Last

Leaving a hotel room, I always feel at least a slight twinge of loss. My room for a night, but my room no longer as soon as I shut the door behind me. Not that I'd spent much time in my Madrid room, but it doesn't take much for me to get attached. I paid the bill at the front desk and left the Hostal Don Juan forever.

In the early morning streets yesterday people made their way to work, more than a few with hair still wet from morning ablutions. In the doorways and foyers of small hotels women in institutional white dresses mopped floors and washed windows. At the street curb men in flourescent green jumpsuits emptied trash bins into big trucks. The shops were still closed, but the cafes were open and people stood inside at the counters drinking small cups of coffee. I walked up Calle Fuencarrel towards the Tribunal Metro station, thinking about how often I had set off in the morning from a newly familiar place, moving towards the novel and unfamiliar. This was my favorite part of a day of travel, the early light, the cool air, a fresh curiosity and before me the means to indulge it. I walked slowly, and only reluctantly descended into the busy Metro station and traded foot travel for a train.

At the airport I bought a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I was afraid that the only book I had left, The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo Jose Cela, would be too dark and would discolor my going-home mood. But The Road, about a father and son traveling by foot hopelessly across a post-apocalyptic America ravaged by fire and mayhem, was no less grim than the Cela novel, which is the confession of a murderer, written from prison. I ended up having time, a whole day in the air and airports, to read both short books, and while the end of The Road made my eyes water and my face crumple, neither of these excellent books damaged the I'm-almost-home good feeling of the day. When I started the Cela book, his name made me think of Finesterre, where at the spot where the path came down to the sea I'd come upon a larger than life bust of him with the nose knocked off.

As on the flight out, the Iberian Airlines plane was Spanish territory and the announcements were made first and more thoroughly in Spanish. The flight attendants too spoke to me in Spanish, though I noted that to others--who looked more obviously American?--they spoke English, and I wondered if after two months I had begun to take on the appearance of a Spaniard. Or maybe I just looked alert at such simple questions as, what would you like to drink? and, pasta or chicken? I certainly did have the skill to respond correctly to brief requests, but the long and muffled p.a. announcements eluded my full comprehension. My Spanish did improve substantially during the trip, but I'm afraid I still must've often looked like a deer in headlights when someone directed a long stream of the language in my direction. To be fair, I could sometimes discern enough to determine the speaker's meaning and make the necessary response; other times I could pick out a few key troubling words and repeat them as a means of asking for clarification; but sometimes I could do nothing more than smile sheeplessly and say "no entiendo," which translates, roughly, as "I'm sorry, but I have no fucking idea what you just said."

On the long flight to Chicago I had a window seat with no window, just a solid bulkhead. I felt cocooned, but not unpleasantly so. I paused often from my reading to simply sit and enjoy the pleasure of air travel's in-betweenness--those hours when you have left one place but before you have arrived in another, when you have no responsibility to act but only to be. And to maybe practice retrospection. Which I did. I opened my notebook and thought to see if I had any profound conclusions.... but ending up simply making two long lists, one titled "I met many people," the other "I went to many places."

In Chicago I stood in a long line for Customs, waited for my duffelbag to come through (amazed at the number and size of my fellow passengers' luggage; even out and about in the world we need a lot of stuff); went through Immigration; checked my bag again (no official had even glanced at it); took a train to another part of the airport; walked down a long terminal and right on to my connecting flight. Contemporary travel is a marvel of logistical accomplishment. And even so we are impatient, but think of how slow travel must have been even a short time ago.

Of course then my flight was delayed. We sat out on the tarmac for over an hour while a violent thunderstorm passed through, rocking the plane with strong winds. I had a window seat again, and two people in their mid-twenties, strangers to each other, sat beside me. The person just to my left was a Korean-American man, and he held a small video device on which he was watching an episode of South Park. On the aisle sat a tall, dark-haired woman talking on a cell phone to her mother in Rosemount. My two aisle-mates had not spoken until we parked on a side runway and the pilot announced our delay. But then they started and did not stop until we landed in Minneapolis. The man was returning from visiting relatives in Chicago, the woman from a six-month stay in Barcelona. They were both recent graduates, she from Winona State with a degree in Human Resources, he from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Physics; they bonded over the need they shared to find a job.

The woman said she had liked Barcelona but that there were a lot of strange people. She said she was glad to be going back to Minnesota, and then showed the man a picture of her chocolate lab whose name was Brownie. She had a boyfriend in Rosemount too, and they had agreed when she left not to see other people. She had returned early and hadn't told him, and she wanted to surprise him and bring him flowers. She asked the man, with some concern, "do you think it's ok to give him flowers? I mean, what would you think if a girl gave you flowers? I don't mean roses, but you know, something more macho?" The man chuckled uncomfortably, clearly wanting to say flowers wouldn't interest him in the least, but politely answering, "yeah, I think that'd be okay." I wanted to interrupt and be more encouraging, but they weren't talking to me; I was just the middle-aged guy at the window, eavesdropping.

Over the course of the flight the young woman told about her other travels. She had been all over the world--to Australia, to Vietnam and Thailand, to South Africa, all around Europe.... For some reason I was surprised. From the little I could discern (and, admittedly, judge) about her, I wouldn't have thought that she would be someone to devote so much time and effort to wandering about the world. But clearly she had made a great and ongoing effort. I wondered why, and as I could not ask, I wondered why I myself did much the same if not necessarily in the same manner. Why go off to Spain for two months? Like her I was coming home after a longish stint abroad, and the ending begged the question, why had I left home? It's a simple but not an easy question. I could say, I wanted to see northern Spain, and that's true but hardly sufficient. I could say, I wanted to work on my Spanish, and I did, but considering my limited success that can only be a tangential reason. I could say, I simply wanted to be somewhere other than Minnesota, and that feels closer to an actual motivation, if not a particularly interesting one. Maybe the best I can do is repeat some of what I said at the dinner table in Finesterre near the sea, when discussing pilgrimage with Mandy and Salima and Eddy. I wanted to cultivate knowledge and experience, and the way to do that, I thought and think, was to put myself out in the far flung world alone. I wanted to be moved, in general and in a Spanish manner. I wanted to be changed. And I was changed, of course. How is the next question, but that might take some time yet.

In Minneapolis at the baggage carousel I saw the well-traveled young woman take up a massive backpack and then look around for her seat mate. I could see him on the other side, but her view was blocked. She hesitated, then shouldered her pack and headed for the door, looking back over her shoulder twice more. Just after the second and last look, she came into the man's line of sight and he saw her, and watched her pass out the automatic doors. They had exchanged emial addresses but my guess is they won't use them. Travel nets one discoveries and connections, but it's also a litany of places and people left behind, lost.

I retrieved my bag and went out the doors too. Soon Alix pulled up and she got out of the car crying and we hugged and I cried a little too, and I was home.

In Madrid one is compelled to eat

Yesterday was a travel day, mostly, today too, the last one, and tonight I will sleep in my own bed. Which will be both familiar and odd. I calculate that since leaving home I have slept in thirty-seven different beds.

In the morning yesterday Rachael made poached eggs for breakfast, which I don´t believe I´ve ever eaten before, so add another new experience to my two months´ journey, though I don´t suppose poached eggs are particularly English (or are they?). We rode the train together from Brighton to London Gatwick, where she was meeting her mother and sister, who were flying in from Australia, and where we reluctantly said goodbye.

I remained at Gatwick longer than planned as my EasyJet--an egregious misnomer--flight was delayed two hours. I was already feeling a a little unloved, since when I'd gone through security my backpack was singled out for full unpacking and inspection and general touching of all my things ("would you turn on your camera so I can see if it works?" and isn't actually a bomb?). EasyJet employs festival seating, and when the flight finally did board there was an unseemly rush to get on. The airline does divide passengers into two groups, A and B, but when the hoards of Spanish teenagers returning home ignored the rights of the A group and crowded the door, the agent gave up and let everyone through together. Bad parenting, that.

We flew over Brighton, and I could pick out the pier and the Marina, a park near Rachael´s rowhouse, as well as Cuckmere Haven and the Seven Sisters to the east.

As on my previous EasyJet flight a few days ago, the passengers broke into applause the moment after we had landed safely. I don't recall such a repsonse on other carriers.

In Madrid I experienced a couple stressful hours before I reached the calming oasis of my hostal. I first had to go to the train station to retrieve my other bag from the Left Luggage room, an operation that was much more complicated than one would expect. Rather than providing the lengthy and boring details, I´ll just say that repated trips for correct change and then a broken locker tested my travel resilience.

A couple changes on the Metro, a long walk down Calle de Fuencarrel, and I finally and with much relief reached the Hostal Don Juan, on the Plaza Vazquez de Mella. I had the good fortune to have booked a room in the gay quarter of town, which meant lots of interesting shops and good restaurants, as well as numerous hip people on the streets. The hostal was on the third floor of a large building, up a wide wood staircase and through a big door; oil paintings and faded tapestries covered the walls inside.

I soon set off again and walked west in search of a used bookshop that purported to sell English-language books, but the shop was not where it was supposed to be. I happily settled for the nearby Plaza de Oriente, bordered but not overshadowed by the ornate Palacio Real. Just to the right of that big white monster, the sun stood above a distant hill, bathing the park with late day yellowy-orange light. Madrilenos sat in the grass in small bunches talking and drinking and ignoring the many big statues of long-dead Spanish important people. I sat on a bench and enjoyed the sunset too. For the first time in sometime I was on my own for an evening, and while I felt melancholy, with leavetakings and endings, mostly I felt happy to be in Madrid with a few evening hours to look about and eat.

In Madrid there are literally hundreds of bars serving tapas and raciones, and it was no little challenge to choose one from among them. Indecisive, I wandered past dozens and dozens, nearly all of which looked appealing in some way, whether they were of the traditional sort, such as El Museo de Jamon, with rows of hog legs hanging closely nestled together overhead, or the supercool mod-modern style, such as at Bocaito, an undersea grotto lit soft blue and pink. In the end I wandered into the Huertas section and settled on Las Bravas, which, with its orange plastic motif, offered little in the way of aesthetic pleasure, at least of the visual sort. But I'd come for the tortilla, which was lovely. An older man served me a small plate completely taken up by the round tortilla, which he doused with Las Bravas' patented spicy, orange-colored sauce; he poured me a small glass of beer too, and I stood at a narrow counter looking out the window onto the now dark street and I ate, with great appetite and satisfaction.

I wandered onwards afterwards, thinking maybe I would top off with an ice cream. I passed through Plaza Santa Ana where several people dressed in pirate costume and standing in a fake ship were putting on a perfromance for a large crowd. Two policewoman ambled past me, both smoking cigarettes. Not for the first time I admired Spain's informality.

Later I was in Chueca, the gay section, walking along narrow streets where the bright shops were all closed, when I was stopped by a sheet of paper taped up in the window of the Restaurante Momo. It described an intriguing menu meal for twelve euros.... I wasn't really hungry, but it was eleven and my night in Madrid was winding down, and what else was I going to do, and why not, I thought, eat more good food. And so I went inside and sat down at a table.

Two men with close-cropped hair, notable biceps, and movie star stubble worked the front of the restaurant, and a few of the dozen or so tables were occupied by men too, mostly in pairs and mostly in sleeveless shirts and sporting tattoos on their arms. To start, a carafe of red wine, bread, and a nice salad, described on the menu as "Ensalada con queso de Burgos con salsa balsamica." Segundo, I chose the salmon a la mostaza (in mustard sauce), which arrived with french fries, of course, and was a success. But best of all was the postre, moco de chocolate, which the menu translated vividly but obscurely as "House's chocolate pudin--anti-depressive!" This was a piece of moist cake, almost a brownie, smothered in a thick chocolate sauce (which indeed tasted pudding-like) and topped with a perfect dollop of thick whipped cream. At this point I wasn't the tiniest bit hungry, but I ate my moco with great pleasure, slowly and with smaller and smaller bites as I proceeded, trying to stave off the inevitable finish.

At midnight I finally rose from the table and went back out into the night. I walked a bit more, but soon returned to the Hostal Don Juan, where the man at the night desk gently admonished me for not leaving my room key with him. Still at the end I have things to learn. Chastened, but not much, I went to my compact room, and lay down on my last foreign bed.

On the South Downs with the Long Man

Yesterday in the cool, sunny morning I sat in the back garden among a crowd of potted plants and ate a bowl of cereal. Laundry flapped on the line, and neighbors on the right and at the back were out in their tiny backyards (separated by stone walls) hanging out their own wash. As in Spain, in England few people have clothes dryers. My cereal brand name, according the the box, was "Just Right," but I would´ve substituted "It Will Do" or maybe "Sort of OK."

Rachael and I drove to the center of town to the Brighton Market, a Sunday swap meet in a big parking lot. Used clothes, a few antiques, kitsch, books and music and movies, boxes of old photographs, framed prints and paintings, lots of junk. Surprisingly cheap, considering everything else in England seems wildly expensive.

We met Rachael´s friend Angie at the market and sat together at a plastic table beside a tea and cakes van. Angie teaches university classes on the social aspects of healthcare, in particular the role of community work. Her original field was anthropolgy, and she´s a trained psychotherapist; not too long ago she published a book on adoption. For her doctoral dissertation, also published, she wrote about the culture of prostitution in Alicante, a coastal Spanish town, where she lived while doing the research.

A dozen or so years ago Angie and her partner adopted three kids, siblings. As a psychotherapist she is working on developing something she calls resilience therapy, but I didn´t get a chance to ask for an explanation, or to hear more from this obviously fascinating person. Her three kids--Michael (17), Ed (14), and Becky (12) showed up together at the market and came to our table, much to Angie´s obvious pleasure. Rachael quizzed them each about their current doings while they stood smiling and squinting in the sun.

In the early afternoon Rachael and I drove east out of town to East Sussex in her pink car. In the village of Alciston (which is quite near Bloomsbury), we ate a long lunch at the Rose Cottage Inn, an old and ivy-ed and cliche but real English countryside inn. Inside an old woman and an ancient woman sat together at a small table. The old woman said, "at least I´m not the fattest one here," and when Rachael turned to her and laughed, the woman said, "oh, I´m not referring to you, dear." I wanted to sit down with them, but they were just finishing and figuring out their bill.

Near the inn we went walking on the South Downs, first up around a steep green hillside where lay the Long Man of Wilmington, a figure outlined in the underlying white chalk rock, and maybe one hundred yards tall. The ancient figure was re-discovered in 1874, and no one really knows its significance, but the outline is regularly freshened up. At the top of the slope a pair of barrows rise up in the green grass, and I thought of Frodo and his nearly fatal night in a barrow probably not dissimilar. Beyond the ridge we walked through high rolling fields dotted with sheep. The afternoon was windy and bright, and a little cool when clouds would momentarily block the sun. The sea rose up on the horizon a few miles to the south.

Later we drove down to near the sea, to a place called Cuckmere Haven, and walked along a small stream across an open green to the shore. Small waves rolled in, rattling the round stones of which the beach was composed. To the east rose a high white chalk headland, the first of the Seven Sisters, which march off to the town of Eastbourne ten miles distant. One can walk along the coast up and over the high headlands, but we´d come too late in the day for that adventure.

Instead we drove back to Brighton, where Rachael made a small, lovely dinner of potatoes, mushrooms, spinach, and veggie sausages. On the Camino she (rightly) ridiculed my claim of vegetarianism, after watching me finish off one too many chuletas. But in Brighton it´s been a pleasure to return to the gentle vegetable fold (well, mostly; I suppose there was the hogroast, a bit of delicious apostasy). After eating Rachael had me read aloud from a volume in the Mommentrolls series, a set of Finnish children´s stories. When my narcolepsy kicked in, I handed the book to her.

Each day in Brighton was full and a pleasure right through. Already Spain seems part of the past, but I still have an evening in Madrid. Then I´m for home.

I am a pirate

Brighton is hilly, and the hillsides are all traversed by rowhouses, chimneyed and slate-roofed. There are always seagulls in the sky, calling out noisily.

Yesterday morning Rachael and I drove westward along the coast in her pink Nissan Figaro, through towns such as Hove and Arundel and Chichester. English place names are like words in a poem, beautiful and evocative--intimately connected, for me, to books and reading, to the imaginative landscape of myriad eighteenth and nineteenth century British novels.

We drove through West Sussex, to Kingley Vale, an ancient yew forest on the chalk downlands. The trees are squat and wide, with broad twisty trunks, reddish-brown bark, and long limbs that grow more sideways than upwards; the lower branches droop down to the duff, and sometimes will send down roots where they contact the forest floor, giving birth to a new tree. We ambled through the Robin Hood grove and out the other side to where a steep, grassy slope reached up towards a ridge. Halfway up we sat down on the green turf and ate a picnic overlooking the yews, with Chichester in the distance down the valley, and beyond the town the sea.

We lingered a bit too long, because we were late for the medieval wedding at Highdown Hillfort, another park, near Worthing back along the coast. Once at Highdown, we could not find the hillfort, though we wandered about and asked directions of some of the people out for a Saturday stroll, none of whom were helpful. We ended up missing the ceremony entirely (which was not actually a wedding, but what they called a "handfasting," an old pagan practice in which the relationship is reviewed once a year and the two people then decide whether or not to continue or to make adjustments). I did, though, get to see the celebrants when they returned to the car park in small, costumed bunches.

The invitation had requested medieval dress, but added that one could also dress "pirate, dragon, jester, or musketeer." Dragons and jesters were rare, but there were many pirates (including the groom himself) and a few musketeers among the Knights and Maid Marions. Myself, I'd tied a red bandana around my head and sported a single dangly silver earring Rachael had loaned me. Not much more than a gesture, I'm afraid, but my brown rolled up pants were vaguely pirate-y too. Most of the guests had more full costumes but a number were historically or regionally anomalous--a smattering of Elizabethan and Tudor, a few Tyrolean or beer garden. One man, inexplicably, wore a Sherlock Holmes outfit.

While we missed the ceremony, we did attend the reception at a pub, The Cricketers, down in Worthing. In a green garden at the back of the pub tables were set out in the grass. A whole and large pig was impaled on a spit, roasting over a bed of hot coals, its legs stretched out forward and back, the open cavity of its underside facing down. Its mouth and eyes were open. Rachael was taken aback, though we had been forewarned of the "hogroast." We found a table of her friends, and she said, with disapproval, "its eyes are blue." Milky blue, I'd describe them, in their cooked state. Several of her friends, also vegetarians, shared Rachael's discomfort, and shivered in agreement.

These were friends from work, and notably more conventional than those I'd met the night before. They were Worthing people, and apparently Worthing is rather dowdy in comparison to bohemian Brighton. But like many of the Brighton folk, the wedding couple were setting out on a new relationship after shedding previous longterm partners. The bride, Harri, had been married for twenty-five largely unsatisfactory years to someone Rachael described as a "grumpy bastard." Now she had taken up with John, a train driver, and appeared quite happy. She came around to our table and the conversation turned to John's qualities. Harri recalled a saw that the other woman recognized: that it actually takes five men to satisfy a woman: one for for intellectual stimulation, one for good sex, one for his good looks, one for his money, and one who is handy (or "DIY," as Harri put it). She was happy to report that John fulfilled three of these requirements, but she didn't say which three.

All the women at my table--Carol and Lorna and Sam and Foxie and Elaine--worked in health care, and the conversation was mostly work-related, though more about bad managers than actual sick people. Eventually the pig was declared finished, and a blonde man in shorts began slicing pieces from its haunches and from along its ribs. Rachael pointed and said, "look," her voice indicating both horror and wonder. We soon joined a long line headed towards the pig and platters of meat and shish kabobs. Rachael opted for baked potato and roast corn and salad, but I did have some of the pig and it was excellent.

Already Spain is receding. England and the English have captured my attention, and I want to walk all over the country and see what is to be seen and talk to people who speak with appealing and mellifluous accents.

Selections from my first day in Brighton

Yesterday I drank four cups of tea, adopting a favored custom of the natives here in England. I was enjoying my second, sitting at the small kitchen table, when one of Bella's friends, Sara, arrived, and the two tall, blonde young women came and stood in the kitchen door. Sara had just returned from her maiden flight as a flight attendant for Virgin Atlantic, and she was full with the experience, telling about it in a laughing but excited manner. Before she took the job she had, she said, always been made queasy by the smell of airline food ("it made you vomit," interrupted Bella, "I've seen you"), but interestingly, while working with the food for a number of hours she suuffered no ill effects. Her first trip had been a flight from London to Barbados, which Shania Twain was on, seated in first class with her husband and young son. During the flight one of the attendants asked the seven-year-old boy if he wanted a bread roll, and he hesitated, then said she would have to ask his mother. When Ms. Twain was appealed to, she first said, "did he ask for a roll?" When the attendant said, no, she had offered him one, mother decided, "yes, but only a brown one." The boy timidly took the roll and nibbled on the end, fearfully watching his mother out the corner of his eye (Ok, I made up that last part).

If Shania was a bit cold and imperious, her husband was the opposite, chatty and friendly. But, Sara added, "he's quite ugly. Possibly the ugliest man I've ever seen."

Rachael took me out to walk around Brighton. For the first time in "weeks," as everyone we met repeated, it wasn't raining, but the day was cool and blustery. We walked along the bohemian streets, which reminded me of Camden Market in London, though less touristy. There were many young people about from various parts of Europe (there are numerous English-language schools in town), a number of hippy sorts, and lots and lots of queer people--apparently Brighton is something like the Provincetown of England.

We went into small thrift stores, each supporting some cause such as Oxfam or Vets for Pets; we searched for potential pirate costume items, as we were supposed to attend a medieval wedding the next day (more tomoorow). We also stopped into used bookstores so I could examine the travel book sections. Eventually we ended up down at the seaside where the wind was blowing a gale and big foamy waves were marching in and crashing on the rocky shingle. A thin spray filled the air, even well back from the water's edge, and no one was having a bathe. Out on Brighton Pier we had fish and chips, and the Irishman behind the counter said he couldn't believe it was July, what with the terrible weather and the resulting small number of people out for a stroll. There were just enough folks for me (including a flotilla of elderly in wheelchiars, well tucked in with lap blankets, their wispy hair tossing about their heads), and I found the wind and waves dramatic and was not at all put out.

For dinner Rachael made pasta and a big dish of homity (a sort of potato pie), and several of her friends came over to eat. Debbie arrived first, a dapper woman in corduroy pants, brown suit jacket, waistcoat and snowy white shirt. We had the same haircut and I immediately took a liking to her. She and her partner have a two-year-old daughter named Lilith, and we talked about the value and power of such a name. Like most people with small children, she talked of Lilith with a mixture of awe, dread, and overwhelming love. A couple soon appeared: Melanie and Rachael met in a drama class, and Melanie works at the local art house movie theater; Melanie's boyfriend Steven is a tennis coach and plays bass in a punk band, and later I wished I'd asked him if he'd read Infinite Jest.

Two more woman arrived, Ella and Lucy, both midwives. At one point in the evening after dinner and well into the drinking, they and Rachael launched in on a series of midwifery anecdotes, the most memorable of which was about a woman who had had an orgasm with each contraction. At that point, Donald, a gay man in his fifties who Rachael hadn't seen for four years but who had called up earlier depressed and wanting company, launched into a story of his own birth. Apparently one day when he was fourteen, sitting with his mother and grandmother, his grandmother had said, "go on, you ought to tell him." And his mother replied, "no I don't have to do any such thing," but his grandmother persisted, and finally his mother did tell him--that he was actually born, at home, into a toilet. This was the punchline of the story, one Donald meant to be a surprise, but all three midwives broke in and said that such a thing was not at all unusual, that it happened all the time, you'd be surprised.

Later Ella's husband arrived, Harper, a striking looking man, tall and bald and bearded. He manages bands and singers, including at one time Goldfrap (who Rachael tells me has been on The L-Word), and who was also his ex-girlfriend and had recently fired him because he married Ella. He had been at a pub somewhere and took a taxi over becasue he was a little drunk. He arrived a bit late for Ella's taste; and she didn't like that he had been smoking cigarettes. "I can smell them on your hand and in your beard," she said.

He replied, deadpan, "I don't smoke."

"He does," she said, turning to us, "he's a sneaky bastard."

Harper said, "I haven't been smoking."

Ella laughed and said, "you have." A few minutes later she was planting a series of kisses on his smooth pate.

Donald told several bad jokes that I can't remember, though one involved the police consulting a monkey at an accident scene. He was a little drunk and got testy if anyone spoke in the midst of one of his story jokes. After Donald left in a taxi, Ella said something about him, and Harper, who didn't know Donald, said, "you mean the damaged man." Ella objected strongly to this term, saying that Donald was "lovely."

Harper is the first person I've met on the trip who has been to Minnesota. He was there in Janaury years ago and it was "bloody cold" and he was not impressed, in part because he was miserable about some woman and in part because he didn't manage to spot Prince in any of the clubs.

Ella and Harper had only been married a year or so. She had last been with a woman, and for some time, and when they broke up, her partner, from spite, had seduced a woman who Ella had long had a crush on. This woman, who owned a shop called Pussy that sold retro and kink sundries, was Harper's wife, though not for much longer. Harper and Ella, separately, both had to give up their houses, but their two ex-s pooled their resources and bought a nice big place and moved in together. Subsequently Ella and Harper had been thrown together at family functions (everyone involved had children), and soon they were dating.... There's more to this complicated story, but I'll leave it there. It was one of many that these intriguing people shared over the course of the night. Rachael told stories too, the comic variety, sung to the accompaniment of a ukelele in a spoken word/song style for which she is deservedly admired by her friends, who laugh and join in and add verses of their own.

Though there was much hilarity throughout the evening, it also had a sort of memorial feel, as Rachael's friends are quite distraught that she is leaving them next month and moving around the world to Alice Springs. A place she sang a long song about.

My first day in Brighton was a success.

Madrid makes for good walking

Modern travel is fast, convenient (mostly), and brutal--on the nerves, mine anyway. Yesterday I spent as a passenger, passive in a series of padded seats--first in Manolo's car to the Vallodolid train station, then in the train to the outskirts of Madrid, then in the Metro to and from downtown (not padded), then in an EasyJet jet to London, and finally in another train with Rachael down to Brighton. I did spend a few pleasant hours afoot in Madrid, mostly in Parque del Retiro, certainly the best part of my day.

There's probably no better way to first see a big city than coming up from underground, coming up into the sunlight and the noise, the hordes of people, the traffic.... It's a moment of spectacle and discovery and excitement. My first sight of central Madrid was on the Gran Via, a wide and busy street lined with posh shops and sidewalk cafes. Four and five stories of balconies rose up overhead on white stone buildings topped with ornate cornices and towers. People filled the wide sidewalks, beautiful woman and men, tourists, waiters among the crowded cafe tables. Immediately three black gay men passed me laughing. Several women in head scarves went by, then a Japanese couple, then a sun-burned group of people speaking British. Of course such diversity is not unexpected in a city like Madrid, but still, I noticed, after nearly two months in northern Spain, a region of great cultural uniformity.

I walked first to the Parque del Retiro, happy in the substantial heat of the day to be under the shady trees. I passed along the white dirt paths, admiring the trees and inspecting the older people sitting on wooden benches, the younger people laying out in the grass in the sun. At a fountain a woman in Minnie Mouse costume stood waiting for a customer, her mouse head canted up to let the breeze cool her face. A couple came near and she pulled down the head and waved animal balloons at them. Her accomplice, standing nearby in a padded Spider Man outfit, accosted another pair, also with the promise of shapeable balloons, while I slipped past unseen. I came to a rectangular lake, where people were out rowing around in small boats; the women wore bikini tops, the men went shirtless. Eventually I found a small table and sat down to a long lunch of bread and cheese and walnuts and orange and chocolate. Afterwards the park was large enough that I got lost.

Eventually I passed by the Prado, wanting to go inside but with too little time before having to go out to the airport. I walked through narrow streets, past a house where Cervantes lived and died, and past an American girl who said, "yeah, 'Sweet Home Alabama.'" I thought, do you know that that is a reactionary and quasi-racist song?

In the arcade around the Plaza Mayor most of the shops were devoted to either ham or souvenirs or stamps. I wouldn't have thought that the philatelic trade could support so many stores.

I walked to the nearby Sol, a roundish hub from which a number of streets radiated, each wide and each brimful of people, some on the way somewhere, some shopping, many like me simply gawking. I took Calle Montera uphill back towards Gran Via, passing shoe and discount clothing stores, more souvenir shops, bars and cafes, and then numerous prostitutes. This last was a surprise, though someone had told me weeks before that prostitution was legal in Spain. But it was the location of the women, and the time of day, which seemed to me incongruous. They were young and old both, and all lightly dressed. They stood alone under small sycamore trees, or in groups of two and three sitting on narrow ledges in front of the shop windows. One of the older woman, wearing a halter top, stood in the middle of the passing throng with her hands on her hips, challenging the passing men with a hard look. All of the women held small purses under their arms. I passed close to one young woman and saw the word "Cornel" tattooed lightly on her upper arm. At the top of the street a plump young woman in a tiny denim skirt stood just outside the door of a McDonald's.

I rode the subway out to the airport and began the ordeal of flying EasyJet. Long lines, long waits, late departure. On the plane I was surrounded by young and shaggy-haired British men returning from holiday; one wore a t-shirt that said "I got out of bed and dressed, what more do you want?" I arrived in London at ten and found Rachael. She had come in just an hour before from Paris, where she had spent the last five days with her daughter, Bella. We rode the train to Brighton, and then walked a half hour in the dark, up and down steep hills through wet and cool neighborhoods to her street, Hollingbury Rise. Inside her rowhouse I met Bella, who is twenty and who was sitting in front of a computer and talking on the phone; I thought, this feels comfortingly familiar.

Manolo

Soon after I returned to Espinosa, Manolo decided to take me to Salamanca. A month ago, when I was in Espinosa for the Christening, I´d said I might visit that city after the the Camino, but I long ago changed my mind. However, I got to see it after all, through the further and still impressive generosity of Manolo.

I keep being surprised by how close together everything is in Spain; turns out that Salamanca is just sixty miles southwest of Vallodolid. An hour in the car and we were into the busy center of the city, and parked in an underground garage. We walked first to the famous Plaza Mayor, a neat square surrounded by pale-gold stone buildings, with arcades and shops all around the ground-level. The edges of the open plaza are filled with tables spilling out from cafes. Along the inside facades, just above the arcade arches, are frieze busts of Spanish leaders from across the centuries, each head set in an oval medallion. In one corner is Franco, which for me was a bit of a surprise--in my travels I´ve seen little to honor or even note the man who ruled Spain for four decades of the twentieth century. Later we would visit the Archivo de Guerra Civil, and the story told there was thoroughly pro-Republican and anti-Nationalist/Fascist.

We also did the cathedral, which impressed me despite my qualms. How can you not be moved by so much stone and and space and accomplishment, despite the familiar scenes of mayhem covering the walls and filling the side chapels. We also walked down to the Rio Tormes to see a roman bridge. We walked out to the middle, and I thought, yep, a roman bridge; Manolo waited till I was ready, and then we walked back the way we´d come and back up into the old city.

All the buildings in Salamanca are built from the same pale-gold stone, quarried locally. It´s this uniformity that apparently accounts for the city´s reputation for beauty (well, that and the size and grace of the buldings themselves too, I suppose). But for me the sameness made Salamanca a little less interesting than other cities. On the other hand, I only walked around for two hours. Manolo was perfectly accomodating, but I could tell I was being humored. At the end of the two hours I suggested we look for some place for "la comida" (the midday meal), thinking that such a respite might revive my companion´s flagging interest. But Manolo already had a restaurant in mind, one ten miles south of the city. Though he tried to keep his voice neutral, the hopeful tone was unmistakable when he asked me if I was finished with Salamanca. He gestured at the map I held as if to indicate that we´d seen everything already. I hesitated just a moment, and then agreed, yes, we had; let´s get out of here.

We ate at my first roadside restaurant in Spain, the Meson Viejo del Jamon. Manolo had first learned of the place from a truck driver friend, and he´d had eaten there twice before. He told me, with great anticipation, that the jamon was particularly toothsome.

We passed through the bar, where huge hamhocks hung in a close row over the drinkers´ heads, and into the smoky dining room. Soon a plate of thinly sliced jamon was on our table. Yes, indeed, very good, but expensive at ten euros for six or seven slices. Once the jamon was disposed of we ordered the menu; for me, ensalada patata (quite good), then chuletas (so-so), and finally natillas (I´m still not tired of this pleasure). A huge jug of wine too, which meant I slept most of the ride home.

Back in Vallodolid I had the afternoon to myself for walking and writing and sitting on park benches. I returned to the piso for dinner, which was huevous guisado. Simple but nice.

Even at this late date I often don´t understand what Montse says to me, which happened as usual when we were having dinner and she quizzed me on my plans for the next days. This is a bit mortifying. I also have a hard time with Sergio, which is disappointing because he seems to really want to talk with me, and I want to talk more with him too. In these moments of difficulty, though, Manolo always steps in. I will look blank at some remark, the speaker will look to Manolo, I will turn to him too--and then he will pause, smile, say, "ah, si," then my name--"Copp-air"--and proceed to explain the matter at hand in words and at a speed that I can understand.

After dinner we all went over to Maite and Sergio´s apartment so I could say goodbye. Maite bounced a fussy Sara in her stroller, Montse loomed close to her, and we men watched a standoff then shootout on a Spanish tv program akin to The Sopranos. Maite´s last words were about Naomi and the boys: abrazos and besos for them all.

I thought I was done for the night, but Manolo said, how about a drink, and we walked to a nearby mall, up to a bar-ice cream shop with a terrace overlooking the far flung suburbs. Manolo had a J & B, while he ordered me a large ice cream sundae. Why not. We had passed the Restuarante Asiatico on the way, and I asked how he liked "Asian" food. He said he didn´t know, he´d never tried it; Montse "no quiere."

We sat on the terrace in companionable silence, while a young couple two tables over made out with considerable passion. Manolo was unphased so I decided to be too. Instead I asked about his immediate plans. Next week the harvest begins, he told me. First the barley, then the oats, finally the wheat. It´ll take about two weeks of long days, working with his brother-in-law Femo, to get it all in. Once the grains are finished he´ll start cutting and baling hay again, though less this year than last. He leaned forward and put a hand on his back and grimaced. Towards the end of August the work will slacken; but then he´ll begin work on the merendero, and on the roof for the bodega. "Siempre mas," he laughed.

We sat for a long time, my sundae done, while he nursed his drink and we faced the view side by side.

This morning he drove me to the train station and insisted on accompanying me inside and out onto the platform. He asked when I would return, and I asked when he would come to Minnesota. Finally, I tried to express my gratitude, but he waved it off. He said that Naomi and the boys and I were his "otra familia," and I choked up and told him he and his were the same for me. We shook hands several times.

Now I am in Madrid, and tonight I fly to London.

Cordonices are very little

Yesterday I was sitting outside a cafe in Palencia with Manolo drinking iced tea, and two women in summer dresses walked by. Manolo said, "Palentinas guapas" (attractive Palencian women), as if he was pointing out a well-known feature of the city. I answered, "que tia mas buenas," and he nodded, a gesture that said, "just so." The night before he had taught me this phrase, which can be roughly translated as "she´s hot" (substitute "tia" with "tio" and "buenas" with "buenos" and you get "he´s hot"). We had been watching some celebrity news on the kitchen television while eating cordonices, little birds not much bigger than sparrows, when a blonde woman with boyfriend troubles exited an apartment to too much media attention. At this moment Manolo thought to share the useful phrase, which I had then trotted out on an appropriate occasion the very next day. Thus does my Spanish improve.

But I don´t improve without embarassing moments. Earlier in the day yesterday, I accompanied Manolo to Osorno, a town near to and larger than Espinosa, so he could visit the bank. While he talked to someone for some time (Manolo does nothing in a hurry), I sat and read a magazine about agriculture in Spain. I learned the words apenas (scarcely), ejes (axis), and temer (to be afraid). I hope to soon use one or more in a sentence. Anyway, that´s an aside and beside the point, though words are the topic. On the way back we stopped in Espinosa at the Ayuntamiento (local government office; every town has one), and sat down in a small office with three men. Manolo explained that one of them, Juan Carlos (and interestingly there was a portrait of the royal Juan Carlos on the wall) was the "caldo," or as one the other men put in, the "jefe del pueblo." I said "entiendo" and nodded. The men proceeded to discuss plans for an August fiesta (which will coincide with celebrations for both Manolo and Juan Carlos´ fiftieth birthdays), and I sat quietly, happy to try to follow but not to be expected to participate in the conversation.

I had recognized Juan Carlos, but I couldn´t remember from when (turns out it was from the dinner in Amusco my first night in Spain back in May), and so when we were back outside I asked Manolo how I knew the caldo. Manolo gave me a quizzical look, a "what the hell are you talking about?" expression that he is kind enough to only rarely bestow upon me. I repeated the problematic word, "caldo," and after a few silent moments of interpretive work, Manolo understood and said, "ah, no--alcalde," which means "mayor." Caldo, on the other hand, as I discovered when I consulted my diccinario, means "consomme" or "stock" (I´d been offered it as a primero in more than one restuarante on the Camino). Manolo´s confusion was understandable, as there is little apparent connection between town administration and soup.

Late in the afternoon yesterday we drove to Valladolid, which is where I am now. Manolo and Montse have an apartment, or piso, in the suburbs, and Maite and Sergio live just down the street in another piso. This makes it easy for Montse to care for baby Sara during the week while Maite and Sergio are at work.

Vallodolid is a huge city, the largest in the large province of Castilla y Leon. Here, and in all the Spanish cities I´ve visited, the word "suburbs" means something quite different than in the States. It does refer to the outskirts, and to new construction, but rather than single family dwellings, the wide streets are lined with tall, brick apartment buildings, six and seven stories tall. The street-level space is occupied by mostly small shops and restaurantes and cafe-bars all along the streets. Big construction cranes loom over these suburbs as more and more of the apartment buildings go up. All over Spain people are flocking in from the countryside to the cities, and it´s to these apartments that they are moving. In the evening last night I went for a walk in the neighborhood, downhill towards the wide Rio Pisuerga. Everywhere people were out, walking, playing with children, exercising their dogs (who were all on leashes, thank you), and gathering in small plazas and parks to sit and talk. Down at the river couples sat on benches making out, while other couples, a little further along in the process, walked by pushing baby strollers. The architecture might be different than in the villages or old city centers, but the social swirl seems little changed by the new living arrangements.

Back at the piso, I sat down to dinner with Manolo and Monte at a tiny table in the kitchen. Earlier Manolo had told me that he prefers to be in Espinosa, and I agree; their apartment is not much lived in yet and does not have the homey feel of the village house. Security is tight, and when we´d arrived he´d had to use several keys to get through a number of doors, grumbling that he didn´t need "llaves" in Espinosa. For dinner, Montse served baked fish (a whole lubina each) with scalloped potatoes. She put out a plate of sliced tomatoes too, after pouring olive oil on top.

After the meal, she asked if I´d liked the fish, and I said, "si, me gusta mucho." She said, with a skeptical look, "te gusta todos" (you like everything). And it´s true, every meal she asks me if I have liked whatever we ate, and everytime I say yes, me gusta. Which is pretty much always true, and when in the rare case that it´s not, what am I supposed to say? Still, I get her point. I could be a little more discerning. I thought about how Alix gets annoyed when she shows me a new piece of clothing and I say "yeah, it´s nice." People want more distinctive answers to such questions.

After dinner we three sat in the living room and watched an American disaster movie in which meteors threaten the United States not once but three times (the good guy from the first Terminator was in it). Montse brought out a big bag of sunflower seeds and two bowls for the shells and put them on the coffee table. She and Manolo sat close together on one end of the courch and talked quietly to each other through nearly all of the action. I found the commercials, which are all for cars, cell phones, and beverages, more entertaining than the film.

So much crucifixion

In Palencia on Saturday, I went in a mid-sized church (which means semi-giant) and stood in the back for a few minutes. A Mass was in progress, and a priest and three elderly congregants took turns repeating the time worn phrases of worship. A high, ornate retablo loomed behind the priest, and the walls were adorned with the familiar accoutrements of Catholic faith, including a bigger than life-sized statue of Christ bleeding on the cross.

Over the last weeks I have stepped out of the sun or rain and into the cool and quiet dark of dozens, maybe hundreds of churches. Casting back, I can hardly distinguish one from another, though the cathedrals stand out, as does the Santuario de Nosa Señora de Barca in Muxia, where numerous model ships, from schooners to trawlers, hung from the ceiling on long chains. But if what I found inside most of the churches became repetitious, even monotonous, I never passed by an open door without stopping in. I don´t know exactly why. I guess I was drawn by the monumentality in part, and also by the aura of intensity and commitment, even though I felt none of the same myself—and even if I was also often repelled by the ways faith was repeatedly expressed.

Repelled may be a little strong, but troubled at the very least. I couldn´t really admire the huge stone structures, the complex and careful art within. When I consider all the treasure and labor devoted over the centuries to constructing the churches and making the elaborate Christian art, my proletarian heart balks. I wonder if such wealth might have been put to better use. And I wonder what might have been if so much artistry had had more than the one tale to tell, if for all those centuries creative people could have pursued a wider field of endeavor.

But it´s not just the churches and art themselves, as evidence of a limited good and a lack of imagination, that I question. More, it´s the story or message that these tell and re-tell in an architecture and imagery that is persistent, insistent, even bullying. For me, seeing Christ crucified over and over and over, in the ubiquitous images of the stations of the cross, in stained glass and paintings and sculptures, seeing him upon his cross in every church, his cadaverous face suffused with pain and suffering—I could no longer take these familiar scenes for granted, but had to confront what they meant, to me. And my conclusions were not happy ones. I came to think of all this imagery of grievous suffering, and of the churches themselves, as a means of waging a battle against the body and mortality. It seemed to me that I was being told that the body was the enemy, to be hated and despised.

The great weight of stone and space, the endless repetiton of the crucifixion spectacle, Jesus´s torn body hanging bloody on the cross—all this, it seemed to me, was intended to drive one towards the ill-defined promises of the soul, at the expense of the body. In these churches and cathedrals one cultivates the spirit, in part to placate God, but mostly to assuage the supposed tragedy of the body, the terrible fact that we are meat and we die. This fate is supposedly unbearable, but not if we embrace spirit, the golden path to a dreamy, eternal residence in heaven.

Here too, Christ is represented as representative. Typically on the towering retablos at the head of even the smaller churches, the crucified Christ hangs near the bottom, where he can be easily seen; but always at the top near the ceiling, distant but just visible, is Christ redeemed, happy in heaven, whole, adorned in comfy robes, seated and serene. The juxtaposition is none too hard to interpret.

I understand that many people find great solace in the story of Christ´s suffering, and in the promise of redemption. But in the churches and cathedrals, while I sometimes felt awe at the architectural and artistic accomplishment, more I came to feel oppressed. I looked at Christ on the cross, his hands and feet impaled, the crown of thorns on his bleeding brow, a gash on his chest, raw wounds on his knees, blood and more blood…. And I felt not uplifted or inspired but queasy and ready to cry. I suppose I´m supposed to weep for Christ, but without the consolations of the spirit, a belief in his redemption, I´m left only with the tragic part.

But then I would go back outside, and here I would find my own form of consolation—an antidote to the story the churches were telling me. Yes, we are meat and we all die, but what I saw in the streets outside the churches and cathedrals were people, in their bodies, living. Back out in the light I would shrug off the morbid story of Christ´s murder, and walk through the streets where always the pagan holiday was underway. People would be sitting outside cafes drinking coffee or wine and eating olives or tapas; maybe at one table two men played guitars; in a park old men with canes would congregate on benches in the shade, talking and reading newspapers; people lolled in the plazas, turning their faces to the sun; children ran about chasing pigeons and each other—they would run to their parents, and maybe a man would gently take a child´s earlobe between his thumb and forefinger, or cup a child´s chin in the palm of his hand.

When I came out of the church in Palencia the other day the street was sunny and hot, and I stood for a moment and enjoyed the heat on my face and arms. While the Mass had promised a life everlasting, through the body and blood of Christ, it seemed to me that the obsession with death overshadowed this message—and that even the promise of redemption was simply morbid fear dressed up as faith.

I shed the gloomy atmosphere of the church as I walked away down the street. I felt happy to be in Spain, in the sun, in my body, alive in that moment and not too worried about the next.

Montse has gone to Vallodolid

Yesterday Maite and Sergio and Sarah appeared in the early evening. They had been in Burgos, where it was a fiesta weekend. A few minutes after they arrived Sergio was asleep on the couch. There was a fiesta in Espinosa last weekend, and there´s one in nearby Osorno next weekend. Alas, I keep missing the fiestas, a quintessential Spanish experience from all accounts.

After dinner the young folks packed up and set off for Vallodolid, taking Montse with them to again to take care of baby Sarah for the week while they worked. When they left they all said “hasta Martes” to me, so apparently I´m going to Valladolid on Tuesday.

After they were gone Manolo asked me, so where do you want to go? I said esta noche, tonight? And he said yes. I thought he was joking, as in, now we´re single, let´s go out and party. I answered, truthfully but tentatively, “dormir?” (to sleep). He knitted his brow and waved off this boring answer and went for his jacket. Just the day before he had finished the last of the haybaling, after a month´s steady and tiring work. The wheat and barley are late this year, because of all the rain, and he won´t start the harvest for another week or two. So I had arrived during a lull in his summer work. When he came back with his coat, he asked if I wanted to drive somewhere or stay in Espinosa. Sunday night is slow, he said, so there´d be little difference. I preferred walking and so answered Espinosa. We made our way down to the stealthy bar by the basketball courts.

Inside, the big room was lit with garish flourescent lights. One of the two young woman who´d been working that afternoon sat at a table with two young guys, both of whom had product in their hair, watching them play cards. There was no one else in the bar. Manolo looked at his watch with surprise; he´d expected to find others.

The laconic young woman went behind the bar and expertly poured me a beer. She made Manolo a vodka and coke, and we sat down at one of the two tables. Just a minute later the others Manolo had expected appeared: two of the couples I´d had dinner with at the start of my trip, Maribel and Francisco (who had also been at the bar earlier in the day), and Blanca and Mariano. They got drinks and joined us. Someone bought a packet of sunflower seeds too, and poured them out in the middle of the table. Another woman, Pili, soon showed up, and the table was full with people in the their mid- to late forties.

The conversation soon turned to Montse´s absence, and the others teased Manolo, wondering with mock alarm how he could manage without her to take care of him. Apparently the thorough nature of her housewifely ministrations are well known. Manolo defended himself by pointing out that the two of us (pointing to me) had done quite well before, getting our own dinners (sort of) and cleaning up after ourselves. I supported him, but then also betrayed him by telling the story of how he didn´t know how to use the washing machine. This produced huge laughs. But then I said that Montse didn´t know how to use the empacadora, and Manolo very much liked this comparison.

Several kids were playing with a soccer ball on the court outside under lights, and occasionally one would come in to ask for money for a soft drink. In this way I would discover which kids belonged to which adults. It´s funny, but such explanations and introductions are rarely made. I usually only learn people´s names and the relationships by asking Manolo after we get home.

I faded in and out of the conversation over the next couple hours. Occasionally I was referred to, and then Manolo would explain to me what they were talking about, and I would participate for a few minutes before they were off again beyond my comprehension. Actually, I could follow much of what was said, but not really enough to jump in unbidden.

About 12:30 the young woman came and stood beside our table, signaling closing time.

In the night I woke in pain. In my sleep I had stretched, flexing and causing excruciating muscle spasms in my calves. Several times I unconsciously repeated this questionable maneuver, which each time brought me wide awake. In the morning I could only hobble downstairs. This follows my first day without walking, and I take it as message that I need to do more here in Espinosa than drink wine and beer and sit at the computer.

Sunday in Espinosa

I was at the computer this morning when Manolo came in to get me. We walked to a nearby bodega which had long been his father´s, but which had come to Manolo last year and needed a new roof. My help was required to take the necessary measurements.

Manolo used a huge key to open the ancient wooden door. The outside of the bodega is rough adobe, the roof is tile on top of wood. Inside, big hand-hewn wood beams support the roof, but only indifferently. An adobe wall separates two big rooms, one several steps above the other; in the back of the upper the roof has collapsed into a pile of tiles and beams, letting the sun into the dark and dusty interior. Down a set of stairs is a vaulted cellar, smelling of age and mildew. There are several empty barrels, and a large rack of empty bottles. In one corner sit two big wooden basins filled with potatoes.

Manolo hooked one end of a measuring tape to a slot in the end of a stick, which he handed to me, and we proceeded to measure the dimensions of the two rooms. I held the stick over my head up to the rafters and cobwebs, and Manolo walked to the other end of the room and then wrote down the numbers. Along with a new roof, he plans to knock out the wall separating the two rooms, and to put in a new door and window.

There is little in the upper rooms—an old bird cage, a pile of onions gone to seed, stacks of chipped tiles. When I asked how he intended to use the space, Manolo said he didn´t, that the work was simply for “conservacion.” The merendero he´s also building will serve the family´s entertainment needs, but he doesn´t want the bodega to simply fall down—as many others in the village have.

After we had finished we walked around a corner into a street lined with more bodegas, where a sixtyish couple were outside one cutting weeds. When they saw Manolo they stopped and we all went into the open door of their bodega. They were friends of his, Trini and Miguel, who live in Santander. Trini comes from Espinosa, though, and they return sometimes on weekends to tend their bodega and drink their wine.

Inside, stairs led both down to a cellar and up to a cluttered room for cooking and eating and drinking. The whitewashed walls were festooned with old, cobwebby farm implements. A vinyl tablecloth was stapled to a wooden table, with a wooden bench along one side, a bench seat from a truck along the other. There was a fireplace in a corner, a long stack of wood along the wall.

Miguel went down to the cellar and came back up with an unlabeled bottle of red wine, which he opened. He put glasses on the table and dusted off the seats. Trini pulled a packet of cookies from a cupboard and put them on the table too. Manolo poured out the wine and said to me “angelica.” It´s sweet, he said, and it makes you happy and sleepy. I drank and it was sweet, and strong. Just the one glass had a substantial effect—and indeed a happy one. Soon I was in love with the friendly Trini and and talkative Miguel, though, I think I would´ve liked them regardless of the wine.

I pulled out my camera and took a few pictures, and then Miguel gestured for me to come with him down to the cellar and take some more. He showed me how they made the wine, starting at the top of the stairs, where a large vat was built into the floor. Here they would dump the grapes, and crush them with presses and by foot. When a drain was opened the juice would run down into a smaller basin in the wall of the stairwell, and from there down another drain into a pipe that led to a spigot at the bottom of the stairs; then rubber tubes connected to the spigot could be directed into one of the several big wooden barrels. A whole wall of full wine bottles attested to the success of this operation, which they undertake each October when the local grapes are harvested.

Back upstairs, Miguel eschewed a glass, instead pouring a copious amount of wine into a clear-glass receptacle that looked very much like a bong: wide round bottom, narrow neck, and a bowl sticking out from the side. This is a porron, and the bowl is actually a spout with a very tiny opening. Miguel held the porron over his head and tipped it, and a thin stream of wine squirted from the spout into his barely opened mouth. It looked easier than it probably was. Manolo laughed and said of the porron, “no me gusta,” referring it seemed not so much to the skill required as to the amount of wine so easily consumed. Even a single glass sent me home a bit loopy.

But I wasn´t done with wine drinking, not by a long shot it turned out. Being Sunday, more visiting was in order. Around the time we would usually eat the midday meal, Manolo and Montse put on nice clothes (Montse red pants, the other woman skirts and dresses), and we walked to one of the two bars in town, which was busy with other people dressed up to have a drink. We sat down at a table with their friends and a glass of wine was put in my hand. Numerous children ran in and out of the bar, standing for awhile beside their parents and consuming candy and chips and ice cream, their own means of dissipation. A white dish of green olives sat in the middle of the table, and a Formula One race played on the television. Everyone was intermittently interested because of the great Spanish driver Alonso.

I was quizzed about my Camino experience, my feet were particularly asked after, and then I was mostly ignored while they pursued their own topics. Soon someone went for a second round and another glass of wine appeared before me.

Eventually we all set out together, with three other couples and four children, walking slowly through the village. Towards home and food, I thought and hoped, but no (the thing is I often don´t know what´s going on, or what´s going to happen next). We ended up down by the basketball courts, which we crossed to enter a long rectangular building. Inside the floor was cement, the walls concrete blocks, the high ceiling sprayed with yellow fireproofing material. At one end was a counter behind which two young women were pouring our drinks. Manolo explained that this third bar was open only in summer, and wasn´t strictly legal. But apparently the authorities weren´t too concerned. Another round was soon purchased, and I began on my fourth glass of wine on this still young day.

Not until nearly four o´clock did we all leave the second bar; everyone ambled off in the direction of their own homes, calling out “hasta luego” to each other. Back at the house, Montse served me a huge portion of ensaladilla rusa and Manolo poured me yet another glass of red wine, from one of the three bottles Miguel had sent home with us. Segundo, Montse carved up a beautiful roast chicken and cut me another hunk of bread.

I had planned to write more after the meal, but instead I napped, or maybe passed out would be a more accurate term.

Verena and Lourdes

The morning city was vague with fog and mist, quiet and still as I walked west from the albergue, through the Portico de Camino and back towards the cathedral. Only a few cafe-bars and the occasional tienda were open. I stopped into one of the latter for some bread, and the old man behind the counter asked if I was German. I said no, los Estados Unidos and he brightened. I told him I was taking a train to Palencia, and he smiled and said "muchos barcos" (many boats), thinking I had said Valencia, and I smiled and nodded and didn´t correct him.

The few people in the cafe-bars looked as if they had been up all night, and no doubt had. The night before I had walked through the start of a neighborhood fiesta in the streets near the albergue, and while I wanted to stay out and participate, I had to return to the albergue before the door was locked for the night. Then, people were still fresh and excited, and men were playing music in raggedy groups as they marched along attended by friends drinking from bottles of beer. But in the morning fog the mood was subdued, almost glum. Three teenaged boys inside a cafe sat with their heads close together on a table, starting up sleepily when a waiter brought them cups of coffee. Outside another cafe a man slept on the sidewalk, looking surprisingly comfortable on the paving stones. Young women in rumpled party clothes passed alone along the streets. A pair of young men sat on a stoop talking and smoking cigarettes. A couple blocks away another man sat on the steps of a closed shop puking, while his four friends crowded around solicitously, the women cooing to soothe and console him.

The plazas around the cathedral were deserted, the spires of the giant church hazy in the mist. I stepped inside one more time, drawn by the giant angels holding up the ornate roof above the head of gold and silver St. James. They looked truly otherworldly, no cute cherubs but strange, uncanny beings. The bells tolled the half hour, and I left the cathedral to make my way down to the train station and my 9:00 departure.

The night before when I got back to the albergue, I had sat for a time out in the public room reading. But I soon fell into conversation with a young German woman, Verena. I had spotted her on first coming in and immediately wanted to know her story. At this point in my trip I´m less shy about just asking. She had walked from Sevilla, on the Via de la Plata, and looked tired, though she had arrived four days earlier. She had small eyes and a broad face, two lip piercings, a moon tattoo on her neck, a sun on the back of her hand. And she was traveling with a dog, who lay on the floor at our feet in a sleeping bag.

She had not started her walk with a dog, only the desire for such a companion. In Zamora she learned that dogs at the local animal shelter were "killed" (a word she apparently preferred to "put to sleep") after twenty days, and she determined to rescue one. There were various complications, but she did end up with a three-month old girl puppy, just what she had wanted. The hospitalera in Zamora where she was staying had called the dog Batussi, after an African tribe, because, Verena explained, "she is all the time running and very fast, and this tribe they are too all the time running and fast." The name had stuck.

But once she had the dog for a companion she was no longer allowed to stay in albergues along the way. At one point she had slept out for five consecutive nights, mostly in the rain, and she had no tent. "This it is hard," she said and gave a pained laugh. At the albergue in Santiago she could least sleep inside, but only in the public room, not in a bed in the dormitorio.

The dog had meant a slower pace too, as it would or could walk no more than twenty kilometers a day. "Only five before a rest," she said. After five the dog would lay down and go to sleep, and Verena would sit and wait an hour or so until it awoke and was ready to continue. "It is young," she said, "too much walking is not good for her bones." When it rained she wrapped the dog in her rain jacket, because "she need it more than me, and it doesn´t matter if I get wet." She said, "we two have to make compromises," but I laughed and said that it sounded like only one of them was sacrificing. She smiled and shrugged. She didn´t seem to mind one bit. She planned to fly Batussi home with her to Germany in a few days, and had already got the dog shots and a chip and a certificate of health. She was still looking for a carrier, but they were "much expensive." In the morning when I left they were asleep together in the sleeping bag, lying back to back.

The seven-hour train ride to Palencia was a lazy pleasure. The fog burned off and I watched the green hills of Galicia pass by, eventually flattening out and giving way to la meseta, where the green wheat has turned to gold in the last weeks.

I spent a couple hours talking with a Spanish woman, Lourdes, who lives with her husband near Negraira and was traveling to the Basque country to see relatives. She was in her mid to late fifties, talkitive and attractive. We sat in facing seats, kitty corner from each other and put our feet up. She has "only the one son," who lives in London with his girlfriend in a flat she, the mother, had bought for them. She has a flat in London too, and one on the coast in Cantabria near Santander. And she told me she owns "places" in Pamplona, and lives off the rents. "But I don´t need much," she said. "I live in teh country and there is no much expense." She had lived and worked in London for a time, and so spoke fairly good English, though she didn´t think so. "I don´t use it so much. My son, his girlfriend is English, but he say to me, no, you must not speak English to her, she must learn Spanish. But when they visit for only a few days I say, it is too short, I will speak to her in Spanish." She shrugged. "It is better."

She told me that people in Galicia eat too much meat. Her son is a vegetarian, which she seemed to think was going a little overbaord, but on the other hand he apparently could do no wrong. She did say that he and his girlfriend could be a little lazy when they came to visit. "They don´t even make the beds," she said. "My husband, he say, why you do all that for them? But it is only for a few days, and I am happy."

Near Ponferrada she pulled down a large, square bag from the overhead shelf. Besides this peice of luggage--which proved to be a soft-sided cooler--she traveled only with a purse and umbrella. The cooler was packed with food and she asked if I was hungry. I was but hesitated politely. She would have none of this.

Lourdes cut me a length of baguette, cut it open and put inside a large chunk of tortilla de patata. I took a bite and spilled a bit on my lap, and she handed me a cloth napkin. This bocadillo alone, along with the plastic cup of apple and piña juice she poured me, made a meal. But when I was finished she opened another container and handed me a large triangle of empanada with tuna. A moment later she held out a couple slices of jamon serrano. Not too much meat, just enough. When I thanked her for this largesse, she said, "it is good to eat," then shrugged and added, "it is better than nothing." Much.

I had three hours in Palencia, where it was hotter than it´s been my entire time in Spain. I walked slowly down the nearly deserted Calle Mayor, under a shaded arcade. A few people began to appear, mostly clerks come to re-open the shops after siesta.

The train to Espinosa was a local and made numerous stops. I got off with one other person and walked into the village. Near the first houses Manolo stood talking to two men. He broke off from them and we shook hands and he asked, ¿que tal?" and I said, "bien, muy bien."

Feeling good in Santiago

So often for me everything seems to fall into place at the end of a trip, and I experience a near perfect sense of well-being and satisfaction. That´s what I felt this afternoon sitting on a bench in a lovely green park in Santiago, where the city people take their paseos on wide gravel paths. Not that my trip is quite over, but the main part is done, and now I´m on to a couple bonus parts.

I left Muxia at 7:30 this morning via bus. Strange to be moving at such a speed after weeks of the more reasonable walking pace. Once in Santiago I walked from the bus station to Acuario Albergue, my last albergue. A pretty Spanish woman wearing lots of make-up took my credencial and wrote my name in her book. Incense was burning and the radio was playing Spanish pop music. The walls were brightly colored and draped with hangings, one dominated by large printed pot leaves. A hippy refuge. The woman walked me to the connected dormitorio, a dog-legged room with twenty-five or so bunkbeds, and chose an upper for me. Nearly all the beds were already taken. As I unpacked she took up a broom to sweep, singing along to a song on the radio.

After a little time on the single, unoccupied computer (again, everything was going my way), I walked into the old city, around the cathedral on already familiar streets to the tourist office. I got a map and walked down through busier and newer streets to the train station. There I found that a train left for Palencia at nine the next morning, and that I could make a connection in Palencia for Espinosa and arrive in plenty of time for dinner. After this great good luck I wandered through the city--which is maybe my favorite, right up there with Leon--and ended up on the bench at the park at the foot of a venerable eucalyptus.

I slept well last night, but at first my rest was in question. The man who had the upper bunk above me showed up only after dark, so I never saw him. I did sense, though, that he was smallish and middle-aged--and I could hear that he was Italian. As soon as he climbed up into his bed he started whispering to himself. At first this seemed maybe just a pre-bedtime conversation, maybe a companionable way to finish off the day. Nothing wrong with talking to one´s self, if one doesn´t go on too long. But it soon became apparent that his mutterings expressed not pleasantries but dissatisfaction, and not with himself: he did not like the snoring that was going on nearby. Now, this was strange to me. Muxia is at the end of the Camino for most people, meaning the communal sleep situation should be old hat. I´ve long been broken in to the snoring, which has been a feature of nearly every night. I don´t have a problem with it anymore; I can sleep through it. So for someone to be so annoyed and worked up about the night noise... I just didn´t get it. But the man did succeed in communicating a certain unpleasant tension.

After a few minutes of complaining in whispers to himself, the man began to talk louder--as if this would help? Then he loudly shushed a man snoring three bunkbeds over. To my surprise the snoring paused--but only for a moment. Then the rather high pitched sawing recommenced, each breath finished off with a short emphatic grumble. The man above me spoke out loud again, appealing to the dark in his indignation. Then he fell to angry mutterings. By this time I was getting uncomfortable. The snoring I could handle, but this man´s frustration was harder to sleep through. I thought he might get down and go over to interrupt the snorer´s sleep. Maybe things would get ugly. But he stayed in his bed and stuck with the muttering and complaining, tossing in a few more loud and useless shushes. Eventually I´m gusessing he accepted his fate, since he fell quiet and I fell asleep. And like I said, I slept well.

From the park I took my map and wandered the town, finding out all the large stone churches and convents, and walking up and down the narrowest streets. I poked into a number of souvenir shops but could find nothing worth buying for the folks back home. When traveling I am incapable of shopping; nothing ever looks remotely interesting.

In the Cafe Dakar I re-discovered that a tortilla is sometimes an omelette, not the tortilla de patata I´d expected. Still, I ate with good appetite, and drank a glass of beer.

By evening the city had become more interesting than ever. People filled the tables outside cafes, and hordes of small children ran about in the streets; a wedding spilled out of a church, and a large group of people in long black robes and pointy black hats went past carrying instruments, mostly bagpipes and drums. In the cathedral evening mass was in progress, and I went in to once more admire the giant angels holding up the golden roof over the head of St. James and over the altar below. Outside in a covered passage beside the cathedral two people played violin; nearby two men played clarinet and guitar together. In the Praza Praterias on the sotuh side of the cathedral, a man and a woman in black and yellow performed a song and dance and juggling act. They did a gymnastic number to a song from Dirty Dancing. When they were done another performer took up in the nearby Praza Quintana, entertaining the kids with funny hats and balloon animals and ring tossing....

In the Praza Obradoiro, on the front side of the cathedral, bands of peregrinos loitered, talking to each other and gazing up at the spires. Just as I had with my own group of pilgrims a week ago. All day long I saw people with backpacks around town, but they were all strange to me. Not a single familiar face. But more than once I saw these people recognize their own Camino frinds and fall on each other´s necks. Just as my own group had a week ago. All day long I was loving Santiago, but I also came to feel it was time to go.

Yesterday in Muxia I was sitting outside the tourist office waiting for it to open, when an old and heavy-set German man hobbled up and sat down beside me with a great sigh. We remained silent for a few minutes, and then he offered me a cookie from a white plastic bag. He said he had just bought them at the panaderia. I said no at first, and he said are you sure, and I said, ok, yes, I will have one. I´d seen him moving slowly along the path outside Corcubion a few days before, one of those people who seem to get along on desire more than physical strength. There in Muxia he told me that he had come all the way from Roncesvalles. I don´t know how long it took him, but I would guess some long time. When the office opened we both went in and got our credencials stamped. The old man shook the Spanish man´s hand and said now he was done. Tomorrow, he said, he would take a train east. In a couple days he planned to be back in Roncesvalles, and to start walking the Camino once again.

Dogs don´t like me

(longish bonus entry for the 28th, and for the dogs)

I haven´t been using my walking stick hardly at all the last couple weeks, but in a moment I can reach over my shoulder and pull it out of the side pocket of my pack. And why would I want to do that? To defend myself.

I have passed literally thousands of dogs in my walk across Spain. Most have ignored me, some have barked, some have strained against their chains in an effort to kill me. But until the walk from Finesterre to Muxia only two loose dogs (and most are loose) had charged me. After today´s morning walk I can add a dozen or so to that number.

The first attack came early. A large brown and white dog lay in the middle of the street outside a house; when I saw that our paths would cross I reached for my stick, merely as a precautionary measure. I thought I might slide by, but as I came close the dog rose up and began to growl in the back of its throat. I pointed the stick at it and tried to look menacing, but it rushed me anyway. I shouted "fuck off!" which is my standard request of an angry dog. It stopped for a moment, then rushed me again. I repeated my wish, this time puncuating the words by banging my stick on the pavement. The dog snarled, charged, stopped; I repeated my moves too--and after a few more dance steps backwards I was past and out of its range of concern.

Shortly after in a wood, I came around a bend in the path, on a stretch where tall ferns hemmed in the peregrino. I stopped when I saw two german shepards waiting for me a few quick leaps ahead. We looked at each other for a long moment... and then I said, "get on with you now." To my relief they complied, running up the trail before me and disappearing into the woods.

A few moments later, though, when I was stopped to have a pee, an ugly black and brown dog with death in its eyes came running silently up the path at me. I pissed all over myself as I hurriedly tried to switch hands from the little to the big stick. The dog turned around and ran back to its nearby house--to wait for me. And I had no choice, I had to pass its way. As I came alongside the farmhouse, the dog paced up and down a head-high wall, barking and growling and making ready to pounce on me. Luckily a man came out of a shed into the small adjacent garden, and he said something to dissuade the dog. The dog hesitated, clearly torn between the compulsion of obedience and the desire to rip out my neck. It seemed to be saying, "come on, man, I want him, I really want him. I need this, man, come on, come on! Let me do it, come on...."

Several times in the few moments it took me to pass I thought that its strong wish for my blood would win out, but just when the dog seemed ready to go ahead and be a bad dog the man would once again mutter some few words of remonstration, resulting in hesitation, just enough.

My day was quite tiring, not so much because of the thirty or so kilometers of walking, but because of the repeated experience of the fear response. When it looks and sounds as if a dog is going to attack, the fear starts up my spine, races up the back of my neck, and makes all my hair stand up as the terror rolls over the top of my head. This is draining and unpleasant.

The dog that interrupted my bathroom break lived in the small village of Rial. Picturesque, on a green hillside near the sea, with stone horreos half filled with corn--and way too many dogs. In Rial, and actually across all Galicia, it seems as if every house has at least three dogs, often more. There were lots of cats too, but they give one no trouble. So, I hadn´t gone another fifty feet in Rial when another dog came around a corner barking and snapping, ready for mayhem--and came to the end of its chain. All right, thank you (though my hair still did that standing up thing). But a half minute later, when I turned to walk past a small sawmill, two more loose dogs had at me. Fuck! I made a feint back and this scared off the larger of the two, but the smaller one and I dodged down the street lunging at each other, it barking, me yelling.

Maybe this is getting repetitious, but I´m not done.

I did have a respite for some time. As long as I wasn´t in villages or walking past houses I was fine. The woods were my refuge. And then I came down to Marineto.

I made a wrong turn and passed a group of farm buildings set down below the road. When I came into view of the front of the house, four dogs, graduated in size from smallish to giantish, jumped up and dashed up the hill at me barking bloody murder. Again the smallest was foremost. But I got past with a few jabs of my walking stick. I had surprised them and was nearly by when they reached the road. Imagine, then, my great sadness when after a kilometer or so I realized I had gone the wrong way and I would have to return to Marineto. The dogs were ready the second time, and it took more fencing work and more repetitions of various forms of the word "fuck" to get past them again.

The road led downhill and just five minutes later into another tiny village, Figueiroa. By this time I was dreading all built structures. The road narrowed to a ten foot wide lane between low stone buildings, and at the other end stood two dogs looking out at me. They barked with vicious intent as I came nearer their home, a home they were ready and willing to defend. I slowed, unsure.... But then a woman came out of a house and said a few words and the dogs moved aside, though they didn´t stop barking their displeasure with me. The woman said, "no problema" as I gingerly stepped past. Right. No problem.

Ten seconds later--and that´s not an exaggeration--I was set upon by a black dog in the most serious attack yet. This dog wasn´t kidding. It came in close and low, growling and snarling and baring its front teeth. I jabbed at it with my stick while taking steps backwards, but this only pissed the dog off more. In this moment I was truly terrified because it looked as if this dog was really about to take a chunk out of me with those bared teeth. Then I glanced over my shoudler and saw that there were three more dogs behind me. Shit, I thought, this is bad.

But just as I was looking for a wall against which to make my final stand, an old woman suddenly appeared, coming over a little rise from her garden below. She shouted at the dogs and they fell back. She looked at me and pointed to a turning I had missed while contending with the dog; I fled uphill out of the village, while she picked up a rock to throw at my would-be assasin.

There were a few other episodes, but you get the idea. I shivered to think what would´ve happened if I hadn´t each time been saved by the intervention (if nonchalance) of dog owners.

Later in Muxia along the waterfront I met a Spanish man named Danny. I´d seen him the day before in Finesterre, and he had made the walk to Muxia too, a couple hours behind me. We talked of the path, what we had seen along the way. At the end I said, yes, it was beautiful, but "muchos perros quieren matarme" (many dogs wanted to kill me). He laughed at my words, and then told me that he hadn´t had any trouble at all.

To Muxia, why not

A last day of walking, but a third ending--first Santiago, then Finesterre, and finally, on this day, Muxia. The route led north, inland but parallel and often in sight of the coast. Like Finesterre, Muxia is on the water and a fishing port.

Much of the way was on paths rather than roads, through pine and fern woods. Beautiful, but not in a way I expect or experience woodlands in the U.S. I wasn´t once in a forest in Spain that wasn´t apparently scheduled for eventual cutting. The woods almost always seemed more agricultural than wild. The pastoral landscape, the fields and hedges and stone walls, seemed much older, lasting.

The route was less well-marked than on previous sections, and twice I made wrong turnings. The first was fortunate, as it led me to a gorse-covered hill above the rocky coast. Back on the right way, I soon came down to a beach, where the Rio Lires empties into the ocean. The day had begun with sun, but a thin layer of clouds moved in mid-morning. I followed the river upstream, passing a large and old fish farm; the water below was boiling with some sort of fish, all with their snouts pointing up through the surface. Just beyond I crossed a footbridge into the village of Lires, one of the few villages in which I was not harrassed by dogs (see next post for details).

I saw only seven other peregrinos on this walk of thirty or so kilometers, and they were all going the opposite way, to Finesterre. Several confused looking people stopped me to discuss route finding.

Beyond Lires I came to a smaller stream, Rio Castro, and found that the water had risen up over the large stepping stones placed for crossing. I removed my shoes and waded, having to go thigh deep at the other side where the last two stones were missing. Not long after I came down a very narrow section of trail and discovered a tethered goat. Neither one of us was happy about my need to pass, but I squeezed by without incident.

I came back down to the ocean and walked the last couple kilometers on a road beside the water. To find the albergue I had to ask directions three times, moving closer after each question. I found it high up with the last of the buildings on a rocky slope above the town.

If it wasn´t for the small sign on the outside I would not have guessed I had arrived: a gray concrete block, just a few years old, but suggestive of totalitarian optimism. I slid open a metal grate and stepped into a forecourt, then pushed through a glass door and into a high, squared space: think Soviet youth group lodgings, or maybe accommodations for 70s Olympic athletes. There wasn´t a single other person in the building, and it smelled bad but not of the usual body odor and mildew. More like chlorine gone seedy, if that makes any sense.

Around a corner, past a corrugated metal staircase, I came into a wide-open, high-ceilinged public space, lit with skylights and filled with square orange chairs and smooth metal tables. Upstairs I found the dormitorio, with a dozen white bunkbeds. Just outside the room were more square chairs (blue this time) and tables, arranged in a tableaux suggesting death and abandoment, like the future as imagined in the film 2001. Motion sensitive lights flickered on as I moved through the building (and quickly flickered off as I passed into another part). A giant sliding glass door led out to laundry sinks, in the corner of a high, concrete-walled court. Think prison exercise space. Finally, up on a third floor I found an open patio, squared off, stonewalled and empty; a bit of the harbor could be seen through the spaces between dirty white apartemnt buildings.

I wandered through the albergue intrigued but also a little spooked. But then a German couple appeared to break the spell. Within a few hours the beds were nearly all full.

The town of Muxia was less appealing than Finesterre, maybe in part because it had very little attention to give to visitors. There were numeroous bar-cafes on the waterfront, and a picturesque breakwater sheltering fishing boats... but mostly it felt like a place for people who lived there.

I walked through town and out to a dramatic, be-churched point. The Sanctuario de Nosa Señora de Barca was built out among the huge shore boulders to celebrate the Virgin´s long ago visit to the spot via stone boat (she supposedly came to encourage St. James in his Iberian evangelizing). After the church, I visited the tourist office in town, where I was awarded my third certificate of accomplishment (there was one for Finesterre too). The latter two required no discussion of my religious life.

I returned to town and sat outside the Bar Wimpe in the sun at a plastic table and drank a beer. Later I returned to the south side of the point and sat in among the rocks and gorse, alternating between reading Dickens and watching the sun set towards the sea.

I go swimming

(A bonus post for the 27th, because there is always so much to say)

The albergue in Finisterre opened at five, and I secured a lower bunk by a window. A few minutes later I was headed out of town, crossing the narrow peninsula to Praia de Mar do Fora. From a hill above I admired the lovely beach, a half mile of white sand giving way on either end to black rocks and high green headlands. The clouds had all blown away to the south and the sun shone without the intermittent pauses of recent days.

Down at the nearly deserted beach I sat in the sand shirtless (a rare condition for me in Spain) and ate some bread and cheese and green olives. Then I walked down to the sea and stepped in--very very cold. But in just a moment I dove into the roiling water and swam out among the three and four foot waves. And in just a moment more I didn´t feel cold at all but nearly as happy as a person can be.

After my swim I sat on the beach for hours; the longer I stayed the longer I wanted to stay. The sound of the waves, the sun glittering on their crests, the wind and sand--all of this somehow undermined my usual impatience. I had that particular all-over good feeling that comes only after a swim in a cold sea, and more generally a satisfying sense of well-being so strong it was almost akin to an ache.

Later back in town I ate at a place by the port, Bar Miramar, where old men stood at the bar slowly drinking glasses of beer and smoking. The Miramar was suggested by the beautiful green-eyed woman who works at the albergue. "It is run by a family," she said, "very nice. The grandfather he will come over and talk to you." Actually he didn´t but the people were friendly. I had a good ensalada mixta (though I had to pick out the canned corn) and the best tortilla de patata I´ve had outside Montse´s kitchen. I sat by a window overlooking the port and the fishing boats, and Family Guy played on the television.

At the albergue when I signed in I had seen the Spanish Martinet--he was out front directing everyone within hearing to all the important sights in town. I also saw Carol, the American woman I had dinner with all the way back in Arre near Pamplona; she had been in Oliveiroa too, and you could hear her braying her bad Spanish througout that albergue. At one point she kept repeating the word "Pittsburgh" to someone over and over: "Pittsburgh!" she shouted. "PITTSburgh!" Not to be an ass or anything, but I was glad to discover that neither she nor the Spaniard had a bed near mine. A tall German woman had the bunk above me, and she eyed me with some distaste when I returned from the beach, I don´t know why.

Despite the minor setback of such company, I really liked Finesterre--the tall narrow buildings stacked up on the hillside above the water, the twisty streets, the stone pier reaching out from the town, the working boats behind the breakwater, the constant sound of crying seagulls. I lay in bed after dark and listened to the gulls, and ran over in my head the full day, and the full days of the last weeks.

Burnt toast

When I first met Salima, I thought that she was a sweet, interesting, talkitive young woman (she´s the same age as Naomi). Ten days or so later, my opinion has not changed, but I´ve learned that she is also a person who does not take any shit. This makes her a good travel companion. Though her Spanish is minimal, she does not hesitate to ask for what she wants, and, if she doesn´t get it, to ask again in a more pointed manner. This morning was a mild example--when her toast arrived at our breakfast table more black than brown, she simply sent it back and asked for a less well-done version. And why not. However, I would have just eaten it (and actually did, as my own was darkish as well). I admire forceful people, especially when they can pull off their forcefulness in a way that is reasonable rather than demanding. And Salima manages that. I told her she was indeed a lawyer, but I have a feeling her demeanor predates law school.

Yesterday when we arrived in Finesterre we had decided to get hotel rooms rather than wait for the albergue to open at five. In this Salima took the lead and the rest of us let her. The first couple places were full, but the third, Casa Velay, had one room, a double. Salima tried talking the proprietor into letting us four share the room but he refused. Instead he walked us five minutes along the waterfront to a house and took us inside. It wasn´t a hotel or pension, simply someone´s house with two available rooms upstairs. The problem was that it smelled like shit. Literally. For me this was an immediate deterrent, and it didn´t help that one of the rooms had only one big bed ("matrimonio," they call it here). The man who lived in the house, and who had proceeded us upstairs, might have been the source of the smell but I couldn´t tell. His neck was sort of collapsed, emphasizing his unshaven and massive jaw in a disturbing way, and he could only aspirate his words, which were utterly incomprehensible to me. Noting the pained looks on Salima and Mandy´s faces, I said (in broken Spanish) something like, ok, we´re going back downstairs and we´ll talk about it--just wanting to get back out in the street and have a big clean breath of air.

Once outside we simply said no thanks, and then returned to the Casa Velay. Salima and Mandy took the one room, though with some reluctance, and Eddy and I set off together to find other lodgings. Which we soon did at the Hotel Finesterre--two single rooms, twenty-five euros each. We climbed to the third floor and found the rooms passable, and you could see the harbor out the window if you craned your neck to the right and ignored the construction site just below. Eddy said, "is better than Darth Vader," which was inappropriate I suppose but it made me laugh.

After walking to the point we ate dinner, an excellent menu del dia--first ensalada con arroz, then a big platter of cooked potatoes and two types of fish, all soaking in a delicious orangey sauce. Salima thought the dessert tart one of the best pastries she´d eaten in Spain.

After eating we reprised the previous night´s discussion by addressing a number of further refelctive questions. I had one this time: would you walk the Camino again? The others all said yes, but I would´ve said no until recently (simply because I´ve done it, not because I haven´t liked it), but now I´m thinkng yes. I imagine that each time it would be a much different experience, depending on the people you met, but also on the albergues, the weather, the time of year....

Other questions ranged from the less interesting (to me) "do you have the sense that you´ve done the Camino in a previous life?" to the fascinating "what is a pilgrim and are you still one after you´ve finished the Camino?" Answers varied considerably to this question. I said yes, I was always a pilgrim, because I was always seeking--not so much something like St. James or Jesus or God or the city of Santiago, but simply experience and knowledge. Mandy also spoke of seeking as a constant in her life; Eddy said maybe he wasn´t so much a pilgrim, and that he had more questions at the end than he´d had at the start; Salima said she didn´t think of herself as a pilgrim, that she was trying not to seek but instead to live more in the present, to be happy now rather than always deferring happiness to a time of future accomplishment. Have I said how much I liked these people´s company?

We also spoke in a nostalgic manner of what we had done in recent weeks and would do no longer, all the Camino experience. It´s been something that has encouraged analysis and discussion, more so towards the end, and those are two activities that I sort of enjoy.

Today we ate breakfast together, then wandered around the waterfront. Finally the time came for parting. We shook hands and hugged, and Mandy and Salima and I kissed cheeks, and then they all got on the bus to Santiago (with reluctance--none of us has used such transportation in some time) and drove away.

So now I am again solo, after what seems a long time in company. There are a few people around town that I know. I ran into Susanne, the Hungarian woman, and I might join her on a walk to the end to burn stuff later. Still an acquaintance is different than a companion. I had only known Mandy two weeks, but it seemed much longer, and I´ll miss her.

It turns out that I am not quite done walking. One can walk one more day north along the coast to the town of Muxia. So tomorrow another day afoot. On my own this time, but that´s how I started and so it´s appropriate and even satisfying to finish that way.