Travels with my Donkey

cancer, a corrosion of human decency that should by rights be detected by some kind of inner spiritual alarm. And punished by some spectacular psychosomatic malady: spontaneous combustion gets my vote, but syphilis would do for a first offence.
    Pilgrims passed me as I led Shinto over the Rio Oja, storks beaking up nest sticks on its flood-rubbled foreshore. They passed as I startled him along the hard shoulder of the N120 with a four-foot length of reflective plastic, salvaged from a shattered marker post and waved semaphore-like through his rearward peripheral vision. And they passed as we plodded out from another wheaten prairie and into the town of Redecilla del Camino, home to an enormous Romanesque font and a euro-in-the-slot weighbridge.
    I saw him as I manoeuvred Shinto on to its platform. He was sitting on a shaded bench, shirt aggressively creased, outstretched boots smugly unbesmirched. He'd slept in the bed two away from me at the refugio, and in fact had still been asleep when I left. Because that never happened, I remembered.
    He hadn't passed me, yet now here he was, spoiling my silly fun.
    'Hey — does he need to diet?' He spoke in a complacent, untraceable Eurodrawl. The coin went in and a strip of dot-matrixed ticker-tape spooled out. I have it here now: '14 MAY 2003. 11:52 PESO: 200 KG.' Less than a third the telly-captioned weight of a doomed bull.
    I appraised him again. The books had talked about a 'pilgrim look', and with 200 kilometres under our sweaty belts I knew what they meant: a dusted, windswept ruddiness, like a Midwestern farmer at harvest end. It is fair to say that my friend didn't have the pilgrim look. With him it was more of the golfer look. A Scottish hospitalero I met later said he'd been given a tip on how to detect a suspected cheat: pat a hand on their back in welcome, and if you don't hit sweat start asking questions. The figure before me would have failed that one straight off. His pastelly polo shirt was crisp and dry. Simply put, the man was a wrong 'un.
    'Bus or taxi?' I said, flatly.
    He looked at me, and I suddenly noticed his resemblance to the pudge-faced, shiftily insolent mechanic who accompanied Bonnie and Clyde during the best-known celluloid depiction of their criminal rampage. He looked but he didn't speak. I nodded at him significantly and, with as much portent as you can muster leading a donkey off a weighbridge, walked slowly away.
     
    A merry, lightly bearded Frenchman stopped as I was fending two insistent yappers away from my lunch-time boccadillo under a tree in some shut-up siestaville. 'You are from... ?' he said, and when I told him he extracted a large and densely annotated ledger and made a note. We walked together that afternoon, across the provincial border into Castille-León, and as Jean-Michel told me of his journey — early retirement, the full-strength pilgrimage from Le Puy in central France — it became gradually apparent that as a metaphorical donkey-prod, conversation was more effective than exhortation. Shinto's asinine curiosity was aroused by any debate: a comparison of Anglo-French primary education systems, last night's festivities, the Ford Focus. He'd feign indifference during the opening rhetorical stages, lagging nonchalantly back. But when we got to the crux, even if that meant rear-light clusters, he could bear it no longer and that big head would nuzzle brightly up between our elbows. 'Chin-chin, chaps, what's it all about?'
    The Dutch kids were all over the grass out the front of the churchside refugio at Belorado, and that meant an albergue up a grubby alley just past the John Lennon bar. Each of the small rooms upstairs was crammed with bunks. The official refugios, particularly the overspill accommodation that was my default experience, were well meant but spartan and vaguely awkward — one might imagine oneself being put up by sandally beardos at a traditional-instrument weekend. But the private albergue, as here and at that place with the Welshwoman's bunioned feet, was a very different gig. A dark patch of wallpaper where a picture had hung, a child's plastic boat in the bathroom cabinet, a pair of patent stilettos in the bottom of a wardrobe: everywhere were reminders that off-season this was a family home. And the home owners were largely doing this out of the goodness of their Catholic hearts — I think I paid 3 euros at Belorado. Somehow we were like resistance fighters secretly billeted with a plucky