Travels with my Donkey

shelf. A retarded exchange of heavy-lidded farewells, and they were off.
    If Shinto looked nude without his saddle, leading him through the streets I looked mad. As Spain's rural populace had discovered in recent decades, deprived of work the donkey has no purpose: with bags and tackle his function was unequivocal, but what was that now at the end of my rope? I caught our reflection in a shoe-shop window and saw what the few locals not dozing behind their shutters saw — some sun-slackened loon taking his daft pet for a walk.
    I hadn't seen a familiar pilgrim since León, but there were half a dozen or so on the shadowed benches around the square at the edge of which, soaring improbably above the sunless back ways of the old Jewish quarter, stood the baroque bookend that was the cathedral's façade. A few token hands were raised in greeting: they were too hot to ask where all my stuff had gone, and I was too hot to tell them. ' 'S'closed,' one slurred thickly as I headed to the cathedral gates.
    So too was the adjacent bishop's palace, one of Antonio Gaudí's slightly melted Sleeping Beauty castles. It's hard to look at a Gaudí building with a straight face, but because of the conditions my wry smile somehow came out as an awful, drunken bark. Shinto looked at me sharply: Really, said his eyes, people will start to talk. With his African genes he was never unhinged by the heat.
    Dead straight, dead calm, slightly downhill: the road out of Astorga was tailor-made for round-shouldered, jelly-spined stumbling. With the sun sitting on my face I couldn't see or breathe properly, and soon my powers of perception were boiling away. That emerging structure over the road was a new shopping centre, right? A health centre? I stood opposite the entrance sign, wiped a hot, donkeyed hand across my slick face and tried to clear a mind now dangerously befogged by heat and fatigue. Yabba di flabba da monasterio da flabba di yabba. Monasterio! I lurched back to the west and started putting my feet in front of each other again. A monastery — a spanking new monastery. Only in Spain, where the churches still looked down on everything and everyone, where boys were called Jesus and girls Camino, where the consecrated host is wheeled through the streets on the Thursday that follows the eighth Sunday after Easter.
    That these conditions were punishing even by Spanish standards became clear when we awkwardly skirted a big set of roadworks and had a close call with a Caterpillar driven by a man in his underwear. Up there in that little cab in his sweaty red jockeys, look. And check them out, Shints, those two playing that funny game on that big green roofless squash-court thing. Just over there. Pelota, that's it. Pelota in your big fat pants, Shiz, that's what we're dealing with here. What's that? Oh yeah — you're a donkey. You don't do that mouth stuff with the words. Right, OK, uphill here, look, uphill for 30 clicks now. Come on, mother. David! Da-vid! I never saw that, sir. Colette choisi le sac. Elle choisi aussi le panier bleu. Ooop! Here we go, get the old head in that fountain, ready, here we go and a... whoooffffthhhh. Pttthhh. Christ al-bloody-Jesus. God. Christ. God.
    I slapped my face, filled my hat with more water and put it on. Better. Right — Spain, donkey, walking, family. Good. I'd just walked through a village, but it didn't seem to be the right one. Castrillo, I wanted. 'Castrillo?' Suddenly there was a little old lady with a dog at my side, pointing me back and left. It was very good of her to help, rather than say have me exorcised or burnt. Particularly because if she hadn't been there, as I realised checking the maps that evening, I'd have presently found myself back in Astorga.
    Castrillo was only a click and a bit up the road, but it was no place for a man in my condition. Birna had warned me by phone that it was pretty, if a little quiet. Pretty it was. Shinto's hoofs clacked impressively down a cobbled street overseen by slate-built houses with covered balconies: scores of sympathetic restorations and not a stoved-in hovel in sight. In this wall a weathered ceramic medallion, in that some doughty familial crest. The obligatory stork's nest on the church roof. And mercy me: the door beneath was slightly ajar. I stuck my head into the cold dark. Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the door, and here are the people. Except they weren't. There were no people, not here, not elsewhere in this whole town.