Travels with my Donkey

obscurely epic platitudes and those manic convulsions of baseless laughter. 'Ramon's aura was not so good last night,' Letje murmured after he'd stumbled fiercely by, 'and I think he is now a little angry that I don't walk with him.'
    'He is?' Ramon was young, wiry and by Spanish standards a freakish giant.
    'Yes, and when he is angry…' She shook her head in harrowed recollection of some Ramonian act of malevolence.
    'Ramon is your... boyfriend, then,' I said, my voice tinged with concern.
    Letje emitted a grandiose snort of derision. 'This is maybe his belief.'
    Now near the back of the column we began to descend through a landscape of lurid, rustic abundance, the greenometer turned up to eleven. Fields divided not with fences but palaeolithic slabs of slate, a woman chasing a horse round her farmyard, an old Escort with a hay-bale wedged in its boot, a proud family in their Saturday best off to market in the back of a tractor trailer. This land was rich but its people clearly were not: the camino pulled a little train of foreign wealth through the poorest parts of a poor region, and in contrast to their neighbours the Galicians were keen to nurture and harvest this in a regulated manner.
    The pilgrimage infrastructure had been lavishly overhauled for the 1993 Holy Year — fountains like the splendid scallop-shell grotto we passed that morning, all those marker posts and a network of staffed refugios constructed to a standard design. And the locals had warmed to the task, sticking Coke machines in their farmyards and opening up craftily sited cafés at likely break stops, such as the place everybody piled dustily into for elevenses. 'She didn't spill that on you,' intoned Letje as an errant French elbow knocked steaming chocolate into my lap, 'but on the world that she hated.'
    The heat that Mario had declared almost unheard of for this time of year got going as we emerged. Farmyard filth should have held no olfactory terrors for me by now, but the sun-ripened slurry and silage were so cloyingly over-fermented that I began to dry retch. And retch and retch and retch, as Shinto pressed his snout to the pat-splattered path and progressed with savouring sloth.
    During that coffee break I'd mentioned to Letje that I still had no idea what to do with Shinto when we reached Santiago, and she'd instantly thrown her hat into the empty ring. 'As a little girl I had a pony,' she blurted, in her excitement absent-mindedly casting a small shaft of light into the otherwise pitch-black cupboard of her life history, 'and I am walking back to Holland.' Her eyes began to shine. 'Now I could be the girl with the dog and the donkey.' She had expanded on this theme over lunch, and after it I could see her casting covetous, dreamy glances at Shinto, already imagining the airy romance of a Vaseline-lensed return journey as she led her winsome menagerie through the wild-flowered meadows with an enigmatic halfsmile. It would be like a three-month shampoo advert.
    This should have been a special moment for me, too: I'd proved extremely adept at blanking out Shinto's post-pilgrimage fate, even as the issue grew into a colossal, long-eared silhouette on a steadily advancing horizon, and now a solution had dropped into my chocolate-stained lap. Yet all I felt was an odd but powerful resistance. Though it apparently hadn't troubled me as I'd barged him wheezing into Triacastela, the concern was Shinto's welfare. With an equine heritage Letje would be kind and probably responsible, but it didn't take an animal psychologist — though by Christ what I'd have done for one — to deduce that Shinto really, really hated that hyperactive, barrel-bellied yapper.
    What made this especially entertaining was Letje's conviction that the two of them had struck up a quirky inter-species friendship, like one of those 'Just Fancy That' pictures of a fox touching noses with a rabbit or something. 'See this — they are playing!' she'd exclaim, and I'd turn to see Sativa barking frenziedly up at Shinto from close range, while he gazed down his long nose with a look that neatly blended scorn with pity. At lunch Sativa had leapt up and nipped Shinto on the back of the knee as he grazed; with faultless technique he'd cast a lazy glance at Letje, and satisfied to see her scanning the rearward heavens with an air of poetic auspice had flicked out a robust rear-hoofed punt that filled the hot afternoon with whining yelps. 'Oh, you missed it,' I sighed, as Letje