Travels with my Donkey

gutters ran up the middle of the road and the municipal pool was streaked and empty; Franco's civic ambience has much in common with Castro's. The generalísimo was a Galician. So was Fidel's granddad.
    A round of sardonic British laughter diverted me towards a party of part-time pilgrims, halfway through an attractive two-week programme of guided rambling and bacchanalian indulgence, the fun run to our marathon. They offered me a glass from the one full bottle of white on a parasoled table of empties, and in return I offered them exclusive, first-rights news on Shinto's fate. Then Donald, Petronella and Evelyn wandered across from the adjacent refugio — walk a donkey into town and you might just as well have been preceded by trumpeting heralds — and I told them too. 'Well, you've got to get the animal there first,' said Donald, though I barely heard him above Petronella's sobbing. All three had scouted out a spot for Shinto round the back of a school, and as we led him there Evelyn removed her sunglasses to reveal a colossal aubergined bruise. 'Face down on the road to Samos,' she explained with a crooked smile.
    The Portomarín refugio wasn't quite to the standard Galician design, but had certainly captured the spirit. Central to this was an enthusiastic embrace of the diminished expectations of personal privacy that had been part of pilgrim life since around the halfway stage. For weeks now we had lived with the lockless toilet and shower cubicle: some saw this as part of the shedding of physical insecurities in preparation for the looming spiritual rebirth, others as the gradual erosion of the norms of civilised human behaviour, depending on which side of the North Sea they lived. But in Galicia it all went a little fundamentalist. The curtainless, unisex showers of Barbadelo were perhaps the apotheosis of this trend, but it was at Portomarín, buttock to lathered buttock with Donald and a hairless Dane in the open bathing trough, sudded clothes underfoot, that I experienced its repulsive nadir. The loo door opposite us eased ajar, and there, huge pants billowed round swollen hairy ankles, sat the camino's fattest man; a young Spaniard who after the blind Japanese was only the second pilgrim I had beaten for pace over the course of a day. 'Please,' he quailed, his bristled moon of a face generously puckered in desperation, 'you find paper please?'
    The curfew was half an hour later than usual, which at least afforded us a rare opportunity to experience dining amidst the crockeried babel of locals. We were joined by a French Canadian woman with her son, who had only started in Astorga and so found themselves vulnerable to our wined-up, road-weary condescension. Raising glass and voice above the clamour I held forth with alcoholic obstinacy on Flans I Have Known; Donald delivered a more thoughtful but no more concise address on the epic landscapes of the meseta.
    It was only as we were into the brandies that the mother quietly revealed her walk as a spiritual gesture for a dying friend. That was sobering, and it needed to be. Once we'd bid them farewell with muted contrition it all went rather maudlin. Bracing himself with the dregs of his snifter, Donald told us of the Spanish pilgrim who had arrived at Rabanal one evening during his tenure as hospitalero. 'I can keep that in the office if you like,' he'd offered, spotting a torch-sized silver phial in the man's hand as he filled in the register. Translations from a bilingual pilgrim in the queue and a quietly polite refusal; the man's ten-day-old son had died after a sudden seizure three weeks previously, and the phial contained his ashes.
    Walking up the valley bank away from Portomarín, a medieval pilgrim must have believed he'd make it to Santiago now. This was the home straight, and he set off up it with a spring in his step and another down his pants: the stretch from here to Palas de Rei was a 24-kilometre al-fresco knocking shop, patrolled by prostitutes who would lure single males into the woods. 'These whores are not only to be excommunicated,' fulminates the Liber Sancti Jacobi, 'but also are to be held in shame by all and have their noses cut off.' Hardly the kind of morally edifying company you'd expect a pilgrim to keep, but by the cold logic of Catholic repentance, what did they have to lose? It would all come out in the Santiagan sin-wash.
    Evelyn, Petronella and I set out into a heavy morning mist and up the wooded valley it filled: there