May 2 – May 16th
Dear R,
About time for an email. I got the book you sent for Xmas. I’m still planning on going to the running of the bulls. Sober, though. You couldn’t have known when you sent the book that my least favourite animal, real or mythological, is the Minotaur. Bulls are bad enough but the minotaur… just the idea makes me shudder.
I’m undertaking a two-month long walking trek across Spain with the most disagreeable person I know: my father. His idea, el Camino de Santiago, whatever reasons he had for the pilgrimage he’s kept to himself. So far I’ve only been able to deduce his regrets, rather than reasons. I was invited to come along as interpreter of French and Spanish. I couldn’t turn down an opportunity of 2 months expenses-paid travel, especially of a walking tour, or so it sounded to me. Walking is one of my life’s sincerest pleasures, my favourite form of transportation (buses being my least) and also an indispensable tool for my creativity. Several months ago you recommended Rebecca Solnitt to me, and for that, I might be always slightly in your debt. It is in Wanderlust that she describes walking as an activity by which you are simultaneously in your body, in the world, and in your mind.
It’s all been rather idyllic, apart from my curmudgeonly companion, who I don’t believe is enjoying himself at all, but I suppose there is an implied requirement of suffering in pilgrimages, going barefoot or with rocks in the shoes or clad in meagre, inadequate clothing. I suppose being a 70 year old from the flat plains of Oklahoma, climbing through the French Pyrenees and hills of Spain is suffering enough. Hope I’ll have that strength of determination four decades from now.
I would love to report that I’ve spent these first 120 miles or so in serious contemplation, self-reflection instead of just humming Gilbert and Sullivan tunes.
Climbing over rocky mountain, skipping rivulet and fountain, passing where the willows quiiiiiver. Passing where the willows quiver, by the ever-rolling river, swollen with the summer rain, the summer rain.
Threading long and leafy mazes, dotted with unnumbered daisies, dotted, dotted with unnumbered daisies!
(Except the trees tend to be birch, and instead of unnumbered daisies it’s countless dandelions.)
I can’t even say that I’ve been struck by the conversations I’ve had with fellow pilgrims (that’s presuming I’m also a pilgrim and not simply peripatetic). Though I have met interesting people (because most people are interesting) but the ones I’ve liked most have been two dear little old ladies (I seem to collect them) one from Adelaide, Australia and the other from the north of England. The Australian and I bonded over conversations of human rights work and the Englishwoman and I over children’s literature and our love of the Seven Stories there in Newcastle.
I’d have to say that what has impressed me most (and this is absurd) are the things I’ve seen that weren’t really there. For example, the very first day of hiking I witnessed a woman remove her pack to reveal a sweat-stain so perfectly resembling the silhouette of Marie Antoinette’s head: complete with fancy up-do, a nose slightly retroussé, and the whole image ending abruptly at the neck. Another time, at a café in Pamplona I saw a woman walking about in a green top and a skirt the exact colour and shape of an upside-down tulip. Or that the birch forests I walked through have such bright green leaves in their boughs but there’s an ocean of orange and brown fallen leaves on the floor that it seems to be in two seasons at once. Or the town I passed through were every building in the place looked both newly built but long abandoned. I have a friend with whom I used go on evening or night time strolls (and will do again when I get back to him). During our crepuscular rambles (I know you can’t use crepuscular without sounding pretentious and silly, but I like it and I’m using it) we would slip into houses under construction and he would tell me where, in the partially built structure on uniform slabs of concrete, various features of the future home will be. Like an archaeologist, just looking the other way in time. He would be able to make more of these new and incomplete ruins than I can. To me, they just seem a bit pitiful. No promise. No past. Decidedly un-picturesque.
The church Santa Maria has four enormous storks nests at its top.
I currently sit on a pew inside, quite impiously writing this in the middle of a mass. I don’t know the proper responses so I mumble my own, rude versions. Irish and Japanese swearwords that no one is likely to understand. There aren’t many attendees, a dozen or so old ladies and a young girl with pigtails tied with pink ribbons and wearing a matching a pink coat. There’s a clear female majority. The few men present shuffled in late, having come from directly from the bar (I know this because I did too). A few pilgrims have come as well. It’s hard to say if they are here for reasons of faith or, like me, they are imposters, interlopers. But they seem to be the real thing. Devout, and all. I scoot down the pew, feeling uncomfortable, regretting my decision to attend. The dragged-along girl, on the other hand, is looking off to the side, tenaciously picking her nose. For the first time since entering the building, I finally feel kinship with someone! If she were to turn around and watch me get up and leave to go by some sweets from the shop nearby (as I am about to do) I’m sure she would feel it too (or at least envy, which is much the same thing: two people with a shared desire.)
Side note: At the precise moment I was planning to make my escape a beautiful Bohemian (whom I’d seen on the trail and whose eye I’d been trying to catch) sat down next to me in the pew. His ostentatious piety destroyed most of his good looks
I’ve mentioned the church but I I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned that I’m actually staying there, in a room off to the side made available to pilgrims, free of charge (though donations are, of course, welcome). It is lovingly cared for by (and I promise this really is his name) Christian, from Basel.
This aging Swiss moves, despite his age and visible hunch, with a sublime grace. He must have been a dancer in younger years; it’s the only thing I can think of to explain such exquisite male poise.
He’s just made me a (seemingly ceremonial) cup of mint tea to go with my piece of fruit and he’s speaks to me in German. For everything but the most basic phrases I answer in Spanish. Our audience of one (a doctor from Lincolnshire who is running, running, the Camino at 50k a day) who has already confessed that he doesn’t understand either language, nods along with Christian, pretending he does. I think he, like I, feels obligated to converse with this gracious and graceful man, as he went through such painstaking ritual to make our teas.
So it’s the unreal that has been the most real for me. The cameo in the sweat-stain, the forest lost between seasons, the woman that was a flower, the town that was going up and falling down at the same time. It’s all sort of a beautiful sham, like an atheist going on pilgrimage.
But is there such a thing as authentic travel? A question I wrote down in a notebook a year ago and haven’t been able to articulate an answer yet.
No, I think. An authentic cultural experience is not possible for the foreigner, only a facsimile of it, what we are able to understand of it, or more likely misunderstand, or treat with too much romance or cynicism. However organic we try to make the experience, we are still a foreign species inserted into a local environment, no matter how well we thrive there or seem to be accepted. Because travellers go to other places to consume other cultures, languages, landscapes, whether in an attempt to grow and add to oneself or to lose and diminish oneself, travel is still the tool we use, or for some of us, more appropriately, the drug we use.
Travel is a kind of appropriation, however respectfully intentioned. Apart from those who have to leave their homes because they’ve been forced, travel is a luxury that signifies you are free enough to make that choice to go away, stay away, to separate yourself from your own kind, whether you sleep in a hotel, hostel, or on the roadside.
I’m not seeing the real Spain, I’m seeing my mind’s own interpretation of it. I’m seeing what I choose to expose myself to, which might be more, might be less than others choose to, but it’s not authentic. Especially as the path is already predetermined. (As I’m not religious, predetermination is not the sort of thing I’m comfortable accepting.) “This way to Santiago.”
Now I’ don’t know if a pilgrimage is the least authentic kind of travel or the most authentic.
And now I’ve used the word “authentic” so many times I no longer know what I mean by it. I think it is a sign I should stop writing and go wash. My pen is running out of ink and my fingertips smell of orange.