Travels with my Donkey

of his joy I felt a lot better about mine. Mainly, though, I felt that the limits of my new-found pilgrim charity had just been spectacularly breached.
    Her rouged cheeks puffed out. 'So... I smock his big joy, and now I... av problem.' She turned now to the uphill horizon ahead, and so did I, picturing myself riding Shinto recklessly over it with a dozen cans tied to my boots and the words of Freddie Mercury tearing from my throat.
    'Please,' she said, sounding suddenly frail and lost. 'You walk wid me, please.' Watching me bully compassion into my features she let out a deranged, whooping giggle, and suddenly I understood. The big joy she had smocked was the big joint she had smoked.
    Her already secure status as the camino's unlikeliest pilgrim was firmly cemented as we continued onwards and upwards. In a faltering, drug-tinted soliloquy she painted a picture of her improbable lifestyle, colouring small areas in extraordinary detail but leaving great swathes of the canvas utterly blank. Seven months a year in Miami in a villa whose kitchen surfaces were edged with tangerine mosaic tiles, two in Gstaad, with the balance divided between homes in Madrid and Ibiza. Refreshingly, she never once enquired into Shinto; barely acknowledged his presence. She laughed when I asked what she did for a living, and why she was doing this. She laughed loudest of all when I treated her to choice extracts from my donkey phrase book.
    'You know wha you say?' she spluttered, subsiding into a huge coughing fit whose convalescence required her to rest both hands and her forehead on Shinto's saddle. Limpiaré, not limpiará: a tiny error, but a crucial one. Instead of promising the hoteliers and hospitaleros that I would clean up Shinto's crap myself, I'd been ordering them to do it.
    The angle of ascent declined, the road rounded a curve and there it was: a 50-foot pole topped with a rusted crucifix and bedded in a sizeable hill of pilgrim rubble. The Cruz de Ferro, cross of iron: roof of the camino, birthplace of my spiritual resurrection. No one was sure when the first cross went up there, but travellers had been leaving a stone on that cairn since Celtic times. Those three sin-signifiers had been ready in my pocket since this morning. They'd been waiting 500 kilometres for this moment.
    'You juan know why I do the camino?' My drugged companion passed a hand across the gorse-painted geological amphitheatre around us, and up at the cross ahead. 'Is special, is beautiful.'
    'Shinto!' There were a few dozen pilgrims taking spiritual stock around the contemporary chapel erected just back from the cross, and one of them was Petronella. I watched her approach, red eyed as ever: she had just left her stone on the summit of shards, and marked it with three heart-shaped tears for her husband and two sons. I turned to do the introductions but Smock Joy had gone, swinging her plastic bag and settling into the descent with small and rapid steps. Someone saw her later, reunited with her trolley and pulling it through a hot forest.
    Shinto was happy — rather too happy, in fact — to be left in Petronella's care while I set out to explore this significant site, the closest the camino came to heaven. Every inch of the chapel's outer stonework was etched and even sprayed with names and dates. 'RAMON PEREZ 1996', 'ALBERTO, PALENCIA, 19.7.98': all left by the Spanish students who were the reason I'd been warned off doing this in high summer, all except the one with the really bad ball-point portrait of a man walking a donkey (sixth stone up, seventh from the left if you ever find yourself in the area). But who to blame for the heretical piss puddles up against the back wall, and indeed for the great bollard lugged up to the foot of that giant cairn? That's a Genghis Khan of accumulated wrongness to unburden yourself of.
    I'd planted a foot on the narrow, spiralling path that led to the cairn's lofty summit when Petronella called out. 'But you must take him!'
    'What?'
    'Up there — take Shinto up there!'
    I looked up. The indistinct path was no wider than a human foot, and the cairn — composed, of course, of loose stones — was a good 30 foot high. 'Don't be silly,' I said. 'He'll never manage that.'
    'It's his pilgrimage too!'
    Not since David Leach's sister said she'd leapfrog over me in her knickers if I wrote 'GAYLORD' on Aaron Pumphrey's skateboard has such an unlikely statement persuaded me to attempt something so ridiculous. Already