Hobo Road

He is at least 45 years old, but he is a homeless child. He´s walking without high-tech, ultralite backpacks or hiking staffs, or even shoes that fit. He´s got no money. He speaks only Portuguese. He asked for children´s books, and pored over the pictures. I had to put his name in the register for him, as he cannot write. He assembled the toy train and made choo-choo sounds along the floor. He is from Braga, Portugal, he said. He is walking the camino to Lourdes, alone.

He is José, pronounced "Cho-say," the Portuguese way. He was a high-maintenance pilgrim. He never stopped talking, and we only understood some of what he said. He needed things -- a razor, so he could  shave. A towel. He needed a t-shirt. When we offered to launder his things, he overloaded the machine with his sleeping bag, coat, flannel shirt, pajama bottoms. I split the laundry into two loads and he panicked, thinking I was taking away his belongings. 

He ate voraciously. He had eaten nothing but cookies for the past two days.

He is walking the camino backward, west to east. His shoulders sagged under the straps of his cheap sports bag, his hands weighed down by plastic shopping bags. He was small and feral. Most of his teeth were  gone. He needed a haircut.

He didn´t look like a pilgrim, but deep inside his bag he had a valid pilgrim credential. He can stay in pilgrim shelters, but most of them charge a nominal fee. If he does not have even that, he sleeps wherever he can find a space out of the rain.

His fellow pilgrims do not always find him worthy company. A week or so ago, José rolled into a town near Astorga with his sneakers and shopping bags, and stepped up to register at the pay-by-donation pilgrim shelter. A couple stopped him at the door. Where were his hiking boots, his proper backpack? they asked. Why was he walking the wrong way? He was a bum, a fake. This was a place for real pilgrims only. He´d have to move along.

And so he did. He slept in the churchyard. It was not so bad, he said. 

"He´s a bum," one of the neighbors said when José showed up at the after-Mass Vermut on Sunday, asking for a place to stay. "With a pilgrim hostel and an albergue here now, the pilgrims aren´t going to make it to your house. They´re going to send you the bums. Bums and freeloaders."

José was a bum, and so was Jan, a ragged Czech who stayed last week. They are homeless and jobless, wandering the road because there is no other place for them. Given an opportunity, they ask for what they need (Wily Antonio, another Portuguese drifter, shows up here every few months with a wish list!). If nobody gives them food and a bed for the night, they sleep outdoors and eat meals of cheap biscuits. They are poor in an honest, matter-of-fact way.

The Camino de Santiago has for centuries been a hobo road, full of drifters and hustlers. Today it´s no different. Alongside the bums are the freeloaders, pilgrims suffering a different kind of poverty -- a poverty of spirit.

Freeloaders have enough money to vacation for weeks at a time, but they gleefully consume resources designed for people who can´t afford anything else. Freeloaders take up the "donativo" bunks in the pilgrim shelter because their friends are staying there, because albergues are "integral to my camino experience." Paying little or nothing for their bed, they can spend the savings elsewhere. They sip beers at their café tables and discuss what makes an Authentic Pilgrim: Walking every step of the way. Prayers. Sacrificing personal comfort and hygiene by sleeping in scruffy pilgrim beds. 

Meantime, on the porch of the church, the bums bed down on the benches.