The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

firewood. The carter’s young son, dressed in oilskins, was perched aloft on the top of the twigs, while he himself sat on the diminutive driver’s seat. “Jump up,” he called gaily as he broke a hole in the twigs to make a place for me. I was encased like a Zulu in an African jungle, and I felt the twigs stick into every part of my anatomy. My knapsack hung from the big beam that projected above my head. We were a funny sight, for the great, lumbering dray lurched forward jerkily, making my position precarious, as I had only squeezed half a buttock on the seat next the driver, and the front part of my body kept slipping down on the rear mule’s tail, against which I had to use my fiddle-case as a buffer. It was a disturbing experience, for as the dray bumped along the rough road there was grave danger of being pitched sideways or else of falling forwards, fiddle and all, on to the mule’s rump. Our exhilarated inebriation, however, did create a certain sense of confidence and devil-may-care, and the boy perched in the twigs above sang at the top of his voice to cheer us.
    The two mules, the carter told me, were called Perico and La Gaona. Perico the leader was a small mule and plodded ahead steadily a nd patiently; La Gaona following behind was what the Italians would call biricchina ; there was a sly humour about her and she lashed me playfully in the face with her tail, as though to attract my attention; then she snorted contemptuously, and.when I was half-dozing she gave vent to her feelings unceremoniously and dunged copiously over my fiddle-case.
    “Arre Gaona ! You she devil!” cried the carter, cracking her viciously with his whip.
    Soon the effects of my intoxication wore off and I began to feel cold and despondent again, and as we ascended into the mountains snow began to fall. The carter, however, left all direction to Perico and snored beatifically with his head resting on my shoulder.
    When we reached the village of Berceo he awoke with a start, saying, “A mala cama colchón de vino [when the bed’s lousy there’s nothing like a pillow of wine]! Come on, compañero. There’s a good tavern nearby where they don’t baptize liquor!”
    We ensconced ourselves in a dark corner of the tavern among farmers and workers from the village, who were friends of the carter. They sat in silence waiting for their turn with the porrón of wine, which passed from one to the other. The air was thick with the smoke of cigarettes which each man rolled mechanically.
    Here, in the home village of Gonzalo de Berceo, I felt in my element, for these farmers and shepherds were the same as those I had known in former years when I used to trek over the Castilian meseta. Unamuno had said that the men of the Poema del Cid and the Romancero and their stock were like oak trees and rocks belonging to the Castilian landscape. No people in the world possess more courteous maimers than the Castilian peasant, who is conscious of being a desert-dweller in the midst of this immense brown steppe and lives his life like a lonely watcher. He neither offers nor seeks pity, because he wants to be nada menos que todo un hombre, a man of flesh and bones, who can stand on his own feet and fight for himself. The silent, austere men of that tavern in Berceo weighed and tested me and found me to their liking. After the offer of wine came a few discreet questions. Was I a commercial traveller? A músico ambulante ? When I said I was a pilgrim, a small hawk-eyed old man began a long monologue on Berceo, the biographer of San Millán.
    “He too was a pilgrim and tramped the thorny mountain paths sacred to the memory of San Millán,” said he, quoting the lines of the thirteenth-century poet:

    andaba por los montes, por los fuertes lugares
    por las cuestas enfiestas, e por los espinales;

    allí daba a Dios de sus carnes derecho,
    martiriándolas mucho e dándolas mal lecho.

    No sooner had the old man declaimed the lines than his neighbour, wild-eyed, with tousled hair upon which was perched a greasy boina, interrupted, saying: “Don Gonzalo was more of a minstrel than a pilgrim and he would always call himself the Juglar of his favourite saint, San Millán, and Santo Domingo de Silos. Although he was a priest, such was his humility that he said on one occasion that he was not learned enough to write in Latin and contented himself with the ordinary speech in which honest homely people converse together. You would always find him roaming