Travels with my Donkey

Shinto with Petronella and walked to the darkened threshold: a multilingual note under a clock announced that the establishment ran on solar time, alongside a newspaper cutting showing a slightly younger Tomás camped out in front of the electricity company offices in León. My red book had the story — threatened with the cut-off for serial non-payment, he'd gone on hunger strike on their doorstep until they'd relented.
    Tomás was cavalierly manhandling some sort of pasta salad from a rust-bubbled biscuit tin on to small, scratched plastic dishes; evidently this was intended for the assembled pilgrims, but all things considered — salmonella, botulism, listeria — I didn't think I'd be joining them. As they made their ponderous way towards the table I scanned a few faces — a nicotine-bearded Kris Kristofferson, two mouse-haired, mouse-faced women in matching neck-flapped Foreign Legion caps — and found myself strangely irked.
    The word passed down the camino had been that Manjarín was in some obscure yet powerful sense different, that its lonely situation engendered a reflective atmosphere which almost guaranteed profundity and inner revelation. Four weeks before I'd have followed all this up with a prolonged rendition of a noise known to aficionados of the whoopee cushion as the Bronx Cheer, but I liked to think my mind had been prised open a little. Either it hadn't or I was right all along: there was something po-faced and horribly pompous about these people, all trying to fashion expressions of zen-flavoured beatitude as they awaited their Special Experience. The ersatz mystical ambience was hardly Tomás's fault — he was just an old chap whose heart was in the right place, even if his head wasn't. In fact I felt genuinely sorry for him, putting up with the humourless likes of this lot day in, day out.
    I bought a bottle of water, and as Tomás stickily patted his pockets for change essayed a conversation. 'Tengo un burro,' I offered proudly, and in response Tomás dropped a mayonnaised 50-cent coin on the plastic tablecloth and shuffled back to his biscuit tin. Probably deaf; certainly bored. Because they're doing a pilgrimage everyone thinks their story is one worth hearing, but Tomás had heard it all before.
    With an unreturned farewell I left, and the three of us were soon lengthening our downhill stride towards the valleys, a warm mist settling below the heather line like some kind of semi-tropical Brecon Beacons. Of the next breathless half-dozen clicks, one occupied us for just thirteen minutes — very possibly a 200-kilo class record.
    Our entrance to El Acebo was witnessed by a village ancient whittling pan pipes on a rude slate doorstep, an anxious goatherd and his suddenly galvanised flock and the Ray-Banned driver of a low-slung, gleaming convertible. However complex El Acebo's cultural identity, it had evidently proved an economically successful one: the gutter still ran down the middle of a meandering, crudely cobbled street, and passed beneath precarious, stilt-propped balconies, but every old home was well kempt and most were audibly hosting televised football.
    I saw the children before they saw me; they were outside a bar being cloyingly fawned over in the usual rural fashion. The bar fronted a restaurant, which in turn fronted the refugio. For the first night in a week I'd share a roof with my fellow pilgrims — if not their abysmal conditions, as in cruel emphasis of the ongoing apartheid, Birna had bagged us a family room with an ensuite bathroom, directly above the bunk-house.
    The rather dishevelled proprietor relaxed his pinch-grip on Valdis's cheek to assist me with Shinto: the saddle was flung with manly insouciance into an opposite barn, and the donk himself led to a ring-fenced vacant plot on the main street. When I returned the children gave me a quick tour of the village, past the rusted quarrying wagons pressed into service as cattle troughs to the playground where they'd spent most of the afternoon: three swings, a 20-foot crucifix and a dumbfounding highland vista that spanned the compass and did its part to explain El Acebo's adaptable prosperity.
    Trooping back, we found the bar filling up with Saturday-nighters, getting the beers in and sparking up cigs as if it wasn't going out of fashion: how they love to smoke, those little men of Spain. The standard soap dispenser in bar toilets comes with an attached ashtray, but it was perennially apparent that no hombre