Lost and Found on the Camino de Santiago: Part 15
Lost and Found on the Camino de Santiago: Part 15
Miguel and Anna continue to walk together and encounter a personality of the Camino following her mother's tradition of generosity. The food and hospitality transport Miguel back to his childhood.
The morning sun came up behind Viana and made a jet imprint of the Church of Santa María la Real against the rose sky. Rain clouds swept in from the east and over the city and then over us.
“Breathtaking,” Anna said as she adjusted her poncho.
I put away my camera. A steady rain began as we left Navarra to enter La Rioja, but quickly became a drizzle, then gave way to the full sun and heat. Fortunately, a delicious breeze came to lift and lead us into Logroño, where Maria welcomed us to her home. She was the daughter of Felisa, a Camino legend who had the tradition of feeding pilgrims and offering them figs when they were in season. When she died at the age of 92, Maria kept her house in order to keep her mother’s custom alive.
“¡Hola peregrinos!”
“¡Hola señora, buenos días!”
“How have you been?”
“Bien.”
“Good. Good, and what about the rain, not too much. We’re glad to get any rain around here.”
“The rain was refreshing,” Anna said.
“Good, good.”
We introduced ourselves.
“Soy Anna, de Brasil.”
“Soy Sandra, de Brasil.”
“Y yo soy Miguel.”
“Where are you from?”
“Born in México and grew up in the United States.”
“Ah, a Mexican. You must want something spicy. Sorry, not here, not until you get to León. They have good pimientos there.”
“Don’t worry, we don’t eat chiles all the time.”
“Oh, I know,” she laughed. “What can I offer you? I have coffee, water, bread, and eggs.”
Coffee for everyone. I ordered eggs. Over easy.
“You’re going to see just how great they are—make sure to clean up the yolk with this great bread,” she said, placing a small basket of slices on the table.
Sandra and Anna went to write in the visitor’s book as I savored the scent of grease and the sound of popping egg whites. They always reminded me of my Tía Sofía who lived in South Chicago on a meager retirement check. Her apartment was a collection of faded, green couches, a small black-and-white TV, her parrot, and the altar to the Virgen de Guadalupe. Candles and incense always burned there, and after many years the soot formed a gray stain on the white ceiling above it. This was where she prayed for us, where she laid flowers and the names of all the family, entrusting them to God. Every Sunday, she prepared meals for about ten to fifteen of us: eggs, queso añejo in salsa, beans, tortillas, and chiles. She never asked us to buy groceries and I had no idea how she paid for it all or how she worked up the energy to do it every week, but somehow she managed and she shared her food with the same spirit I saw in Maria.
“Buen provecho,” Maria said, placing the plate with two eggs before me.
I took the bread and used it in place of tortillas, trying to pinch up the egg white and scoop up the yolk. And Maria was right, I did desire some heat, some of my tía’s salsa, but the meal was perfect.
“¿Te gustó?” she asked.
“Me encantó,” I answered.
We took pictures, got our passports stamped and said goodbye talking for about ten minutes about our plans for the day and the Camino. It was a wonderful reminder of family—some far away, others like my tía, long gone.
“What a lovely woman. Could you imagine living like that, giving that much of yourself? She’s an angel,” Anna rejoiced.
We walked over the Ebro River on the stone bridge that was first built in the eleventh century, and then reconstructed in 1884. Logroño was the first Spanish city to truly remind me of a Mexican one. I remembered Morelia’s beautiful pink stone buildings built by enslaved native people and their mestizo children. The architecture here was similar—especially the slender baroque steeples of Santa María la Redonda. Morelia’s core was essentially a Spanish city, at least on the surface. I thought of home.
Mamá, Papá. Pronto estaré de regreso. I want to walk with you and talk to you about all I’ve lived this past year. I know I’ve been silent, but sometimes it just hurt too much to talk about it. I mean those are the simple, but most profound, dreams we all have. To find the one. To fall in love. To create a new family. I dreamed of that, and chased it all away.
On the walk out of the town, we shared the path with residents out for a stroll, a power walk or a bike ride. Some children gawked—but adults mostly walked by and waved, or wished us “Buen Camino.” A Spanish pilgrim we had met in Villamayor de Monjardin zoomed past us. “Hola,” she said, though seeing her surprised us because she had recommended that we slow down.
“And why are you in a hurry?” I asked.
“I’m not really in a hurry—I just agreed to meet some friends at Navarrete. That’s where I’m spending the night.”
It was near noon and we were almost at Navarrete. Anna and Sandra had both insisted that we walk to La Ventosa, which was about thirty kilometers from Viana, and even with a steady pace we were making good time. We were told that the refuge would have few guests.
We crossed the overpass of the A-68 freeway, whose vehicles latched onto my thoughts and pulled me from the bubble of the Camino. Cars, trucks and hot roads always returned me to cell phones, email, Facebook, deadlines, and to the past year’s late nights, the fear of failure and sprouting gray hairs. Once, my friend Lisa called me in tears because she had received a F on an article, which was scratched onto an assignment with a factual error. Just one factual error was an automatic failure. I tried to calm her, but she sobbed nonstop for half an hour telling me about her boyfriend and how she wanted to see her mom who was 2,000 miles away in Los Angeles. After being unable to help, I fell into a three-day drinking binge. At the end of it, I flung several bottles of beer into Lake Michigan and yelled, “You can’t do anything right! You can’t do anything right!” Falling facedown onto the sand, I kept repeating that phrase until the sun rose a few hours later. The sand rubbed against my teeth.
I shuddered with the memory, but had fallen behind, so I ran to catch up with Sandra and Anna, who had walked ahead of me and stood in front of the ruins of the San Juan de Acre Pilgrims’ Hospital, built in 1185. Little of it remained, just some wall fragments and parts of the floor and foundation protruding from the ground. At that moment, I felt like I was at the foot of the remnants of an ancient tree that had stored in its growth rings many of the stories of pilgrims who had become before us. I hope it did the same with ours. And in taking us in, that it could give our lives meaning beyond the pain. That’s what I wished for. I was cracked from within and could scarcely hide my hurt, just as the broken building lay exposed. A Spanish pilgrim walked by.
“Hola peregrinos.”
“Hola,” we responded.
“Fortunately, they saved the entryway. It’s at the cemetery as you leave this town.”
“Gracias,” Anna said.
The gateway was a beautiful example of Romanesque architecture, with angel and dove decorations placed on it among other religious symbols, but it was a plaque on the cemetery wall that caught our eye. Engraved in stone, it is dedicated to the memory of Alice de Graemer, a Belgian pilgrim who died after a car struck her as she biked to Compostela. This was a reminder that we are not completely safe, even while on pilgrimage. I thought that perhaps that is why we care for one another, put up with each other’s smells and troubles, and why solidarity is probably born so spontaneously on the walk. Perhaps that is why Maria and Felisa and the builders and keepers of refuges are so generous.
We stood there. Silent. Anna shuffled her feet, walked away from us, tore some tiny flowers from a nearby bush, picked up some stones and laid them at the foot of the wall where the plaque hung. It was perhaps the first time in many years that someone had done it.
We drank water and continued toward La Ventosa without saying a word. Large, puffy white clouds became a single sheet of white and gray that hid the sun, though the air remained infernal. Rancid sweat—a fermenting bouquet that tickled the back of my nose and scratched my throat—rose from my backpack straps and crept into my nostrils.
Sandra was right, we were the first to arrive at the refuge—and it seemed like we were the first in the town, too as we climbed toward that final stop for the day. She really knew a whole lot more about the Camino than Anna or me. La Ventosa was still, and really wasn’t a town, but a few houses surrounded by farms, vineyards and trees. I asked myself the same question I asked when I saw houses in the middle of the cornfields in the Midwest. What the hell do people do for fun out here? This place is dead. And it wasn’t exactly what Sandra had hoped for, but she had insisted on meeting the Brazilian in charge of the refuge. She waited by the door. We checked in and climbed up to our room, leaving Sandra behind. The room—the room was empty. Clean. There was not one backpack, not one sleeping bag, not one trace of dirt or mud on the floor. Not one footprint or whiff of armpits. No rude old woman. This was not Viana. Thank you, God. We paused at the threshold, savoring the moment. Anna hugged me and kissed my cheek in the excitement.
“You need a shower, you’re salty and smelly,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
I grabbed a hold of her arm and kissed her on the cheek, but she scurried away to a claim a bed by the tiny window. The room was dimly lit and silent; the scent of wet earth wafted in on a breeze. As we unloaded our bags and kicked off our shoes, the sky roared and rain returned, lulling Anna to sleep. I rushed off to shower. I had an entire bathroom all to myself. It was like being home. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I whispered as water flowed over my hair and down my face.