Travels with my Donkey

expression blending curiosity and wary amusement. John had told me exactly what to say — I think he'd even made me repeat it — but all I could recall was the word for barley. 'Cebada,' I croaked, proffering my wrinkled sack, happily the one with 'nitrate' printed on the side. 'Cebada. Burro. Peregrino.'
    A querying masculine babble echoed around, and a fullshouldered man appeared out of the shadows. They talked briefly, then she said 'Inglés?'
    'Si. Yes,' I replied, trying to remember how to smile.
    'You av burro ? He like cebada ? You go Santiago?' I kept nodding, and they both broke into beams. The man took my bag and strode over to a conical mound of grain, and began transferring the latter to former with a big steel scoop.
    'Is... for sheeps,' elaborated the woman, 'but OK I think for burro. Is cebada wis... soya?' Her accomplice dragged the half-filled sack over and heaved it into my arms: this product of peasant industry was the weight of a fat four-year-old. Again the awkward attempts to offer payment, again the ostentatious refusals. When my brain was better I pictured a Spaniard with a big bag walking into a barn in Suffolk, and when I pictured him waddling raggedly back out with it stretched tightly over his head and torso I realised how very wonderful these people were.
    The tape-loop barks were now counterpointed by a mournful braying that reached me as I laboured the sack into the relevant backstreet. Shinto threw himself towards the shed door as I unbolted it, and looking at him straining on the rope, the air full of hydrocarbons and dog noise, I knew that I couldn't make him stay in there. Thieving gitanos or no, he'd be snuffling up his sheep swill in the open alley.
    As I manhandled my possessions to the end of the dim, brownish hall, the albergue abruptly opened up into a huge and agreeably rambling edifice, corridors floored with age-worn planks arranged around an enormous central staircase. Everyone was filing to and from bathrooms in preparation for bed: the good news was that I'd somehow once again bagged my own room, a strange trapezoid with over-varnished panelling; the bad news was that I hadn't eaten.
    Never judge a Spanish house by its cover, nor a Spanish town by its outskirts. Unshowered I fumbled down into the street, and very soon found myself in an arcaded plaza of confounding beauty. In gathering gloom I squinted about, trying to square this arched and towered Renaissance majesty with what had gone before. And look: there were people, an unpilgrimmed multitude, laughing, smoking, pushing prams. Old men sitting outside bars gamely tapped their feet along to the techno leaking from within, peered down on by nosy old dears perched on precarious second-floor balconies. Friday night it may have been, but this was the first time a small town had been willing to demonstrate evidence of significant inhabitation.
    A church filled one side of the square, and I found myself drawn towards its buffed colonnades. The towering doors of the Iglesia de Santa Maria de la Asunción were slightly ajar — an unencountered astonishment that demanded entrance.
    Inside was a single worshipper, a bandanna-headed young Spanish pilgrim I remembered exchanging road lore with somewhere near Pamplona. He was genuflecting at the back of the aisle, head almost touching his knee, lips working soundlessly. In other circumstances, ones that would have involved the prior ingestion of equilibrium-restoring calories, I'd have found this spectacle faintly embarrassing. Instead, I looked beyond him to the distant altar, and found myself impressed, transfixed and at length swooningly overwhelmed by a great wall of gold, a Baroque retablo sumptuously alive with a profusion of gilded cherubs and virgins and Christ in all his forms. The apostles — could this be right? — returned my stare with eyes of crystal; I lowered myself ashenly into the rearmost pew.
    With unblinking eyes I slowly scanned the walls: shoals of scallop shells, gourd-toting Santiagos and a tight mass of screaming, golden souls in purgatory; I turned behind and at the back beheld a glass coffin enclosing a serene saviour. The bandanna pilgrim rose, and crossed himself, and as he passed I felt his zealous, knowing gaze upon me. I thought again of the people who had walked here from all over Europe, stoked by the belief that in doing so they would earn their place in heaven. And just for a moment I thought they might have been right.
     
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