Therapy

original association of St James with Spain all goes back to a scribe who wrote mistakenly that the Apostle’s patch was “Hispaniam” instead of “Hierusalem” (i.e., Jerusalem.) “No,” she said. “I think he’s around the place somewhere. With so many people walking to Santiago to pay him homage, he could hardly stay away, could he?” But there was a twinkle in her eye as she spoke of these things, as if it were a private joke or tease, designed to scandalize Protestant sceptics like me.
    There was nothing frivolous about her commitment to the pilgrimage, however “It’s absurd, quite absurd,” I remembered Bede saying, but the word had a Kierkegaardian resonance for me which he didn’t intend. In the mediaeval town of Villafranca there’s a church dedicated to St James with a porch known as the Puerta del Perdón, the Doorway of Pardon, and according to tradition if a pilgrim was ill and made it as far as this door, he could turn back and go home with all the graces and blessings of a fully completed pilgrimage. I pointed out this loophole to Maureen when we got to Villafranca, and pressed her to take advantage of it. She laughed at first, but became quite annoyed when I persisted. After that I never attempted to dissuade her from trying to get to Santiago.
    To tell the truth, I would have been almost as disappointed as Maureen herself if she had failed to make it. The pilgrimage, even in the bastardized, motorized form in which I was doing it, had begun to lay its spell upon me. I sensed, if only fragmentarily, what Maureen had experienced more deeply and intensely in the course of her long march from Le Puy. “You seem to drop out of time. You pay no attention to the news. The images you see on television in bars and cafés, of politicians and car bombs and bicycle races, don’t hold your attention for more than a few seconds. All that matters are the basics: feeding yourself, not getting dehydrated, healing your blisters, getting to the next stopping-place before it gets too hot, or too cold, or too wet. Surviving. At first you think you’ll go mad with loneliness and fatigue, but after a while you resent the presence of other people, you would rather walk on your own, be alone with your own thoughts, and the pain in your feet.”
    “You wish I wasn’t here, then?” I said.
    “Oh no, I was almost at the end of my tether when you turned up, Tubby. I’d never have got this far without you.”
    I frowned, like Ryan Giggs when he’s made a goal with a perfect cross. But Maureen wiped the frown off my face when she added, “It was like a miracle. St James again.”
     
    In due course she talked about the death of Damien, and how it had led to her making the pilgrimage. “It’s a terrible thing when a child dies before its parents. It seems against nature. You can’t help thinking of all the things he will never experience, like marriage, having children, grandchildren. Fortunately I think Damien knew love. That’s a consolation. He had a girlfriend in Africa, she worked for the same organization. She looked very nice in photographs. She wrote us a beautiful letter after he was killed. I hope they had sex. I should think they would have done, wouldn’t you?”
    I said yes, undoubtedly.
    “When he was a student at Cambridge he brought a girl home once, not the same one, and he asked if they could sleep together in his room. I said no, not in my house. But I would’ve let him, if I’d known how short his life was going to be.”
    I said she mustn’t blame herself for actions that were perfectly reasonable at the time.
    “Oh, I don’t blame myself,” she said. “It’s Bede who does that, though he denies it. He thinks he should have tried harder to persuade Damien not to make his career in relief work. Damien did VSO, you see, after graduating. He was going to go back to Cambridge afterwards and do a PhD. But he decided to stay in Africa. He loved the people. He loved the work. He had a full life, a very intense life, though it was short. And he did a lot of good. I kept telling myself that, after he was killed. It didn’t help Bede, though. He became terribly depressed. When he retired he just moped around the house all day, staring into space. I couldn’t stand it. I decided I had to get away somewhere on my own. I read an article about the pilgrimage in a magazine, and it seemed just what I needed. Something quite challenging and clearly defined, something that would occupy