The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

model Cervantes had in mind for his Don Quixote. * Alonso Quijada, who was an uncle of the wife of Cervantes, entered the Benedictine Order and lived in Toledo, but he was as fantastic an eccentric as his ancestor Don Gutierre, and he became so absorbed in the books of chivalry that he believed that the deeds told of Amadis and his knights were Gospel truth. And so we may link the Passage Honourable of Suero de Quiñones through Gutierre de Quijada with the exploits of the Knight of the Rueful Figure, and Cervantes himself in Chapter 49 of Part I admits his hero’s ancestry.
    The bridge, whose oldest arches, according to Gómez Moreno, belong to the thirteenth century, became celebrated all over Christendom when Suero de Quiñones, the spiritual forerunner of Don Quixote, conceived his fantastic notion of running seven hundred and twenty-seven courses a Voutrance against all knights in the world. The Passage Honourable, however, possesses for us a deeper significance, for it illustrates the pundonor and self-respect that have always been, as Richard Ford said, the keystones of character in the individually brave Spaniard, who is ever ready, when personal considerations are at stake, to find a quarrel in a straw and think it but an easy leap to ‘pluck bright honour from the pale-faced Moon’. And Richard Ford, quoting the well-worn proverb sanan cuchilladas pero no malas palabras, criticizes the touchy sensitiveness of the Spanish hidalgo, whose quixotic porcupine fretfulness, he says, is a drawback to social intercourse. *
    Nevertheless, the vast majority of foreign travellers and pilgrims have always paid tribute to the Spaniard for his courteous manners. The reason for this national trait I believe springs from his innate individualism. So conscious is he of his own solitariness that he respects it in others. He knows that he is a desert dweller in the midst of his immense meseta and that he must live out his life like a lonely watcher. Hence his cult of manliness and his particular concept of honour: the honour of the Spaniard, as many have shown, is the pathos or passion of the lone individual. He neither seeks nor offers pity, because he wants to be, as Unamuno says, ‘nada menos que todo un hombre’, a man who can stand on his own feet and fight for himself.
    As I plod through this parched land with its yellow earthen pueblos I feel that the first-century geographer Strabo’s book on Spain was as useful as Richard Ford or Borrow, so little has the fundamental matriarchal civilization of this strange region of León, wedged in between Asturias and the mountains of the Bierzo, changed in two thousand years. For matriarchal its civilization remains today, in spite of the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors, the Jacobean foreign pilgrims and the jousters of the Paso Honroso itself. In the fields through which the road passes I see women, not men, working under the blazing copper pall of the noonday sun. When I expressed surprise to a beady-eyed, talkative old man to whom I stood a glass of wine in the pueblo of Órbigo he replied: “Señor, you are in the country of the Maragatos where it is Eve who ploughs, sows and reaps, and it is Adam who stays at home and spins. Here we have a proverb which runs:

    Hace la mujer en León
    del hombre la obligación.

    (The women in León
    do the work of men.)

    “Don Suero was a smart lad, I’m thinking, and he must have been a Maragato, for he left his wife at home, and he came here and posted himself by the bridge, where he knew he would meet the noblest and richest pilgrims on their way to the tomb of the Apostle. He knew, too, that if they were able to stomach the miracles of St. James they would believe any moonshine, and so he spun them the yam about the iron fetter his lady had clamped on his neck. Ah well, señor, God works by devious ways, and man lives not by bread alone.”
    Shaking his hand and muttering to himself, the old man hobbled away tapping his stick against the kerb.
    After leaving Puente de Órbigo the road ascends to a height whence one can see in the distance, throned on an eminence, the city of Astorga. In Roman days it was an imperial colony and the centre of Roman legions. Later it became the spoil of the Barbarian and the chattel of Almanzor who mutilated, but did not destroy it. Later still it was the bone of contention between Castilians and Leónese. Today it does not preserve even the shadow of its former greatness: even its castellated