PILGRIMAGE (VI) - ANGEL

                        
The meseta. Photo by Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James.

I began the next day alone, but wasn’t alone for long. Squatting on my back-pack under a hedge eating a late breakfast of salami sandwich, I was overtaken by the first walker striding out early from Burgos, an elderly, energetic man from Toulouse, so pleased to meet someone he could talk to in French that he didn’t mind halving his pace to mine for a while.

We walked on, chatting, and the sun came out, and somehow I didn’t tell him what happened the day before. The Camino was smiling, reasserting its positive spirit. I never did tell another pilgrim that I was robbed. Why cast a shadow on their positive impressions? I couldn’t. I told no one when I returned home either, and I’ve rarely spoken of it since (what is it about blogging?).

But that didn’t mean I buried the bad thing, hardened my heart. Far from it. It completely changed, for the better, the rest of my journey. I was so grateful thereafter for the company and friendship of other walkers, for the good spirit of the path, the spirit of those who had walked before us for more than a thousand years. My heart opened then to all of it. Without the shock of fear, I don’t think this would have happened.

So we chatted along through flat, flourishing fields, and much later reached a straggling village whose pilgrim refugio, unusually, was offering lunch. As we slumped against the long table, waiting, other walkers came, and the pile of back-packs in the corner grew. This was where I met the old hippy, the bank-manager, the psychiatrist, and others.

Lunch was long and we all set out again together, on a path that now followed a country road, winding through woods, and out again across the fields. I found myself talking, first, to the Dutchman. He was friendly, but made me feel obscurely uncomfortable(I found out later that he was a psychiatrist. Ah.) So after a while I fell back, and into step with another new arrival. He was another Frenchman, tall and loose-limbed, with a long, shy, clever face. This was H. He’d walked from the Pyrenees to Burgos back in the previous Summer, with his girlfriend, then had to return to his work as a busy, globe-trotting engineer employed by the French airline. Now he was back to continue the path – his first day’s walking, still weary and stressed from work, and his feet hurt, so our strides were well matched.

We walked and talked all afternoon, and for the next week.

Blistering and despairing, he took off his boots and walked in his socks. I laughed at his very large bright blue feet tiptoeing on the stony road, and he was indignant, and indignation kept him going. My own trauma began to recede.

               
Castrojeriz

Castrojeriz (so remote it has no English-language website) was the next town we came to, and the next refugio. A quiet, dusty, rambling place, the road spiralling around a hill, and no sign of the hostel, or by now of our fellow walkers, who had all left us behind. Finally, a woman with a shopping bag in the distance, and I pounded after her, panting under my back-pack. "Señora, estamos perdidos – we’re lost! Where is the refugio?". I had to ask her to repeat her instructions. My brain was busy computing what I’d said. I’d just become 'we'.

In the hostel kitchen, H produced camomile teabags and offered me one. We sat down and eyed one another through the fragrant steam rising from our cups. This was not a stranger. I felt familiarity, ease and affection, as I had never felt with someone I’d just met.

A communal meal was cooked in the ramshackle kitchen, and while some of us fell early into bed in the dormitory upstairs, others were still down there talking until very late. Lying in bed, sleepy, with voices drifting up the stairs, I felt safe, like a child in bed and hearing the adults of her family still awake and talking. H was in the next bunk. That night and the following nights, our eyes met and smiled before we slept.

H was many years younger and about a foot taller than me. "You go ahead", I would say every morning, "You don’t want to walk at my pace". And off he would go, sometimes, but there he would be at the next village, the next crossroads, with a sight or a thought to share. So we shared the weather that rapidly changed from sun to rain and back, and the land that grew flatter and bleaker as we entered the meseta, and we shared conversations as long and as deep as I’ve ever known.

At Carrión, before the lovely tour of the church, we had sat on a bench overlooking a precipice, with misty ruins and tall trees and a river far below, and talked of how the city and work were hard, too hard, sometimes. And we grew silent, looking down, and we knew we both were thinking it wouldn’t be a bad place to end all the busy-ness.

"I wish", H said one day, "that I could walk and walk until I stop thinking. I get so tired of the nagging, worried voice in my head". I stared, realising with amazement that I, who’d been walking longer, had actually found this state for brief periods. Thus the seed of meditation was planted.

It wasn’t all po-faced taking ourselves so seriously. There was the bad-tempered, toad-faced hostel keeper who barked at the pilgrims and cooked us peculiar food. When we left next morning, his cross face loomed up in the window and he silently, grimly, waved. Bizarre. We looked at a each other and doubled up, giggling helplessly, floating away down the path on a cloud of incredulity and silliness.

But H’s time was limited and he wanted to get to Santiago. One day, as I struggled to keep up with him and the old Swedish hippy, who was also tall and robust, resolve and generosity seized me. "That’s it. I’m staying the night in the next town.  You go on. Yes! Go!" And they went. And I checked into a cheap hotel, in the absence of a refugio, and cried, as I hadn’t cried when I was robbed and threatened and frightened.

I don’t know quite how I believe this, how I conceptualize it. But I do utterly believe, on some level, that H was my guardian angel, who came because I needed him.

Comments

[Tall Girl]

Lovely

[dale]

I often think of this -- how you never know; the next person I meet might just be in one of those special states of grace, when they're ready to meet an angel, and I -- stupid and wanty and fearful as I am -- might be called upon to be one.

We all have to be ready to be called, that way. It's much harder to do the calling than to answer though. That's what I think. Really any old decent person can do the angel part. You give more by calling than by answering.

[dave]

Very moving.

[zhoen]

I love that wordless floating of long walking.

You also found the other part about angels, sending them off when still wanted, but no longer needed. Grace for everyone.

[tamarika]

I am always fascinated about the idea of angels. I have recognized a number of them passing through my life ... and yet, I don't believe in them ... how strange. This story is so beautiful, Jean. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

[Lucy]

Wonderful.
I wonder if I'd have the courage to tell my guardian angel they could go now?

[andy]

My eyes were a little misty, but I had a smile of happiness for you on my face as I read this... Perhaps a touch of bittersweetness too...