Tristimania (21 page)

One day as I walked I learnt Yeats's ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus', its rhythm making the path easier. That evening, among a group of pilgrims, I heard an Irish accent. I felt shy, as awkward as before, but I wanted to give each poem a good home every day.

– Do you want a poem? Dunno if you might want to read it.

The man gave me the widest sort of surprised smile. He had, he said, been longing to read poetry for years, but he had absolutely no idea where to start.

– This would be a good place, I said. Take it. It's by Yeats.

I called my doctor every few days. He was gently but firmly trying to persuade me to go back on antidepressants, but I felt that, if I couldn't come off them here, I'd never be able to. At the same time I felt stupid, hearing myself refusing medicinal help. One day, he commented on the birdsong, which was so loud over the phone that he could hear it hundreds of miles away. I picked up a feather from those singing birds to give him when I was home, and in the
meantime it was a talisman to remind me that I was still safe, could still talk to him every now and then, could still feel a line of safety in my hands on the mountain path.

I heard it said that, in the middle section of the Camino, something within you dies. It is a
meseta,
flat and relatively featureless, a hard slog of a week's walk. Halfway through my life, halfway through the road,
mezzo del cammin,
this part was like walking through my illness again. According to some people, it is the most tedious part of the route, but it is filled with millions upon millions of sunflowers in August and no yellow like it. All you can see is acres of yellow and, every day, a huge page of turquoise sky. I was swimming in flowers, daily. But then one day I saw them differently and I thought of van Gogh, whose sunflowers are not laughing but crying, pain-swept with the mad yellow of the overbright light in the mind. I cried for his hurt and humiliation.

The priest at Carrión de los Condes blessed every pilgrim individually, which, with the numbers in the thousands, was a staggering commitment, but people were immensely grateful and he was famous along the Camino for the love and kindness in his eyes.

One evening, I heard a strange sound in a hedge. It was a litter of four starving kittens, hungry and cold, cheeping like baby birds. A woman nearby, who spoke better Spanish than I did, stopped a passing car to ask if the owners of the house knew about the kittens. He was young, pissed and smoking a spliff.

– No, the guy said. It's a holiday home. The mother cat's gone, the kittens'll die.

He scooped them up in an old shirt and put them on the back seat of his car.

– I can't look after them. I've already got four cats. But I'll look after them.

He drove off.

– And he will, said the woman, you could see it in his face.

If you're the kind of man who doesn't like women mentioning periods, you should skip this paragraph. If you're a woman who has walked the Camino, though, you will understand exactly the situation. Getting my period was bad enough, because although about two hundred thousand people walk the Camino every year, there are almost no toilets on the path itself, unless you're passing through a town. Worse, the Camino seems to make women's menstruation impossibly heavy: several women told me they had had the equivalent of two periods in one go – one person I met on the Camino had been hospitalized because her blood loss had been so great. For myself, I couldn't physically walk further.

I stumbled into a hostel, where a young, tough-looking German guy looked at me with something close to contempt for my physical weakness. (I wish that had been the last time I would meet him, but it wasn't to be.) The following day, I took a train for thirty minutes into León, found somewhere to stay and spent an entire day not doing anything much. Except crying. Tediously, endlessly, hopelessly, boringly. That was when I dug my antidepressants out of my bag and started taking them again. I simply couldn't have carried on. The self-pity, for starters, was killing me, and self-pity isn't even
funny.
I hadn't heard a good joke in weeks, and couldn't come up with one. Then I met one.

I ran into a bogus monk. He was Hungarian and said he belonged to an order called the Brotherhood of Mother Teresa. He was obsessive about which supermarkets had the cheapest food and was always trying to get food and lodgings for free. He was completely incurious about anyone else and seemed entirely unconcerned with any spiritual aspect of the Camino. He complained about sleeping in the dormitories ‘with people snoring and –' he broke off and made
farting sounds with his lips: ‘And doing pee-pee. I don't like it.' He piqued my curiosity, because I was fairly sure he was not for real. One day, we happened to check into a hostel at the same time. He told me he had had a massage the previous night – which, on the Camino, was not necessarily the monkish impropriety it might seem, and many hostels offer massages to pilgrims. But then he leant towards me, lowered his voice and said suggestively: ‘And then I gave two ladies a massage. Hey?'

His English was pretty good, but when I asked him why he had wanted to become a monk, he didn't know the word. ‘What is this word “monk”?' Learning any new language, one learns early the vocabulary for one's own job or vocation. That he knew ‘massage' and not ‘monk' said it all. Two young Czech women had clocked him by instinct alone.

– Weird man. Fake-monk, said one, shaking her head.

– Look at his eyes.
Whoooeer.

Their light-hearted grimaces made me giggle for the first time on the Camino, and I was sorry that they were walking so much faster than me and I probably wouldn't ever catch up with them. Later, I met a young English guy who had an infinitely foilable plan to become a monk. He said the Hungarian was fake and he knew why: he could tell from the way the Hungarian wore the cords around his waist.

– He didn't tie his
knots
properly.

The English guy, incidentally, went on to meet a woman on the Camino, fell in love and instantly revoked all his monkish plans. (Bless.)

By this point, I was two thirds through the journey. I'd gone back to baccy, beer and pills and was phoning my friends fairly regularly. One friend of mine decided to come and meet me in Santiago, my longed-for destination. For the first time on the Camino, I felt a real, if momentary, sense of happiness.

I spent a night in the hostel run by the English confraternity of St James at Rabanal del Camino. They organized afternoon tea for the pilgrims and checked everyone for bedbugs. It seemed to be the only hostel that deliberately woke everyone up in the morning and got them out of bed (by playing Vivaldi at full volume). It was also the only hostel to have worked out how not to run out of toilet paper. It was nannying, good-hearted, bossy and hilarious.

At that hostel, I met a young English guy, a student at Cambridge, while we washed our socks at the laundry sinks. He was, he said, trying to learn to be happy.

– How do you do that? I asked: I really, really want to know. I've been a bit crap at being happy recently.

His answers were those of a sweet teenage sage.

– Just four things, he said: Live in the present moment. Have no expectations. And accept yourself and others, accept all your feelings. Feel gratitude for everything which happens.

I thought I was rubbish at all of those things.

– Do you ever read poetry? I asked.

– I'd love to, but I'm an engineer. I'm not
allowed
to, if you know what I mean.

I gave him the poem I'd read the previous day, Rumi's ‘The Guest House', perfect for our conversation in this guest house and also for its subject of acceptance:

                                  
This being human is a guest house.

                                  
Every morning a new arrival.

                                  
A joy, a depression, a meanness,

                                  
some momentary awareness comes

                                  
as an unexpected visitor.

                                  
• • •

                                  
Be grateful for whoever comes,

                                  
because each has been sent

                                  
as a guide from beyond.

As I walked, I began to feel that at least I would be able to finish the Camino; and I was desperate to meet my friend in Santiago. I also felt for the first time that it was not such a stupid idea to do this walk, after all; to have tried to leave illness behind, to undertake a poem-strewn practice of parting, to break the hold of depression's paralysis. I was also getting physically stronger each day and, thinking back to the beginning of the walk, I was amazed at the difference.

For several days, I walked with a seven-foot truck driver from Denmark who wore fluorescent pink and green clothes and piled pipe-cleaners in her bright blonde hair. She was a walking anti-depressant and seemed a total stranger to sadness. I gave her a poem by ee cummings, one which splashes its infinite blessing for the stout joy of the green world and, to my shock, she broke down in tears for its beauty and told me some of the secret stories of her heart. A friend of mine had given me Rumi's ‘The Force of Friendship', which includes the lines ‘Anyone who feeds on majesty/becomes eloquent,' and I gave her that poem, too, because she walked in majesty and talked in majesty and, even when she wept, she wept in majesty.

I tried to learn from the splendour of her strength. Her energy was infectious and vitalizing; her spirit was stupendous. But she was running out of time and had to break off the Camino and go home to her children. I walked on alone, missing her sorely but holding to what I'd felt in the dawns we had seen together, each day's sun a giant apple, slowly ripening over the day.

But nothing comes simple and I knew I was still far from well. It disappointed me bitterly to know that my idea had not worked, that even walking across Spain I could not outpace depression, I could not outwalk it. ‘The meaning is in the waiting,' writes R. S. Thomas, and I had to hold on to someone else's wisdom with a patience which is not naturally mine.

Depression still hung in shadows, it gurned in my solitude, it waylaid me if anything difficult happened. And, of course, something difficult did happen. I had a horrible moment when a group of pilgrims had deliberately pushed me out of their way to get into a crowded hostel with a limited number of beds. I was disproportionately upset and tried to get my place back in the queue. The contemptuous young German man I had met before was there. He had seen me move ahead but had not seen the group jostle me out of the way. Suddenly, he sheered round on me, screaming and berserk.

– I know you, I've seen you on the Camino, I saw you nearly faint on two different days, there is no way, no fucking way, you have walked this,
he said.

His face was six inches from mine, livid with a self-righteous hatred and snarling with the particular contempt that strong people can feel for the weak or weakened.

– I know you haven't done this on your own. I've seen you crawl.

At this point he started shrieking.

–
You must have fucking cheated, you must have caught fucking buses and trains and taxis and FUCK knows what else . . .

I was trembling but furious, and determined to stand my ground. I hate being bullied.

–
Who are you, the Camino fucking Gestapo?
I wanted to say but didn't. I dredged up a residue of grace.

– Yes, I caught a train for thirty minutes on one day. And yes,
I've been ill. And yes, apart from that one day, I have walked every step of the Camino. And I wish you a
buen Camino.

And then I walked away, but I was shaking uncontrollably. I went into a café, and the barman gave me a cigarette and a glass of water and asked if he could help. I couldn't eat. I could only walk, sick, trembling, angry and frightened that I would re-meet the German guy, because one of the features of the Camino is that one re-meets many people along the way. I walked till late that evening, bought and smoked a packet of cigarettes, rested a few hours and began walking again at 3 a.m. In twenty-four hours, I walked thirty-six kilometres, almost all of it overnight, to outwalk him, to get a day ahead. When I walked in the dark I had often seen shooting stars and, during the small hours of that night, I saw seventeen of them and made seventeen wishes (all for the same thing).

In the morning, to my absolute delight, I re-met the two young Czech women who'd made me giggle. They were sitting at a café having a late breakfast, high on coffee and sunshine and croissants. There was something about their simple, straightforward appetite for life which I adored: an appetite for language, beer, people, knowledge, food and ice cream – always ice cream.

I told them about the screaming German.

– What a
wanker,
one said, bluntly.

– Walk with us. We missed you, we were just talking about you, we were hoping we'd see you again, walk with us.

So all the last few days of the Camino I spent with them, eating, drinking and making merry. They were enjoying their Camino as much as I wasn't. They were as unwilling to reach Santiago as I was keen, but since they could walk about twice as fast as I could, their unwillingness slowed them down to the speed of my willingness and it was an ideal pace for us all. We slept out one night, and I read
them lines from St Francis of Assisi's ‘Canticle of the Creatures', addressed to ‘Brother Sun . . . Sister Moon . . . Sister Water and Brother Fire, through whom You light the night; and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong'. As they were themselves.