Following the Sun (12 page)

Not to worry. I dismounted, carried the bike up into a pasture, and set about changing the wheel, only to discover that somehow with all my focus on the derailleur I had forgotten to get a spare. I tried to patch the split tire but the break was too wide. And I sat there in the pasture in the warm spring sun for a long time, trying to figure out what to do.

I had always loved the city of Madrid. When I lived there, I was in the habit of walking down a side street to a favorite café to take a coffee and sit in the sun. I spent long days in the Retiro Park watching the ducks and daydreaming, reading, and attending boring afternoon lectures on El Cid that would cause me to fall into a sort of half-conscious state of dormancy in which images of Babieco the horse and red-turbaned Moors would float before my mind's eye. Then around seven I would head for the
tapas
bars for the evening. It was a good routine, a quiet life, but I wouldn't wish to have lived that way forever. Nor would I, after my current sojourn there, wish to see Madrid again for a decade or so. But I seemed doomed to be stuck there.

The logical thing would have been to return, get the spare, and leave again. I was only about ten miles away. But then Griggs would discover me and insist that I stay on, or worse, prepare to come with me. I would lose days, having already lost too many days. In the end I limped back to a roadside bar I had passed, ordered a coffee, and chatted up the owner. Were there any bicycle shops nearby. No. Was there anyone around who could repair tires. Yes, but he was out of town. In the Spanish style, word of my dilemma got out around the café. Many advisors appeared to help me with my plight. But all of them—unfortunately—had the same answer. You must return to Madrid. About this time, an energetic little man in a white delivery truck pulled up and sailed into the café and greeted everyone. He was a known regular and soon joined the advisory council. He too said I must return to Madrid. But unlike the others, he offered to take me there.

I gave up and called Desdemona.

“Timiteo will be so happy …,” she said.

Things went downhill from there. Griggs, good soul that he is, claimed he had arranged to take time off to meet me in France, and said, further, that it would not be a problem to change the dates, and said furthermore that he would drive me over the mountains and deposit me in France, and that we two could pedal along the coast of southern France, stopping at the little seaside towns to eat and drink, and it would be a glorious time and that by driving over the Sierras rather than pedaling, I would live to tell the tale. This much I questioned, as I had noticed that Griggs had adopted the Spanish style of driving.

But in the end, I caved in, since it did make sense. And in any case, I had never set out to test myself in a marathon bicycle journey from Andalusia to Scotland. I was a solar pilgrim, not a long-distance bicycle racer.

That night we went back to the Plaza Mayor and ate at Botin, the most famous restaurant among American literary tourists because it was featured in the last scene in Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
. Jake and Brett have lunch there in an upstairs room and drink
rioja alta
and then go for a ride in the hot light of the Madrid summer. Griggs had stuffed pork and a bottle of
rioja
, I feasted on kidneys and drank sparingly.

Two days later, having outfitted Griggs with the proper equipment—more or less—we left for France.

Five

Half Course in the Ram

I've been on some hair-raising roads in my life. I've driven the Amalfi coast in southern Italy, around vertiginous bends with sea cliffs that drop a thousand feet. I have been on similar roads on the coast in the south of France, between Nice and Menton, and even worse roads in the interior of Corsica. Once I rode up the ill-maintained twenty-two bends of a washed-out road to a tea plantation perched high on a peak in the Western Ghats in southern India and lived to tell the tale.

But I don't think I have ever been so terrified on a road as I was with Griggs in the Sierras of northern Spain. In this case it was not so much the road or the heights; these were generally civilized, and well-maintained compared to some other mountain passes. It was the barbarian Griggs, who seemed to have imagined himself on the Paris to Cairo race and took the mountain passes and the curves and the downhill tracks as if he were attempting to overtake Mario Andretti himself. From time to time I insisted on having him “rest” for his upcoming bicycle journey and drove part of the way myself. But he was annoyed that I drove so cautiously.

“Hurry up,” he would shout. “Pass that slow bastard.” “Overtake this truck or it'll slow us down at the next pass.” Do this. Do that. Turn here. Stop. Go. He never slept during his enforced “rest” periods and wouldn't relax. But, alternately spelling each other in what amounted to a marathon road race, we sped through mountain passes and deep valleys, crossed the Sierras under the vast, brooding Miranda de Ebro, and somehow managed to get to San Sebastián, still counting ourselves among the living. From there we headed up the coast and crossed the border at Hendaya.

At St.-Jean-de-Luz I found a quiet room over a restaurant and we spent the rest of the day walking around the town, strolling the beach and sampling the local cafés. That night we celebrated our arrival in France with a five-course meal—local mussels and a fine spinach soup, a baked white fish whose name I never could manage to translate, a puff pastry of potatoes and leeks, and a crème brûlée for dessert. Griggs took a cognac after dinner. And after that we went down the street to a long zinc bar and took a coffee and Griggs nursed another cognac. There were two pretty German women at a table behind us, and he kept turning around and nodding to them. They bowed back, coolly, and he tried some German on them and they smiled weakly, and went back to their conversation. So Griggs ordered another cognac, sipped it approvingly and turned and toasted them. Once more, ever so politely, they nodded and forced a smile and I said, finally, “Give over, Griggs, you're a married man, and a gentleman, and I won't be part of this. I am on a pilgrimage, not a lark.”

The next day, we wheeled our bicycles out to the street, loaded our gear, and rode out along the coast smelling the salt air and trying to recover. Now it was Griggs who lagged behind. He had an old three-speed thing with a straw basket in front of the handlebars, and as we pedaled up the coast, he grew puffy and red. I slowed down to allow him to catch up, and then pedaled onward, then waited, and then rode off again. Barely clear of St.-Jean-de-Luz he suggested we stop for a coffee. That done, we pedaled on for a few miles, and he suggested we take a little drink of something. Two miles down the road, he suggested we stop for “elevensies,” as the English phrase it, and after that he wondered what I would think about an early lunch.

We were headed for Cap Breton, but at this rate it was clear that we wouldn't make it. On the other hand, I was rather enjoying the pace, so I suggested we go over to the beach to rest and look for restaurants. Here we found a pier with a crowd of old men fishing from it, and we wandered out and watched the gulls and the action, such as it was. This done we pedaled along the shore road until we came to a little square with a promenade, and many outdoor seaside restaurants, one of which seemed suitable to Mr. Griggs. He ordered a plate of
fruits de mer
and a carafe of the local house white, and tucked in. Then he thought he liked the look of the cold
langouste
at the next table and ordered one. And then he thought we really should share a plate of the famous Arcachon oysters, a local specialty. I picked at the oysters, watched the gulls circle just over the promenade and the little children and nannies, and young couples with active dogs, and an old town drunk in a traditional French striped sailor's jersey and baggy blue trousers who commented on the parade of people to himself from his parkside bench.

We had coffee and paid the bill.

“Time to push on,” I said.

“Leave? Already? How far is it to Cap Breton? Aren't you tired from all that riding?” Griggs asked.

We had made all of four or five miles I believe, and this was some of the easiest bicycle territory I had experienced, flat lowlands through sheltering pines that blocked the wind. I persuaded my companion to ride on.

But when he arose from his repast he was stiff and hobbling.

“Work it out, Griggsy,” I said, jokingly. When we were in school together we had a coach from Alabama who would always say that. Some poor child would be writhing on the field of battle with a sprained ankle or a broken leg, and he would tell him to get up and “work it out.”

“No, this is serious,” Griggs said. “I am grievously wounded.”

“I mean it, just keep moving, it'll get better, same thing happened to me when I started out.”

Bravely he hobbled to his bike and mounted up, only to begin shouting again.

“What is it now?” I asked.

“My poor arse.”

“Work it out,” I said.

He didn't laugh this time.

But he was a brave soul, old Griggs. Injuries notwithstanding he pedaled on, albeit far behind. I would ride ahead, stop, look back, and there he'd be, plodding along willingly. Against my recommendations, he was dressed in a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep the sun away, but, as I told him it would, the wind kept catching it and so he tied it on with one of his string undershirts which he knotted beneath his chin. He wore his white flannels and had started out in a tennis sweater, which he had now stripped off and tied around his waist. As he pedaled along, his collared shirt came untucked and the shirttails flapped in the breeze so that what appeared behind me was a wide white seabirdlike figure. Glancing back at him, as he struggled on the road behind me, Sancho Panza came to mind, save that Griggsy fancied himself a member of the nobility, an old knight in the style of Don Quixote.

“Slow down, for Christ's sake,” he said at one point when he caught up to me.

I was riding at about half my normal speed.

In time, riding on like this, stopping often to take a little something, we reached the Cap Breton and the town of Hossegor by nightfall. Here we found a small hotel and looked around for dinner. Griggs was somewhat less ambitious about eating now; he reviewed the menu and selected a plate of baked small fishes in garlic sauce, which he savored with a good Bordeaux, followed by another good Bordeaux from a different vineyard. The wine refreshed him and he and the waiter got into a discussion of good vintages and bad winters and rainy springs and the noble rot and the problems with getting people to pick the grapes when the right time comes. Then he got into a fish discussion, and then he ordered a dessert and cognac and a coffee, and then another cognac, and then he went so far as to suggest we take a stroll along the beach. Then he stood up. He gave a cry and nearly crumpled to the floor.

Solicitous waiters rushed over.

“What is wrong with the Monsieur?” they wanted to know.

Griggs was leaning on the back of one of the chairs, moaning.

“It is nothing,” I said. “He's an old soldier. It's a war wound.”

“Which war?” they asked enthusiastically.

“Don't listen to him,” Griggs said.

We explained his predicament and they helped Griggs out of the restaurant, and slowly, he limped back to the hotel. Like an old man, he mounted the stairs step by step, holding onto the rail, fell into his bed in his clothes and promptly slept.

I lay awake wondering how to get out of this quandary.

The next morning over coffee Griggs solved it for me.

“I say,” he began. “I'm not in the shape I used to be, as you can tell.”

“Well such is life,” I said. “Time is marching on.”

“No I mean it. I can hardly walk. Much less pedal. My arse. You wouldn't believe it.”

“I would,” I said.

“Listen. I've a thought. You're interested in the old pilgrim route to Santiago that goes through the Pas de Roland are you not? Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“Well it's steep, you know, very steep. Precipitous. I've driven through there. Rough country. High hills.”

“I know. I've read about it.”

“No place for a cyclist. Hills like cliffs. Narrow roads. Sheep flocks appearing out of nowhere. You'll be killed. Probably a lot of bandits and there are said to be bears in the region.”

There were in fact bears in the area. But no bandits as far as I knew.

“Look, I don't think I can go on with this bicycle thing. I've wounded myself, I'm afraid. Overdone it. There's a little train line back to St.-Jean-de-Luz. I'll take the train back, get the car, pick you up, and we can push on into the hills.”

I had thought earlier about taking that route. I wanted to pick up the old medieval pilgrim route that led to Santiago de Compostela and follow it northward wherever I could, but I knew about the steep hills, and since I was falling behind on my schedule as far as the summer solstice was concerned, I had planned to go up to Bordeaux on the coast; furthermore, it was southeast of where we now were—the wrong direction.

“I'll drop you at the base of the Pyrénées, in the foothills,” Griggs said, “easier riding. Mainly, I know a good little restaurant in the town of St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port where we can have a fine meal. Very good cheese there. Sheep cheese.”

I dreaded driving with Griggs, as much as he dreaded riding with me. In the end I cut a deal.

“I'll do it on one condition.”

“What's that?”

“Let me do the driving in the mountains.”

That settled, I packed my things and began immediately on the return journey while Griggs walked and rode over to the nearest station to find a train. We agreed to meet back at the hotel where we had stayed the previous night.

All over southern France there are ancient pilgrim routes that lead out to the cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela. Some pilgrims came down on an inland route from Paris, specifically from the old Place Saint Jacques and thence along the Rue St. Jacques, which is still there today. From Paris they flowed south to Orléans, then Tours, Poitiers, and on to Bordeaux, where they climbed the foothills to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Others meandered south from Bourges, through Nevers to Limoges and Périgueux. Some pilgrims came south by sea from England and the north of France, landed at Bordeaux, and headed south from there. Some flowed across southern France through Provence from Italy, or drifted down from the high mountain town of Le Puy. Others came north from Madrid, or arrived by sea at the port of San Sebastián. The land routes swirled like a funnel all across southern France, narrowed down, and ran the Pyrénées at Roncesvalles, the Pas de Roland, the site of the great epic battle recounted in the Chason de Roland, and then entered Spain and converged at Puente la Reina. From here they turned west and flowed out in various tracks to the shrine.