Travels with my Donkey

then with a wristy flick dispatched a viscous skein to the dust at our feet. 'Yeah, been pretty ill,' he said. 'Three days' sick leave in Burgos.'
    If his complex mid-Atlantic vowel sounds were the first indication that Joe had been away from home a long time, then that nasal cameo was the second. The third, and handsomely the most compelling, occurred during a consideration of what brought him here, when without breaking conversational stride he hoicked down his waistband and passed water loud and long, directly into the small gap between us. 'But aren't you a bit young for a mid-life crisis?' I croaked, meaning, Mummy, that man done wee-wee on my shoes.
    'Not at all,' he said, shaking off the drips and palming everything back into place. 'I'm twenty-one, halfway.' His eyes locked into mine, and in that fearful moment I'd have gladly let him crap in my panniers. 'I'm going to die when I'm forty.' With a half-smile Joe turned and walked on. For the next hour I watched as he strode into the unsteady distance until at last it absorbed him.
     
    A pilgrim who walked through Calzadilla de la Cueza in 1974 walked on streets of dust past largely stoved-in adobe shacks, and found the handful of villagers queuing to raise buckets of brackish sludge from the only well. They've piped water in now, and paved a couple of streets, but house martins were still nesting in the wattle and daub and a powerful sense of deprived isolation prevailed. The rumour I later heard was that all the land I'd walked through that day, and would walk through the next, was owned by four men, and not being one of them made you a serf in all but name. Shambling gratefully towards the refugio, I passed a gap-toothed, boss-eyed villager sitting on a kerb, blankly tracking a large woman as she wobbled down the street on a tiny child's bike, knees out, dinging the bell to announce something important: end of siesta, death of Franco, arrival of four-legged solution to the sausage famine. It was a scene that somehow encapsulated a favourite Jerry Springer caption: 'Slept with cousin's boyfriend and had his child.'
    The refugio was compact, and nearly full, but it had a drinks machine on the porch and bordered a patch of grass shaded by rude barns. That was the two of us sorted out. I fumbled and tugged my horrid boots off, then slumped against the cool wall by the door with the first of many Cokes upended to my tilted head, watching familiar and new faces come and go. Foremost amongst the latter were an oldish Japanese couple, the husband shuffling behind his wife with an outstretched hand on her shoulder. 'Almost 100 per cent blind,' whispered German Barbara. But no Joe. Petronella had seen him walk past; the next refugio was unthinkably distant.
    'Eh, burro!'
    It was the hospitalero, young by the standards of Calzadilla and short even by the standards of Spain. I gathered that his name was Antonio and that he liked donkeys, but was then happy to hand over translation duties to Australian Kathy. Antonio prattled away theatrically, sizing absent donkeys with his hands and mourning them with his eyes and forehead. Kathy tried to keep up. A many-assed upbringing on his grandfather's farm, the improbable agricultural tonnage a burro could haul, the cruelty he saw inflicted on donkeys in neighbouring farms, and the strict edicts that now proscribed this. 'He says donkeys are very rare now in Spain,' said Kathy. Well, I knew that. Antonio blurted a couple of loud words as he walked off. 'Only fifty,' Kathy translated.
    I gawped. Could that be right? Was I really responsible for 2 per cent of the Spanish donkey population, and by inference around 24 per cent of all proscribed cruelty? It was a thought that preoccupied me throughout my unpacking procedure, after which a Chilean-German chap in the bunk opposite announced that Antonio had earlier told him of his grandfather's recent death. At the age of 131.
    There was only one place to drink and eat and we all went there, thirty of us lined up either side of a long table. After a day of authentic pilgrim suffering it was always good to enjoy an authentic pilgrim debrief. 'Hey, remember that tree?' called out Evelyn as the lomo arrived. And we all did.
    Many bottles in we relaxed into stereotypes. Jean-Michel announced that life was short, and in a voice unsteady with philosophical melodrama urged us all to welcome each day as an opportunity to experience new adventures. A man I knew as Gunther started taking his