first echoing organ chord of John Bunyan’s ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, a school-assembly regular of wrathful, Old Testament righteousness, whose indefatigable protagonist fought with lions and giants and then, as the fearsome Judgement Day descant kicked mightily in, saw off the last wave of hobgoblins and foul fiends to inherit eternal life.
This was first-degree Christianity, ill at ease in the third millennium. On the ferry home I pondered that these days, in England at least, even its mildest churchgoing variant was no more than an eccentric if harmless hobby, as might be poodle clipping or my father’s enduring love for the Red Army Marching Band’s rendition of ‘It’s a Long Way To Tipperary’. Say ‘pilgrim’ in a questioning tone and people might mutter about the Mayflower fathers, or possibly a Gothic-scripted supermarket cheddar. But footsore fanatics? Not now, not in Europe. We’ve been there, done that and worn the hair shirt. Per might as well have told me he was giving up teaching to retrain as a cooper. Yet he had spilt his seed on my stony soil – I’m going to have a word with him about that when we next meet – and there it lay awaiting germination.
My wife Birna and I travelled, settled, bought a house. One Christmas a card from Per dropped on the doormat – he had met a new woman, been promoted to head of languages, and what he had learnt and felt while treading the hallowed path to Santiago had been the catalyst to it all. I thought, Well, good for him. Here was a man whose life had been a bit of a mess, and a nice long walk in Spain had helped him clear his head and sort things out. My life, pleasingly, was not a mess. But then we had a child, and then children, and suddenly it sort of was.
Pushing forty, or rather being pulled brutally towards it, I had felt the usual twinges of angst; not quite a what-does-it-all-mean existential crisis, perhaps, but the vague sense that my soul-ometer might benefit from a little recalibration. I’d find myself sitting on a Tube train with a Boots carrier bag on my lap, wondering how ‘Ideas for Life’ had triumphed as the under-logo corporate slogan, rather than ‘Just a Bloody Chemist’. The Power of Dreams, Engineered with Passion, Because You’re Worth It: all these preposterously overblown mission statements suddenly seemed the anthem of a consumerist society disappearing up its own two-for-one arse. But then what were my Ideas for Life? Why was personal growth just something I read about in medico–sexual junk emails?
Responsibility for three young humans sharpened concerns over the poverty of my spiritual bequest, and the mirror wasn’t shy in emphasising that I really ought to get my immaterial affairs in order for the next generation. With empathy furrowing my brow I read an interview in which Bob Geldof desc
ribed the improbable tipping point that had caused him to reappraise his own life values: his innard-withering dismay on hearing a daughter tell two visiting classmates not to put their cup in that rack of the dishwasher, as her dad was very particular about how it should be stacked. ‘Was that really all I’d taught my children?’ he asked himself in anguish. ‘How to stack the fucking dishwasher?’
For this unkempt firebrand is describing a discipline in which I give quarter to no man, and outside that warm, white door it only gets worse. Has Bob browbeaten his family into ensuring that every Biro in the jar by the phone is correctly placed nib down? Does he press-gang and dispatch a junior litter patrol into the foot wells after a long journey? Are the perishable contents of his fridge arranged in order of sell-by date from the top shelf to— Oh, make it stop.
The medieval pilgrims did what they did because they believed. As a cop-out cynic, what did I believe in? I couldn’t even start the relevant sentence without finding myself sniggering through a Celine Dion chorus. Despite the fact that we had named our eldest son Christian Holy (well, in Icelandic), my exposure to the Scriptures has been limited to the Lord’s Prayer and The Omen. My solitary religious pursuit was at best metaphorical, the scrupulous quest for precision regarding the time within my house and the meteorological conditions without. I don’t mean to boast, but I apparently do mean to reveal myself as a career dullard: even my oven clock is synchronised to Ceefax Mean Time, and I have the outside temperature projected on to my bedroom ceiling in insomnia-sized red numerals.
Sixty-one per cent of Americans agree with the statement ‘Life is meaningful only because God exists’; in Britain, you’d only match that figure by sticking ‘alcoholic fermentation’ in there instead. Empirical knowledge, understanding the world through observable fact and experiment, might have killed off traditional religious belief as a mass phenomenon in twenty-first-century Europe. But without pledging myself to Hare Krishna or L. Ron Hubbard, it might be nice to imbue life with a little more . . . depth.
Per’s seed was beginning to crack and swell, but it took two newspaper features to force that frail stem up through the crust of shrugging inertia to unfurl majestically before a new dawn. The first was a poll in USA Today, which listed Santiago at number six in its top ten ‘great places to rejuvenate your soul’. I can’t remember where I read the second, but let its topic and salient revelation never be forgotten: prominent amongst the world’s cheapest holidays was walking the camino, the pilgrim road across north-west Spain.
I found myself tentatively introducing Santiago into conversation, testing the holy water, and discovered a popularity in excess of all expectation. People would say, ‘Oh, I know someone who did that.’ Usually it was their yoga teacher, but not always. A bloke who painted my parents’ house had walked the camino to get over a divorce, encountering en route the young French girl who was now his wife. I learnt that a friend of ours, Nicky Chambers, had cycled to Santiago six summers before with an unconventional fellow thrice her years, in search of something spiritual; serenaded by a choir as she slept in a pilgrims’ dormitory above a church, she had found it. ‘A died-and-gone-to-heaven experience,’ was the conclusion when I quizzed her on the phone, and despite the explosion of derisive merriment which thereafter assailed my left ear I found myself impressed.
If a common theme was emerging to these crusades, then it was the search for something beyond the typical tourist routine, an antidote to the vacuous consumerism of contemporary travel. A trip to the moral high ground – I hear the view’s excellent from up there. ‘Pilgrimage’, even more so than ‘sabbatical’ and ‘retreat’, added an instant gloss of worthy righteousness to what on the face of it was just a very long holiday. Plus, three years on from the monstrous bike ride round France that represented my last proper workout, I was at the stage of my athletic career where triumph meant successfully returning the big Le Creuset to that shelf above the fridge–freezer. A physical service was long overdue, and this one came with a spiritual overhaul thrown in.
A structured rationale was taking shape in my mind’s eye, and I liked what I saw. A trip purged of the empty decadence that characterised most foreign trips, yet still demanded alcoholic indulgence in the name of historical authenticity. A holiday that wasn’t a holiday, even though it involved going to Spain. A journey of transcendental discovery that was also a stiff but sensible aerobic challenge, and whose inherent asceticism had the happy side benefit of economy. A medieval tale retold for our times, but at 1350 prices.
One
It’s 500 miles from St Jean Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela near the north-western coast of Spanish Galicia. From the dawn of the last millennium until its final quarter, countless millions walked this route as the final leg of an epic hike from their own dusty thresholds, partly to stretch their legs in one of Europe’s most scenically appealing regions, and partly for remission of accumulated sins and a consequently more benign afterlife. Their goal was the cathedral in which were housed the crumbly mortal remains of Santiago, the patron saint of Spain: St James, as anyone who recalls Judith Keppel’s progress towards the first top prize on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? will be aware.
The fourth apostle recruited by Jesus, James was hardly an obvious choice for a thousand-year personality cult: so volubly stroppy his fellow fishermen nicknamed him and his similarly ill-tempered brother John ‘sons of thunder’, so petulantly arrogant he demanded to be placed at the Son of God’s right-hand side in paradise. When he was dispatched westwards by his doomed master on an evangelical mission, these attributes helped ensure that by the time James wound up on the left-hand tip of the Roman Empire, in north-west Spain, he had somehow managed to attract just seven disciples. That mouth clearly did him no favours after his return to the Holy Land: in AD 44 he became the first of the apostles to experience the afterlife, beheaded on the orders of Herod Agrippa.
Still, a martyr is a martyr, and after being sneaked out of Jerusalem, James’s body was taken by sea to Galicia, terminus of his inefficient prophetic crusade. If I reveal that this voyage was made in an unmanned vessel hewn from solid marble, you will begin to understand that we are now on a voyage of our own: a journey beyond the shores of Factland, now gingerly skirting the Cape of Myth, now steaming gaily through the Straits of Arrant Cobblers. (Precisely where this figurative journey of ours set sail is a matter beyond sensitive debate, though for contextual ends I’ll point out the lack of even biblical back-up for James’s previous visit to Spain.)
Washed up on the beach – a beach littered with the scallop shells that came to symbolise Santiago – Jim’s hefty aquatic hearse is met by a divinely forewarned army of disciples, perhaps all seven of them. His body is promptly absorbed into a large stone slab, before being carted away by oxen for interment on a hillside significant only for its peculiar remoteness: an ox-whacking 25 miles from the shore.
Despite the many arresting features of its history, Jim’s final resting place is quickly lost, and lost so completely that it takes 750 years to find it. By then the Romans have given way to Visigoths, who in turn are handing over the Hispanic reins to the Moors, rushing up from North Africa with Europe-alarming haste: by the early eighth century, Spain finds itself almost completely under Muslim control. I say almost, for in their impatience to get at the French they overlook a few Christian huddles hunkered down in the northern mountains. One might draw parallels with Asterix’s home village in Gaul, neglectfully unconquered by the surrounding Romans. And if one did, one would be more right than one supposed.
The embattled Christian guerrillas begin fighting back, assisted by Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor in waiting, who crosses the Pyrenees to harry the Moors. Yet it’s still proving difficult to form a front line across northern Spain, a bridgehead for the Christian Reconquest to start pushing the heathens back to Africa. If only there was something or someone to rally around, a figurehead to unify not only the various anti-Muslim factions in Sp
ain, but focus righteous, fund-raising wrath across the Christian world. If only we could find some— What’s that, old hermit type? You saw stars twinkling over a cave on a hillside? You went in there and dug up these bones? Here, Bishop Teodomiro, check this skelly out. Really? Well, that’s a result. What about these other two? Fair enough. Hey, everyone: we’ve just found Santiago! And, like, a couple of other stiffs who are probably his disciples or something.
In a slightly random, Life of Brian way, it was all in place. Campus stellae, field of stars: Santiago de Compostela. The body of St James, a proper apostle, was one of the most prized relics in Christendom – two of them, in fact, because along with the humble Santiago Peregrino, Pilgrim Jim, the pilgrim’s pilgrim, we now had the parallel promotion of Santiago Matamoros, James the Moor-slayer. Riding out of the sky astride his white charger, Big Bad Jim was regularly spotted dispatching the heathen foe in splendid profusion: no fewer than 60,000 kills to his name at the (probably fictitious) Battle of Clavijo in 852. A mascot for the cuddly Christians who sought to love their neighbours, and an insatiable psychopath for those who’d sooner decapitate them.
It was this broad fan base, tempted from their homes by a praise-one-get-one-free pilgrimage, that made Santiago de Compostela one of the Christian world’s must-sees. The local king, Alfonso, built a church and monastery on the site, around which a city began to grow up. The first authenticated pilgrims arrived in the late ninth century, and by the mid-tenth the Camino de Santiago was already an institution. At its twelfth-century peak, with anti-Moor Christian fundamentalism rampant and the crusades in full flow, it has been estimated that between 250,000 and 1,000,000 pilgrims were arriving in Santiago every year; even more in a Holy Year, when Jim’s feast day, 25 July, fell on a Sunday. (By papal decree, pilgrims arriving in a Holy Year received total remission, a plenary indulgence, for all previous badnesses committed. Notch up the pilgrimage hat-trick – Santiago, Rome, Jerusalem – and you could build up a credit balance, Sin Miles redeemable against the perpetration of future wrongness.)