Off the Road (7 page)

My exile is not geographical
because I am never really all that far away, as much as I (and Madame Debril)
want to think that way. The modern road makes everything within reach. The
Roman road, Charlemagne’s road, the pilgrim’s road—built for them and their
purposes—no longer exists for me and mine. It has been paved over, yielding to
the demands of trucker and tourist.

As a pilgrim, I am an
anachronism. Fittingly I can’t even make myself walk
on
the road. The
strong winds roaring up from the valley have the same Doppler effect of a car
approaching from behind. I instinctively find myself hugging the side of the
road. Even the architecture of the modern road, slightly buckled at the median
for rain off-flow, makes the pilgrim list toward the edge. A pilgrim can no
longer walk in the center. He’s forced to walk just off the road.

By nine
p.m.
the slanting yellow light is thin
and pale. The temperature drops considerably—it’s nearly freezing—and the
clouds open with a gushing rain. A Basque shepherd stops to tell me that Roncesvalles is just down a dirt road through a forest. After he drives away, I come upon
the boundary of France and Spain. A simple metal gate bears the word
España
painted above another yellow arrow. My map marks this spot, which gives me
enough of a bearing to realize that I am still five or six hours’ walk to the
next town. Roncesvalles is just over there, the shepherd said. Of course it is.
By car.

I have been walking on the
more dangerous edge of the road near the cliffs. My head is extremely light
from lack of food, so I shift to the other side to keep from slipping off the
mountain. Several times I find myself staggering and simply sit down in the
rain and mud to gather my ebbing faculties. I wonder if I shouldn’t retreat to
the paved road and beg the next shepherd to take me somewhere, anywhere. But
human instinct doesn’t acknowledge danger until it sweeps over you. So I push
on into the deep dark forest.

The road in the woods is
normally damp dirt. Wheel tracks show the frequent passage of shepherds. With
the rain, the damp ruts become gushing canals of mud. Getting twenty feet down
the road is becoming difficult. When the sun pops behind a mountain, darkness
sets in as quickly as hitting a light switch.

I find the least damp
hummock on the side of the road among a dense knot of trees. There has been
some logging farther up the mountain, so the mud is shifting around my little
hill. But this spot seems safe enough. The decision, however mournfully taken,
is to make camp rather than to walk on in the dark. I hang my shell on a nearby
tree to claim my place. Of the hundreds of millions of pilgrims who may have
passed this way, maybe one of them had to camp in this spot in the rain as
well, wrapped in his cape, his head on his crip, his broad-brimmed hat resting
on his face.

I feel a boyish excitement
amid the cold and suffering. Those tent poles snap into position as
effortlessly as advertised.

Madame Debril floats into
view. “You are not a true pilgrim.” Shivers consume me, yet my doubts about
being a true pilgrim and worrying about my clothes, my shell, and my
convictions are easier to assuage after a day of such intense labor. The
historical pilgrimage shouldn’t be the model, as it is for Madame Debril. No
pilgrim can make sense of the road if he reduces it to mere reenactment. I
can’t be a medieval pilgrim.

I can’t consider myself an
exile in the etymological sense of the word
pilgrim
because that
meaning, like the etymological meanings of so many other words, has become
quaint and out-of-date. I haven’t left the village, walked through the fields,
and wandered far from my home because the road is always an outpost of the
place I have just left behind. I have my American Express card. Even here, were
I to succumb to hypothermia, I would be found the next morning by a passing
shepherd—curled into a large blue fetus. I would be choppered out and taken to Madrid. Eventually I would wind up back home. A little brain damage, they would tell my
mother. And I would assume my destiny as one of Charleston’s glorious
eccentrics, a supernumerary from a Tennessee Williams play.

What the modern pilgrim is
exiled from is not a place but velocity. I haven’t left the world of the city;
I have left the realm of the car. What distinguishes me is not that I am out of
town but that I am on foot. My predecessors were outcasts because they left the
security of the village. I have left the world of technology and speed. I can’t
pretend to be that other pilgrim. Nor can I try to breathe sense into the
meanings we’ve inherited from the people who were. I can’t wear the cape any
more than I can believe in the contents of the shrine. I am a pilgrim on the
road to Santiago or, rather, a pilgrim just off the road. I am more like Thor
Heyerdahl, the man who sailed the Atlantic in a prehistoric raft of sticks. I
too am trying out a neglected conveyance, not to reexamine the old meanings
that have trickled down to us, but to see if I can’t recover one or two that
we’ve lost.

The temperature outside is
plummeting. Inside the tent, inside my sleeping bag, inside my coat, inside all
my clothes, I arrange my small supply of goods and examine my pantry: one
orange, one five-inch chunk of baguette, a jar of mustard, and a tube of
condensed milk. The rain sounds like a shower of marbles. Despite having
trouble focusing on objects, I feel a child’s sense of safety in this tent. I
peel the orange and savor each wedge. A twelfth-century chronicler, after arriving
more or less to this same spot, wrote: “How many thousands of pilgrims have
died [here], some lost in snow storms, others, more numerous still, devoured by
the ferocity of the wolves.” The orange is the most delicious one I have ever
eaten.

The baguette smeared with
mounds of mustard flares my nostrils until they hurt. But the pain reawakens my
senses, and I feel my equilibrium ebbing back. The questions of where to begin
and how officially to get started now seem serenely irrelevant. I feel as if I have
been on this road half my life. Madame Debril drifts away. I have other things
on my mind just now—the likely sound of approaching wolves, the final thoughts
of snowbound pilgrims, the symptoms of hypothermia, and the width of Spain. I grip the tube of condensed milk with my fist, put the aluminum teat in my mouth,
and squeeze with all my strength.

O
n a bend in the last
mountain of the Pyrenees, a slight dip in the road leads up a hump until a hazy
green valley lowers into view l
ike a card on a stereopticon.
All appears peaceful in Spain today. The chimneys from the scattered farms feed
thin columns of gray smoke into a blanket of drifting white mist. I feel
restored this morning and ready for my descent into Roncesvalles.

A marker tops the ridge,
with a dozen wooden arms pointing chaotically in all directions. I expect to
read outrageous distances—New York, 8,000 kilometers; Buenos Aires 11,000 k; Tokyo, 16,500 k. But I am entering Navarra, the land of the Spanish Basques. They are not
a people famous for irony. This sign is just a sign pointing to nearby hamlets
with long, unpronounceable names. All of them should be within view, but I see
nothing except boulders spilling down a deep gorge into the valley.

Roncesvalles
is a famously mysterious
place and has been since the eighth century, just before the pilgrimage began,
when it became the most notorious killing field of the Middle Ages. At the
time, the giant armies of Islam had come to Christian Europe, so the scene was
set for a cataclysmic encounter. The Moors had invaded Spain in 711 and by the end of that century were in control of all but the ribbon of
desolation in the north that would become the road. Meanwhile, in Europe, Charlemagne was uniting the continent. This era would culminate on Christmas Day
a.d.
800, when the pope crowned
Charlemagne the first Holy Roman Emperor.

But Charlemagne’s
reunification of the Roman Empire and of Europe would come at a cost, paid at Roncesvalles in 778 and hymned forever in the greatest medieval epic, the
Chanson de
Roland.
So the story goes, Charlemagne had entered Spain to liberate the local Christians but after some time had decided to make a prudent
peace with the Arabs. As the poem opens, he is trying to settle a dispute
between his nephew Roland and his brother-in-law Ganelon (also Roland’s
stepfather). Both are vying to be the king’s emissary to win peace from the
Arabs.

Ganelon won the argument,
but his jealousy over Charlemagne’s apparent preference for Roland drove him to
treachery. While sitting in the silken tents of the Arabs (known as Saracens in
poetry), Ganelon betrayed Charlemagne’s route back into France as Roncesvalles. He explained to them that the rear guard, led by Roland, would be most
vulnerable when it began to file into the narrow gorge that cuts into the Pyrenees, where I now stand.

High
are the hills, the valleys dark and deep,

Grisly
the rocks, and wondrous grim the steep.

On the late afternoon of
August 15, 778, Roland and the rear guard were ambushed here. As the fighting
spilled into the valley, Roland’s best friend, Oliver, begged him to call
Charlemagne for help by sounding his horn. All manly symbols in the
Chanson
de Roland
have names; the horn’s is Olifant. But rather than blow Olifant,
Roland cried out for immediate battle. He goaded his men to fight at once and
claim their honor. In the early exchange, no Saracen was safe from Roland and
his mighty sword (Durendal by name). Roland’s dispatch of the Saracen dandy
Chernuble, whose “unshorn hair hangs trailing to his feet,” is horrific even by
our standards of violence:

He
spurs his horse and goes against Chernuble:

he
breaks the helmet on which rubies gleam;

he
slices downward through the coif and hair

and
cuts between the eyes, down through his face,

the
shiny hauberk made of fine-linked mail,

entirely
through the torso to the groin,

and
through the saddle trimmed with beaten gold.

The body of the horse slows down the sword,

which, seeking out no joint, divides the spine:

both fall down dead upon the field’s thick grass.

As the battle raged, Oliver
pleaded with Roland to call Charlemagne, until it was too late. When the
fighting turned against his men, Roland gave a blast on Olifant so powerful
that his temples burst. In his death throes Roland cracked Durendal on a stone
so no Saracen could carry it in triumph, and then he fell. After Charlemagne
hastened to this ridge, he saw red pastures below, drenched in his men’s gore.
The enemy had vanished. Charlemagne sank to his knees and so moved the heavens
with his plea for revenge that the late afternoon sun, it is said, held its
place in the sky and lit the Spanish plains until Charlemagne caught the
Saracens and carried out a final furious slaughter.

For pilgrims, the story was
important, and vice versa. Along the road the song was performed by itinerant
musicians called jugglers, and it became enormously popular. The pilgrimage and
the song also introduced new ideas into Christian thinking at this time. The
constant skirmishes with the Moors just off the road to Santiago had put the
pilgrims, and subsequently Europe, in contact with a novel Arab concept—the
jihad, or holy war.

After three hundred years of
pilgrimage and fighting Moors, the lessons were learned. This new idea tried on
different accommodating theologies until it became a Christian virtue. The Arab
jihad was Europeanized into the Christian Crusade. In 1095, Pope Urban II
called on Christians to retake the Holy Land from infidels. Four years later Rome’s flag flew in Jerusalem.

On the field in the valley,
a stone marker announces the spot where Roland and his men engaged the
Saracens. A nearby highway provides a short walk into Roncesvalles. This little
village —no more than a hundred people—is a few houses, two bars, and an
Augustinian monastery. A knock at a door of the chapterhouse puts me in the
orbit of Brother Don Jesús. A short bald man with a quick chaotic air, he is in
constant motion.

“Pilgrim. Pilgrim. What a
surprise. How good this is,” he says in fast, clipped Spanish. He herds me into
his private office and eases me into a comfy chair. From somewhere he produces
a clipboard and shoves a questionnaire in my lap. I am being polled. The
monastery wants to know about the pilgrims who pass through. I am asked where I
am from, where I started, how I heard of the road. The critical, final question
asks my “motive” for walking the road. I am provided four possible answers:

■
religious

■
cultural

■
historical

■
other (explain)

That fourth option looks so
sad and out of place alongside the first three. I check this box and write in
Spanish, “I’d have to write a book to answer this question.” Don Jesús reads
it, laughs, and playfully snatches the clipboard from me. Apparently he doesn’t
care for polls.

“You are a pilgrim. We have
been welcoming you for a thousand years!” Father Don Jesús throws his arm
around my shoulder and squeezes my neck.

At evening, he says, the
church still rings the bell, the last call for pilgrims to find their way out of
the mountains and into the shelter of the monastery. I ask him if he has any
pilgrim’s passports lying around.

“Of course. We have no
problem. They are here.”

I tell him that I had met a
Madame Debril on the other side of the Pyrenees and that she had told me it was
pointless to walk without one. Don Jesús looks up at me through caterpillar
eyebrows with a pair of warm, conspiratorial eyes. He pulls out a fresh
passport and makes a show of applying an intricate stamp the size of a silver
dollar. Sometimes I can’t understand his fast Spanish, but just now our few
words flow with all the elliptical intimacy of two old buddies.

“Ma-dame De-bril,” Brother
Don Jesús intones slowly. He smiles.

“Madame Debril,” I say, and
smile.

“Madame Debril,” Brother Don
Jesús says.

“Madame Debril,” I say.

Slipping his arm through
mine, Don Jesús escorts me out of the chapter house and into the open air. I
tell him that I am especially interested in the story of Roland. There, he
says, indicating an eleventh-century funereal chapel, that is where Roland blew
Olifant. The shrill winds that whip through the mountains and valleys here are
said to be echoes of Roland’s ancient blast. He points to an open area and says
that this is where Roland broke Durendal on a rock and where he died. A large
tourist bus pulls onto the gravel near Roland’s resting place and crunches to a
halt.

Don Jesús drops me off for a
coffee and some breakfast at a restaurant next door. Trying to be polite to the
waiter, I tell him how enchanted I am to be in the place where Roland first
suffered at the hands of the Arabs and Charlemagne turned the road to Santiago into a European phenomenon.

“Arabs?” muses the waiter.

“Yes,” I say, baffled at his
confusion. “Arabs.
Chanson de Roland.
Road to Santiago,” I add, hoping
my collection of Spanish phrases makes sense.

“There were no Arabs here.”

I never know how to handle
this. When one is convinced one speaks with authority on a subject, there is
the tricky business of imparting this obvious (on your part) superiority
without coming across as supercilious.

I tell him I had just read
the
Chanson de Roland.
He smiles to congratulate me on doing my homework
but ignores the arrogant implications.

“Roland did not die in an
ambush of Arabs,” he says. I decide to play along.

“So who killed him?”

“We did.”

“You?”

“The Basques killed him.”

Everyone in Spain issues warnings about Basques, and I had heard plenty before arriving here. They are
a notorious people —most recently for a terrorist guerrilla war against the
Spanish government. But, historically, they have always been enigmatic and work
hard at perpetuating their cultural reputation. Linguists who have mapped the
intersecting landscapes of language cannot place Basque anywhere on the map.
Its origin remains a mystery.

A sardonic Englishman named
Richard Ford published an account of his 1845 visit to this area. He found the
Basque people inscrutable and their language outrageous—a people who write the
name “Solomon” but pronounce it “Nebuchadnezzar.” Ford tells the legendary
story of the Devil, who studied Basque in order to corrupt these people, but he
abandoned his effort after seven years because he had mastered only three
words.

I look at my waiter and
automatically screw up a dismissive look, but he stops me.

“When my father returns, he
will tell you. He knows the whole story. We are the only people who tell the
truth. The French, the Spanish, the Arabs, all lie about Roland.”

Not long after, the waiter’s
father arrives. He is a short, stout man with a warm, inviting face. On several
occasions he stresses the depth of his knowledge of America.

“I know who Nelson
Rockefeller is,” he says with a wink of braggadocio.

He owns this inn but was a
teacher in Pamplona for most of his life. Before I can pose a question, he’s
launched into an excited explanation of where the Basques originated. I had
read theories alleging that the Basque might be of ancient Celtic origin and
another that suggested possible commonalities with old Hungarian. But both of
these apparently are wrong.

“Originally, we were
Japanese. Thousands of years ago a group of brave warriors were banished from Japan. They wandered the earth and arrived here.”

“Really?” I pipe up, not
able to disguise my incredulity even behind the thick blanket of a foreign
language. I look again at my new acquaintance—an old white man a bit broad in
the beam, his hair still showing traces of brown, his eyes as round as coins.
“How come you don’t look Japanese?”

“Diet.”

He’d prepared for that one.

“Several Japanese scholars
visited here not long ago,” he continued. “One of them was a language
professor. We were both amazed at how much of our language we could understand.
For example, the word for mother in Basque is
ma.
That also happens to
be the word for mother in Japanese as well.” He nods his head significantly.