Spanish Steps Read online

  At a time when there were fewer than 65 million Europeans, with an average life expectancy of perhaps thirty-five, the demographic implications are arresting: by one calculation (yes – it’s mine) between a fifth and a third of the medieval populace would at some time have paid personal homage to St James. As the Council of Europe noted when declaring the camino its first Cultural Route, ‘the Compostela pilgrimage is considered the biggest mass movement of the Middle Ages’.

  Google-based curiosity was hardening into something like intent, and this new level of preparation was soundtracked by the weighty thump of footnoted product of academic industry on doormat. An early casualty of the reading was my Monty Python image of pilgrims as a brainwashed corpus of robotic, masochistic zealots: though that Get Out of Hell Free card was clearly top of the Santiago bill, it was difficult to generalise about the pilgrims’ motivations. The sick – the horribly, medievally sick – were lured by the hope of miraculous cure. So too the troubled: Thomas Becket himself recommended the pilgrimage to a woman who feared herself possessed by Satan. The curious came for education and adventure – Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, no sombre devotee, visited twice in the late 1300s (accurately fictional, as lone women of good repute were a pilgrimage rarity). The naughty came to plunder this invitingly vulnerable tourist army, by violence or deception; and if they were caught, they might come again, as criminals given the option of walking to Santiago in lieu of a less appealing punishment. (Actually, they’d have been strung up and left to rot by the road – on the medieval rap sheet only those guilty of less straightforward crimes would have been spared the noose, such as the Surrey adulteress who in 1325 was given the choice of visiting Santiago or ‘being beaten with rods six times around various churches’.)

  Some were sent by their village to seek heavenly relief from famine or pestilence, and some by indolent lords and masters on a sort of pilgrimage-by-proxy. Your pain, my gain: by papal edict, the sin-remission was granted to whoever’s name decorated what was by now known as the compostela, the commemorative certificate granted at journey’s end. At Santiago, the good, the bad and the ugly came together.

  And they came from the furthest-flung corners of the known world, or at least the well-known world. God-fearing, foolhardy pilgrims set off for Santiago not just from France, Italy, Britain and Germany but Greece, Poland and Hungary. One of the earliest pilgrim accounts tells of a Viking’s trip to Compostela in 970; an Armenian hermit recorded his visit in 983. As their paths converged and their numbers grew, so recognised routes were first trodden bare, then developed. The main route from northern Europe wound through western France and nipped over the Pyrenees just past the town of St Jean Pied-de-Port; gradually joined by other paths from the Mediterranean side, it proceeded ever westwards as the Camino Frances, the French Way, largely following roads laid down by the Romans.

  Dropping coins on inn table and collection plate, all pilgrims left a thin trail of gold behind them, and some laid down a fat seam of it. Driven by piety and PR, medieval notables from St Francis of Assisi to El Cid walked to Santiago and most made conspicuous donations. Particularly the procession of monarchs, who arrived in such profusion that the Camino Frances became also known as the Camino Real, the Royal Way. Prince Sigurd of Norway, Louis IX of France, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain: all keen to display their credo credentials, perhaps keener still to promote the fight against the forces of anti-Catholicism. (Our own Edward I copped out by sending a proxy, and Henry II, having sworn to the Pope that he’d pay personal homage to St James, later quietly switched to the less onerous Canterbury option.) If local entrepreneurship provided the inns and taverns that catered for a pilgrim’s physical needs, then the spiritual infrastructure, the gilded, jewelled shrines that sustained their faith along the way, was built by the wealth of kings and their noble henchmen. So too the network of fortified monasteries and churches that offered a haven from the Moors, and the castles dispatching the soldiery that provided protection in its more proactive form.

  In 997 Moorish raiders turned Santiago over and nicked its hallowed bells: they were put to contemptuous use as olive-oil containers in the southern city of Cordoba until the Christians nicked them back 240 years later. Yet by the twelfth century the northern road to Compostela – the Way of St James, the Camino Real, the Camino de Santiago – was largely secure from heathen attack, and prospered not just as a holy procession but as a trade route. The grain and wool merchants of Navarre and Castille were now able to export their produce in confidence: wealth begat wealth, and in gratitude they too funded the cathedrals.

  With the Moorish menace receding over the southern horizon, the hard-nosed religio-political rationale that had underpinned every cobble along the camino was now itself eroded. More and more would-be pilgrims were opting for a sort of no-win, no-fee approach: they would beseech St James from the comfort of their own homes, and if the leprosy cleared up, or it started raining, then it was off to Santiago in cheerful gratitude. With the urgent zeal diluted, penitential piety degenerated into tourist loutism: scuffles began breaking out at the Santiago altar, sometimes over queue-jumping at the apostle’s tomb, sometimes on crude racial lines, sometimes so bloody that more than once the cathedral had to close for re-consecration. Papal intervention was required to clamp down on stalls flogging ‘spurious’ scallop shells and other dubious souvenirs in the cathedral square. Professional beggars and quack doctors were beginning to ply their ignoble trade along the route in growing numbers; Louis XIV forbade his subjects from walking to Santiago because of the number of pickpockets, false priests and harlots. ‘Go a pilgrim, return a whore,’ declared an arresting adage. The golden age was at an end.

  For the first time Christian Europeans began to think the unthinkable, and even to write the unwritable. ‘There is not one haire nor one bone of Saint James in Spayne in Compostell,’ carped sixteenth-century British traveller Andrew Borde – and that was while he was on his way there as a pilgrim. The Reformation, and the resultant establishment of Protestantism across much of northern Europe, turned the pilgrim tap down from a multinational flood to a steady stream of Frenchmen and Italians. The religious scepticism fostered by science and the philosophical Enlightenment in the eighteenth century reduced the stream to a trickle; the infrastructure of Church-run pilgrim sanctuaries, the refugios and hospitals where walkers found succour in all its forms, collapsed in 1835 after the Spanish state seized and sold almost all property and land from the major religious orders.

  Hidden in 1588 lest Sir Francis Drake follow up his routing of the Armada with a relic-pillaging raid, the bones of Santiago were lost once more. A trio of skeletons turned up under the cathedral floorboards in 1884, but even when the Pope hastily confirmed them as those of Jim and his two disciples, no one was really listening. The sacred way that had for long centuries resounded to the shuffle and thump of holy footsteps fell quiet, and much was gradually reclaimed by nature: by the 1950s, anyone intending to follow the route needed a tent, a compass and a machete. An American who walked from St Jean to Santiago in 1982 found herself regularly stumbling about in dark and forested circles, untroubled by human company save the occasional old soldier fulfilling a wartime vow to some heavenly saviour.

  Anywhere else but Spain the whole business might perhaps have been forgotten altogether, and with some relief, as the shaming embodiment of religious extremism and intolerance. But because the Spanish still pelt each other with tomatoes in God’s name, and christen their boys Santiago and their girls Camino, it wasn’t. Built by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Hostal de Los Reyes Católicos in Santiago’s cathedral square might have been converted from the grandest of all pilgrim hospitals to a ponced-up hotel favoured by Julio Iglesias, but by obscure decree the management still fulfilled an ancient obligation. Turn up at its regal reception in your filthy road-clothes with a compostela in your hand, and its management would serve you a complimentary meal, in fact three of them, every day for three days. Whatever they say abo
ut free lunches, I could taste them already.

  Two

  If the Confraternity of St James suggested some sinister Masonic sect, then its Pilgrim Workshop had the ring of enforced labour in an airless peat-fired foundry. Almost a disappointment, then, to walk into a South London church hall one Saturday morning in early March and find it filled not with hooded moaning and the laboured wheeze of heavy bellows, but quilted gilets and Styrofoam cups of Nescafé.

  A few shrewd-eyed, wild-haired academic types, two pairs of doughty bluestockings, a couple of note-scribbling loners and plenty of apple-cheeked, fol-de-ree fleece fanatics: this was the Continental arm of the Ramblers Association. Looking around and finding myself very possibly the youngest delegate, I contemplated the enduring truth that this pilgrimage was a senior pastime. The typical medieval pilgrim wasn’t a king or a bishop but a serf, a man who would only have been given permission to set out for Santiago once his master had worked him to the end of his productive life. In those days that would have been about forty-five; we might have raised the retirement bar a little since then but nearly all those around me were still wage slaves granted their belated freedom. On cue, a check-shirted greybeard who’d just walked to Santiago from Canterbury (‘Mmm – now that’s the way to do it,’ came an approving mutter) rose to address the hundred-odd pilgrim wannabees.

  ‘Hardness of heart and selfishness,’ he said, sweeping the room with eyes abruptly aglow. ‘These are your stones; leave them at Santiago.’

  Well, that was slightly more like it. It had been proving difficult to square these hearty nodders with the Camino de Santiago’s recent spiritual resurgence, a renaissance that saw the number of annual pilgrims soar from 2,500 in 1986 to 154,000 in the 1999 Holy Year. You could certainly imagine them volunteering to rewire a refugio, or to paint yellow arrows on walls and tarmac, the arrows that apparently now waymarked the route with almost overbearing efficiency. But not, I’d felt, participating in the sort of business that I’d recently been reading about in accounts of the contemporary pilgrimage experience.

  Would the small bearded fellow on my right have confided to a Californian anthropologist that whilst on the road to Santiago he had woken every morning with a painfully vast erection? Would that cardiganed librarian on my left have revealed to the same academic that throughout her pilgrimage the sound of church bells had brought her to shuddering orgasm? It was just possible to imagine the current speaker covering the entire route without eating, as I’d read that a German dentist had four years previously, but only just. And of course it was only a matter of time – seconds, perhaps – before I leapt to my feet and manifested a barefoot, filthy Shirley MacLaine, who would urge us all to make peace with our ancient emotions and live up to mankind’s moral obligation to seek joy.

  Endeavouring to trace the origins of the camino’s rebirth, I’d had to look back to its birth, and that meant going back beyond St James. If I started this quest believing religious faith to be a form of delusional madness, then I’d soon be encountering many other forms. Shirley MacLaine’s The Camino, loosely billed as an account of her walk from St Jean to Santiago, mentions St James only twice, five pages from the start and five pages from the end. For Shirley, and not only for Shirley, the pilgrimage’s roots go deeper: the route is at least as old as the Celts, a route along – inhale, exhale – telluric ley lines, a route that lies directly under the Milky Way and ends not at Santiago, but further west, on the coast at Finisterre.

  Finis terra, end of the earth – as Celtic geographers had calculated, this jutting promontory formed the left-hand edge of the known world (it seems unfair to criticise them for overlooking the rather more westward tip of Ireland, though if they hadn’t their Gaelic brethren would have been saved a bit of a hike). The Celts were big on solar worship, and it’s tempting to regard the camino’s undeviating drive to that western-most cliff as a beeline to the sunset of sunsets. Certainly, some of the cairns built up from stones left by passing walkers have been dated to pre-Roman times.

  Shirley, most notable of the tens of thousands of Americans who have arrived in Santiago the hard way since the pilgrimage’s renaissance, walked the camino to – and clearly I quote – understand the destructive fragmentation of our own souls. ‘Thus I came to believe that the surface of the earth is the matter and form through which a higher subtle electromagnetic spiritual energy flows,’ begins the second paragraph of her book; later highlights include ‘I decided my stick was male’, ‘Taureans like to run with ankle weights on’ and ‘Was life my gorilla?’. Shirley is accompanied much of the way by an angel who smells of vanilla, reveals assassinated Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme as the reincarnation of Charlemagne, and describes at length – indeed for well over half the book’s 307 pages – her own amoeba-like birth in a tank filled with gold liquid, at some unknown point in cosmic history, in the now submerged realm of Lemuria (where the temperature never falls below 52°F and multicoloured electromagnetic lizards share the sky with extraterrestrial crystal transporters).

  Shirl’s is a book so mad it howls at the moon, a book that with any name on its cover but that of a Hollywood legend would have had orderlies with soft, placatory smiles knocking on the author’s door. Yet The Camino has inspired countless pilgrimages, and reaching the last page (a page I’m ashamed to say now features a large ballpoint bird shrieking ‘CUCKOO!’ into a speech bubble) I thought I understood why. Just as I’d envy any full-on Christians I’d meet for their appealing belief in an eternal paradise, so, in a less straightforward fashion, I envied Shirley: an understanding of one’s destiny in life, enhanced etheric vibrations in the brain, the multidimensional presence of gnomes, fairies and trolls – what’s not to like?

  New Age mysticism offered answers to those big questions previously taken care of by organised religion: this was the pilgrimage’s growth area. At its radical Shirlean fringe were those who believed that coded messages had been left along the camino for us to find and unravel, that the extraordinary number of towns it passed through featuring the Spanish word for ‘goose’ in their names (um, two) linked it, in some mysterious manner tantalisingly beyond our current comprehension, to a traditional board-based pastime entitled the Game of the Goose.

  In the mainstream were those content to ally themselves to the catch-all view I’d read in one introduction, that ‘the camino represents the human desire to seek beyond the self, to delve deeper into the soul’. A little mystery, some embedded energy – in any event, there was just something about the camino, its cosmic ambience, its pagan and post-pagan history. You walked it and you walked in the shadow of the past. Surely all those millions of medieval devotees had left behind something more than mere footprints.

  These were the people who went to Santiago and embraced the apostle’s gilded statue as tradition demanded, then caught the bus on to Finisterre, burnt their clothes on the beach and ran nude into the crashing Atlantic. These, in fact, were my people, and one of them was up before me now, talking of inner transformation, of repaid kindnesses.

  ‘When you get up to the altar and hug St James,’ concluded the check-shirt in an air of sermonising drama, ‘you’re bonding old and new friends into the new you.’

  I looked around the room: the new him, the new her, the new them . . . the new me. Was I really ready for this, or the slightly overbearing eye contact that seemed to go with it? ‘I guess I’m hoping it will change me,’ whispered the little man beside me in a matching voice as we rose for our coffee break. ‘I don’t know if that’s scary or not.’ One thing was certain: doing this walk never made anyone less weird.

  Blowing steam off my Nescafé I mingled uncertainly with proto-pilgrims motivated by unhappiness, perhaps even a slice of spiritual desperation: people who didn’t like themselves, and wanted to do something about it. ‘Religion is for those who are scared of hell,’ I now remembered reading. ‘Spirituality is for those who have been there.’ This wasn’t just a long hike – somehow, though with a twenty-first-centu
ry twist, it remained a transcendental, life-altering experience. ‘It’s a kind of catharsis for tremendous grief or personal shame,’ said someone behind me, and I almost retched with foreboding. ‘The real camino only starts after you get back,’ announced the veteran of a recent pilgrimage, a woman whose intense features seemed at odds with the mellowness of her words. ‘These days I think about why I’m doing something, and the consequences when I’ve done it.’ People were talking about solitude and solidarity, about finding ‘a whole new set of things to learn’. Could I handle that? A tall order, certainly, for a brain that’s been steadily leaking facts and knowledge since about 1982. Learning curves have become learning cliffs. Three years I’ve had that Volvo, and I’m still indicating an intention to turn right by squirting foam all over the rear window.

  It was a relief to take my seat once more for the technical workshop, to shift from chicken soup for the soul to Deep Heat for the feet. No sooner had we all settled than a red-faced woman leapt from her chair and, with a savage rip of parted Velcro, violently severed her trouser legs at the knee. ‘Two pairs in one,’ she barked. ‘Now, who wants to see my self-inflating mattress?’

  For a middle-aged Englishman this was safe ground, home territory, and I wasn’t the only one happy to find myself there. Those around me oohed over a rucksack with integral water hood, championed the multifunctional utility of the safety pin, argued keenly over poncho designs. ‘Can we talk blisters?’ someone piped up, eliciting a hall-wide chorus of pent-up enthusiasm.

  In its way, this particular debate proved more unsettling than the transcendental module. Prevention was all well and good – wear synthetic socks, soak your feet in surgical spirit – but oh, how much more rewardingly hard core, more medievally authentic, was the cure. ‘Obviously if there’s fluid under it you’ll just jab that out with a needle and stitch it up,’ intoned a weather-beaten three-timer. Obviously? Just? ‘But what a lot of people forget is to leave the thread under the skin,’ and here he fixed his hard, candid eyes on my saucered counterparts, ‘to wick away the badness.’