The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

sterility. At the last moment the King decided to keep his old wife and Don Felipe married the cast-off princess, but she soon pined away and died. He married again, this time Doña Leonor Ruiz de Castro, but he never forgave his brother Alfonso the Wise for the wrong the latter had done to Christina of Norway and he became, like Alfonso’s son Sancho, a thorn in his flesh, stirring up one kingdom after another against him.
    Here in Villasirga, however, in spite of the presence of the Infante Felipe and his wife in their elaborately carved tombs, it is the spirit of the minstrel King Alfonso X, El Sabio, which bewitches me, for this is the shrine he celebrated again and again in his ‘Canticles to Our Lady’, in preference to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela against which he was prejudiced. There was here in the thirteenth century a miraculous Virgin who worked so many extraordinary cures that her shrine became a rival for a time to that of Santiago. Indeed many pilgrims, who had failed to be cured at the Apostle’s tomb in Compo-stella, regained their health here at Villasirga, and the Wise King tells us many tales of those miraculous cures in the Canticles. There was, for instance, the rich merchant from Germany who, owing to a long and painful illness, was reduced to beggary. One day seeing a great procession of his fellow countrymen setting out for Santiago de Compostela he begged them to take him with them, and they, knowing his great honesty, took pity on him and brought him along with them. But God did not allow him to be cured at Santiago. On the return journey the hapless pilgrim went blind and his companions forsook him and went on their way. But Our Lady heard his prayers and he was miraculously cured in this shrine of Villasirga.
    In Villasirga, even more than in Las Huelgas or in Toledo or Seville, I felt nearer to the spirit of that great king whose immense learning and science did not dim the naïve poetic vision he shared with lois humble subjects. Whenever he heard of a miracle that had happened to a pilgrim on the road to Santiago he would immediately see that it was turned into folk poetry in his beloved Galician-Portuguese dialect, which appealed to his lyrical nature, and then it would be set to music, not slow-moving chanting but to the dancing, dactylic measures of the Muiñeira which the people would sing, for in that way they would draw nearer to God.
    So long did I linger in the lovely church of Villasirga that I lost all notion of time, and I felt like the monk in the Canticle of Alfonso the Wise who was so enraptured by hearing a bird sing that he stayed listening to it in a garden for a hundred years.

THE OLD PILGRIM

    My meditations were disturbed by a man who slipped noiselessly into the church and knelt down in the gloom in front of the statue of Our Lady. For a moment I thought that I was suffering from a hallucination, for in the dim light of the flickering candles his face had an unearthly pallor and his matted grey hair and straggling beard made him look like a figure of Gregorio Hernandez. He was dressed in a rough unbleached habit and walked barefoot: by his side was his long staff and his broad-brimmed hat with the traditional shell. He remained for a long time absorbed in prayer, murmuring ejaculations in a voice that echoed through the silent church. When he rose to leave I followed him and asked him whether he, too, was on his way to Com-postella.
    “Yes, I am,” he answered, “but I hope my two feet will carry me there, for I’m getting old and feeble and there are days when rheumatic pains pierce me like knives.”
    “Where have you come from?” I asked.
    “Today from Burgos, but I’ve been a long time on the tramp, for I started in Bayonne.”
    “Where are you making for this evening?”
    “Carrión de los Condes.”
    As my next halting-place was Carrión we walked the road together. The old man was so much the embodiment of the mediaeval pilgrim with his habit, his broad hat, his long staff and bare feet that I felt ashamed of my modern clothes and my well-shod feet.
    ‘You made me ashamed of my self-indulgence,” I said, “for you are old and feeble, yet you martyrize your flesh and make your pilgrimage an expiation. You remind me of Alfonso El Sabio’s story of the good man from Toulouse who made a vow to carry on his journey a pilgrim’s staff weighing twenty-four pounds which he would place on the Apostle’s grave, but when he reached