Travels with my Donkey

back through the mighty refugio doors, I thought of Shinto, a four-footed Cinderella shut up under a carport with a bucket of barley while his ugly master lived it up at the ball. A minute later I was clambering about a building site, uprooting huge armfuls of alfalfa and wedging them into a bin-liner.
    Shinto seemed very nearly moved by the unexpected bounty I upended at his loud (or louder) end, settling immediately into its enthusiastic ingestion. For a moment I surveyed his steady jaw work with proprietorial content, the concrete at our feet sporadically illuminated by an aerial pyrotechnic flash whose retort hit us a second later. The trumpets whined and blared distantly, a fading jeer after every off-key parp.
    I smiled, happy in at least two different ways. And soon in at least three, because groping my way out through Shinto's yard and back to the refugio 's rear entrance, I immediately blundered into a wire cage that twittered and gobbled in shrill protest. The occupants, starkly so even in the uncertain half-light, were a dozen or so white chickens, strutting jerkily about in aimless alarm. I stooped to the cage and could just make out 'CATEDRAL' Dymo-taped to the top of the frame. The cathedral had naturally been closed, this time at least for festival preparations, but here were its feted avian inhabitants: evidently the pairs were subject to squad rotation. I nipped quickly back to Shinto's enclosure, brushed up a handful of spilt barley from around his bowl, then breathlessly emptied it into their cage. 'Eat,' I hissed, and in a great chirpy flap they instantly did. The holy roosters had spoken: I would reach Santiago alive.
     
    Evelyn attended the odd mass, the bereaved old Chicagoan did so every day, so too a few of the big snorers and those wide-eyed young Hispanics. That was largely it: in the soundtrack to this pilgrimage, the droning chants of the pious went largely unheard, unless you count all that Enya I had to put up with in the evenings. But though the judge of all men might not have pointed our way to Santiago, someone had. This was still somehow a sacred undertaking: even if you didn't talk the talk, you had to walk the walk.
    The golden rule was this: you got to Santiago under your own steam. 'Pilgrim' was derived from the Latin peregrinus, a cross-country walker, a wayfarer. The power ramblers might not have understood much, but they understood that. Yes, many lacked the holiday allowance to do the camino in one go: two weeks' walking a year for three years was a popular option. But if you said you were going to do it, you did it — all of it.
    The road to Santiago was for centuries plagued by what medievalists call 'false pilgrims', usually thieves or fraudsters dressed in the requisite hat and cape who'd inveigle themselves into a pilgrim convoy for the purposes of covert or violent plunder. They came from all over Europe, attracted by the compelling opportunities presented by a ceaseless throughput of tourists wandering through lonely woodland. They particularly came, I'm afraid, from Britain: in 1318 'John of London' ransacked pilgrim hospices throughout Navarre, and twelve years later an unnamed Englishman was hanged for drugging and robbing travellers in Estella. Even before William Wey's ship landed in Spain, a light-fingered fellow pilgrim had snipped purses from at least two belts.
    But the modern breed of false pilgrim comes with a more malignant deception in mind. He wears the shell, and bears the pack, and carries within his papers the imprinted cipher of many a humble hospice. But when the human tide sets forth each morn this man tarries. And then when the coast is clear he nips down the taxi rank and bungs his stuff in the boot of a Citroën Xantia.
    It takes one to know one, of course, but for me all the short cuts were blocked off well before those 'Moral Dilemma Ahead' signs. Even a Spanish bus driver would probably baulk at a donkey, particularly when his owner refused to pay full fare for a nine-year-old. And hitch-hiking was out of the question unless I happened upon a driver with the stunted quadruped-detection faculties of Little Red Riding Hood. I'll never know if I would have cheated if I could have. But because I couldn't, I galloped Shinto up to the moral high ground and sat impressively astride him, seething with righteous indignation.
    How could you come on a pilgrimage and cheat? And lie about cheating? To do so, I decided, was a symptom of terminal soul