Therapy

be a complete con, seeing there’s no evidence the Apostle is actually buried there. The story goes that, after the death of Jesus, James went to Spain to convert the natives. He didn’t seem to have much success because he returned to Palestine with only two disciples, and promptly had his head chopped off by Herod (I don’t know which one). The two disciples were told in a dream to take the saint’s remains back to Spain, which they did in a stone boat (yes, stone), which was miraculously wafted through the Mediterranean and the Straits of Gibraltar, up the west coast of the Iberian peninsula, and beached on the shores of Galicia. Some centuries later a local hermit saw a star twinkling above a hillock which, when excavated, revealed the remains of the saint and his disciples — or so it was claimed. They could have been anybody’s bones, of course. But Christian Spain badly needed some relics and a shrine to boost its campaign to drive out the Moors. That’s how St James became the patron saint of Spain, and “ Santiago! ” the Spanish battle-cry. According to another legend, he appeared in person at the crucial battle of Clavijo in 834 to rally the wilting Christian army, and personally slew seventy thousand Moors. The archdiocese of Santiago had the face to lay a special tax on the rest of Spain as a thank you to St James, though in fact there is no evidence that the battle of Clavijo ever took place, with or without his intervention. In churches all along the Camino you see statues of “Santiago Matamoros ”, St James the Moorslayer, depicting him as a warrior on horseback, wielding his sword and trampling the corpses of swarthy, thick-lipped infidels. They could become an embarrassment if Political Correctness ever gets a hold on Spain.
    I found it hard to understand why millions of people had walked halfway across Europe in times past, often under conditions of appalling discomfort and danger, to visit the dubious shrine of this dubious saint, and even harder to understand why they were still doing so, albeit in smaller numbers. I got a sort of answer to the latter question at the Augustinian abbey of Roncesvalles, which has been offering hospitality to pilgrims since the Middle Ages. It looks fantastic from a distance, a cluster of grey stone buildings tucked into a fold in the green foothills, with the sun gleaming on its roof — only when you get close do you see that the roof is made of corrugated zinc, and the buildings are mostly undistinguished. A man in black trousers and a red cardigan watched me get out of my car and, observing the GB plates, greeted me in English. He turned out to be the monk on pilgrim duty. I did my Bede Harrington act, and he asked me to follow him to a little office. He had no memory of Maureen, but he said that if she had presented her passport at the monastery she would have been asked to complete a questionnaire. Sure enough he found it in a filing cabinet, completed in Maureen’s big round hand four weeks earlier. “ Name: Maureen Harrington. Age: 57. Nationality : British. Religion : Catholic. Motives for journey (tick one or more): 1. Religious 2. Spiritual 3. Recreational 4. Cultural 5. Sporting.” I noticed with interest that Maureen had only ticked one: “Spiritual.”
     
    The monk, who introduced himself to me as Don Andreas, showed me round the monastery. He said apologetically that I couldn’t stay in the refugio because I was travelling by car, but when I saw the bleak, breeze-block dormitory, with its naked lightbulbs and rough wood-and-wire bunks, this seemed a deprivation I could bear. It was empty: the day’s quota of pilgrims hadn’t yet arrived. I found a little hotel in the nearby village with creaking floorboards and paper-thin walls, but it was clean and comfortable enough. I went back to the monastery because Don Andreas had invited me to attend the pilgrim mass which was held at six every evening. It seemed churlish to decline, and anyway I liked the idea of doing something Maureen would certainly have done a few weeks earlier. I thought it might help me to get inside her head, and track her down by some kind of telepathic radar.
    I hadn’t attended a Catholic service since we split up, and the pilgrim mass didn’t bear much resemblance to anything I remembered from the repertory of the Immaculate Conception in the old days. There were several priests saying the mass at the same time and they stood in a semi-circle behind a plain