Travels with my Donkey

grain and bread were fresher,- stay long enough in a monastery, and a complete recovery was almost guaranteed.
    I found myself almost uncomfortably affected as I stood under that great, pointed arch and let the guidebooks direct me to two little niches set into its base. Every night the monks would fill these with loaves of bread, untainted bread, lest any hungry pilgrims arrived after the big doors were heaved shut at dusk. And as I stood there, contemplating all the hideousness and beauty of the medieval pilgrimage, I heard the telltale taps and scrapes that heralded the approach of a serious, pole-pushing walker. Two of them in fact, walking up to and straight beneath that glorious arch without ever once raising their eyes from the tarmac.
     
    Castrojeriz was known to the old pilgrims as 'long town', and certainly embraced the tenets of ribbon development more tightly than any town of 1,200 souls should ever dare. It was half four when we ambled past the first church, and half five — sixty whole, hot minutes — before the refugio revealed itself. An airy gymnasium filled with incense and tinkling instrumentals, this was an establishment under the languid stewardship of two terrific middle-aged hippies — brothers, said Evelyn, poofters, said our old friend Total Shithouse. The younger took an instant shine to Shinto, carefully inscribing his name and age in the refugio logbook, and then insisting I accompany him on a quest for suitable donkommodation.
    This involved a brief reacquaintance with some of the forgotten pleasures of motorised transport, but also with every one of its obscurer elemental terrors. He piloted his elderly Renault in a manner inconsistent with its braking system, a largely external affair involving piles of sand and pliable roadside vegetation. It was perhaps fortunate that plenty of both edged the driveway to a farm additionally blessed with charitable owners and a surfeit of uncultivated land. There were good people in this town. I returned there with Shinto and shuffled back alone, warmed from without by that ever-blazing sun and from within by the spirit of San Anton.
    'Hey — where's the donkey?'
    I turned to see an American woman, fiftyish, in racing-driver shades and a white beanie hat, and crossed the pan-fried tarmac to join her. A swift résumé of recent travails revealed that she had also taken coffee with Udo, and our walk back to the refugio was accompanied by a breathless account of her experience. 'Like, it was just so theatrical,' she said, her pursed and painted lips working furiously, 'though as an actress, from Hollywood, I really have to say I found the whole experience totally amazing.' This sentence was delivered in perhaps two seconds, and I was still trying to pick through its many salient features when without warning she grabbed my arm and abruptly adopted a tone of low, urgent confidentiality. 'But he hated me. That man hated me.'
    'I think he was just generally odd,' I said when she'd let go. 'To everyone.'
    'He wouldn't even let me use his toilet! Can you believe that?'
    'There wasn't a toilet.'
    She fixed me with a cold, suspicious stare; I had the Confraternity book in my hand and read from it: '"NB — there are NO sanitation facilities."' Watching her walk briskly away up the refugio steps I wondered why I'd said those capitals so loudly.
    I had dinner in an uplit, dandified cellar with Jean-Michel and a female compatriot of his who spoke Spanish and at my behest wrote down what I felt to be a key phrase on a napkin. I have it before me now, that plump and gracious Continental calligraphy sorrily furrowed and wrinkled: 'Limpiará la suciedad de mi burro.' How oddly rewarding it was to pick up the sort of holiday vocabulary that substituted pleas for beer with a pledge to clear up the mess of one's donkey.
    'I met a very interesting lady from America today,' whispered Jean-Michel as we picked our way up the dark refugio stairs. He described her and we both nodded in confident recognition.
    'The actress from Hollywood,' I gently confirmed.
    'Ze children's book right-air from Philadelphia,' murmured the Frenchwoman, more slowly.
    Jean-Michel eyed us as carefully as the gloom permitted. 'Ze artiste from Connecticut?' And that was the story of how Baroness von Munchausen got her name.
     
    The farmers weren't around to thank again when I released Shinto from the old bedstead I'd tied him up to the afternoon before. As I surveyed his environs in the light of