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Speaking in Tongues: Stories from the Road to Santiago
Five days' journey from León to Santiago, it says — I don't know who this text was intended for, but I don't know anyone, including the Frenchwoman (who had walked the entire 800 km journey twice already with the same impeccable coif and that inexplicably obscene shade of lipstick) and the Hungarian (who had walked to Santiago three times from Paris) – who could walk that camino in five days. Not today, not a millennia ago, when the first trickle of supplicants and devotees to St. James the Elder, Bishop of Jerusalem, son of Zebedee, wound its way to the basilica situated at the end of the world. A thousand years ago, the end of the world lay at the outer coast of Galicia, a province in northwest Spain, and all of Europe – kings and queens, princes, dukes, popes, and popes-to-be, as well as a host of the less moneyed and less privileged (swindlers, serfs, mystics, saints, troubadours, artists, common and uncommon) – was drawn to Santiago de Compostela, the resting place for the relics of St. James. One story holds that the alchemist Nicholas Flamel, believing the road to be the Way to the Philosopher's Stone, prayed to the Apostle for assistance in decoding a book of hieroglyphs that had remained obscure to him. He never received a direct answer, but upon reaching the city of Le'on on the return journey, he met a Jewish doctor who revealed to him the secrets concealed within the book, and from this information he synthesized the Stone. (Is this story meant – I wonder, at the moment of this writing – to reflect the larger mythology of the Road: not simply on the obvious but exasperatingly subtle metaphor of the Road as the personal quest, but as a pointer to the source, the elixir of everlasting life? The Camino itself appears to have many fingers in many mythological and historical pies, with ties to Jerusalem (through St. James himself), the holy grail (kept by the Knights Templar, an association that formed first as an order solely committed to the protection of pilgrims on the Camino), and the Crusades, with all the full force of resonant meaning behind its name. What it means to say about these things in its homegrown mythology, in my experience, is always a little less clear than one might expect.) Walking from León to Santiago – a journey of over 300 km (200 miles) – this summer took me thirteen days, not five. I walked with friends, and we walked without a guide – an unusual choice for most modern pilgrims, who prefer to know the distances they walk each day, elevations, locations of fountains with potable water, landmarks, a bit of history, places where wine is cheap and plentiful after a day's hard hike. Had we been walking in 1200 AD, we would have most likely familiarized ourselves with the Codex Calixtinus – which, in some ways, can be said to have founded the genre of the travel guide, if not its breezy tone – before beginning the dangerous road. Yet the text, for all its intent to convey practical information about the pilgrimage (names of towns, locations of hospitals, insightful characterizations of local peoples and their table manners), veers off frequently into the realm of the mythical and the fantastic. One chapter heading reads, “HERE BEGINS THE PASSION OF THE BLESSED EUTROPIUS OF SAINTES, BISHOP AND MARTYR,” interrupting the informational thread with a story of the life and bloody sainthood of Eutropius before allowing the text to resume its previous narrative train. And then there is the matter of the veracity of those travel times. Concerning the author's timetable of the journeys, or stages of the Camino, José Luis Puerto says this: “Los datos … unas veces son reales, fruto de la propria experiencia personal, y otras sin embargo observamos que nos habla de oídas, basado en distintas Fuentes. Pero esta conjunción de lo real y de lo fabuloso … es lo que otorga al libro un encanto especial.” [The times at once are true, derived from personal experience, and also not, coming to us from Other Sources. This junction of the real and the fantastic is what lifts the text, sublimates it.] Others have held less misty-eyed views on the veractiy of Camino legend. Warnings about the dangers of drinking from certain regional rivers (“Careful with the water – either for you or your horse, for it is a river of death” ) were passed on in stories such as the one told by the traveler who, upon meeting two locals sitting on the banks of a river in Navarra, was informed that the water was potable; he led his horse to drink, which promptly fell down dead, and the two Navarrians pounced immediately on the animal with sharp knives to carve up its carcass. Walter Starkie, the director of the British Council in Madrid during the 1940s, maintained that such stories had been invented solely by local peoples to ensure that pilgrims drank wine – which bolstered regional economies – instead of water. Did the medieval pilgrims believe what they heard? The Camino has always been a path paved as much with language and literature – especially as the (literal) crossroads of Europe, located in a land ruled by a revolving door of conquering peoples (the Visigoths, barbarian migrations, the Carolingians, Arabs, and others) – as by dirt and stone. The motive justification for the pilgrimage itself is legend: the bones of St. James, martyred in Jerusalem after a lifetime spent evangelizing in Galicia (to apparently little effect, as the story goes), were carried up to Spain over the ocean in a stone boat without oars or sails; and a popular etymological tautology for the name of Santiago (St. James) de Compostela derives from the heavenly portents, auroras, and strange stars that appeared roughly between the fifth and eighth centuries above the city to mark his presence after the location of his relics had been forgotten. Compostela – campus stellae, or “field of stars” – then, is the name for the end point of the road that runs beneath and parallel to the Milky Way. Dante as well seemed to get into the linguistic spirit of things by taking the time to specify, in La Vita Nuova, the distinction between the proper names for religious travelers to the three major Christian pilgrimage sites: “romeros” was to be used only for those headed for Rome, “palmers” for Jerusalem, and “pilgrims” for Santiago. Non s'intende peregrino se non chi va verso la casa di Sa'Jacopo … chiamansi peregrini in quanto vanno a la casa di Galicia: one is not a pilgrim who does not visit the House of St. James — they who set foot in the Galician homeland alone earn the name of pilgrim. In the great cathedrals of León, Astorga, and Santiago, words, verses, and teachings etched into stone on the walls, floor, ceilings, and pews construct their own significance. They are everywhere, as if they offered a kind of protection, swaddlings for the children of God. Solid, like words spoken at eight o'clock mass, they carve out a hollow space in which the supplicant can settle his aching feet and ragged soul — the familiarity of the words allows him to reach some bright space beyond articulation, that place beyond words that is accessible, for instance, in moments of acute pain or ecstasy. Hollowness – the same quality of replete vacancy in Gregorian chant (which provided us a kind of soundtrack and mantra as we walked) – seems straddle that line between speaking and silence, myth and meaning. It's difficult, ironically, to articulate. At the monastery in León where we stayed the first night, the nun who led the benediction service for the peregrinos hit it right on the nail: silencio, she said, interior y exterior. Only in silence does God speak. And she spoke to us slowly, each syllable measured and leveled with plumb-line precision, disciplined, a disciple of the Architect. Did the medieval pilgrims believe what was said (or not said)? The legends and stories are difficult to tease out. What seems straightforward on the surface – a story such as this, from the Codex Calixtinus –
becomes less so to the traveler on the road. Stories like this, meant to dazzle and inspire Christians into making pilgrimages to sites where relics rested, suddenly become deterrents in the context of the road. Surely more than one potential pilgrim stopped to wonder at the profusion of corporal fragments scattered along the Camino – John the Baptist's head in one village and his jawbone in León, hands of one martyr here, and the bones of another there – and comprehended some of the danger involved in such an undertaking. Pilgrims regularly lost their lives to the elements, marauding bands of thieves, illness, injury, and poverty; the road is littered with their relics and monuments as well. The sheer number of villages along the Way named “Hospital” (every 50 km or so, it seemed) stands testimony to the risk involved in seeking to save one's soul – one of the many small ironies of the Road. It is as if the legends seem to say, see what has happened to other Christians during their walks of faith – take note, admire, prepare, and be warned. Sometimes – oftentimes – it seemed to me, on the road, that the only sense it made to be walking hundreds of miles to visit the bones of a man whose body floated in a stone boat from Jerusalem to Santiago some ten centuries ago was a sense that only a poet could assent to. Or a mythmaker. Both, in a sense, liars. Was I playing the part of the foolhardy pilgrim, hell-bent on the contemplation of martyrdom and sainthood to the point of precipitating my own? There were days when, had a sharp knife been at the ready, I would have gladly carved off several toes. Linguist and ethnographer Vicente Garcia de Diego construed legend as whatever contained the marvelous, hyperbolic, and strange – stories with a hint of popular flavor and a sensational style acquired from centuries of oral transmittance. Only a few legends were transcribed into text, “más o menos culta” – through various cults of St. James. Ironically, it is only through these written works – codices, travelogues, novels, hagiographies, and chronicles – that we know of these legends. Writing the Camino is a strange undertaking. The very idea of text itself is strange and foreign to the road, where all interaction is oral and aural. Writing is done on and about the road almost as an afterthought, a concerted effort requiring will and a touch of contrariness. Every instance of textual interaction on the road – scribbling in a notebook, perusing poems in an anthology carried along from home, buying an English-language newspaper in Palas do Rei with reports of a drowned Louisiana – lodges uncomfortably against the experience of days spent in halting conversation with others or in unchecked inner monologue. In some ways it is a luxury – a break from wrestling with conditional perfect, present subjunctive, and other Medusa-like monstrosities of verb conjugation (or from simply attempting to recall the proper word for “peanut butter”). Mostly, it is noise – dissonant, but not altogether unpleasant, like the clacking transitions of notes played on the traditional Galician bagpipe. The bagpipe – actually a stringed instrument with a body made of wood – appeared at the end of my first week as the accompaniment to a poetry recitation held in the town of O Cebreiro, just within the Galician border. Its sound was peculiar, like muted pipes which held a single chord below a thin melody (produced still by the same instrument) flickering above on a higher register. The instrumentalist held it on his lap like an autoharp, pumping air through the guitar-like body with the steady cranking of a handle with his right arm. The poetry spoken against this sound seemed more like song, a distant cousin of troubadour lyric, or a chant – something monks might sing in the early morning when we packed up to leave. Reading poetry after that, and in your own native language – poetry that, back home, seemed all awkward elbows and stuttering consonants – becomes something like finding yourself speaking in tongues: the language is yours, technically, and you recognize it, run your tongue over the syllables and the sense of it, and yet it is not yours at all. That transformation – that strange alchemy of the road – has touched even the inert text on the page before you so that, reading it out loud, you are just as surprised as the waiting audience at what comes clacking out next. Problems with the texts and the languages of the Camino are to be expected. The Camino has always held a complicated relationship to legend, expression, orality, and their negatives: fact, internalization, textuality. Meaning – and, to a lesser extent, significance – is difficult to pin down in stories; places and events along the road pull the pilgrim in multiple directions towards a veritable gradient of expressive response – prayer, exultation, singing, chanting, conversation – and inexpressive activity – meditation, reading, writing, listening. The Camino's talent is for producing tension and fostering ambiguity. So many of the legends of the road are couched in terms of conflict: in the story of the Battle of Clavijo, Muslim armies had invaded Christian territory under the pretext of a lapsed tribute and were arrayed against a small band of soldiers organized under a local king. At the moment of greatest despair in the battle for the Christian king and his people – when a loss for them would have meant enslavement and the end of Christian dominion over Spain – a bright caballero, clothed in blinding light on a white horse, appeared among the ranks to fight against the Muslims. It was Santiago himself, whose sign and emblem still today is a blood-red cross fashioned in the shape of a sword: the guard and grip form the junction, and the blade comprises the long shaft of the cross. The story ends predictably with the victory of the Christians and the sealing of St. James's patronage of the Crusades — and yet, all along the Road, signs of Muslim influence and acceptance – architectural flourishes, wildly fantastic tiling patterns and geometric motifs in the decorations of private homes, names of places both important and obscure – make themselves evident. The Road is not easy to read. We arrived in Santiago on a Sunday, although not quite in the state we had imagined the night before, camped a mere 3 km outside the city in triumphant ease. We had meant to sleep in, to stroll with leisure through the streets (the way we hadn't the twelve days before), and to breakfast like kings in the first place we found. Instead, struck with sudden illness the next morning, our group straggled into the Oficina del Peregrinos 100 m from the cathedral in Santiago and collapsed. We barely made it to mass at noon on time. The place was packed to the seams – we could see almost nothing of the front dais, and the hush and the holiness I had imagined gracing the service manifested itself in reality as a terrible kind of bored chatter from the crowd. And then, suddenly, the assembly parted way immediately before me, and I saw a jostle of monks unleashing something from the pillar I was standing next to: miles of – rope? The rope was attached to something, which the five of them were hoisting high, high into the air above the altar, like a bell; it was heavy, silver, and smoking — the crowd gasped, and a thousand cameras flashed as the silver capsule began to swing, faster and higher, from one end of the cathedral clear to the other. Later, a fellow peregrina informed me that we had seen the botafumeiro, the 87 kg incense burner that had been used from the very beginning of the existence of the Road to bless pilgrims at mass. (“They used to put a bit of cannabis in there, too” she winked, “to cover the smell – and to make them happy after the wretched trip.”) The botafumeiro is only taken out a few times a year, which explained the crowds, but at the time, unaware of its history or significance, I could only see the incredible tension in the rope, the wild swing of the heavy artifact low over my head and dangerously close to the centuries-old moldings on the ceiling. Watching, I couldn't help but feel this was an astonishing concept of holiness: action tethered to ritual, but sparked and sparkling, breathtaking in its improbable regularity. Church was never going to be the same now that I'd seen how little and how much the hands of the monks held – now that I'd felt sicker and more terrified for my life in a holy space than I had elsewhere before – now that church was the place that I had almost been beheaded once. Of course, I had known the danger before starting: Genesius's head remained somewhere along that path still working miracles, his name – which could mean everything, or nothing – one of those tantalizing half-ironies of Camino legend. And anyway, Camino stories have a way of resurrecting the dead: they are talked about and written about, the way we do with the living. The important question was this: did I, a modern pilgrim, believe what I heard (or read), or what was said (or not said)? The story is difficult to tease out – so little about the Road to Santiago is straightforward – but I know this much to be true: I saw the tension in the rope, and I lived. I heard the stories, read the words, and I walked from León to Santiago in thirteen days, not five.
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