Pilgrim's Road

brought along a ‘real pilgrim’ to their feast. Don Pablo responded that if that was the case then I would be fed and wined for nothing, as that was the custom.
    At whose charge finally I dined I am unsure, but there was no doubt as to who was the guest of honour at the feast. The seat at the head of the table was left vacant for St James, and my handlebar bag with its large scallop shell was commandeered to represent him. I didn’t write down the details of the meal at the time, and my mind is now a blank about what exactly I ate. I know that it was very good and that course followed course as befits a banquet, and that the wine was served from brown jugs, but all other details escape me because there was so much talk and so many questions to answer. Many of the Belgians were around my age; they put in a lot of time and effort they said to have ‘authentic and meaningful holidays’, and clearly money was no problem to them. But what I was doing, taking off on my own, travelling under my own steam impressed them as something special. ‘How can you take such risks?’ they asked. I was at a loss as to how to respond. I have made dangerous journeys, certainly, but I wouldn’t have included the Santiago pilgrimage among these, at least not in any physical sense. If there were dangers then they were more subtle, more to do with having ideas challenged, attitudes changed.
    After lunch Don Pablo made a great show of stamping my certificación de paso as a further object of interest for the tourists, and with everyone just a little glazed with the abundant rich food and wine, we made our final farewells. They would be back in Belgium long before I reached Santiago.
    Before I left Villalcázar I had the chance to see the church in more detail when Don Pablo spotted the sacristan and asked him to unlock it again for me. It was a wonderful interior, and I particularly wanted to see again the huge altarpiece painted with scenes from the life of Christ. To do this required the use of a hundred-peseta piece to light it, and when the sacristan saw me fish one out, he snatched it from my hand, pocketed it and substituted a piece of base metal instead. When I left the church, however, he presented me with my second white carnation of the day. I don’t know if I would have found all this so delightfully in keeping with the tradition of the pilgrimage had I not been feeling so relaxed and expansive. But in spite of the obvious tourist hype, Villalcázar had provided more sense of the medieval than many other places on the Camino, and I rode away from it feeling deeply at peace with my fellow men.
     

10
     
    Mostly Pilgrims
     
    T HE splendidly named Carrion de los Condes, a town associated with the legend of El Cid and approved of by Aimery Picaud, was only four miles down the road, but as the celebratory lunch with the Belgians had taken up most of the afternoon, I could not have gone much further. Nor would I have thought it wise to make strenuous efforts on top of such a meal.
    The refugio was in the house of the parish priest, which adjoined the church of Santa María del Camino whose worn Romanesque carvings on the south portal were supposed to depict the hundred Christian virgins given to the Moors as the yearly tribute before the Battle of Clavijo put an end to the practice. The dormitory was attached to the north wall of the church and had the strange decoration of a row of gargoyles leering above the beds. It was quite a contrast to the flesh pots of Villalcázar, and somehow the austerity of it made me decide it would be a good idea to wash a little more thoroughly than I had been doing recently, even though the water was the same freezing temperature as in most refugios. It was an exercise that required a good deal of firmness, especially as I decided to wash my hair as well. The water was so cold that I doubt I could have held my head under the tap long enough to rinse off the shampoo had I not concentrated hard on St Cuthbert and all those ascetic Celtic saints. By the time I finished, it felt as though an iron band had been clamped tightly around my skull.
    The reward for this minor mortification of the flesh was that it felt wonderful just to go outside where the temperature was, as usual, several degrees higher than indoors. Picaud describes Carrion de los Condes as ‘industrious and prosperous, rich in bread and wine and meat and all fruitfulness.’ Its river, the Rio Carrion, was also one to which he