The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

I was and he begins to zigzag and cavort about the road like one daft. On comes the witch. Holy Smoke! She’s right above me, and I can see she’s trying to sweep down on me: in her hand I see a knife bigger than the one I carried in my bag. I then pulls one of them knives out of the bag and when she swoops down I slashes out at her. Suddenly the mule plunges and throws me off into the ditch and all fades away... Devil a thing I remember after that.
    “The boys from the village found me some hours later lying in the ditch as if I was stone dead. As for Benitillo, he never budged, but stood stock-still above me with his ears still twitching with the fear. Next morning when I awoke I hears the church bells tolling mournfully, and Patxi comes to see me, and says he: ‘Nemesio, man, what do you think happened at my home last night? When I returned I found the house all shut up and not a soul about. I knocked and knocked, but could get no answer. When I did break in I found the old aunt lying dead as a door-nail in her bed.’ As sure as I’m telling you, my friends, the old hag died in the night and ’twas myself gave her the savage uppercut with the knife I was carrying, even if it was the ghost of the old witch herself was after me on her broomstick. She’s a good riddance, thanks be to God, for she had Patxi and the whole neighbourhood scared out of their wits with her curses and her spells.”
    I was not surprised to hear that Nemesio came from Ataun—a characteristic old Basque village, which has an unenviable reputation among the Spanish Basques, for there is a local proverb which says: Tonto como uno de Ataun (mad as one from Ataun). In 1931 when I had visited the neighbouring village of Ezquioga where people had seen visions, I met a visionary from Ataun who assured me solemnly that he had seen the Devil in person. “He was,” he said, “a tall figure dressed in black with red hair and long teeth like a wolf.”
    Don Florencio, our host, had grown uneasy as Nemesio went on telling his tale, and I saw him frowning and turning about uneasily in his chair. I am sure he wished to exorcize the wild butcher and his accursed spooks and witches, for as soon as Nemesio finished he called the accordion player and the saxophonist to start the aurresku, in order, as he said, to bring a little sense back into the party:

    Once the company began to dance the aurresku, which might be called the national symbol of the Basque race, we were back on firm earth again. The dance of collective security brought us all back to normal life and lulled the Dionysian god, the duende, the demon or whoever he is, to sleep.

CHAPTER 7

PUENTE LA REINA AND LENTEN CAROUSAL

    A S Pamplona is on the other Jacobean route from Ostabat via il Roncesvalles, I rejoined my own road from Aragon at the lonely little church of Eunate, which is one of the strangest survivals of the ancient pilgrimage. It is octagonal in shape and recalls the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It reminded me of the Church of San Marco in Salamanca and the Templar chapel at Segovia. In the body of the church, above the shafts in the corners of the octagon with their capitals, rose others, smaller in size, which sustain the dome. Around the church outside is a mysterious octagonal cloister which has puzzled all the experts. Lamperez believed that the arches had been originally covered by a roof resting on walls that have disappeared, but Miss King believes that the cloister never had a roof, as no traces remain of the walls, and she recalls how the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem was from the tenth century the goal of pilgrims and crusaders, and the Military Orders, born under its shadow, built after its fashion. Moreover, in the twelfth century King Alfonso Sanchez in his will left the inheritance of his kingdom to the Military Orders, and it was likely that they would evoke in Spain the Sepulchre to which they were dedicated, and they would remember how St. Jerome speaks of an uncovered, concentric atrium constructed around the Holy Tomb, ‘so as not to intercept the space by which the Lord rose unto Heaven’. * In the fourteenth century there existed here a confraternity of local nobility presided over by the Prior of the monastery of El Crucifijo of Puente la Reina, and recent research has revealed that around the church there were tombs in which shells of St. James were discovered. *
    From Eunate, which incidentally in Basque means the house of the