Oy.  I am knackered.  Currently in Arca, or Pedrouzo, or Arca Pedrouzo, or Arca (Pedrouzo) – it all depends on the sign you read.  Just as whether we’ve traveled 40 or 43 kilometers in the last two days depends on whether you believe the piece of paper given us by the French, the somewhat suspicious Galician kilometerstones, or your lyin’ legs.  In any event, we’re at about Kilometer 18 – or about six hours’ walk from Santiago, which we’ll reach tomorrow.

A few days ago I was going to write here that I’ve finally gotten the hang of all this walking business.  By the time we reach Santiago, I thought, I’d be in shape to walk this Camino.  But yesterday the bones (or something; ligaments?) of my legs hurt. And today it was the bottoms of my feet.  We’ve been resting for hours, and they’re still sore.  It’s like a dwarf pounded on them with a wooden mixing spoon.  Why a dwarf?  I don’t know.  Imagery.

Let’s catch up, shall we?

Spanish Pilgrims

The Spanish (all references to “the Spanish” here expressly exclude Julio) keep to themselves, somewhat like the Asians.  Everyone else on the Camino interacts with one another.  In the Asians’ case, I think it is a matter of language and culture.  If they speak English, or want to talk, they don’t let on.  In the case of the Spaniards, it is both the lack of a common language (few speak English, the common language of the non-Spanish pilgrims) and the Spaniards’ lesser need to seek out friendship:  their own friends are just around the corner.  And who else but the Spanish can take just two or four days to walk on the Camino?

“Lejos!” they say, when I answer that I am from the United States.  Anywhere in the U.S. but New York is, in their minds, even farther away.

The Spanish are also not as much in the moment, perhaps because they are in their own country, so they have not, in a sense, left their old lives behind.  They are still on the same cell phone plans, and they, unique among the nationalities here, carry their phones with them around the albergues, or can even be heard talking on the Camino itself.  I’ve seen Spanish Camino bikers ride by wearing earbuds.  “Buen Camino!” one called out to us, and then continued talking into his cell phone’s microphone as he rolled past.  Really, why bother with the Camino?  You can do that on a stationary bike in your local gym.

On Toilets

I think it’s time we had a serious, adult conversation about toilets in Europe, and perhaps especially in less developed Europe.  The traveler to certain parts of Europe, like points on the Camino, cannot help but notice that there must not be a distribution channel for toilet seats in these areas.  There the commode sits, fine white porcelain, yet bereft of any place for you to sit.  Except that you are supposed to sit.  You must sit.  And if you are a man, you will sit where the splashing from other men goes.  On the porcelain itself.

Was there, at some point, a rash of toilet-seat thefts by tourists or pilgrims?  Where would you put one?  My driver’s ed teacher in high school made his bathroom pass a toilet seat precisely because they can’t be hidden.

At least it’s not southern Italy, whose toilets alone (last I was there, in 1989) gave it Third World (or Developing World, as we’re now supposed to say) status.  There, you get a hole in the ground.  If you’re lucky, there’s a chain or rope from the ceiling that you can clasp hold of while squatting.  I remember I was right out of college, this was in Naples, there was a long line for the bathrooms.  I walked to the front of the line just to see WTF.  There sat an unsmiling matron of a certain age, at a large desk, doling out five squares of toilet paper to each of the backpackers.  There they all stood, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, waiting for their squares.

I then went to see the toilets.  Cheesus Crise! as Julio would say.  Hole in the ground and not even a chain to hold onto.  The Romans were better sanitation engineers in 40 BCE than the Napolitanos were in 1989.

Ventas de Narón to Casanova Mato

Web with Dew

Every inhalation in Galicia brings with it a surprise.  It is an earthy, aromatic part of the world.  Woodsmoke and sorghum, fall leaves and grass, cow dung and a smell like oranges (but there are no oranges), hay that smells like camomille, soil.  Eucalyptus!  Brought in from Australia in the mistaken belief it would be useful for building.

In the morning I am inhaling the camomille-like smell in deep breaths, taking it in, imagining the freshness of it nurturing my cells, and then I am caught short by a smell so foul that my cells threaten to mutate, or at least to revolt, until once again I can smell something like tea . . .

We have left so early that we navigate by moonlight.  I have left my new headlamp somewhere, and Mom has spent so many hours reading while others sleep that her battery is dead.

Oh what a plight

Dark as dark night

Thank God for Carrie

With her wind-up light

There is a corona around the moon, like a small rainbow.  “Grandma Powell always said that meant a change in the weather,” Mom said.  “I guess that was the Indian in her.”  Grandma Powell was one-quarter Indian – Cherokee, and perhaps Blackfoot or Blackfeet (these are two distinct tribes).  The rest, as I’ve written elsewhere, was gristle.

From the hills we’re in, we can see fog blanketing the valley below.  When we enter the fog, the air is so thick with water that our packs grow wet, and the trees rain water down on us as we pass.

We pass a cemetery.  My eye catches the word “Peregrino,” Pilgrim, on a sign, and I back up to read it.

Cimetario de Peregrinos

How encouraging.  A cemetery for pilgrims who fell between the 80^th and 60^th kilometers.

Mom said she read in her book, the one by the German comedian, that only 16% of pilgrims finish the Camino.

We are still navigating by moonlight, and when we enter the trees and the moonlight can’t penetrate, we navigate by litter.  Pilgrim litter is far more reliably ever-present than the Camino’s fabled yellow arrow.

My mind is still working on yesterday’s legal kerfuffle.  It’s also working out solutions to the electronic document signing on Friday.

Secure DocuSign signature starts with the preparer of the document having the email address of the signatories and giving them a password.  Title company inexperienced with DocuSign, won’t think to require a password.  Person clicking on the signature lines needs only the credentials to the email address to be used. 

And this I give to Julio, who is on his way to Madrid, by text message, with instructions for him to pass the same on to Adam, in New Jersey, by email.  Problem solved, I return to the world around me.

Dog and Corncrib (What do these things *do*?)

We will put in around 20 kilometers today.  It is almost too much for Mom.  “I wish we were already there,” she says, with a few kilometers to go.  I have noticed the same thought in myself.  I then put my attention back in the present, including on my sore legs or hips, working to remain in the now.  I suggest that she too follow Eckhart’s advice not to resist, not to want to be in the future.

“I’m not resisting,” Mom says, resisting even talk of resistance.  “It was just kind of a little hope.”

Carrie laughs.  Forget being a prophet who isn’t heard in his own house; try being a mere life coach.

Casanova Mato

We finally reach the albergue in Casanova Mato.  The older woman who runs it is handsome and officious and as helpful as she can be without speaking English.  We three go upstairs and shower, and then Carrie and I take a nap.  It is probably my second nap of the trip.  I’m finding that naptime is an excellent time to get sleep without snorers around.  Daytime has always been for me an illicit time to sleep, a hedonistic indulgence, and so it’s doubly delicious.  In fact, it’s downright —

“Wake up,” Mom says.  “It’s five-thirty.  Time to eat.”

She’s perched on the edge of her bed, shoes tied smartly.

“We just ate a few hours ago,” I say, stifling a sob.

“No, we ate at three,” she says.

Mom’s gusto for food has reached a fever-pitch on this trip.  I point out that I’m not yet hungry, and that nothing in Spain starts cooking before six-thirty, and that in fact the woman downstairs told me that the albergue a kilometer to the east opens at seven-thirty, and the one 1.5 kilometers to the west, which offers a ride, opens at six-thirty or a quarter to seven.

“I’m bored,” she says.

“Why don’t you arrange the mochilas for tomorrow?”  This will get rid of her, I think.

A young Spaniard named Álvaro helps me speak to the service that handles the mochilas, the backpacks that Mom and Carrie send ahead by car every day.  I thought I was clear to tell the mochila man that we need him to carry the mochilas from Casanova Mato to Ribadiso, but he keeps asking the name of whichever woman is downstairs.  Is it Carmen?  How the hell should I know?  We went around like this for some time.  I asked a group of four Spaniards of about my age if any of them spoke English.  They all shook their heads and pointed to Álvaro.  He got on the phone, then off.

“He is very hard to understand,” Álvaro says.  “It’s a strange dialect. I think it’s maybe his first day on the job.”

I asked Álvaro why he was on the Camino.  “Because in January my mother was very ill, and I promised if she got better . . .  She got better.”

We invited him to join us for dinner, but he’d brought his own comida, he said.  So we called the albergue, Casa Bolboreta, that served food 1.5km away, and then we were blown away by the great meal we got for 8 Euros.  Meatballs, great fries, lentil stew, water, wine – Mom said it was the second-best meal she’s had here, after the dreamy two servings of soup she got during the festival in tiny Navarette.

She and Carrie had been reading the blog and got themselves into a laughing fit.  Mom started to reminisce about a trip to Germany in the 1990s, when Oma, my mother’s mother, was still alive.  Mom had gone with her then-husband, known now as whatsizname, and they decided to take a bus tour of the Rhine Valley.  Oma invited herself along.  They’d been riding in the bus for several hours when Oma leaned across the aisle and said to Mom, “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said.

“Well, where is it then?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Oma, disgusted, turned to the man next to her.  “Sir,” she said, in her unmistakable (and usually incomprehensible) Bavarian accent, “d’yaknow where this bus ‘s goin?”

“Leiwen,” the man said.  She thanked him and turned back to Mom.

“Where is this Leiwen?”

“How should I know?”

“What,” Oma said, “you get on a bus and don’t even know where it’s going?”

The Albergue at Casanova Mato

The albergue itself looked a lot like the little hospital in which I was born.  Boxy, small, and, by definition, I suppose, sort of clinical.  There must be a manufacturer out there who makes albergue dormitory bunk beds, because I’ve seen them again and again on the Camino.  They’re made of hollow aluminum.  They don’t fit together well, and they squeak.

But their squeaking is nothing compared to the sound their springs make. Imagine ten windshield wipers that have lost their rubber.  I felt bad every time I got up from the bed, or sat down.  It’s not good to hold it in when you’ve got to go in the middle of the night, but some times – and I do mean only some of the time – I’m more thoughtful than is good for me.

Or maybe I still had in mind the ominous sign downstairs.  Its English translation assured us that the albergue had the right to “throw away” any “infractors” of the rules of the albergue.  (The fine print said infractors could be thrown in either a culvert or the trough of a pig (also known as pre-jamon) “at the proprietor’s sole discretion”.)

Casanova Mato to Arzua (~ Km. 60 to ~ Km. 38)

Still no grocery stores. And our albergue didn’t even serve breakfast.  The next spot on the map – there are few towns on the Galician Camino – is over 9 kilometers away.

It is cold when we start.  After thirty or so minutes, I have to take off my windbreaker and cap, leaving my two wool layers and gloves.  Then, without any change in altitude, we all suddenly walk across an invisible line and the temperature drops.

“Did you feel that?”

“Yes!  It got cold again!”

We walk on for a bit, and then it’s like walking into a warm house.  By now I am totally confused.  I am able, finally, to empathize with Tiger Woods, never quite sure whether his clothes are to be be put on or taken off.

Mom says that she no longer feels anything in her back, where the tumor sat.  She says that Barbara the Bavarian told her about a German woman who’d had cancer and walked the Camino.  The woman visualized the cancer as a ball of wool, and every day saw herself pulling a strand of wool off it.  When she went back for her tests, the cancer was gone.

The Ultimate Second Breakfast

However, Mom says she feels a pain like a band across her stomach.  Perhaps it’s the lentils, which begin to do their job and send her into the bushes.

Mentally, I am more of a walker now.  Walking 20 kilometers, or almost 13 miles, is no longer a big deal.  On some days, I could see walking a good bit more.  And of course 13 miles will get you all over Manhattan. But we rely on our food, and our breaks, and we love above all Second Breakfast – which is hard to find in Galicia.  We are all starving, and need a break from walking in the near-darkness.  I am just commenting on the dearth of places to eat when, up ahead, I see it.

It’s like a shining city on a hill.  A castle.  A grail.

“Is it a mirage?”

No.  It is, in fact, a place to eat and rest.

We fall upon it like castaways on a toasted bagel with cream cheese.

Menus and signs are everywhere, and they have pictures of pizza on them.  “I wonder if they’re really serving pizza this early,” I say.  “I was thinking the same thing,” Carrie says.  It is 9a.m.  We order, get on the Internet, I click to electronically sell the big, beautiful house I’ve owned for almost two years, and at 9:30 we’re each hoovering up a medium pizza.

Only later does it occur to me that I didn’t even read the closing documents on my house.  I just clicked.

We spent over an hour there, and then we were off.  We were nearly run over by a small herd of cattle, including a feisty little bull whose head had been tied to his right leg, so that he ran with a misleadingly submissive ducking motion.  Then we were into the eucalyptus trees, and then we came upon another hill.  Mom has not yet seen a hill that didn’t elicit a groan from her.

I felt my pack pulled backward.  I looked back and saw that she had grabbed a loop of it with one of her walking sticks.  “Come on,” she said.  “I carried you around everywhere for nine months.”

I am sure we pass a kilometerstone saying 44 kilometers, and then 45, and then, much, much later, 42.5.  I am hoping this system prevails at dinner, when someone will serve us 12.5 Euros of food and charge us for 10.

“Buen Camino!” we say to some bikers.

“Good way!” they cry back, in English, much as the flirtatious waitress (which kind of has a nice ring to it) in El Acebo, when thanked, had translated directly from the Spanish de nada to sing, “Nothing!”

Bone-Tired and Shaky

My legs are bone-tired.  But Mom is worse off.  There are more hills.  “Look,” she says, holding out her hand.  “I’m shaking.”  Indeed she is.  We ponder why it is and she walks some more, stops.  Holds up her shaking hand.  She tries to walk some more, stops, trying to catch her breath.  “I can call a taxi,” I say.  She shakes her head.

“You slept terribly,” I remind her, “and didn’t eat much for Second Breakfast.  And no First Breakfast.  Let’s get you something to eat.  I think Carrie has a banana.”  Carrie did have a banana.

In Arzúa, we opt for another hostel, so we can have our own rooms and get some sleep – and rest even when not sleeping.  I fell asleep on the bed with my laptop on my chest, something about as common, for me, as fainting.

Are we going to make it to Santiago?

Part 1:  Food on the Camino

Monday.  We’re in Sarria now.  I have before me a bottle of wine that did not cost extra and has no label.  This makes me very nervous.  This time the “espaghetti bolonaise” came in the form of penne pasta tubes.  I think the Camino Spanish have some confusion about what spaghetti is and how spaghetti is made in Bologna, and I propose a fact-finding mission to Italy be scheduled by a team of qualified Spanish culinary and scientific experts.

I wonder how many Spaniards per year name their sons Jamón.  I would not be surprised by any answer but this one:  “fewer than sixty”.  In the United States, I remember reading of two girls who had been named Orangelo and Lemongelo (the “gelo” instead of “Jello”, I assume, to avoid actual trademark infringement).  This is child abuse.

I’ve been to Madrid, Bilbao, Pamplona, and Barcelona, among other Spanish cities.  I know that they do have restaurants.  But the cafe-bar, especially on the Camino, has a distinctive kind of menu.  I wouldn’t claim that a 500-mile walk through the rural United States would yield a greater diversity and creativity in the food, so what I say here applies only to the cafe-bar on the Camino — which is to say, to just about every place you can find to eat for over a month.

The menu del dia along the Camino de Santiago usually comes with a first plate, a second plate, dessert, and your choice of wine or water.  It costs between 8.50 and an occasional high of 12 Euros – usually 9 or 10.  The choice of first plate is invariably one of the following:

The Camino notion of spaghetti Bolognese, which somehow does not involve a tomato, or even, necessarily, spaghetti.

Ensalada mixta, mixed salad, which is lettuce, a few slices of tomato, and a scoop of tuna – even when the menu does not mention tuna, it comes with tuna.  A cucumber, tomato, Caesar, arugula, beet, mushroom, pea, bacon bit, corn, spinach, or any other type of salad is not possible.

Other options are jamón and cheese, jamón and tuna, eggs and bacon, and eggs and jamón.

The second plate offers a choice of fish – cod (bacalao), usually – or grilled chicken.  Sometimes beef, or another type of fish.

Dessert can be flan, yogurt, some kind of cake (tarta), and only occasionally ice cream.

In Sarria, I go to the bar to pay and the proprietress reminds me that dessert was included.  Yogurt or flan.  I shrug and order the flan.  She reaches into a refrigerator and takes out a small white plastic carton of the sort yogurt comes in.  Right in front of me, she peels open the lid and turns the carton upside-down on a coffee saucer, allowing the flan to slide out.  Then she presents me with my dessert.

So far I have seen no to-go coffee in Spain.  Not a single Starbucks, not even in Bilbao, Pamplona, Burgos, or Leon.  The Spanish seem to hold to the charming creed that a person who intends to drink coffee should simply drink coffee, rather than drinking coffee while also doing one to five other things.  A Zenmaster would approve.

At the Bar Morgade, at kilometer 99.5, I had an empanada Gallega, or Galician tuna pie.  It wasn’t bad, but would have been greatly improved by cheese and grilling.  I also ate huevos con bacon, because the Spanish eat fried eggs and omelettes all day long.

Part 2:  Language in Modern Spain

I have collected a half-dozen different Spanish lessons on CD or podcast, and, since my arrival, have faithfully listened to virtually none of it.  (I also imagined that I’d listen to audiobooks on my long, presumably boring walks.  Never once has the urge struck me).  One of the Spanish courses, when I bought it in 1993, had long been used by the Department of State’s Foreign Service officers.  It has quaint phrases like “Deme la pluma,” or “Give me the quill pen”.  But I need something for a modern country, a member of the European Union in the year 2011.  What I could use in modern Spain are phrases like the following:

Do you have Internet?

No, it doesn’t work.

Do you have wi-fi?

This also doesn’t work.

Dear Orange, What do you mean by the slogan “Internet Everywhere”?  Because it doesn’t actually work.  Anywhere.  Ever.  Not for a minute. 

Is there a Thai, Indian, Chinese, German, Mexican, Japanese, or French restaurant in the area?

Dear Vodafone,

Your retail staff in Bilbao doesn’t know how your Internet service works.  Or your cell phones.  Could a shoe salesman have gotten into one of your retail stores?  Your Internet-access interface says I can click to find out my balance.  But it doesn’t work.  It also says I can recharge on the Internet.  But the link doesn’t work.  When I find the right page on my own, the form doesn’t work.  The error messages are alternately incorrect, nonsensical, or unhelpful.  In other words, they don’t work.  No one responds to my help requests.  Does anyone, I wonder, at your company work?

Part 3:  Sarria

The municipal albergue in Sarria was one of the least pleasant we’ve seen.  (The taxi driver had dropped us off there; in the morning we walked past half a dozen visibly nicer albergues).  Each floor’s beds were all bunked around a triangular, all-glass airshaft that enabled anyone trying to sleep to hear the noise and see the light of pilgrims on all the other floors.  There was no Internet.  The kitchen was tiny, and shared space with the washing machines.  There was one outlet, in the hallway by the bathroom.  Competition for it was fierce.

In the albergues, I have seen a number of things I would rather not have seen, usually in the nature of older Europeans without sufficient cladding.  In Sarria, as all the pilgrims on our floor quietly prepared for bed just before lights-out, a fiftyish Spanish couple arrived at their bunks, speaking loudly.  The generously proportioned woman stripped to a shirt and her panties and lay on her stomach, and the man began to vigorously rub a cream of overpowering scent into the backs of her ample legs.

This went on for some time.

Then they hung a towel from the top bunk so as to obscure the bottom bunk, and our uxurious husband climbed in with his creamed-up wife and they yakked late into the night, indifferent to Mom’s attempts to hush them.

Part 4:  Into the Cabbage Groves of Galicia

The Camino ends in the capital of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela (“St. James of the Field of Stars”), and the Camino as a pilgrimage was originally a Galician tradition.  (This was before the kings of Navarra and Castilla and Leon realized how much revenue could be raised from pilgrims, most of them from France.)  The Galicians have placed milestones, so to speak, every half a kilometer on the Way, so that pilgrims can count down the distance to Santiago.  These have been defaced almost beyond legibility by people’s names, messages to one another, and relationship status.  (Almost all are in Spanish).

I had understood Sarria to be a neat 100 kilometers away from Santiago, but the morning found

Camino Kilometerstones -- and more discarded boots

us walking by a restaurant that called itself “Kilometer 111”.  Uh-oh.  Mom’s ailments tell her she can do 16 kilometers a day, but not 19 or 20.  We’ll have to figure out how to make up this difference and still make Santiago in time.

Mom said she’d read that pilgrims walk more slowly in Galicia, perhaps because it’s so beautiful and they don’t want it to end.  The beginning of our walk was not so promising.  The smell of fresh animal dung as we left Sarria was strong enough to be detected in outer space.  We passed a curious Galician custom we would see repeated in every village thereafter:  cemeteries that looked like a blend of mausoleum (tall concrete structures) and morgue (small doors, three high, into which coffins, or ashes, were slid).

Once we got into the country, the day became simply magical.  We were back in the trees,

Galicia

and we wound our way through one small farm after another.  Mist rose from the fields, seemingly without source, for we could see no rivers or ponds nearby.  We crossed quaint stone bridges spanning tiny trickling creeks.  And the smells!  We breathed in not just astringent, bracing cow dung but loam and the leaves of autumn, the sweetly pungent smell of sorghum, woodsmoke, and pig farms capable of being detected from universes parallel to our own.  Cabbage was cultivated in what could only be called cabbage trees – six-foot stalks with the eating end at the very top.

Soon we began to climb, and the landscape became even more storybook.  The small farms

Galician Farmland

spread across gently undulating hills, with ever more hills in the distance, and were bounded by mile upon mile of walls made of carefully stacked stones emptied from the fields themselves.  The houses themselves were made of the same stones, all found in nearby fields.  Mile after mile we could smell the sorghum, and sometimes we could see the plastic tarps that covered it up.  German Shepherds could be seen in most farms, apparently the Galician guard dog of choice.  Roosters crowed nearby.

And then there were the slender, elevated buildings near many of the stone homes in the country, standing on foundations about five feet off the ground, six feet tall, ten feet long, three feet wide.  Were they for hens?  Some were topped by stone crosses and even had

A corncrib that's seen better days

inscriptions:  were they mausoleums?  Or, as a German maintained, for bees?  My guidebook said many houses had next to them something called “corncribs,” which raised more questions than it answered.

“The sky!  The sky!” I could hear Mom saying to herself.  It was yet another perfect day.  “My cells are loving this!” she said.

Mom and Me

Carrie was going to take a picture of Mom and me walking side by side.  I put my hand on her back and began to walk.  “Are you in there?” she said.  “I don’t feel you.”  I understood what she meant, and I visualized light flowing from myself, down my arm, and out my palm into her back.  “Oh!” she said.  “I see a big blue light!  It’s like a . . . what’s the word?  An aureole.”

I don’t know what to make of this.  I can’t say I believe it in the sense that such a belief would matter – belief matters only when and to the extent it affects behavior, as we may see by watching the uninspired conduct of many of the super-religious and god-fearing.  If I really believed what people say about my energy then I suppose I’d spend all my time visualizing myself healing people, starting with Mom.  Which I don’t do, obviously.

At times we walked in a sort of bounded walkway ten feet across, with stone walls three to five feet high on either side of us.  For long stretches the rock walls were covered in ivy,

Path in Galicia, after Sarria

and the stone itself invisible.  The path itself was impassable by car, and we had to pick our way carefully over the uneven stones.  I’ve never seen such byways on any farm, or anywhere.

“Who put all these rocks in our path?” a German woman joked.

“That’s what I’d like to know, too,” Mom responded, also in German.

We did, I thought.  God did.  Does it matter?  They’re still there.

Part 5:  Pilgrims Have Increased by 20% Since This Book’s Publication

I have been asking pilgrims a simple question:  “Why are you on the Camino?”  Quite a few Germans say it’s because they read a best-selling book, first published in 2001, by a well-known German comedian.  This is a disappointing answer.  The book itself, at least as translated into English, seems to me incapable of inspiring one even to finish it, much less to walk 500 miles.  Even Mom complains that it’s boring.

I asked one German, “Is it good in German?  Because in English it’s not funny at all.  It doesn’t have any fresh observations, or information about the locations, which you sort of expect from travel writing.”

“We know the author,” the man told me.  “It’s interesting if you know him.  We can hear his voice.”

Over three million copies sold.  Either the English translation was doing the author a great disservice or his readers were doing all the work.

Part 6:  La Bodeguina in Mercadoiro

Mercadoiro Albergue - Our Favorite So Far

Tuesday.  We reach Mercadoiro.  The La Bodeguina albergue costs a princely 10 Euros (about $13.30), but it has a patio with tables, a large yard with picnic tables, and a superb view, as well as a lounge-like room and free wi-fi.  A single laptop is available for surfing, in exchange for a donation that we see no one pay.  The bathrooms and showers are all new.  The showers even have six hydro-massage heads that can be angled to effect stimuli from the thighs to the chest.

The menu has more variety than we’ve seen, and the entire operation is run by two men, one of whom speaks English, and other of whom is simply very helpful.

However.  The menu showed a picture of an assortment of sliced fruit beautifully arrayed in a bowl.

“Son las frutas fresco?” I asked, hoping that meant, Are the fruits fresh?

“Si,” he said.  But the kitchen was not open, he explained.  Then he shrugged and went into the kitchen.  Amazing!  He was going to get me something to eat anyway.  I was feeling very grateful.

He returned with a bowl of canned peaches in sugary syrup.

There are more flies in Spain than in the rest of the world combined.  This is called a hypothesis.  I now ask graduate students from around the world to prove me wrong.

The downsides of the albergue:  for perhaps 50 people, it had two bathrooms, each containing a toilet sans privacy and two showers.

Part 7:  Mom and Food, Part 27

Mom tried to buy bread this morning, in a small shop, and was told it was reserved.  “All of it?” she asked, incredulous, pointing to the array of bread.  Yes.  All.  Reserved.

Wednesday.  In Ventas de Naron, Mom and I were sitting at an outdoor table, reading.  She wanted to know how to ask what time dinner was.  I told her.  She practiced it a few times before she pulled out her notebook and pen.  “This is an important sentence,” she explained.  She got up to go to the café.

“And if she says seven-thirty, I’m going to slap her.”

Afternoon in El Acebo

In the end, I did not perform much of a ritual myself at the Cruz de Ferro. It takes time to create a meaningful space, or a meaningful moment in time, and I hadn’t invested that time in the Cruz de Ferro. I spent a few minutes mindfully intending to let go of some of the hurt I’d felt in my marriage and, especially, during the divorce, and the guilt and sadness I felt about my own many mistakes, and the hurt they had caused, especially before and during my marriage. And that was all. I did not want to suck from the mountain all the oxygen that my mother needed to breathe.

At first the terrain leading away from the Cruz de Ferra was easy – a slight downhill slope

El Acebo

on compacted white sand bounded by milled lumber. To our left ran a road whose many patches bespoke a great deal of freezing in the winter. Before long, though, we entered an all-downhill, punishing, rocky single-track trail, some of it straight down. Well before we reached El Acebo, Mom was convinced we’d already gone well beyond 16 kilometers.

But no, tiny El Acebo was a 16.7 kilometer hike. It had been hidden for some time, so when we saw it, earlier than expected, some compensation for the more common false summit, we were happily surprised. It sits high up on a small mountain above the valley below, so small, so isolated, that for the first time on the trip my Vodafone USB got no reception.

The village was a typical Camino village: a single road bounded by a few houses, and a handful of albergues and hotels with restaurants attached. We chose the Meson. Mom was ready to eat.

Carrie ordered the Botilla del Bierzo, which on the menu was translated as “pork with paprika”. According to the menu, it was a specialty of the Bierzo area. I ordered the same.

The very nice waitress set down our plates. On it was boiled cabbage, chickpeas, chorizo, and a beating, pulsating, human heart.

At least that’s exactly what it looked like: a heart covered in paprika. Tentatively I set my

The pulsating human heart in El Acebo

knife upon it and began to saw at it. Grudgingly it parted in two, yielding unrecognizable chunks of white (bone marrow?), shards of pig bone, and something that was like, but not quite, meat.

I turned to Mom, the expert, and said, quietly, so that Carrie would not hear, “Could this be organ meat?”

She peered at it. “I have no idea,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Try it.”

Ha ha. I haven’t fallen for that since my age was counted in the single digits. My German aunt Elfriede, post-mortem benefactress of Mom’s trip here, had once submerged something utterly revolting in some opaque white soup – it may have been tripe – but my boy-sonar had found it effortlessly, and I had refused to touch even the bowl.

“See what it is,” I said to Carrie. “You’ll probably really love it,” I added.

She shook her head. “I’m not touching it.”

Foiled.

Eventually I caught the waitress’ attention. “Perdon,” I said, politely, holding up a single, graceful finger. “Una pregunta.” A question. “What the hell is this?”

Actually, I said, “Que es eso?” What is this?

She pointed to the casing of the heart-thing. “Thees is the tripe,” she said, “and thees” – now pointing at the stuff in the middle, “is from here.” She put her hand on her back. “It is the goats.”

“The goats?”

“Jes,” she said. Her own face a question mark, she watched my face to see if I was satisfied.

I smiled enormously. My smile was like those stars that could easily swallow the sun a million times. “Thank you so much,” I said. She went away.

“What did she say it was?” Carrie said. I turned back to the table, still smiling.

“Stomach lining and guts,” I said. Carrie’s mouth bulged as if she would puke. Neither one of us touched our human hearts again. Mom tried a tiny bit of mine and made a face. “All the meat I’ve eaten here tastes very strongly of the animal. It’s too strong. Very pig-like.”

The web says:

The “botillo” is a meat product made in the Leonese county of El Bierzo, with different parts from the butchering of the pig (above all ribs and tail), chopped up and marinated in salt, paprika, garlic and other natural spices. It is packed in natural skins and, before being eaten, it must go through the smoking and part-curing processes. Its exterior appearance is defined by the shape of the skin, although it normally takes on a globe shape, reddish grey in colour and weighing between approximately 500g and 1,600g per piece. When cut, it shows deep red tones, a firm consistency and an intense aroma. It is eaten cooked and accompanied by vegetables, above all cabbage, potatoes, chickpeas and chorizo pepper. It is a simple, hearty dish with no great secrets in the preparation, but it is one of the stars of El Bierzo’s cuisine.

The waitress was very apologetic when she realized we’d been surprised. I told her it wasn’t her fault, it was the menu (“pork with paprika” it had said, benignly). When I saw her a little later, on break outside the restaurant, she winked at me. Who winks anymore?

In the afternoon, Carrie lost one of her money purses. Luckily she had taken Mom’s advice not to put all her money in the same place, so she lost only about 15 Euros. But she was still upset. At dinner, I asked Mom if she still wanted wine, as she’d mentioned earlier, to celebrate the Day of the Cruz.

“Yes!” Carrie said, a little too enthusiastically. You want wine? we both asked her. “I need it,” she said.

At dinner, the waitress moved to stand right next to me, brushing my side, while I looked at the wine list, and went so far as to lean on my shoulder as I explained that their being out of my preferred desert was nothing short of a disaster. When she had gone, Mom and Carrie started laughing. “What?” I said. “We think she likes you,” Mom said.

Women in the United States never leaned on me or winked at me, so I left what for Spain was an unusually large tip. “She can have that,” I said, “instead of me.” Carrie made a face.