The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

his pilgrimage thirty-six days later he finds his son’s body hanging on the gibbet, but he is still alive, for the Saint has held him up all the time. It is, senor, one of the so-called great miracles of Santiago.”
    “And was there a cock and a hen that crowed in vindication of the miracle, when the judge was about to carve them at the dinner table?”
    “Ah, for that, señor, you must continue your pilgrimage. When you reach the town of Santo Domingo de la Calzada you will see the cock and the hen in a cage at the back of the church. When this statue was carved for the church of San Cernín the miracle had not yet been located in the town of St. Dominic and neither the white cock nor the white hen had entered the story.”
    I was excited by what the old priest had told me, for I had again discovered the trail of the legend which I had heard in Toulouse of the German pilgrims and the hanged boy. I straightway rushed off to find the French pilgrims. When I told them the story the Professor said in his Gasconading voice:
    “Quelle belle histoire: it has always warmed my heart to think that the saligaud of an innkeeper at the end took the boy’s place on the gibbet. Hoteliers or Venteros, they are all birds of the same feather; hanging is too good for them. But, a propos de bottes, you never said anything about the roast cock and hen that crowed. Your story reminds me that I am famished. My mouth waters for a poulet au riz a I’ espagnole.”

BASQUE WITCHES

    No sooner did my Basque friends hear that I was passing through Pamplona than they did their best to turn me from the straight road of St. James. “Get thee behind me Satan,” I said to myself when one message after another came inviting me to San Sebastian, Zumaya, Azpeitia, and Zumârraga. Others, subtler in their temptation, urged me to leave Aymery Picaud’s route and follow the Basque Jacobean road by Iran, Hemani, Villabona, Tolosa, Villafranca, Zalduendo, Salvatierra, Vitoria, Miranda de Ebro, Pancorbo, Briviesca and so on to Burgos. That route I had followed on various occasions, and it had been the road followed by Manier, the peasant from Picardy, in 1726 who went into ecstasies over the beauty of the girls and matrons of Iran with their flowing tresses, their blue and red bodices and fine bonny faces. 33 I was undecided what to do, but an affectionate telephone message from my compadre, Don Tomas Alfaro, from Fuenterrabia sent all my doubts away and I found myself some hours later in his car speeding up the road from Pamplona to the frontier town of Fuenterrabía.
    My short visit to Fuenterrabia coincided with a characteristic Basque minstrel gathering given by a farmer, and friend of my host Don Tomás who lived in an ancient farmhouse on the slopes of Mount Jaizkibil. The air was thundery and from time to time there were flashes of lightning. The Mayor of Fuenterrabia who was sitting beside me told me that the haunting sadness of the landscape on the mountain probably was the reason why the slope near the stream of Santa Barbara had been the scene of the aquelarre or Witches’ Sabbat in centuries gone by, which led to a celebrated witch trial in 1530, the documents of which are preserved in the archives of Fuenterrabia.
    Memories of the Basque folklorist Don Resurrección de Askue rose before me but were interrupted by the arrival of the minstrels. They consisted of an accordion player and a saxophonist. The accordion-player—a romantic-looking young man with the profile of Alfred de Musset—was a singer as well as instrumentalist, and he soon roused the company by his repertory of the latest music-hall and jazz, which he varied with humorous anecdotes of smuggling and estraperlo or black-marketing and occasionally he would sing Basque songs collected by the greatest of Basque composers, Father Donostia, the Capuchin, who lives in the College at Leikaroz. The gaiety of the company rose to an uproar when the saxophonist, who possessed an uncanny technique, began a most amusing series of distortions of celebrated classical and popular tunes for which that sardonic and peevish instrument was admirably suited.
    At the beginning of the fiesta, there was a certain amount of formality, as is usual among the Basques, for our company included a good many fishermen, who generally keep exclusively to their own confraternity when drinking in the fisherman’s tavern called Arrinchalé (fisherman’s corner). There was my old friend the fat, genial