When I think of Spain I think of a dog, handsome but dusty, sleeping in the shade of a tangled olive tree, while the sun beats down all around and the cicadas screech. Repeat that scene a hundred thousand times and you will have a passable impression of España.
Of course, there are variations. The dog isn’t always a dog; sometimes it’s a mule or a straw-hatted abuelo. The olive could just as easily be a Spanish oak, a fig, or even an avocado tree. If you are in the north, it might be about to rain, to hail, to snow. If you are in the south, you might not have seen rain in months and months. But wherever you are, you will have the sun, and the cicadas, and the sense that time moves differently in this place.
I left Spain sometime about half my life ago, when I was 16. Since then I have studied, worked and travelled in other countries. Many of them beautiful. But always, there was a place called home that wasn’t where I was. When I met Spaniards abroad, I would joke about my origins and my mongrel nationality. Half Irish, quarter Dutch, British passport – Andalusian heart.
*
I decided to walk the Camino de Santiago on a bit of whim. As with all the best plans, I’d done very little planning before I began, and had no real reason for doing it, other than it was my 30th birthday and I wanted to be out of the house.
Of course, I’d met plenty of people who’d walked it before. The Camino is one of the best-known pilgrim paths in the world. There are dozens of routes and no set starting point. If you wanted, you could conceivably set out from your front door and it would still count. The only constant is the destination: the Cathedral of Santiago in the Galician city of Compostela – compostela meaning field of stars.
Our starting point was another cathedral in the town of Ourense, about three hours by train from Madrid. We began walking sometime in the comfortable mid-morning after a leisurely lie-in – this was Spain, after all.
Light-hearted and heavy-laden, it didn’t take us long to realise our complete rookie error. The midday sun lashed down with unrelenting ferocity as the road curved steadily upward for several hours. The going was hard and we sweated and cursed miserably, wondering aloud why the hell we’d ever thought this was a good idea.
Suddenly, and seemingly out of the heavens – very deus ex machina – a gaggle of Lycra-clad cyclists descended from the mountain above, gliding effortlessly down the very road we were struggling up it. It should have been infuriating, but instead it was close to miraculous, as every one of them beamed radiantly and bellowed as they passed: BUEN CAMINO! in a voice of genuine sincerity.
We continued up the mountain. Still tired, still sweating. Somehow lighter than before.
There’s been a lot of that. The gentle feeling of involvement that seeps from the locals. Not everyone, of course. Plenty of people will treat you as just another gormless tourist. But more often than not, there is a real sense that total strangers care about your journey.
One assumes the original purpose of the pilgrimage was for the good of all. Not just for your sake, but somehow for theirs. And there is still a grain of that. A heartfelt sprinkling of “Buen Camino”s wherever we go, especially from the old men in bars when we pay for our café con leches, or at the supermarket till when the lady sees our bags and nods some advice about the road, and a muttered blessing. Usually it feels honest.
Something else I’ve noticed is that the people do not change. I’ve been away for a decade and a half, but everyone here is exactly as they were and likely always will be. The people of this land are either surly and brief – not unfriendly so much as busy doing nothing and angry at the interruption – or they are fully ready to embrace you as a long-lost child, offering a lifetime’s advice and stories as they pass you in the street.
There is a line from Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’ – written almost a century ago – that goes: If you ask (a Spaniard) for a cigarette he will force the whole packet upon you’ – it is nice to know that sometimes, a hundred years changes nothing.
*
We spent our first night in a strange stone town called Cea. Very odd place on the edge of nowhere. If Lovecraft had had too much cheese while reading Tolkien late into the night, he might have dreamed up this town. Thick stone-grey slabs laid elegantly amid stone arches and endless columns. All standing on stone cobbles. And everywhere, flowers growing.
It should have been beautiful, but instead it was off. The town was dead calm. Nothing in the streets except cats who all seemed to be sick or blind. A stone town full of one-eyed cats.
Over the next few days, the terrain grew trickier and steadily more beautiful as we trudged though the forested hillsides of Galicia. Averaging around 25km a day, we were taking it pretty easy. Plenty of time to enjoy the views or to eat lunch by the endless streams we crossed over and over by way of tiny sandstone bridges. Again and again, we passed through stunning but empty villages, where the only busy thing was the road full of cars on their way somewhere else. It was sad.
Around the third or fourth day, we began to really feel it. The hurt. The blisters. The sheer evil sound of the squeak-squeak as our packs ground into our shoulders. Luckily around this time, the towns started getting nicer. More shops open, barmen less surly than usual. And best of all, the bells. Wherever we went after the third day, we heard bells everywhere. Bells as we walked into town. Bells as we left. Everywhere the bells, pealing greeting or farewell.
*
I find myself remembering my village, which consisted of fewer than 40 houses nestled in the crook of a valley in the hot hills of Andalucía. Less than hundred people lived there. Miniscule. But my entire world at the time.
I remember my primary school, which was also the village church. Pews all pushed up to front, carpets laid down and toys all over the place. No doubt a placid, tenderly suffering Christ hung somewhere above us as we played, but I can’t remember him.
My strongest and dearest memory of that time is of the kindness of the old lady who lived across the street, and who took it upon herself to cook me a full Spanish lunch every recreo, as it was too far for me to walk home every day and besides, my mother was usually out working anyway.
So instead, I would go across to her little living room and eat alubias con jamon, or garbanzos con espinacas, or the ubiquitous hearty gazpacho. I must’ve eaten at her house every week day for at least three years, but you know what? It felt like the most natural thing in the world. We weren’t related beyond that we lived in the same village, and she knew nearly nothing about my family, us being extranjeros. She knew nothing at all about me. I was a person who needed feeding, so she fed me. That is just how it was.
Sitting on a balcony watching the birds. We are close now. If we leave early enough in the morning (so far our average is around 11am), we should arrive in Santiago by tomorrow afternoon.
I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling except to say that I feel journeyed. Fresh and exhausted. Full to the brim with the insurmountable pleasure of small cafes in bright plazas. Yesterday a Dutchman asked me why I was walking the Camino. I think he was religious and inquiring about my guilt: the health of my soul. Instead, I said something completely cringeworthy but as close to honest as it gets.
I said I was walking for the abundance of it all. I circled my arm around in a dramatic Shakespearian gesture. Because I am here, I said, and the world is there, and I live to close that gap. I don’t think he understood. Maybe it was a language thing.
Our last night on the road was spent in a small town full of bridges, called Ponte Ulla – ‘bridge over the river Ulla’, where we lay on the grass and bathed our bloody feet in the water from the quiet church and never was a blessing more obvious. Earlier that day, we’d swum in the river and stood motionless in the fast-running water as the blue dragonflies rested on our bare and sunburnt shoulders.
It is the evening now, and I will spend the night watching the sky as it goes from blue to blue to blue. And it will be good.
Though I spent much of my childhood surrounded by lush wildlife and majestic landscapes, having sincere experiences and wholesome interactions, the honest truth is most of my time in this country – or any country, for that matter – has been spent busily not-living.
It really is the strangest thing. You spend all your time in love with life, desperate to capture the moments that come close to holding some sense of meaning, some instant of fleeting consciousness – which you hope will live beyond you, or at the very least bring you closer to those who love you. But in order to do this properly, you have to step away from them. You have to leave. You have to turn your back on the sun and sit in the shade of a closed room and hack out an opening, through which you seek to see it clearer.
Essentially you are saying to the world: I must go away because I want to be close to you. That is what these last few years have been for me, where my travels and all my studies have led me. And what this walk has been, a stepping away so that I may step toward you.
Santiago is a city of reds and whites, and massive grey statues that shelter whole families of pigeons. The sky is heavy and you get the feeling it rains often here – though the streets were bright with sunshine on the day we ended our pilgrimage.
We arrived in the great square just before six in the evening – so much for our carefully planned afternoon entrance – and were immediately blown over by the chorus of bells pealing from every church tower in the city. The cacophony swallowed us like a hug, a warm stone hug. Among it all there was a man playing the bagpipes for the tourists, of course. And the pilgrims were lying on the cobbles or looking up at the cathedral or calling their wives with tears running down their cheeks.
It had been the hottest day, but rain was in the air now. Clouds coming down low and our bodies thick with sweat. It made the moment feel breathless and exhausting. As the bells faded, it finally came down. We sat in the square as it started to pour, looking around at the place that was our ending.
I left my walking stick in the great Plaza del Obradoiro, beside the cathedral along with the two or three others abandoned there.
There was something in that, the sight of those twisted branches lying on the cobbles. All over the city, there were sticks leaning in odd places, no longer needed. I thought about what they meant, the weight that they carried, now released. I thought about Spain, and the past and myself. I thought about it all, and then I let it go.