The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (27 page)

‘Choose three books from the library,’ said Miguel, gesturing around the hot room. ‘The first will tell your past, the next knows your present and the last will see your future.’

A basement in Madrid: its walls lined from ceiling to floor with shelves. On the shelves: hundreds of wooden boxes, ranging in size from narrow cigar case to shallow treasure chest. The boxes were all open at their outwards-facing end, and the mouth of each box had an identifying number burnt into it. Held in each mouth was the plain linen-covered spine of what appeared to be a book, though some of these spines were thicker than the spines of any book I had ever seen before. Pinch-holes had been cut into the boxes so that the books they contained could be gripped and slid out, as one might pull a loose brick from a wall. The spines of the books were unmarked by text and were of different colours: orange, mulberry, taupe, black, scarlet. The effect was postmodern baroque: Pompidou colours for a vast
Wunderkammer
.

‘You don’t need to take much care,’ said Elena, Miguel’s wife, smiling, ‘because the books will choose you, not the other way round.’

The library of Miguel Angel Blanco is no ordinary library. It is not arranged according to topic and subject, nor is it navigated by means of the Dewey Decimal system. Its full name is the Library of the Forest,
La Biblioteca del Bosque
. It has so far been a quarter of a century in the making, and at last count it consisted of more than 1,100 books – though its books are not only books, but also reliquaries. Each book records a journey made by walking, and each contains the natural objects and substances gathered along that particular path: seaweed, snakeskin, mica flakes, crystals of quartz, sea beans, lightning-scorched pine timber, the wing of a grey partridge, pillows of moss, worked flint, cubes of pyrite, pollen, resin, acorn cups, the leaves of holm oak, beech, elm. Over the many years of its making, the library has increased in volume and spread in space. It now occupies the entire ground floor and basement of an apartment building in the north of Madrid. Entering the rooms in which it exists feels like stepping into the pages of a Jorge Luis Borges story: ‘The Library of Babel’ crossed with ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, perhaps.

In the Museum of the Botanical Gardens of Lisbon, there is a wooden chest of fifty-six drawers presented in 1560 to King Pedro V of Portugal by Vasco da Gama. Each of the drawers of the chest was made of a different species of tropical hardwood, and each of these fifty-six species was at the time to be found growing somewhere in the colonies of Portugal. Though the chest’s form is analogous to the library, its purpose is drastically different. Da Gama’s chest treats trees as colonial subjects whose acquisition and arrangement was a means of demonstrating dominion – proof of plural worlds under a singular control. Miguel’s library, by contrast, disperses its maker’s self into nature.

I slid the first book, my ‘past’, from its snug wooden box. It was small, about the size of a paperback novel, and its identifying number was 95. Miguel took it from me. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘
La Máscara de Henry Moore
!’ He and Elena glanced at each other. Miguel carried the book over to a desk, placed it in a pool of light from an anglepoise and opened its cover. At first, it resembled a conventional book. There were four pages of shiny paper, with bold black handwriting on them. ‘These are made of vegetable paper,’ Miguel said, running his fingers over their rough grain as he turned them.

Then he turned the fourth page and the book became a box. There was a glass window and beneath it a cabinet-like space resembling a specimen drawer in a Victorian natural history museum. Under the glass was a strip of rusted metal with two rhomboidal eye-holes punched into it, pieces of broken white pottery and two shards of white quartz. These objects sat on a bed of what looked like sand and resin. I looked at Miguel and Elena for interpretation, but Miguel showed his palms, as if to say,
Only you can know what this means
. I thought of the many trails of white stones I’d met, and of the fragment of quartz that Steve had found for me beneath his boulder.

The Library of the Forest owes its existence to storm and snow. Between 30 December 1984 and New Year’s Day 1985 a severe winter gale struck the Guadarrama mountains, the sierra of granite and gneiss that slashes from north-east to south-west across the high plains of Castille, separating Madrid (to the south) from Segovia (to the north). Thousands of the Scots pines that forest the Guadarrama were toppled. For those tempestuous days, Miguel was trapped in his small house in Fuenfría, a southern Guadarraman valley. When at last the storm stopped and the thaw came, he walked up into the valley, following a familiar path but encountering a new world: fifteen-foot-deep drifts of snow, craters and root boles where trees had been felled, sudden clearings in the forest. As he walked, he gathered objects he found along the way: pine branches, resin, cones, curls of bark, a black draughts piece and a white draughts piece. When he returned to his house he placed the gathered items in a small pine box, lidded the box with glass, sealed the glazing with tar, bound pages to the box with tape and gave the whole a cover of card-backed linen.

In this way the first book of the library was made. Miguel called that original book-box
Deshielo
, ‘Thaw’, and it became the source from which a stream of works began to flow. His manufacturing method is unchanged in its fundamentals. All his book-boxes contain objects he has collected while walking; the results of chance encounters or conscious quests. The found objects are held in place within each box by wire and thread, or pressed into fixing beds of soil, resin, paraffin or wax. Thus mutely arranged, each book-box symbolically records a walk made, a path followed, a foot-journey and its encounters. And the library exists as multidimensional atlas – an ever-growing root-map, and the peculiar chronicle of a journey with no respite.

I carried
La Máscara de Henry Moore
, the book of my past, back to its host box, feeling the displaced air rush out around my fingers as I slid it home.

‘Now for the box of your present! Let the oracle speak!’ said Miguel. I chose a bigger box, backed with purple linen: No. 588. I opened it on the desk, in the pool of light. The title page read ‘
Zarzamora virgen
’. I leafed through the pages and reached the glass. The bed of the box was covered in a curdy yellow substance that resembled congealed fat. Protruding through the fat were thirty or forty curved thorns, like the dorsal fins of sharks swimming in a lipid sea. Like my first box, it was sharp on the eye, full of aggression and darkness, compelling but obscene. Miguel frowned. ‘I’m not sure what you call these,’ he said, pointing to the thorns, which looked to me like very large bramble thorns, ‘but we will see much of this sharp plant, this
Zarzamora
, in the next few days, when we go to the Guadarrama to walk.’

For all the atmosphere of fairground clairvoyancy that surrounded the choosing, I felt somehow
known
by these boxes, this vast mute library, these books which I appeared to open but which actually opened me.

Miguel and I had been corresponding for several years, but this was the first time I had come to Spain to see him and his library. I wanted to find out more about Miguel’s obsession with walking and wayfaring, and his unconventional means of recording his journeys, as well as about Spanish practices of
senderismo
, or ‘path-following’. There is an exceptional richness and variety of old paths in Spain. A network of
cañadas
or drove roads crosses Spain for nearly 80,000 miles, occupying almost a million acres of public land, shaping land-holding patterns across the country (especially on the plains), and still used for the transportation of livestock. It includes routes such as the Cañada Real, which runs from León to Extremadura, curls round to the west of the Guadarrama and then takes a near-perfect north-easterly bearing up towards the Basque country. In parts of Asturias, the red cows of the north – the
vacas rojas
– roam in free-grazing herds, trampling wide and persistent paths into the landscape as they search for shade and pasture. The pilgrimage to Santiago has its local and profane versions in the
romeria
, the traditional village community walk that originated in the pilgrimage to Rome, but which is now usually made from the village centre to a nearby sacred site, with drinking and eating en route to celebrate the revival of the land after winter. In the Cantabrian mountains, where bears and wolves survive, different rural relics can be found: nomadic shepherds moving their flocks and herds along pathways thought to date from the Bronze Age. Paths snake in their tens of thousands out of the coastal mountain ranges to make landfall at ports and bays, connecting the interior with the sea. As the valleys down from the mountains drained the snow-melt, so the paths have over the centuries ducted the flow of pilgrims, traders, merchants and other travellers.

The profusion of paths, the reputation of the Santiago pilgrimage and the picaresque tradition of wandering in search of adventure made famous by Don Quixote have attracted many English and Irish walkers to Spain since the end of the Peninsular Wars. George Borrow of course, but also Laurie Lee, V. S. Pritchett, Walter Starkie, Richard Ford, Gerald Brenan and, more recently, the walking artist Hamish Fulton, who, in a campaign of chronic athleticism, has walked across Spain dozens of times, clocking up tens of thousands of miles and inscribing his routes in black marker-pen on a large-scale road atlas of the country. A former student of mine, Matt Lloyd, had walked the full Camino route one autumn, with a knapsack and a ukulele, like a latter-day Lee living off his musical skills and the hedgerows: ‘Forty days westering across the breadth of Spain,’ he wrote in a letter to me after he had returned, ‘feeling a whole country turn beneath my feet, beginning in the French mountains and ending in the Spanish sea, singing for my supper as I went.’

The concept of the path animated Miguel’s library. ‘
Each of my books,’ he said, ‘records an actual journey
but also a
camino interior
, an interior path.’ He had once walked the Camino Francés – the traditional route through the Pyrenees and across the Castilian plains – and collected moss from the facade of the cathedral in Compostela, which he had used to make Book No. 632. In the late 1990s he had lived in the village of Brion in Galicia, around ten miles from Compostela. There he had met and walked with the
meigas
of Galicia, the wise women known pejoratively as ‘witches’ and admiringly as ‘herbalists’. The
meigas
quickly accepted Miguel into their world and began to teach him their knowledge of medicinal herbs. He began to use these ‘witches’ plants’ in the boxes he was making there, creating what he called a ‘shadow herbarium’. Over the course of several months he also established an alternative, pagan
camino
, which he named the Camino de Santa Minia. This path began and ended in an old wood where a great oak stood as altarpiece within the cathedral of the grove itself. Miguel first walked the route on the day of the full moon, 17 April 1998, and then repeated it daily until he had inscribed his own path.

Miguel’s true heartland, though, is the Guadarrama range. He has devoted hundreds of books to the mountains, gathering objects from its summits, creeks, paths, steep slopes and secret sites. He has known the Fuenfría valley since the age of two, and walking the forest’s paths has become to him a means of metaphysical as well as actual wayfaring, much as sailing the sea roads has helped Ian Stephen to navigate and steer himself within the world.

‘
My life,’ Miguel noted, ‘has been united
with trees, which I have considered as my equals, and in them I have seen my destiny.’ He once described himself to me as having ‘roots’ in Fuenfría, of becoming ‘part tree’ when he was there. Such utterances are as natural to Miguel as offering a cup of tea or commenting on the weather. There is no silliness to him because there is no pomposity. He mentions these matters with none of the ostentation of someone unveiling a carefully nurtured eccentricity. His animism is so unabashed as to exceed naïvety. He is a gentle Green Man and I have been fortunate to know him.

Miguel also possesses an air of great and influential calm, secure in the knowledge that he has consecrated his life to a worthwhile proceeding. The library structures his life past and his life to come. His belief in the worth of his ongoing task is absolute and modest. Money seems uninteresting to him, and he long ago stopped selling his work to galleries. It has become more important to perpetuate the library and preserve its integrity. The library’s melancholy grandeur lies in Miguel’s total commitment to his project, and in his disinterest in himself. Its artistry exists not in the detail, not in the individual boxes – exquisite though they are – but in the overall gesture. He has created a memoir utterly devoid of egotism, an autobiography with only nature at its heart. ‘This is my life, my memory store,’ he said to me. ‘It will be here when my memory is gone.’

‘Finally, then, your future!’ called Elena. I chose No. 818. Its title was
Pizarras, Espejo de los Alpes
(‘Slates, Mirror of the Alps’), and it was the most conventionally attractive of the three books. I was glad to have picked it after the sinister jags and angles of the first two. The opening pages were of a lightweight and translucent vegetable paper that bore the imprint of rock forms and fossils. Strands of seaweed were strewn under the glass. The book commemorated a walk in the Alps in 2001, and played with the fact that the summits of Alpine peaks had once been seabeds: the
coccoliths
represented in the paper alluded to this deep-time conversion of the submarine into the aerial.

I browsed the library for another two hours. The day lessened outside. The noise of cicadas bristled from nearby trees. Elena and Miguel sat, talked quietly with each other, watched me. They had seen the magic of the library work on people before.