Travels with my Donkey

not caring that the head to which it belonged now lay buried in a warm, soft neck, not knowing that through that head spooled a messily spliced loop tape of mud and sun and barley, of treble bunks and double brandies, of flan and friend and midnight bray, of trial and tribulation. 'Photo, photo, photo!'
    My brother was watching from the Plaza del Obradoiro's distant opposite bank, and later reported that my tourist entourage had all exchanged shrugs — and, in one case, swivelled-fingers-in-temples — before clicking away regardless. When I raised my head and blinked out the last tear one snapper came up and pressed a euro in my hand; I contemplated it blankly, too fraught and drained to protest. I'd had this down as a humble alms offering until an unkempt man in a brown felt cape and scallop-brimmed hat shuffled into shot for a piece of the action — his outfit was set off with a staff and gourd in one hand and a cig and a multilingual note in the other: 'Foto with me €2'. Simon had crept up unseen with my camera and captured the scene as my rent-a-pilgrim struck a photogenic pose with his head arched down to Shinto's, and looking at the result now I'm rewarded to note those long ears flattened back in sour hostility.
    I walked on before I began to feel like the false medievalist, or that caped and gourded dog with the same notice over there, or those Pentax-toters sticking their head through the comedy pilgrim cut-outs over there. Still the crowd surged and eddied around, shouting out all the old questions in French, in English, in Spanish, but always now in retrospect: what did he eat, where did he sleep. I again had the certain feeling that Shinto knew this was an important, defining moment in his life both as ass and pilgrim, and again I was right. The oohs and aahs morphed into ohs and urghs, and sure enough when I looked back he'd laid down a dozen hot markers on those holy cobbles.
    Simon jogged up just before a pair of finger-raised policemen, and together we crinklingly dispatched the unwanted souvenirs with plastic-bag mittens. Returned to earth more literally than ever before we stood, sagging crap bags in hands, and embraced carefully. 'I'll stay with him,' said Simon when we'd finished, 'and you go off for your certificate.' The compostela — my Get Out of Hell Free card, and I'd forgotten all about it.
    Obtaining this might have held more significance had the process felt a little less like renewing a TV licence during a water shortage. Queuing in the strip-lit Pilgrim Office at the end of a long line of unwashed, unfamiliar arrivals — snorers to a fat-bellied, big-nosed man — I felt a suggestion of the anticlimax that many pilgrims had written about. Half an hour later I was dictating my name to a bored official, who after a little scribbling handed me a small scroll. Topped by a sepia depiction of Santiago Peregrino and fulsomely bordered with scallop shells, in a Latin rubric unchanged from the fourteenth century this detailed the devoted ambulatory achievements of Dnum Timoteum Moore. 'Compostela por mi burro!' I asked, in an unexpectant tone that perhaps made the ensuing refusal too easy.
    Jubilation was what I'd wanted, and happily it had taken hold in the streets by the time I bounded outside. Simon and Shinto were already beleaguered by familiar and now ecstatic faces: English Sara, Jean-Michel, the Scottish couple who had rescued my donkey from suicidal garrotting at Ribadiso. Our hugs were cut short by the dull gonging of huge bells; midday, and the daily Pilgrims' Mass. Leaving Shinto in Simon's care once more, outside a bar with the singing gay Italians, I trotted up the double staircase and into the cathedral's dim but thronged interior, a majestic Romanesque cavern encased beneath that baroque icing.
    In that buffeting crush of rucksacks and day-trippers, it was never going to be easy to work myself up to the spiritual orgasm this moment seemed to demand. Too restless and hassled for insight or manifestation; no statues here you could imagine sweating blood. Perhaps the closest I came was while pressing my hand into the column supporting the welcoming image of Santiago, into five finger holes worn deep in the marble by the grateful, weary touch of pilgrim digits over 900 years. Yes, that was a moment.
    More of a moment, certainly, than my contact with the brashly gilded representation of St James that loomed up behind the altar. Only after twenty minutes in a