Travels with my Donkey

with proprietorial satisfaction. 'Burro here, you there.' He inclined his head at the front door. 'Is my house.'
    Mario was his name, and no sooner had he deposited my stuff in the guest room than the phone rang, heralding much manipulation of that iron-filing stubble, his fifth cig of the hour and, with the receiver down, a faltering explanation of pressing cow matters. 'My girlfriend Maria here soon,' he fumbled, scribbling something on a drug-company note pad and instructing me to pass it on to her. And with a wink, a toothy Latin smile and a genial slap on the back he was off, leaving me alone with his Led Zep and 'Legalise Pot' posters, an enormous library of DVDs and a menagerie whose Ark-like abundance would become shortly apparent.
    Mario and Maria? It all seemed a little unlikely. Such trusting good nature was so alien to a suspicious urbanite that I felt almost bemused: if not a miracle, this was at least a bona fide parable. I'd read some Englishman's contention that 'luck on the camino is 2 to 3 per cent greater than it should be', and here was the tangible evidence to verify that apparently ridiculous statistic. From the kitchen I watched Mario drive back out and off up the road, then looked down at Shinto, now happily embarked once more on his mission in life, the processing of lawn into crap.
    Imagine for a moment that your partner is a veterinarian of unusual enthusiasm, and that you are not. Your homes are separated by a three-hour drive, and conflicting patterns of work restrict your time together to a single weekend a month. After two years you have perhaps become accustomed to the reality that this weekend will be regularly interrupted by bovine miscarriage and bastard strangles, and that when it is you will be left alone in a small house with six relentlessly voluble canaries, a tiny dog of similar persuasion, two tanks of fish, four mewling newborn kittens and a shelf replete with jars containing the pickled embryos of memorably deformed cattle. But now imagine that you arrive at the Friday afternoon commencement of one of these rare weekends to find your partner absent, that offbeat petting zoo supplemented by a foaming donkey and his master, and the unkempt, foreign latter bearing a foolish smile and a note ordering you to feed and entertain him.
    And yet having read this, Maria — auburn and petite with a smile as ready as her cheerful beau's — elected not to slop me out a bucket of twin-headed-calf tripe on the doorstep, but instead sat me down at a little round table which she began to fill with the fruit of Galicia's arable cornucopia. Dark, cured chorizo that cast my daily sarnie-filler in the most unflattering epicurean light, a decayed pastille of greying dairy matter that offended every sense but taste, a winning marriage of rich cream cheese and honey, and all this washed down with crisp local beer that demanded the back of a hand to be drawn across a grateful mouth.
    We talked as we ate. I learnt of Galicia's difficult history, a poverty so endemic that — another link with the Scots and Irish — economic migration has been a way of life for 500 years. I learnt that jobs are still hard to come by in Galicia, explaining that ludicrous monthly commute from her IT post in the coastal city of Ferrol, and I learnt that ten in the native dialect was pronounced 'death'. 'Mario, his shoes are always with the shit of the cows,' said Maria in a mock moan, and yet her man plainly adored the animals in whose company he spent the vast bulk of his professional hours. As well as that distressing homage to foetal mutation, there were cow posters on the walls, cow milk jugs in the kitchen, and even, on a shelf by the huge flat-screen telly that was his extracurricular existence in the pre-Maria period, the scale representation of a Friesian pelvis.
    Overwhelmed with calories and kindness, I dearly hoped Maria would now allow me to wash up, or perhaps even deworm a couple of budgies. Instead I was led outside. 'We go to Samos,' she said, opening the passenger door of her Renault Clio and ushering me in. 'Is old monasterio of six century.' But I wasn't listening. Gingerly lowering myself to the velour I felt a rush of primal vitality spark through every neurone in my body, a rush that came out of my mouth as an ineffectively smothered whoop of exultation when she fired up the engine and reversed slowly away from a suddenly curious Shinto. I was in a car, and it was moving.
    We rolled on to the