Pilgrims lose notions of pride and prejudice on Camino byways
Don’t lose heart on the Covid Way; look to the Way of the Camino, writes Leo Cullen
IT was last year — in the time before Covid — and we could go anywhere. My son, Emlyn, and I went to walk part of the Camino Way: The Portuguese Camino.
On our first morning, we wandered through the city of Porto. Built on hills, the buildings crumbled from Atlantic oxidation and the slips and slumps of gravity.
We passed cathedrals, palazzos, apartments with balconies from which jerseys in the colours of popular football teams hung on clotheslines. Men in vests smoked cigarettes up there and watered flowers; one old woman peered steadily down a narrow street as though catching sight of a husband who’d walked out 70 years ago to make his way in Utopia, New York.
We had the pastries and creamed coffees of Porto. We were at a pavement table on a busy corner across from a cathedral. A restrained group of the unhappiest Christians I ever saw stood in front of us while a tour guide talked about the cathedral. They wore yellow neckerchiefs bearing a map with red dots on it for Fatima, Lourdes, Santiago. Bored, tired; they gazed with longing at our heavenly pastries. We joked: they must be Belgians.
Why, because Belgians love pastries. No, we put aside that prejudice, decided instead they were Germans. We laughed. No, put that aside too; prejudice is not the way of the Camino.
Then, in a leafy square on top of a hilly street, we came across the Camino Trail: its yellow painted arrows on the roadway pointing the direction — the trail that starts south in Lisbon and runs north to Santiago de Compostela. Many such trails wend across Europe. One begins in Puy, France, another in Lindisfarne, England, another from St James’s Gate, Dublin, one from Rome, one even sets off from Moscow; pilgrims follow these ancient footprints, driven by whatever compulsion. That day we would be taking a bus some kilometres out of Porto and the next day we’d
pick up the Camino of the Portuguese Trail and walk to Santiago some eight days on.
For hours, we searched for our bus station; we roamed in circles around hills. We were getting in practice for the days ahead, we said. It’s the way of the Camino, we said: Acceptance. Lost among
markets and roadworks and streets with no names, we made enquiries but only strayed further from the way and the light.
But then we needed refreshments — and into a bar we repaired for cervezas. Where we were also treated to olives, bread, tortillas, generous cuts of ham from an enormous side of bacon on the counter.
And company: a small slim drinker in painter’s overalls, on finding we’d come from Dublin, became very enthusiastic and told us he’d worked in Dublin, where his favourite bar was the Sunset House in which the Dublin football supporters congregated, followed by the bar where Bono drank, followed by bars in Temple Bar. He’d be going back soon, he told us, to visit his daughter who lived there with her mother, the Dublin girlfriend he’d left behind. On departing, we shook hands with him, shook hands with the lady who swept the floor, shook hands with our generous barman. Shook hands with one another: Buen Camino. And miraculously found ourselves outside the bus station.
Next morning early we laced our boots, hoisted our bags and were on our Way of the Camino and God knows how many more hands we shook and from where and going to where. And we passed fellow pilgrims, eager to always keep in front of them, and we said to one another, ‘Quick, here come the methodical Germans to overtake us, don’t let them by.’ And oh, but that was not the way of the Camino.
And there was one time when shamefully we didn’t stop to help carry the heavy baggage of two elderly ladies from Sydney, Australia, over humps along the Way. Nor did we much meditate on Simon, the man who carried Jesus’s cross on Calvary.
And we didn’t bed down in rough-and-ready hostels of the pelegrinos every night but once treated ourselves to a two-and-a-half star hotel. And oh, but these were not the Ways of the Camino either.
At times, the mountains got tough and the paths got swampy and the rivers got talking to us — and many we bridged, for we were traversing a land of rivers fast flowing and precarious from the high Sierras of Iberia to the Atlantic Ocean. And they were telling us we were travellers.
And then we paused and thought of all those we’d left behind both long ago and recently — such as the eager hand-shaking house-painter who loved his Sunset House bar, his Dublin daughter, his other family in Porto: his non-utopian life — his Way of the Camino. And whatever we did, thought, said, found… well, wasn’t that our Way of it. And when we arrived at Santiago, we found that two we hadn’t left behind were the Australian ladies — they’d beaten us to the post. You never can tell!
And now this story has come to an end and I’d hoped I’d be able to draw something from it that would help us all along the other Way, The Covid Way. I found nothing. Apart from the ‘you never can tell’ of things: don’t hang up your boots yet, folks.