Travels with my Donkey

another, until my arms could barely encircle its circumference.
    He jumped down and waved away my crust-muffled offers of payment.
    'Peregrino, peregrino ,' he said, escorting me to the entrance and thence across the busy road.
    'You are a lovely, lovely man,' I shouted over my load as he turned back. Not quite a miracle, perhaps, but certainly a defining moment.
    I shed a couple of loaves on the way back, but Shinto still seemed rather overawed by the scale of his nutritional undertaking, piled up before him like some daft inversion of the feeding of the five thousand. I had made a cathedral-sized prannet of myself on his behalf, but I was happy. And also hungry: it was now 7.30, and the dinner my landlady had promised would be cooling on the second-floor dining table.
    Indeed it was, a brimming bowl of ketchupped pasta amidst a table full of empties. Four other pilgrims had arrived in the interim, and the one with her head under the formica was Welsh. 'Oh, God,' she said, with a sort of intrigued disgust. 'My big toe is just one huge... well, have a look.'
     

Eight

     
    ' E veryone told me that the camino offered those who walked it a love affair,' wrote Shirley MacLaine. 'It was the individual's choice whether to take it.' Well, it hadn't offered me one yet — even though, like her, I'd made 'a conscious decision not to wear a bra'. The same work of academic reference that had detailed those church-bell orgasms (top that, Pavlov) and breakfast erections also incorporated a case study of a Barcelona man who notched up three marks on his staff in three weeks. 'I think my lovers were inspired by natural beauty,' he smirked. Then there was the sixty-year-old German, and the tantalising confession of his experiences as 'a very bad pilgrim'. The author had indeed included a whole chapter entitled 'Increase in Sexual Energy', going so far as to suggest the camino's scallop-shell motif derived from an ancient association with some Venus love-cult. Where were the 'end-of-the-day group massages'? I'm not complaining, not really, but who wouldn't have felt erotically short-changed by a priapic donkey and a faceful of bunions?
    Not the medieval pilgrims, at least not openly. Keen to bolster the sin-list, and so maintain a healthy stock of penitent potential pilgrims, throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Church authorities made it more and more difficult to avoid carnal wrongdoing. Sex was proscribed for forty days before a major religious festival, and for five before communion. Ditto on Thursdays (the day Jesus was taken prisoner), and obviously Fridays (when he was crucified). Sunday was clearly right out, and in fact why not Saturday (out of respect for the Virgin) and Monday (in honour of the dead). But hold on to your codpiece, Mr Tuesday Casanova: no unseemliness in the dark, certainly no nudity and none of that foreplay filth. And now I'd like you to stand up, hand on heart and before God, and repeat after me: 'I pledge to douse lustful feelings by practising conjugal relations only whilst extremely tired and ideally half-asleep.'
    Yet it could have been worse. The Cathars were a twelfth-century French sect who concluded that Satan, not God, had created the world, and thus reviled procreation with an unusually righteous passion. Forget actually having sex; they couldn't bring themselves even to eat anything created by it, directly or indirectly. No meat, no eggs, no milk. Oddly enough, they didn't last long.
    With the sun setting off across a pure blue sky, the second week of my pilgrimage began as had the first. May was bursting out all over: here was a vision of natural fecundity to make a Cathar weep. On the path out of Villatuerta poppies blurted en masse from the well-watered hedgerows, though I could never get Shinto to pose fetchingly before them. He hated pandering to the picturesque, another dogged trait which like his dining habits I had to admire him for. Every time I tried to line him up for a photo by a sun-stippled old horse trough or a walnut-faced widow on her doorstep he'd just saunter onwards and out of shot. If he couldn't he'd very subtly cock his ears and limbs, somehow approximating the symptoms of rickets and abused dementia so effectively that almost every photograph came out like one of the Donkey Sanctuary's 'before' shots.
    Welsh Julie walked with me to Estella, and I forgave that appetite-shrivelling dinner-table performance just outside the town, where with her energetic