Travels with my Donkey

exclamation marks; watching the Toyota toot away up the tight street they slowly drooped from rabbit mode to spaniel. The hotelier's daughter, who'd escorted me back to her grandmother's yard to retrieve Shinto, clapped a sympathetic hand on his back, then heaved aloft a welcome gift: a 5-kilo sack of wheat fluff and husks that may easily have been chaff.
    Good news for both of us, and just as well, because if any pill needed sugaring it was the one I found myself being prescribed at the vet's ten minutes later. 'No, no!' quailed a horrified white-coat as I pointed first at the Pacman monster, then at the donkey tied up outside to her oversized fibreglass Alsatian, and last, more forcibly, at my own chest in brutal interpretation of hypodermic hara-kiri. 'No, no, no!' she continued, rummaging noisily about in a cabinet before seizing exultantly on a hefty bottle of trigger spray. She held it up to me: the label was dominated by a large blue cat, a small gallery of insect silhouettes with red crosses through them and an absurd price tag. 'Fifty euros?' I yelped, suddenly remembering why I don't have pets any more.
    The back end of Cacabelos was well-to-do but rustic: two flour-faced ladies plaiting 3-yard lengths of dough on a bakery trestle, a carpenter knocking up a hefty kitchen dresser in his garage, and yes — a donkey hauling an overloaded hay wain across the bridge heading out of town. '¡Hola!' I called out companionably, then felt my features crumple as the leathery, flat-capped drover curled his lip with almost parodic relish and spat out a furious burst of vitriol. Pilgrim, schmilgrim, appeared to be the crux of his argument: what the fuck did I think I was doing, wasting a perfectly good beast of rural burden on this stupid, bogus promenade?
    The road began to roll: the mountains that shored up Galicia, the camino's final province, were massing on a grey horizon. I knew from the electoral prominence of the Galician Nationalist Party to expect a new glut of separatist sloganeering when we got up there, but even down here the independence issue was a live one. The proprietor of the Hotel Madrid had been keen, using the modest overlap in our vocabularies, to highlight the distinction between the pen-pushing leeches of León and the honest-toiling, horny-handed sons of Bierzo. It all seemed rather feudal: his two favourite words were 'land' and 'property', and whenever he said either he pressed a fist to his heart. I blame the language: Birna had explained that there are two Spanish verbs for 'to be', one expressing a state seen as 'temporary or reversible', as might be 'I am lonely', but the second a chest-prodding, emotive iteration of 'a permanent or inherent quality': 'I am Catalan!' And that's it for generations.
    As if to highlight the hotelier's sentiments, the road out of Cacabelos seemed to radiate civic pride and stolid rural affluence in a way that I'd forgotten was possible. Window boxes and roses; a slate-roofed dog kennel. The only constant was the penchant for building things in the wrong order: I passed huge new chalets with satellite dishes and carriage lights bolted to bare cinder blocks.
    Villafranca del Bierzo was rewardingly like nothing else that had come before, its regal but slightly careworn housing stock scrambling recklessly up the sides of two steep and converging valleys. The stout eminence stacked up behind it made Villafranca the last staging post before the rigours of Galicia, a strategic significance which cemented its role as a bulwark against the Moors during the reconquista. Villafranca means 'Foreigners' town', and by 1250 half the residents were expat pilgrims who'd been persuaded to settle there: Dutch, English, German and even the odd Scandinavian. Most, though, were from just north of the Pyrenees — it's said that French was Villafranca's lingua franca until the sixteenth century. Coincidence, perhaps, but following weeks of blithering non-communication with the populace, since Ponferrada it had become weirdly commonplace to find myself exchanging 'bonjour 's with a local.
    We passed the prim and comfy official refugio and shortly after arrived beneath the wrought-iron chalices screening the windows of my intended stopover: the famously eccentric albergue run by Jesus Jato. A predictably under-groomed old chap with a charismatic twinkle in his smut-rimmed eyes, Jesus was healing a Brazilian woman's foot, rather lasciviously I felt, when we arrived. With cheery