Travels with my Donkey

nonchalance and a lapful of toes he thumbed us towards a barn lined with old mattresses, and as soon as I led Shinto in the poor animal flung himself at the dusty floor. I jumped swiftly to unburden him — it was wretched when he tried to roll with the saddle on, and not just because of the resultant compression of my belongings: this seemed the closest he'd get to sexual pleasure, or so I hoped, and that was like doing it with a condom. Made out of egg boxes.
    The albergue shared a familial ambience with Tomás's place up on the mountain, a quirky Scout-hut shambles of plastic sheeting, recycled pallets and eccentric announcements. Two doors off the main dormitory were labelled for the use of the over fifties and 'professional snorers'; plastic flowers coiled up the corners of every treble bunk. 'It was like the Garden of Eden,' said a German girl, reminiscing with Total Shithouse a few days later about their stay the night before mine.
    'Yeah,' he retorted, 'if you just trod on the rake.'
    It wasn't yet 2.00, and with Shinto sneezing into a basin of chaff I set out to explore Villafranca. That stoutly towered fortress told of an eventful past — I'm ashamed to reveal that the town was most recently despoiled by British troops in pursuit of a retreating Napoleon — and the plunge into a disorientating vortex of narrow alleys certainly made for an exciting present. One was Calle Sucubo: who'd live in a street honouring a female demon who rapes men in their sleep? It was with a heightened sense of relief that I emerged into a broad and beautiful square, its grand ecclesiastical structures arranged around an immaculate rose garden.
    On each of the many benches within sat a pair of pensioners, tackling foil-wrapped sandwiches and chugging beer straight from the bottle. I watched them all nodding slowly at the flawless blooms as I worked through a calamari roll in a bar opposite, an establishment empty but for the memorable presence of a hairy-legged transvestite. What must life be for an exotic deviant in a small and remote Spanish town with a throughput of earnest pilgrims? No wonder he'd drunk himself to sleep.
    The man I would know as Donald was en route to a similar state when I returned to the albergue. A second-time pilgrim, Scottish Donald had just finished his two-week tour of duty as a hospitalero at the Confraternity's refugio at Rabanal. 'Here,' he said, emptying the dregs of a bottle of red into a plastic cup, topping it up with bitter lemon and pressing the luridly mauve consequence at my chest. 'I've just invented a new drink.' His Borders slur was barely intelligible even to a fellow Briton, but retired teacher Donald's most tragic vocal handicap was to sound majestically drunk when he wasn't. Though in fact by the time I turned up at a refugio he usually was: his routine was to leave early, arrive early, and spend a long afternoon touring the bars. Four others had helped Donald out with that bottle, but later on a dozen of us had to do our bit to save him from an earthenware vat of fortified monk-brew he'd somehow sourced in town.
    Donald was the embodiment of untroubled conviviality: as with many pilgrims a relationship meltdown apparently lay behind his journey to Santiago, but unlike most he kept all the details to himself. Instead he reminisced engagingly of his time as a hospitalero, with particular reference to the last-night celebrations that had led to him being locked out of his own refugio. Donald had heard all about Shinto and asked for a peek; after we'd both been nipped on the forearms I decided to put the tick-spray business on hold for a day.
    We ate with Barbara and Walther in a neat little square just behind the grander one, though I couldn't seem to muster much enthusiasm for either lomo or flan. My innards began to percolate ominously as we wound back up the alley-ways, and as darkness filled the valleys I gingerly prepared for an early bed. 'Not yet!' whispered Donald, as I creaked past the over-fifties chamber. 'Jesus is having a queimada.'
    Obscurely persuaded and hoping this wasn't Bierzan for wet dream, I shortly found myself stooping beneath a line of damp socks in the gathered gloom, cornered by wide-eyed, flame-lit faces. Before us, on a trestled altar rigged up in front of the toilets, Jesus was throwing handfuls of sugar into a burning crucible of alcohol, mumbling significantly as he did so; periodically, his mutters swelled into a moaning chant, and when it did he drew a