Travels with my Donkey

the fifteenth century, the rollo served both to celebrate and expedite the town's newly acquired right to hang its own criminals. The deluxe gallows stood at the edge of a doornail-dead plaza, a strangely unpeopled realm dominated by a sombre, foursquare church whose big, cracked bell tolled out as I stood there, a ponderous, hang-'em-high tocsin echoing tonelessly off the shuttered houses.
    'Yes!' I looked round to see a young man with a huge ponytail grinning brilliantly in the albergue's gateway. 'Here we kill de killers!'
    He stood there impressively as I walked Shinto over, fists on hips, black-leathered legs planted distantly apart, perhaps debating whether to do something complicated with a sabre or catch a willowy swooner in the crook of his elbow and press his lips roughly to hers.
    Edouardo was his name, but he was more than that. I was looking at the King of Boadilla. He had done everything that I said small-town Spaniards didn't do, ruthlessly targeting the pilgrim euro with a success whose visible trappings multiplied throughout our short walk to Shinto's overnight field: the Burberry pullover on the back seat of the big car, the pair of haughty white stallions prancing magnificently about in an adjacent pasture. Shinto surveyed them glumly — in the equine attraction stakes, he was now up against a couple of babe electro-magnets. Edouardo's farewell to him, a belittling sonny-boy slap on the rump, can't have helped.
    'It's a good life,' breezed Edouardo as we walked back to the albergue. Too right: 14 euros for half board in a bijou country club might seem a ludicrous bargain, and indeed was, but when you multiplied 14 by the forty-eight beds that meant a lot of cash in Edouardo's manicured hand, seven days a week for seven months a year. Great weather, cheap property and guests you can lock up together in a big room at 10.00: I know I'm tempted.
    I hadn't dared expect the albergue to live up to its promotional billing, but oh, how it did. Within its walled grounds pilgrims were prostrate on the velvety lawn with books over their faces; a woman, who was of course Edouardo's put-upon mother, walked out from the main house with a tray of beers.
    When I noted that these were delivered in frosted glasses I could have fallen back into Edouardo's hairy forearms, but it was just as well I didn't because they were full already. 'I had a girlfriend from Canada one time,' he was crooning, his hand round Evelyn's shoulder. 'What happened?' she asked, gazing at him wondrously. Edouardo shrugged cheesily, a parodie homage of the Fonz. 'I love de ladies too much.'
    I'd never thought of Evelyn as a simperer, and when Edouardo followed these words by brushing his knuckle gently down her cheek with a sickening wink I waited eagerly for her to empty that frosted glass into his leathered crotch. Instead, she giggled like a schoolgirl. 'That was a lot better than the kissy old granddad this morning,' she said once she'd recovered. I find I'm now obliged to point out that as a Spaniard, Edouardo was by no means a tall fellow.
    For this performance and so much more I should have despised him, as should everybody else, but because he had created heaven on earth he got away with it. If Edouardo loved his job just a little too much then he was also very good at it: bantering with each and every guest as he took our evening orders, and supplying me with FLAN! even though it wasn't on the menu. After we'd all sat up late, sprawled on huge sofas in the candlelit, wood-stoved antechamber guarding our dormitory, he brought in all the stuff we'd forgotten on the lawn: books, shoes, saddles.
    And the next day there he was at 6 a.m., or in my case 7.15, serving up café con leche with a toothy Wham! smile. All things considered this made up for the in-between bit, which was rather besmirched by a German woman accusing me of cheating ('But with a monkey this is an easy way to walk') as we brushed our teeth, a vast spider on the wall by my pillow, and a pair of French boots under the next bunk that assaulted the senses so savagely they might just as well have snored.
    All morning we walked along the Canal de Castilla, an appealing but grandly over-ambitious civil-engineering project, inaugurated in the 1750s and rendered redundant by the railways long before its completion. Every few clicks we passed a comely little classical gazebo, one of the original maintenance huts; the flight of locks just outside Frómista was more like a