I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (26 page)

Today I listened to Renée Fleming on my iPod sing Schubert lieder for the rest of my walk. I’m so surrounded by Germans on the Camino I thought I might as well go all in and listen to their music. I kept playing “Gretchen am Spinnrade” several times in a row. Though it was rather incongruous to be listening to a lied about Faust on such a spiritual trek, there was something about the hypnotic constancy of the “spinning wheel” piano accompaniment, which Schubert so brilliantly acknowledges in his musical interpretation of Goethe’s words, that mirrors the hypnotic constancy that my walking day in and day out physically provides as it accompanies this spiritual quest. I haven’t sold my soul, however. I’ve just misplaced it. After twenty days now on the Camino I am still trying to find it.

I kept thinking of Rodger’s death all day.

And the name of that town where he chose to die.

*   *   *

I am writing this in my lovely hotel room in Astorga. The loveliest really of the trek so far. A boutique hotel called Casa de Tepa. It reminds me of Soniat House, where I stay in New Orleans and where I lay awake the night after I read about the Camino in
The New York Times
and decided to come here and attempt this spiritual journey I’m now on. I even invited Marge and Judy and Ginny and Coral over for gin and tonics earlier. The place even has an “honor” bar like Soniat House does. They practically swooned at how nice it is. Of course, it cost me fifty bucks to fete them with liquor, but it was worth it to share some time with them in comfort, especially after my long thirty-two-kilometer day.

Time for sleep. I had vodka, not gin. My eyes are about to close. Hope I’m not hungover tomorrow.

5/21/09

I woke up this morning after three weeks of walking and began to hate the Camino. I am
not
a Catholic. Why am I putting myself through this on such a Catholic pilgrimage? All day long I ruminated on how much I hate the Catholic Church. The pedophile scandal and the cover-up of all the molestation of girls and boys by priests. The vulgar and obscene wealth of the church. The pornographic idolatry of violence and suffering in its statuary. The misogynistic male hierarchy. And no, this is not just a hangover from last night.

The day was dusty and hot and the more I walked in its dusty heat the angrier I got. And the angrier I got the more I began to get a splitting headache in the blinding sun from the gestureless sky. Was this part of my spiritual enlightenment—having to burn away some of this anger? Confront it. Is the anger really about Catholicism? Or were my ranting thoughts about Catholicism a way to exorcise some deeper anger in me?

I finally headed up into a lovely little mountain village at the end of the day. As I neared it I had to walk by a long fence by a field on which other pilgrims had stuck crosses made from sticks, broken bits of limbs, twigs. Hundreds and hundreds of crude crosses greeted me and my cruder anger. I succumbed, however, and made a cross myself and put it on the fence. The path by the fence was shaded and that calmed me as much as the sight of all those crosses after walking in that blazing sun all day.

As I entered the village there was chanting coming from an ancient little church. Were there really monks in there chanting, I wondered, or was it a tape? I went inside. The sanctuary itself was behind bars as if it were being jailed. The gate into it was locked. But the stone interior of the vestibule area was about twenty degrees cooler than the temperature outside. I sat on a stairwell in the back and listened to the chanting. I removed my boots and socks and put my feet on the stone floor. The coolness was just the comfort I was seeking. If it felt that good on my feet I wondered what it would feel like on my forehead, since my head was still aching. I knelt on the floor and put my face down on the stones. It was as if the whole day—the heat, my headache, my anger at the Catholic Church—had conspired to get me to that one moment: prostrate in a Catholic church accompanied by the chanting of unseen monks. God does have a sense of irony. All anger left me. All discomfort. I stayed facedown for several minutes. I decided since I was already down there I should pray. I asked for forgiveness for my anger. I asked to face the truth about myself or face the consequences.

5/22/09

Got up before sunrise to walk farther up into the mountains on this part of the Camino. Stopped off at a little hostel on the mountainside where I saw Toby and Teresa and Aurelia. They had stayed there the night before. I walked with them to the highest point of the Camino, where you place a rock at the foot of a gigantic wooden cross. Had my picture taken there. Sublime moment. But then I was brought quickly back to earth when I walked behind the outhouse structure there to pee, since there was a line and I saw that people had actually shit back there as well. Yet maybe that’s what the cross is all about: the coming to terms with the most base of human conditions. Perhaps it comes down to that. The difference between man and God is that God doesn’t have to take a shit.

*   *   *

The walk today up along the mountainside was the most beautiful yet. “The poetry of the earth is never dead,” Keats wrote. But as I descended the mountains into Ponferrada—the last major town before I reach Santiago—my knees and feet began to kill me again. The pain was brutal.

But that is what is so sacred about the Camino. It is not just the spiritual aspect of it; it is also sacred in its brutality. It can break you down and make you call on reserves of strength you never knew you had. I have spoken about this aspect with some of my fellow pilgrims. It is hard to describe to others what we are going through, hard to put it down in words. For the rest of my life when I meet someone who has walked this arduous journey I will instantly feel a kinship with them. I will not only be aware of a kind of spiritual light in their eyes but also know that they will possess the shared knowledge in their bodies of how brutal the experience could be at times. Perhaps that’s what it will be like to arrive in heaven—wherever, whatever, heaven is. We will look into the eyes of whoever it is who greets us and recognize that same spiritual light as well as share in the recognition of how brutal the human experience we just left behind can be. The brutality will live on as memory. The spiritual light will be what survives. Is that how I will feel about the Camino once I finish it? Will I finish it?

A man broke his leg today descending the mountain into Ponferrada. The other day another man died of a coronary right on the path in front of his wife. I told burly Mary about it and she said, “What a lovely way to die, don’t you think? Right on the path where so many pilgrims for thousands of years have walked seeking spiritual enlightenment. That man’s soul must have been so happy at that moment.”

I had not thought of it in that way. I only thought how brutal it was for the wife to witness her husband’s death.

*   *   *

I am getting quite tan from walking in the sun for the last three weeks. The creepy Swiss guy from a few nights back who was staring at me when I woke myself up by talking in my sleep passed me on the path as I was hobbling down the mountain to Ponferrada. “You’re getting too dark,” he said. “You look like a nigger.”

I had imagined having lots of experiences on the Camino, but being called a “nigger” by a creep from Switzerland was not one of them. The
n
word knows no boundaries. Another form of brutality.

5/23/09

I am about to turn out the light and close my eyes and think of my Methodist mother. I long to see her standing in the doorway on that snowy night before she turned around and slid into bed with my father and Chico and Coco and me. But right now I’m staring out my window at the rain—not snow—that has begun to fall and thinking instead of her shadowy presence behind the shower curtain when she caught me staring at her.

I reach in my pocket and palm the two smooth black pebbles I took from the
M
in “MAMA” and the
D
in “DADDY” back on the Camino that I’ve been carrying with me ever since. I put them on the desk here next to this journal. They stare up at me as if fossilized pupils.

I hum “The Church’s One Foundation,” which I remember singing from the Cokesbury hymnal that first Methodist church service I attended with my mother. “The Church’s One Foundation.” I suddenly remember the words and am singing them as I write them here, “Is Jesus Christ her Lord; / She is his new creation, / By water and the word: / From heaven he came and sought her / To be his holy bride; / With his own blood he bought her, / And for her life he died.”

I touch the staring pebbles.

The rain reminds me of its presence.

My mother’s shadowy one moves about the room.

5/24/09

Only seven more days to go until I reach Santiago if everything goes well and my knees and feet hold up. No more blisters to speak of since I bought the new pair of hiking shoes. My heavy mountain-climbing boots tied onto the backpack have been weighing me down as they knock about behind me while I trudge along. I sat staring at the boots in the room at my inn this morning and decided to leave them there. It was very hard to let them go. They have been like talismans to me ever since I made the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. But I did. I let them go.

5/25/09

I am now sitting in a ratty little hotel room in Samos with a bathroom down the hall from which I just hobbled after soaking in a tub for a bit. I walked forty-two kilometers today and my right ankle is now twice the size of my left one. I hope with just a week to go I haven’t injured myself in such a way that I now won’t make it all the way to Santiago. I was shocked when I took off my socks and shoes and saw the swelling. I have it propped up now as I write this and look out my window at the ancient fortress-like monastery here in Samos just across the street. Another pilgrim told me it is the oldest monastery in Spain.

I ate dinner by myself downstairs here tonight in the hotel’s restaurant. It was hard to concentrate on the food with my ankle killing me so. I have never felt so tired. So alone. Staring at the Samos monastery across the way, I wonder how many monks through the ages suffered through such fatigue, such loneliness, such pain. Is this, finally, how a monk feels, Mary?

5/26/09

After the hard day I had yesterday I only walked fourteen kilometers today and checked into a hotel in Sarria. I am only one hundred kilmoters from Santiago now.

I just checked my e-mails and found one from my sister. I’ve been sending lots of e-mails to her and my brother as I’ve walked the path. I told her in my last one how I would have never guessed it would have been I out of the three of us who would have been the one to climb Mount Kilimanjaro or walk all the way across Spain on a spiritual pilgrimage. In the e-mail she sent me back she wrote: “The only reason we wouldn’t have picked you to be the one to do this back then would have been because of those ‘weak spells.’” That made me smile remembering how when we’d go out to play or shoot some hoops in our backyard after we ate a meal my blood sugar would become imbalanced and I’d get light-headed and kind of dizzy and complain, “I’m having a weak spell,” and go inside and have either some juice or my favorite remedy, a glass of ice-cold water while I sucked on some peppermint candy. It all seems so long ago, those days when I was such a little Mississippi sissy complaining of my weakness instead of my ankles and feet and knees.

“Guess you’ve showed those ‘spells’ now!” my sister continued in her e-mail. “Reminds me of having fun growing up with my two brothers. I was telling a friend the other day about our bonding time growing up being over the kitchen sink. Washing and drying dishes and ‘puttin’ up.’ I can feel it like it was yesterday and when I stop to conjure it all the only emotion that comes with it is laughter. So those must have been some fun times … laughter … how could we have come from the same address since you so often say how sad your own childhood was? I feel your life changing now though and you will never be the same. I hope you are not only finding some happiness there on the Camino but also real joy. Because joy is much deeper than happiness and not dependent on external conditions.”

5/27/09

Such a lovely walk into Portomarín today on a long bridge over the Mino River. A pilgrim walking beside me pointed at the town sitting up on the hillside and told me it is hard to tell that it is only about forty years old. He then pointed down at the river rushing beneath the bridge and, reading from his guidebook, told me that the original village lies underwater beneath the Mino because when it was dammed by a reservoir upstream it flooded the place. The villagers dismantled many of the most ancient and sacred buildings submerged under the water and rebuilt them original stone by original stone up on the hillside. Still with his nose in his guidebook and not really seeing the beautiful hillside village before us, he said to be sure to check out the Romanesque church of San Pedro and the monumental church fortress of San Nicolás. Some of the old medieval palaces were placed in the main square of the new town, he continued, and the medieval bridge stayed underwater. All that remains of the medieval structure is the base and one of its arches at the entrance of the new bridge we were almost across by the time he finished his reading and little tutorial.

I am now at a bar on the banks of the Mino. I’ve come over to a table by myself to write a bit in my journal I brought here with me and stare at the river down below and think about how far I’ve come from the one named Mississippi back in America. In fact, I’d never even heard of the Mino before I arrived here today and the pilgrim with the guidebook told me of its history. I am staring down into the water and imagining the submerged village that I was told about. I think of the churches that were rebuilt stone by retrieved stone up here on the hillside. I think of my own life submerged in my memories that keep flooding back at me during my walk each day—my brother and sister and Chico and Coco and countless movie stars’ mouths moving in conversation and crystal meth pipes and Howard Moss and Henry Geldzahler and my HIV status and the HIV-negative person I will never be again and Andy Warhol and Mount Kilimanjaro and so many cocks and so many asses of so many strangers and Harry Potter and Daniel Radcliffe and the sweet kid I’ve mentored and that sweet kid I once was myself who watched his father make flattened
M
s fly and who held his mother’s hand that first time he walked into a Methodist church and now writes of himself in the third person—and how he is (how I am) trying to rebuild my life stone by retrieved stone. I look down at the river and wonder about all that has been left submerged.