I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (21 page)

“Yes, I guess he did. Sure,” I said.

“In your own language?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

He smiled once more. “Last week he spoke in Swahili to a woman from South Africa. Before that in German. Last summer: Swedish.”

I was confused. “So he’s an educated monk who toys with us tourists—I mean pilgrims, sorry: pilgrims—who seem to need advice. Though we’re all on this fucking pilgrimage—sorry, for my language, sorry—so I guess we all need some sort of advice or we wouldn’t be doing it. Right?”

The man laughed, then decided laughter wasn’t called for.
“Fantasma inquietante…”
He seemed to be whispering the words to himself, then looked up at me. “It is a haunting, I think you say in your English.” He touched the cross again. “I think it is a blessing myself, not a haunting. You are a blessed one. Your Jim Morrison has only started appearing in the last year or so and only a few times. The people he speaks to are the only ones who peer him. Peer him? Ummm.… See. Sí? See him.”

“A ghost?” I asked, laughing now myself but getting a little nervous remembering the Shirley MacLaine book about all her Camino experiences. Or was this one of Keats’s no things? Was I consecrated by my having been seen by it? “Come on. You’re pulling my leg,” I said.

The man sat back in his chair with a quizzical look on his face, translating, no doubt, the literal meaning of such a phrase back into his Spanish. “You are joking with me,” I explained. “A haunting? Go on. That’s crazy.”

The quizzical look on the man’s face turned very serious. A calmness even covered his eyes with a sadness as he stared at my disbelief. “A ghost with wings,” he said, each word spoken slowly and with great care, the tone my mother took when she first told me my father had been killed in a car wreck, her own eyes too eerily calm and sad when she too stared at my disbelief at what she was telling me. It is her voice I hear now, in fact, tonight here in the Spanish countryside so far away from the Mississippi countryside of my childhood as I record this Spanish man’s words, record hers, and recall that moment yesterday as well as the one from my childhood so long ago. “Your father has flown off to heaven,” said my mother that day, spreading her arms as wide as my own Jim Morrison spread his when his tunic longed to be winged as I watched his shadowy image unfold, my mother’s arms—the shadow of which has defined my world ever since—folding instead about me and keeping me close to her, earthbound, protecting me from heaven and all it from then on held.

“Crazy, you think?” the man said in his heavily accented English. “Okay. I might be the crazy one. Or the crazy one: you. But I think you are, no, this: blessed. You are blessed to have been visited by the angel of Roncesvalles.”

It was my turn now to crease my brow. We held each other’s stare for a moment before I walked away from him. “Catholics,” I muttered under my breath, and headed across the road to a restaurant to have some dinner. “Fucking Catholics.”

Completely incredulous? Well … no … I can’t say that I am. Especially having crossed that mountain and wondered what I had done it for. Was my reward yesterday a vision, a “waking dream”—to quote Keats again when he was contemplating a nightingale, another kind of creature with wings—for my making it up and over the Pyrenees and setting out on this spiritual pilgrimage? Is not one man’s vision just another man’s psychosis? Maybe instead of that Jim Morrison guy being the crazy one, it really is I. Maybe walking the Camino is about my coming to terms with that, and not my spirituality. This does seem to be seeping into C. S. Lewis fantastical territory. Maybe I should use this in a pitch meeting with Perry, since he’s such a Lewis fanatic.

But let’s face it. I have, after all, flown halfway around the world and traveled all day to get to the Pyrenees to wake up the next morning to walk this path all the way across Spain that people have walked for two thousand years in search of just such experiences. There is a kind of craziness in that alone. Some—the craziest of Catholics, no doubt, who equate physical suffering with a way to complete their souls in a way that I, a Protestant, cannot truly comprehend—have even walked it on their knees. Chaucer, upright, walked the path. Dante did it. Saint Francis of Assisi. Charlemagne. Ferdinand and Isabella. John Adams walked it in the eighteenth century when he was commissioned before his presidency to go to France to secure needed funds for the Revolutionary War. His ship began to take on water off the coast of Spain and he was forced to walk the Camino in the reverse direction toward Paris. He said in his autobiography that it had been a life-altering expedition.

And that is what I want: an altered life.

But do I have to achieve an altered state to get it?

Last month Hugh Jackman got it slightly wrong when he asked me if I had fucked the angel. An angel, it seems, its voice fluttering about me even now as I write this, is fucking with me.

*   *   *

My meal last night:

Potato soup.

French fries.

Delicious fresh trout caught from a nearby Urrobi river in Roncesvalles.

Wine.

My dinner mates were from France, Italy, and Denmark.

After dinner I talked some more to sweet Lucas, the Swiss kid—he’s only twenty years old—before going to bed. But not much sleep came. I kept thinking about that Jim Morrison monk or the ghost or the goddamn angel or whoever it was who touched my arm without my feeling it and told me exactly what I needed to hear. Plus, there was a man who snored really loudly in the bunk next to Lucas and me.
That
was real. No doubt about that. In four nights now I’ve had about eight hours’ sleep. I’m running on fumes. Maybe the “ghost with wings” was formed by such fumes. I guess “walking” is the right word. Not running on fumes—walking on them. Walking, it is dawning on me, will be my existence for the next month.

*   *   *

The hostel early this morning was awakened at 6:00
A.M.
People applauded. I didn’t. I gave the snorer next to me a dirty look and was on the road by 6:30. That’s when I saw the road sign.

After all the rain this region has been having I had to walk through thick, awful—oftentimes ankle-deep—mud. There’s a reason that “mud” is so close in sound to the French word “merde” I realized after walking through the thick, stinking stuff.

Outside one of the little villages I approached today my mood lightened when, as I stopped to take a drink of water from the bottle I keep in my backpack, a beautiful blond wild-haired boy came striding my way. At first, because of his beauty, I thought he might be a girl. But no: a boy. As he passed, I noticed he was palming some wooden Buddhist prayer beads. “Forward,” seemed to be the mantra he was whispering to himself as he counted them in his hand. Just that: “forward.” I quickly put my bottle again in my backpack and followed him, wanting to stop him to ask if I could take a photograph of his hand holding his beads, but he was already too far ahead of me on the path. His gait was almost a canter compared to mine. I thought I would probably never see him again as he disappeared in the distance. I could not get his hand and those beads—and his beauty—out of my mind’s eye.

When I arrived in the village I sat on a bridge over a rushing river and saw him, the blond wild-haired boy, down below soaking his feet in the water. I waited until he and the equally beautiful young Asian man he was now with approached me on the bridge. I asked if they spoke English. The blond boy told me he was from California and his name was Daniel. He agreed to let me photograph his hand holding the beads. Japa mala, he called them. It is my favorite photograph so far on the Camino—a Buddhist image taken by a Protestant on a Catholic path.

*   *   *

As I walked on I carefully had to descend some steep steps since my knees are already killing me. “Are you okay?” I heard a voice behind me.

I turned and saw it was the young Asian man from the bridge a mile or so back. I told him I was fine and we began to walk together. “Are you Catholic?” I asked at one point, which has become my way of starting conversations on the Camino.

Unlike Basel, the Methodist minister, back at the bus station in Pamplona, he did not laugh dismissively at such a question. “Yes,” he said. “I am a Catholic. Very.” He paused. “I am a priest.”

“You’re my first priest on the Camino,” I told him, and took his photograph to document it.

He told me that he was Korean and that he was thirty-two years old—the age my father was when he was killed in his car wreck. His Korean name is Hong, but his baptismal name is Raphael. He had a parish in San Diego but now has been assigned to a Korean Catholic church in Vancouver. He is walking the Camino before heading to Canada.

“Is your father proud of you for becoming a priest?” I asked him.

“My father died when I was seven,” he told me, saying a sentence I have so often said in my own life.

“My father died when I was seven,” I echoed him.

We walked along and talked for miles of our very different fatherless childhoods.

“Father Raphael, it’s been really nice to meet you today,” I finally said as we ran out of memories to share.

“Father,” he said, repeating the word, shaking his head at such a thought, it seemed. I was twenty-one years older than he. Did the sound of such a word addressed to him by me strike him as odd in that moment as I was finding it? “Father,” he softly said again, as if trying magically to find the meaning of some foreign word simply by pronouncing it. Then once more: “Father…”

I looked at the primitive landscape about us and remembered the one my own father had drawn so primitively for me. Three birds fluttered flat against the sky like the elongated
M
s of that long-ago Sunday, an
M
now found at the beginning of “Morrison” and “monks” and “mala beads,” not “Methodist” and “Mississippi.” This Korean father and I found the same kind of silence that my first father and I could find ourselves enveloped in when I was a child and language too failed us. I marveled at the rough beauty of the world in which I now found myself and recalled that other rough beauty of Mount Kilimanjaro when I asked my friend how he had stayed alive and he had motioned toward it. “This,” I said aloud now as he had so curtly said that one word in response atop Mount Kili.

“What?” asked Father Raphael.

“This,” I said once more, and motioned at the world about us.

He smiled. “Yes, I know,” he said, and I knew he did.

We fell back into our silence.

We moved steadily onward.

This.

This.

This.

5/3/09

I had my first dream in four nights.

I dreamed I was still at
Vanity Fair,
but I had on the type of ankle bracelet device that house arrest prisoners wear. A researcher brought me a portfolio of stories by someone who was obsessed by me and my writing, and handed it to me with concern on his face. I told him, “I don’t give a shit what someone thinks of me. Take these away.” He looked crestfallen.

I awoke—as I do several times a night—and dreamed next that I was scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing my apartment.

Whatever.

I began my walk this morning again at 6:30 but without my backpack. I hired a service to bring it to my next destination for me. It was my first Protestant decision. Catholics might believe that salvation comes from suffering. We Protestants believe it comes from acceptance.

I do know the decision saved my back and shoulders. Indeed, it made the walk even joyful for the first time once I was freed of the burden. I remembered I had the Mississippi Mass Choir on my iPod and this morning played it singing, “This morning when I rose / I didn’t have no doubt!” The fervor of the choir blasted in my ears. When they got to the part when they sing, “Hallelujah!” I shouted it at the top of my lungs, no longer disgruntled to be on the path. I was up on a ridge here in Basque country and began to dance about as if I really did have the Holy Ghost filling my body. Maybe I did. I came upon a group of girls who began to laugh at my dancing. I took off my earphones to say hello, but before I could one of them said to me in her blunt Germanic accent, “You are fully happy.” No one had ever said such a thing to me before or had cause to. I don’t know if I’ve ever been fully happy before that one moment or will be ever again. But I think I was fully happy in that moment, and if the Camino doesn’t give me anything else it has given me that.

I walked on and came to Pamplona today on this sleepy Sunday afternoon. The streets and parks were mostly empty. I thought of how panicked I was to be lost last time and how calm I was today to be walking the empty streets. On the outskirts of the city I stopped at the nicest hostel so far where I am now outside at a table writing. My backpack was waiting for me here under the shade of a tree just where the service said they would leave it.

I just had a long lovely conversation with Toby, “the Austrian mountain goat,” as I’ve come to think of him. He and Lucas have also become friends. Toby’s sitting at the next table and writing in his own journal. He has passed me the last couple of days on our walk. I recognized him because he had stayed at the same bed-and-breakfast back in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port and had even sat by me at breakfast when “the sergeant” fed us our bits of toast and tea. He asked me to walk with him tomorrow, but I don’t think I can keep up with him.

My longest walk I have charted out is coming up in the morning—a Monday—my first full week on the Camino.

5/4/09

Today was fun. And moving.

Last night was just the opposite. It had to have been the worst meal I’ve ever had in my life. By the time the waitress got to us there wasn’t much food left in the restaurant’s kitchen, we were told, and she offered us “hamburgers,” which doesn’t translate well in this part of the world. I got a plate of cold, greasy french fries and a thin fried patty of some indefinable meat. No bun. I asked, “Is there a skinned dead dog in the back somewhere?” I know: rude. But last night I was a rude and hungry American.

On the path I was longing for some chocolate and could have kicked myself for not at least buying some Oreos from the vending machine back at the hostel before setting out. All I could think of was eating an Oreo for the first few miles of the Camino this morning. I turned a corner and there was one on the ground. I couldn’t believe it at first. I thought I was hallucinating again. First an imagined angel who looked like Jim Morrison and now a forlorn Oreo at my feet. I picked it up. Yep: real. I plopped it right in my mouth and devoured it. It was still crisp. Someone had obviously just dropped it. I laughed at how the Camino really does provide what one needs.