Travels with my Donkey

'VILLALCAZAR' it read, meaning we were somehow back on track. A paragraph of lunchtime reading inveigled itself out of my skull's shrivelled core, and I slowly turned round to share it with Shinto, his head at half-mast, a grubby, crusted streak leaking from each huge nostril. 'The church in Villalcazar has the tallest porch in Spain,' I announced, in a dry gasp that gave out halfway through. And if there hadn't been a fountain outside, we'd have been looking up at it for eternity.
    It was another 5 clicks to Carrión, which was a long way to keep the jokes coming, but rehydrated and at peace with my donk I got there in under two hours. The Monastery of Santa Clara looked like a prison of the sort Butch Cassidy might have blown a hole through to escape, but it was a proper, working nun-house and I'd been looking forward to staying there for days. There were three sheets of corrugated cardboard wedged through a barred window by its hefty arched entrance, and each bore a message. 'No Stamp' said the first. 'Completo — FULL' said the next. And at the bottom: 'Go to the Other'. Nay, nay and thrice nay. After my miserable experience at that monastery just before Pamplona, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.
    'Christ, mate!' It was Total Shithouse, walking out of the gate and gawping with raw consternation. I'm surprised he recognised me: on top of everything else a sudden lust for cold alcohol had reduced me to perhaps half my normal size. 'We had a... a race,' I said, belatedly appraising the more conspicuous aspects of my appearance and their suitability for the monastic environment. 'No room here, right?'
    'There's some funny feller in the office. He found me a place in the bunk-house. Check this out — there's a machine in the courtyard that sells beer. A convent with beer...' I watched his long, weathered face crack into a gum of carefree depravity; it was a shame that no one would catch even a glimpse of the fourteen nuns said to be in residence.
    I dropped my dead sunglasses in a street-side bin, effortfully unpacked a replacement shirt and walked in and across to the office. He was right about the funniness of the feller. 'No, no — no room here,' the man jabbered into an open drawer, fussing about behind the desk like Mañuel.
    'I don't mind sharing,' I said.
    'With a nun,' called out an Australian voice from outside the door.
    'No, no — no room.' He stopped suddenly, and looked straight at me. 'Only private room, one bed, 16 euro.'
    'Hey!' cried Total Shithouse.
    'Too late,' I called back, peeling a damp pair of tens from my money belt.
    Accessing my room involved three keys and a long walk. I followed the little man up many stairs, along a covered balcony overlooking the ancient courtyard and down a succession of immaculate but grimly spartan corridors. 'Here,' he said, ushering me into a tiny whitewashed chamber. A cupboard, a barred window, and over the narrow bed a framed depiction of Mary keening over a flayed Christ. It was a cell, really, but it was a nun's cell and I had it all to myself. And that was before I opened the cupboard door and found it contained a bath.
    I secreted Shinto behind some trees up against the monastery's rear wall, half-filled his bowl with barley in a spirit of Christian forgiveness and returned to my room, via that vending machine, with an armful of baggage and as much of a spring as my step could conjure up. And a minute later there I was: drinking beer, in the nude, on a nun's bed! Drinking beer, in the nude, in a nun's bath! Drinking beer, in the nude, in front of a nun's mirror! And — oh, filth and buggery — seeing a tick attached to my throat.
    Eating was going to come next, but by the time I'd twisted that little bastard out of my flesh I felt an unstoppable backwash of fatigue dragging me under, and my beery aperitif evolved into a nightcap. It didn't feel as if I'd been out for all that long when some night train of thought crashed into the buffers and my eyes blurted open. In fraught and sweaty retrospection I lay there, watching the moon diced and sliced through the curtainless bars, piecing together the clues to Shinto's recent behavioural problems. I smelt a hot sack of grain fermenting on a clammy grey back, I heard the banging of planks, I saw four burly monks pinning a screaming, noseless freak to his bed. Shinto wasn't just a bit pissed off. He was medievally unwell. This was ergot poisoning. My donkey had St Anthony's Fire.
     
    'Initiation