All in a day’s walk:´I hope bed bugs eat your weiner’
The sweet rasp of the cicadas, so often my morning companion, and the soothing whoosh of a high wind in low trees, pulls me out of Portomarin.
As so often, it is a long ascent and I passed two squat South African women, struggling with their feet. More and more now, I meet new arrivals and find myself in the role of elder, a veteran of The Way.
This veteran now knows how to take his time and is breaking the next two guidebook days into three. I was enjoying the wind, but a storm was brewing and although not far from my stop for the night, found myself holed up in a cafe with a Dutch couple, sheltering from the skies.
I realize I am meant to be alone at this time, and am pondering the deeper reasons for my journey, questions of good and evil and the role of the Church — whichever church — in splitting we humans in two: body and soul, good and bad, self and other…
For some reason, I am interrupted by thoughts of my encounter with a Japanese man in Sarria, now a good way across northern Spain.
I had checked in to the municipal hostel, asking for a lower bunk. But when I got upstairs, he was in my bed.
He was a caricature: wearing a headband, glasses, piano keys for teeth, and prone to hysterical outbursts of laughter.
¨You are in my bed. I have this bed, A5, ¨ I said, showing him my slip.
He pulled out his and contemplated it. There was a burgeoning sense of mirth in the dorm.
¨They or A, ¨ he said. ¨They or A! ¨
He was exasperated, finally drawing a circle with his hand, ¨They or A! ¨ he screamed, indicating the whole room.
Yes, they are all A, I said, we are in dorm A, but they also have numbers for the beds.
He didn´t get it.
I took his bed on realizing it was also a low bunk. He started to get up. Stay put, I told him, let´s not get more confused.
Later in the day, still looking like he´d won a wild card at Wimbledon and was about to play an extremely poor set of tennis, he approached me with profuse apologies, bowing and scraping.
¨No matter, ¨ I said, ¨They are all A.¨
And so I come to stage three of my journey — not as the books said, first the physical part over the Pyrenees, followed by the emotional and then the spiritual. For this pilgrim, it´s different.
Initially, I was looked after by my American and Australian friends, then enjoyed a ´family’ with my daughter Meg, Jamie and Ute, but today I let them go and headed out on my own.
It is in these times of solitude, that angels seem to whisper to me, and I know I need them. Ute, the young German woman with whom I had fallen into an affair, had wanted to know what I wanted to do as she felt in a dilemma: to go quickly with the young and fleet of foot or slowly with me.
What do you want she asked me at the albergue at Vilar de Mazarife last night? It was coated in graffiti, a kind of living effigy. I had looked up at the bunk slats above me earlier:
´I hope bed bugs eat your weiner,¨ said the author.
I hoped not but lay there knowing the truth: the day I had met Ute I had completed my quickest day and was getting fitter. Since meeting her, I had walked less and spent a few days eating cakes in the city.
It was neither her fault nor mine, just the rolling current of life, closeness with another, my innate self-indulgence — and an old pattern that I had come here to let go of.
´´You are like the sun and an invitation, ¨ she said to me rather flatteringly earlier, ¨I can lean on you. You are the first person for a long time I can do that with.¨
It was a role I was very comfortable with, but one I knew I had to change. It was painful for me not to put others first, not least women — I had been doing it since my father left my mother — but I knew it was not good for me, and that it was time to look after myself.
So we said goodbye. She put some fruit in my bag and gave me some money. It had been a while since I hit a bank and I had miscalculated. For where others drew from the deep well of soul strength inside me, I drew on their more worldly capacities.
It was a trade-off and it worked in its way. It had gotten me through life and yet I am here for something else, for me.
I hit the long, straight road out of town, carrying my full pack for the first time in ages. I had been advised early on to have it portered, but now it seemed important to carry the full weight of my life. So I did.
Almost immediately, I felt the weight pressing into my right heel, and my left hip and knee struggled, reminding me of the American with two titanium knees.
¨I didn´t know it would be so painful, ¨ she told me. ¨I just cut off both your legs, what do you expect? ¨ said her doctor. She was sanguine about it.
I was late out. The others were doing 20 miles and were gone. I was going to do just over 10, although I lost the path and wound up on a bypass and so limped into Hospital de Orbigo with a few extra kilometres behind me.
Any town calling itself hospital was a mecca for people like me, I thought.
But I was not in too bad a shape for once and looking forward to showering, washing my clothes and relaxing.
Would I see the others again? I do not know. I wanted to see Meg last night, but she did not come and see me despite saying she would.
It was hard to tell last night if something was wrong. The young people seemed to be sticking together and so I asked Jamie, the young boy, what was up?
¨You are a Camino celebrity, ¨ he said, smiling. ¨Because of your blog.¨
Perhaps that was it, perhaps there was more. I had seen again and again how although the human heart is infinitely expansive, the human mind on the other hand can become infinitely small.
It was a strange corollary that here the most devout are the most judgmental, as if the church had planted itself in their minds, catching them on a wheel where more masses were needed, more rosaries, to counteract the self-condemnation so often projected on to others.
