Travels with my Donkey

Calzada and we passed the big potato warehouse on its outskirts at half twelve.
    I liked Santo Domingo before I'd even got there. The name helped, of course: St Sunday of the Causeway in my dictionary, St Dominic of the Cooking through that peerless Internet translator. But it was more than that. Somehow the history of Santo Domingo was a microcosm of the history of the entire pilgrimage: a tale that combines piety, endeavour and winningly surreal cobblers.
    It's not many a fifteen-year-old, unfortunately, who strides off into the forest resolved to the life of a hermit, but Domingo Garcia was a special character even by the standards of the early eleventh century. Inspired 'to improve travel conditions in the Rioja region', apparently by a dream rather than an infrastructure-development press release, he set about upgrading a nearby stretch of camino. Domingo hacked out a road through 37 kilometres of dense forest, and laid a stone bridge over the mighty Oja, the Rio that gives the province its name. He built the pilgrim hospice and the church that were the kernel of a new town that would later be Santo Domingo — and he did all this alone, or at least with a handful of spirited volunteers and the odd angel who took up the slack when everyone stopped to pray.
    Domingo dies in 1109, his apposite final act the literal digging of his own grave, and having been canonised is interred in his own church. Life goes on in Santo Domingo — a steady stream of pilgrims, a fire in the church, the series of vicious regional disputes that sees Navarre and Castille swap ownership of the town six times in one twenty-four-year period alone — until some unknown point in the mid-twelfth century, when a family of Germans en route to Santiago stops at a Santo Domingo inn.
    The innkeeper has a beautiful daughter and the pilgrims a handsome son. Well, you know the story: boy meets girl, chastely eschews lewd congress, spurned girl frames boy for theft, boy is strung up by furious locals and left to rot. One of the perennial attractions of these tales is the bereaved family's nonchalant acceptance of tragedy.
    'I don't know if you've looked out the window this morning, Heidi, but there's a corpse swinging from the gallows that looks an awful lot like our Wolfgang.'
    'Let's see... Honestly, why do they always have to spin about like that? I can't get a proper look at him.'
    'Next time he's facing our way try and imagine him without that big purple tongue lolling out.'
    'OK. Here we go... Know what? You're absolutely right: that's the tabard I had to stitch up after that business with the donkey.'
    'Oh, marvellous. Some bloody pilgrimage this is turning out to be. Anyway, best crack on — you nip down and get his shoes off and I'll bring the cart round the front.'
    They reach Santiago and pass back through Santo Domingo a month later. But when they go to pay their respects to the fly-blown bird table that was once their little boy, instead there he is, waving happily at them from the gibbet. St James has held his weight the whole time, presumably with one hand, leaving the other free to lob earth-bound scraps of sustenance into his mouth. The newly unbereaved couple rush to inform the local town clerk of the miracle. 'If he's alive,' he snorts, 'then so are these roast chickens I'm eating.' Cue flying supper.
    The enduring upshot is that to this day a coop in the west transept of Santo Domingo's baroque-towered cathedral houses a pair of noisy white cockerels. The curious pilgrim can still today take a rather high-risk Baguette Challenge: chuck a lump of bread in the cage, and if they eat it, his pilgrimage will reach a successful conclusion. If they don't, he'll find progress to Santiago impeded somewhat by his own death.
    I don't know who'd been fattening up their cocks that day, but the Santo Domingans were evidently happy about something. As the street narrowed and the buildings aged and grew, so my fellow pedestrians swelled in numbers and effervescence. There were groups of men in matching neckerchiefs, children in lace caps and harlequin-hued plimsolls. Suited dignitaries with religious medallions covering their tie knots and red-haired wives in tow. An audibly complex commotion echoed towards me off the aged walls and was presently traced to a brass band in polka-dotted boiler-suits, half of them parping enthusiastically into cornets and the rest extracting flamboyant refreshment from those chemistry-lab wine-spout things, arms