Travels with my Donkey

confront a whole castle alone. 'Who is that mad man?' remarked the enemy commander, peering curiously from the battlements before dispatching a patrol. After the unplucky Vianans retrieved Cesare's body the next day, they identified twenty-five wounds.
    Anyway, I didn't find the tombstone — snidely stuck out in the street so his many enemies could grind his name underfoot — but I did think about him over the course of dinner. I'd met the chocolate Polizei and a nice German chap called Simon, and together we'd found a rigorously authentic local hang-out: dark heads thrown back in swashbuckling laughter, the sour smoke of black tobacco, nutshells and fag ends all over the tiled floor. And, high up in a corner, a large telly showing a man in an embroidered pink over-corset waving a tablecloth at a big black animal.
    From here on it would be impossible to eat cheaply without encountering a broadcast bullfight, and in consequence I saw one almost every night. As a torture it was a peculiar blend of the cruel and the tedious, as technically complex as pulling the legs off a greenfly and as a spectacle hardly more dynamic. And yet being a televised sport — I was oddly thrilled by the studio experts doodling with light pens on the freeze-frame replays — I felt a duty to my sex and age to find something good about it. The matador's expressions were dependably entertaining — a constipated, glowering pout that German Simon endeavoured to adopt throughout the soup course — but that night there was a very special bonus.
    'Look! He has him here!' cried Simon, leaping to his feet and clamping a hand to his groin with the vigour of a young Michael Jackson. And as I turned, the man in pink copped a tusk deep in the loins, before being hoisted, twisted and tossed in one fluid movement. A couple of the girls cheered discreetly, though they quickly stopped when we rewound to the slo-mo. Oh, dear Lord it was grim. But not for the locals. From their titillated gasps you knew that here was a star clip for the next series of You've Been Gored.
    Bullfights and Borgias: walking back up the cobbles I speculated on the continuities of Spanish life. In the 500 years since Cesare's last stand uptown Viana hadn't changed much on the surface, nor apparently beneath it. And in terms of this enduring celebration of third-party violence, I was still regularly intrigued by the schizophrenic cult of Santiago: Jimbo Peregrino, the open-faced, gourd-bearing shell wearer, versus James the Moor-slayer, a slavering psycho on horseback, his hoisted blade lustrous with the blood of a million Muslims. Perhaps it was a twist on the old nice apostle/nasty apostle routine. (Though the nasty one wasn't really that nasty, being largely a propaganda creation, and the nice one wasn't that nice: what sort of ungodly egotist goes off to pay homage to himself?)
    The refugio was a faultlessly converted monastery with majestic views, but along with the best points of its genre it showcased all the worst, and these as usual rose to prominence in the hours of darkness. Unexpected confrontation with full-frontal, Pilsner-bellied German nudity was an occupational hazard in any refugio bathroom, but in these early days forewarned was not always forearmed. The man trimming his tache in front of the mirror nodded at me in greeting: I'd enjoyed a linguistically compromised but warmly conducted conversation with him and his wife on the way out of Los Arcos. As I recall he'd given Shinto a cup-cake. A good man, a kind man, but a man whose wrinkled pilgrim parts now rested on the rim of the sink I was waiting to clean my teeth in.
    And just as the communal claustrophobia of refugio life engendered heart-cheering mutual trust — a camcorder charging in a corridor, an unattended six pack on a sleeping bag — so it also catalysed heart-hardening misanthropy. Petty grudges quickly coagulated into destructive loathing: she took twenty minutes in the shower, they broke one of my clothes pegs, he stuck his sandals in the tumble-dryer at 11 p.m. — wait a sec, that was me. The worst, though, were the snorers. And that night we had the phlegm-larynxed, sinus-dredging king of them all.
    You recognised them after a while. That grey-maned, conspicuously featured Frenchman at Villatuerta had looked like a snorer, and he was. Generally, if they were round of gut and large of nose, you knew you were in for a bad night, and after a quick silhouette survey of surrounding bunks — this