The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

neither a Galician, an Asturian nor a Basque, did not believe in ghosts and had read Calderon’s play, La Dama Duende (The Ghostly Lady), which ridicules the belief in such superstitions. The two members of the audience held opposite views. One, an Asturian, held strongly that ghosts were inoffensive spirits who haunted houses which had been for a long time untenanted and were probably the product of unhealthy vapours which rise in such places. People may hear sounds coming from those houses, but will never see them. Often they can be heard at night time playing bowls, firing pebbles, and rattling chains. Occasionally they may even feed the cows in the stall, and even milk them, too. The other man who was a Maragato from Astorga took a much more serious view of ghosts, and he became excited as he gave instances of the way in which they persecuted people in their sleep. “I’ll not be able to sleep a wink this night after the story you’ve told us,” he said. “As it is I’m always afraid ghosts will attack me when I’m asleep and that they will smother my face and prevent me from breathing, or else suck my blood, and I knew a tramp in the mountains, a queer fellow he was, whom they would catch when he was by himself, and beat him black and blue: but when they were at him he could neither shout, nor speak nor move.”
    “What’s wrong with you, my son,” said Don Eusebio in his booming voice, “is that you eat too heavy a meal before you go to bed and you have nightmares.”
    El Morao, the cross-eyed guitarist, who had been strumming nonchalantly his guitar as a faint background to our arguing, suddenly stopped, leaned forward and said to Don Eusebio in his wheezy voice:
    “Señor Eusebio, give the poor devil this higa made of jet: ’tis infallible against the evil eye. I bought it in the azabacheria by the cathedral, when I was on a pilgrimage to Compostella in 1944.” Pulling out of his pocket a little jet hand, he handed it to Don Eusebio, who gave it to the superstitious Maragato, saying: “Take my advice, señor, when in trouble with ghosts best of all is to follow the words of wisdom written in the Great Book of St. Cyprian, who says that when persecuted by unholy spirits you must go to the nearest church, fill a bottle with holy water and keep it handy by the head of your bed at home, and every morning pour a few drops of it into the water in which you wash your face. If you do that you can ‘fig’ all the ghosts, trasgos and devils in hell itself.”

PULCHRA LEONINA

    Toledo en riqueza,
    Compostela en fortaleza,
    Y León en sutileza
    (old proverb)

    ‘Everyone has his own way of killing fleas ( cada uno tiene su modo de matar pulgas)’, says the Spaniard tolerandy, alluding to the vagaries of human nature and thereby implying that he is fatalistic about his fleas. In the old days when I roamed through Transylvania I developed such fatalism, but in recent years pampered living in Spain has made me thin-skinned, and a thin-skinned man is one who has bad fleas on him (tiene malas pulgas) and would exaggerate and make an elephant out of a flea (hacer un elefante de una pulga). The night I spent in the fonda in Mansilla de las Muías convinced me that my skin was thin, for Satan’s horses, as Gypsies call the fleas, banqueted upon my flesh. Having neglected to include Flit in my pilgrim scrip, I rose betimes and set out for León my next halting place.
    I was not the only traveller on the road in the early morning, for at the corner of the street I ran into a young pilgrim dressed in grey trousers and brown coat carrying his pack on his back, a guitar strung across his shoulder, and striding along singing.
    “You’re up early,” I said, “Quien canta, sus males espanta (singing drives away sorrows).”
    “Why not? The morning is the best for tramping, and I sing to get an appetite.”
    “How far are you going?”
    “All the way to Compostella, eventually, but in León I hope to meet my friends and we’ll all go on together.”
    The youth was a seasoned pilgrim, for he had walked all the way to Rome from his native city of Barcelona in the Holy Year. During his tramp through France and Italy he had picked up a surprising number of popular songs which he sang, accompanying himself on the guitar. He gave me graphic descriptions of mountaineering expeditions he had made with his companions of the alpine club in Barcelona. “I hate travelling alone,” he confided, “for we Catalan