The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

fees,” said my friend, “and is a devoted doctor, but his methods of treatment are original. As he knows all the family histories of his patients, he generally does not need to see them in his dispensary. Living as he does in the lower part of the town, which is built like an amphitheatre, he has only to walk out on his balcony to get into contact with his patients like a quack doctor on a stage, and possessing as he does a booming voice they gather in groups below in the plaza and he shouts their prescriptions to them one by one. Most of the men patients with minor ailments he treats summarily, saying to them: ‘Go away and wash yourself; all that’s wrong with you is dirt—inherited dirt, too, for your parents lived like pigs (guarros)!’ If one of them needed medicine he would shout the directions and throw him down a piece of paper with the prescription written on it. Every afternoon at three o’clock, after his dinner, he passed through the village carrying his huge white párasol and on his way women would waylay him asking for advice. One would roll up her sleeve and show him a boil, another would raise her skirt and show him a cut on her thigh. The doctor would pause, shout a few directions and plod onwards under his large parasol.
    Pepe Argüelles, on the other hand, had in Pravia a more ingenious method of dealing with his patients who lived in the tiny hamlets in the valley around the town. He worked out for them a system of semaphore signals, by which they hung sheets out of the window, a signal that someone in the house was very ill. Or else they put out a coloured skirt or petticoat—red for fever, blue for bronchitis, yellow for colic, and so on.
    It is an eerie experience to walk up the winding ‘ghost way’ through the town and up the cliff to the cemetery, and I never cared to do it alone, but I did it several times accompanied by an old fisherman called Xuanín in order to hear his stories. Xuanín, whom I used also to visit, was a tough, weather-beaten old salt who lived with his wife and five children in one of the rough old houses in what I used to call the ‘upper circle’, in the amphitheatre of the town. It was a surrealistic house and might have been designed by Heath Robinson. There were two entrances, a lower and an upper, for the path down to the town circled above the roof, twisted round the house and ran in front of the main door below. Through the upper door in the roof Xuanín’s mules on their return at sunset from the pastures entered into the loft of the house which was their stable, and by the hall door the family entered their kitchen and main living-room. Xuanín on ordinary days was inclined to be morose and self-centred, but on feast days, especially at the feria of San Pedro on June 29 and the feast of Santa Ana at the end of July, he became ecstatically drunk and beatifically indulgent and open-handed.
    Xuanín’s wife was extremely superstitious. When I asked her whether she believed in the Evil Eye she showed me a number of ciguas winch she used to sew on her children’s clothes when they were small She told me a story of a woman in Cudillero whom she knew: “a fine, plump, good-looking young woman she was until she came up against someone who was jealous and who cast the Evil Eye on her. She then began to get very ill, and we all told her to go and see the parish priest—Don Sixto it was, an old man, older even than Don Bernardo, but one who was said to exorcise the Evil Eye. When she went to him he said, ‘Surely you do not believe in such trumpery,’ but she replied that people had told her that she was under a spell. The priest then said to her: ‘Well, it can’t do you any harm to have my blessing and a few prayers por añadidura.’ So the priest put on his stole and blessed her, whereupon she felt better immediately, and did not have to seek the services of the local witch-curer, Doña Eugenia. Now, Doña Eugenia was a friend of the young woman and she said to her when she met her: ‘I see that you don’t need me to cure you, but I’ll tell you how you may recognize the woman who cast the Evil Eye on you. You must go the next fair day to Pravia and buy in the market a big new pot and bring it home with you to Cudillero holding it in your left hand close to your side. When you get home fill the jar with water and put it to boil. When the water boils the person who bewitched you will appear!’
    “The young woman did as she was told, and when