Travels with my Donkey

my back — a calculated, hawked-up flob.
    'Right!' I barked. 'For that you get the cans.'
    I'd been hoarding the three empty Fanta tins since a blurt of nocturnal inspiration two nights before. Lashed to a string and trailed across tarmac they would make a potent multi-sensory goad, I was sure, and so indeed it proved. The greater his efforts to distance himself from the harsh grating and sunlit winks of metallic orange, the more frenziedly profound their effect. From 2.5 kilometres per hour we shot up to 4, no mean feat on this gradient: the facing mountainsides, garishly coloured by the yellows and purples of broom and lavender, very nearly flashed by. It was the answer to all my prayers. Assuming, at least, that one of these was a humble request to be propelled to the crumbling brink of dangerous, taut-featured insanity.
    After half an hour, and a page full of snapshot memories for my 'Bemused Cyclists' album, with clawed and bleached knuckles I tore the string off at the saddle end and twitchingly crammed the entire apparatus back into a plastic bag. For better or worse, that noise is a part of the man I now am. Sometimes Birna catches me tilting my head and smiling distantly at a tin, or something orange, and when she does I allow myself to be gently eased into the cupboard under the stairs.
    This seemed poor preparation for the gaunt rubble and satanic dingoes of Foncebadón, and it was with enhanced disquiet that I slowly rounded a curve and beheld the bent and weathered sign announcing its imminent appearance. Overseeing a panoramic sweep of sloped desolation it was an obvious spot for the Roman fortress that begat the village,- equally, one glance at the frost-splintered tarmac and the windswept, uncultivated wildness it traversed was all you needed to understand its contemporary decline.
    Speculations in this vein were checked by plentiful human activity about a large building conspicuously lacking the visible signs of dilapidation, and, before that, by a little wooden-roofed roadside information point. 'Experience Foncebadón, where lonely death at the jaws of a hunger-emboldened pack of ghost dogs is never more than a haunted hovel away!' it might have said, but though everything was in Spanish the glossily laminated presentation suggested it probably didn't.
    And in fact that building promptly revealed itself as a new hotel, with a dozen cars in the forecourt and a pair of feet sticking out from under a duvet in an upstairs window. What was going on? Some of the houses up the road stood in ruins, but many of them did not. And the church: closed, of course, but completely rebuilt. In place of the dogs were small packs of ambling day-trippers. It was a colossal disappointment, and not just for me. A couple of days later we met the Irish lot again: the year before, their leader — a six-time pilgrim — had arrived with a trowel and a hammer and a determination to fulfil a distant vow that the Lord's word be heard once more at Foncebadón. He'd opened the church door to find a tattooed delinquent on community service up a ladder with a mouthful of nails, putting the finishing touches to the roof.
    Half an uphill, crestfallen mile later we were caught, conspicuously, by a middle-aged woman done up like a seventies Barbie: dressed from turbaned head to galoshed feet in white, her features almost totally obscured beneath impenetrable Jackie Onassis shades. She walked unsteadily past, swinging a small plastic bag, then suddenly stopped and turned.
    'I know you.' Her accent was almost impenetrably Spanish. 'I see you juan tame.'
    'I don't think so,' I said carefully. Surely she couldn't be a pilgrim.
    'Si, si. I walk camino with... like dis, for shopping.' She pulled at a phantom old-lady's trolley.
    'I would remember that.'
    She angled her black-glazed face at the wild mountains to our left. 'I av problem,' she said at length. 'You elp me?'
    'Well, I'll try,' I said, happy to find my voice coloured with rather more enthusiasm than it might have been a month earlier.
    She exhaled loudly and let her linen-jacketed shoulders sag.
    'In bar in morning, I make friend with men.' It was an arresting opener. 'One men say he av ear, an he take to next town my... like dis, for shopping.'
    'Your trolley.'
    A red-nailed hand carelessly swished the clear air: yeah, whatever. 'But other men, he av... big joy.' Her head lolled about in overawed recollection, but when she held out her hands to indicate the actual dimensions