Os Da La Bienvenido: A Look Back

The knife plunged through the crispy top layer of pastry, but hung itself up in the gooey honey leaves deeper down. It wasn´t a good knife, but it had come with the house. The light was weak and yellow, even though the the chrome and mirrors behind the black-lacquer bar did their best to multiply the shine back into the salon.

This was our “company room,” the one part of the old barn-turned-dwelling that didn´t have straw or sticks or adobe showing somewhere. The owners had left here a vast boardroom table, twelve faux Louis XVI chairs upholstered in scarlet brocade, and a wall-sized glass-fronted cabinet loaded with schoolbooks, painted plaster geisha girls, and gift-shop souvenirs from a dozen Spanish vacation spots. But best of all, glistening in the near corner, was The Bar. It was shiny as a patent leather shoe, with black faux-leather pads along the edges, and gold-tone chrome trim, with two matching stools like check-marks you could perch on. All this, too, had been thrown in for the price of the house. When you sank the two bare wires into the matching little holes in the wall, the corner glowed with Light Fantastic.

It was real polished wood, Las Vegas Luxe. Someone paid a fortune for it. And somehow it ended up here, in a semi-abandoned farmhouse in Moratinos. It gave the best light in the place, perfect for hacking apart pastries. I wasn´t sure I had enough. I´d bought a dozen. I wasn´t expecting any more guests than that, but I wanted to be sure. So I halved them into 24. The leftovers we could eat ourselves, later on, instead of cooking dinner.

Cooking was a challenge still, in the little summer kitchen. The cooktop was in there, but the oven was in the pantry. We could not switch on the lights in the main house while the oven was turned on. It was kind of fun, discovering what worked, and how to work around what didn´t. It wouldn´t be too long before the place was overhauled, and our lives returned to a convenient kind of normal. Til then, it was an adventure. Like camping, but in your own place.

An adventure, like today. Two weeks after moving in, this was our first social event, our first stab at hosting anything at home. It was a house-warming.

I tried to go about it politely. I´d asked Julia, our first Moratinos friend, what we´d need to do to have the house blessed, and how many people we might expect to turn out. It was a strange question, evidently. Julia had to ponder it for a minute.

“I´ll tell Don Santiago, and he´ll stop by on a Sunday afternoon, after he´s done all his Masses, after he´s had his siesta. It takes maybe ten minutes. Just you, just your family. Private. And you don´t need to give him any money, you know.”

“But where I come from, a house blessing is a big event. Everyone in the neighborhood is invited,” I told her. “Moratinos isn´t very big. I´d like the whole town to come.”

“Everybody?” she said. “All those people, in your house, at one time?”

“It´s an American thing,” I said. She nodded. I could tell she wasn´t sure about this, but she also was enjoying herself.

And so Julia spread the word amongst the neighbors. It was a strange invitation. Julia warned me not to expect too much. Moratinos had never had an “English party” before, and innovations don´t happen too often around here, especially in October. Some people might want to wait and see first, she said.

Sunday came, and twelve people went to Mass. Don Santiago announced the 4 p.m. Event from the pulpit. We all went home. I made the 24 hojaldre bites, and set up some orujo and vermouth for the men. (Vermouth is THE Sunday after-Mass drink here, but only for males.) I put out some lemonade and fizzy water for the ladies. I put on the only nice outfit I could find. Paddy swept the brick pavers in the patio.

It started to rain. I poured myself an un-ladylike vermouth, to calm my nerves. What if only Milagros and Julia showed up? What if everyone decided to stick with tradition, and leave us to our “private family affair?” We´d look so foolish if no one showed up. What would I tell people, when they asked about the party?

And at 3:45 p.m., my nightmare came true. The bell tolled in the church tower, over and over. My heart dropped into my stomach. It wasn´t time for a Mass. When the bell rings outside the normal hours, something is wrong – someone has died, a house is on fire, help is needed right away. Paddy went down to the church to see what was going on. I grabbed some plastic wrap to cover up the cakes. Our party wasn´t going to happen after all. It didn´t much matter, I told myself as I slipped my shoes on and looked round for my jacket. What´s a housewarming, if someone´s died?

The tolling stopped. The rain let up. I scratched the dog´s head and let a few moments tick by in silence. Paddy didn´t come back. So I went to see for myself, down the sidewalk, out the front gate, down the driveway to Calle Ontanon, my ears cocked for shouts or sirens, my eyes open for smoke plumes on the horizon. All I could hear was someone singing.

“Vamos caminando,” they sang, “juntos una iglesia”... I turned the corner and looked down the street to the church. And coming toward me was Moratinos, in full religious procession. Up front was Paco, holding aloft the town crucifix. Behind him, robes flapping, came smiling Don Santiago. Following behind, singing in several keys, was just about everyone we knew, and some faces I´d never seen before. They were dressed in their Sunday clothes. They were coming to our house.

I held open the front gate, held back the dog as they streamed up the steps and into the patio, what seemed like a vast crowd. They circled round our cleaned-up patio, with Don Santiago in the place of honor under the ivy arch. Paco stood to one side with the cross. Modesto flanked him to the right, with the holy water in its ceremonial bucket.

This may have been a strange event, but the padre never missed a beat. He greeted us all, said the holy words written in his book, then took the wand from the water-bucket and sprinkled us all in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Thunder grumbled. Modesto, a poet of local note, pulled a folded sheet from his suit-jacket. He´d composed a few verses for the event, he said. And in the traditional Castilian rhymed couplets of the region, he read out a moving tribute to polite applause.

Milagros stepped up and filled my arms with long stems of iris. She kissed both my cheeks. “I´m Miss Spain!” I said, starting to cry a little. The tears made everyone smile and giggle.

Esteban then handed a gift-wrapped package to Patrick. “Open it now,” he said. “It´s from all of us.” Inside was a blue leather presentation box. And inside that, a splendid silver plaque, engraved with a formal greeting:

“Patri y Rebeca, Moratinos Os Da La Bienvenido. Octubre 2006.”
("Patrick and Rebekah, Moratinos Bids You Welcome. October 2006.")

The plaque is kept now in our living room, where everyone can see it. I think it may be my favorite possession.

Oct. 2006 House blessing: Photo from Modesto´s blog

The plumber we´d been waiting for since Thursday arrived just then, at last. Modesto handed him a camera and made him the Event Photographer.

With the formalities finished and the rain starting up again, everyone moved into the salon, the cakes, Cokes, vermouths. They climbed up the concrete steps and bumped their heads on the low upstairs ceilings, which showered them with dust. They lifted the lid and peered down the well. They told of the people who´d lived here last, the little girls grown and gone to live in Burgos, their beautiful mother whose heart was weak, their father´s skilful basket-weaving and rush-caning, the good mules he raised in the corral out back. (We brought out a basket and a woven mat we´d found in the barn. The admiration and acclaim at their durable beauty turned to clucked tongues and shaken heads – who could have left these treasures behind for strangers to find?)

None of the comments was overly harsh. The culprits, after all, were cousins, nieces, aunts of the commentators. "You forget what´s in your barn. You see it every day until you don´t see it any more,” Julia said. “And which of us has been inside these walls in the last 20 years?”

Everyone looked at one another. It dawned on me that some of them came out of sheer curiosity – an opportunity to look around a house that was closed to them since they were children. Castilian homes are jealously guarded preserves, after all. You can be intimate friends with someone for years, and never see the inside his house.

And this house hadn´t been inhabited year-round since 1982. The woman who sold it came here only one or two weekends per year, to harvest her husband´s fruit orchard and to dance at the town fiesta. The place needed maintaining, and she´d put things off too long. If she didn´t sell it quick, it was going to start costing real money.

The visitors gave us lots of advice: Cut down the trees, they said. Get rid of those rose bushes. Have the water in the well tested. Get some chicken-wire and concrete render on those outer walls, where the wind hits – winter is coming, and those walls are in bad shape. Run an electric line here, and plumbing there. Attach a hose to the well here, and run it through the hallway of the house and out the back window, and voila! You irrigate the little garden out back!

You can use my ladders, my cement mixer, my electrical circuit-tester, my shovel, they said.

You can plant oats out here, and use this part for grazing. The barn will hold 40 sheep, and two cows can live in that storage room there. Why is this bar in here? Did you bring it with you from America?

It all was overwhelming, exhausting. In less than an hour they´d drunk the vermouth and eaten the cakes, washed up the dishes, said their goodbyes, and put to rest all the warnings we´d heard about the stony, cold shoulder these Castilian people would turn to us, the outsiders.

Rain came down in earnest. We put the lid back on the well, and disconnected the glowing chromium bar-lights. We walked back up the sidewalk into the main house, up the stairs, and down the narrow hallway to our cavelike bedroom.

In the half light we grinned at one another. They liked us!

Manure Allure

WARNING: If you are of a fastidious turn of mind, you might want to skip this one. It´s kind of icky. (And you might want to ask yourself what you´re doing here in the first place.)

This one´s about poo, doo-doo, manure -- an essential part of life out here on the plains.

The air of Moratinos today is heavy with the aroma of well-seasoned manure, the rich, black layered remains of months of cow, sheep, and pig living. Farmers let the stuff accumulate on the floors of their folds and barns and yards for a while, then they scrape it up and heap it into mounds. It sits there and moulders until early September. That is a good thing. Fresh patties are too strong for most plants to withstand, but manure, the long-term vintage kind, mellows into a moveable, malleable substance that is very very good for gardens, plants, and fields.

In a perfect world, farmers have too much manure on their hands. They´re happy to have small-time gardeners like me come and haul away however much doo we can move. And back in the day, when Julia and Paquito and Milagros kept dairy cows, and Justi and Oliva kept a big herd of sheep, the manure wealth was a community treasure. Cattle and mules grazed among the trees of what is now the plaza mayor. Their leavings lay where they landed, free pickings for anyone whose roses were fading. Gardens in Moratinos grew lush and green.

Those days are gone, along with those magnificent manure-producing beasts. The plaza is paved-over, and the only critters leaving messes there now are the dog and pilgrim kind. Only the Segundino family keeps pigs these days, and all their stable-gleanings go straight onto their large and lovely garden. The rest of us keep chickens, but their litter only goes so far. (Dog and cat crap are useless for growing things in.) 

So in September, when it´s time to spread manure, what does one do for poo?

Three kilometers up the road in Terradillos is a full-size animal farm, with a focus on dairy cows. The place maintains magnificent mountains of manure out back, and this time of year the dairyman makes manure-runs up and down the N120, delivering richness to the fields of all his friends and relations. When he´s done, he mixes up what is left with water, and sprays it onto his feed-crop fields using a huge tanker truck. It makes for a fragrant few days, especially when he´s using pig shit. When the wind shifts from the east it makes your eyes water.

Two years ago I established a vegetable garden in the blasted adobe-clay oven that is our back yard. That kind of enterprise requires generous helpings of manure. The dairy man was the first person Patrick spoke to (such negotiations are the exclusive province of men). He didn´t know us. He said no, he needed all his poop for his own fields. We then tracked down all four of the shepherds between here and Terradillos, and all four said their sheep-droppings go only to family. There aren´t any big pig sheds around here. So we newcomers were, as they say, shit outta luck.

But next door, Justi´s barn was newly empty of sheep. He´d sold off the last of his herd, and wanted to use their barn to store his tractors. He was pouring a new concrete floor. Which meant scraping level many years of sheep leavings. It wasn´t high quality, he told me, but he kindly carried over two tractor-bucketloads and dumped them outside our back gate. We kept a donkey for a three-week period about then, too, and with her generous contributions our little garden was golden.

For a while. Now, alas, the shit´s running short.

I see the tractor-loads of dairy dung rolling past, I see the hillocks of black earth standing in the farmers´ fields, and I am seized with envy. When we take the dogs out on the back roads for their evening rambles, I notice where the farmers have dumped years´ worth of waste straw and lesser-quality stable litter. I am not picky. I don´t need the pure stuff. Any doo will do.

I am not ready, not yet, to sneak out and rob the poop-piles of strangers. I shiver to think what the neighbors would say if I was spotted on a midnight manure maneuver. What would I say if the rightful owner roared up, tractor headlights ablaze, and caught me black-handed? What charge would a doo-rustler face in a Court of Law?

There is an element of justice at play here. All those times I told people "don´t give me your shit." "Get this crap outta here..." They haunt me. Now that I need some, I can´t get crap for ready money. 

Before I blacken my good name I must exhaust all other options. Last night, with young Juli at my side, I spoke to our neighbor Eduardo. I am told the dairyman in Terradillos is Edu´s cousin. Maybe he can fix up something. Maybe not. It´s kind-of late now, he told me -- that stage of the manure handling is just about done. I may have missed my chance.

I haven´t heard anything today. No truckload of dung has magically appeared at the back gate.

Over in the Promised Land great mounds of fragrant black manure stand waiting to be plowed into the earth. I walked past them this morning with the dogs, who marveled in the wondrous, complex perfume.

If I must, I will drive 50 kilometers to the garden center and buy a carload of pre-composted manure. It will be neatly bagged, I can move it easily and put it exactly where I want it, when I want to. That would be the obvious solution, certainly the easiest if not the cheapest.

But something in me knows the local stuff is best. I want to be able to look those Jersey girls in their liquid black eyes and say "thank you."

Thank you, cowgirls, for giving me your crap.

She Ain´t Heavy, She´s My Sister

They have nice hands and neat, clean faces. They have almost 40 years of combined service between them. They´re walking the Camino under a special dispensation, to pray for their community, which is going through a crisis. They wear their gray and white habits under their backpacks.

They are Sister Mary Elizabeth and Sister Miriam, from the contemplative Community of St. John in France. They started walking from there several weeks ago, following a monastic pilgrim tradition of seeking shelter at convents, monasteries, and parish houses all along the Way. (Public albergues, an innovation aimed at the latest upsurge of tourism, they usually leave for secular pilgrims.)

But like the "donativo" and the "Casa de Acogida" traditions of old, the monastic hospitality concept is evidently dying out. As harmless and decent as these two sisters are, they are sleeping outdoors more and more. They say they really don´t mind, that dossing down in doorways is part of the adventure.

But c´mon. A little nun pilgrim asks if she can sleep in your spare room tonight. Do you tell her to hit the bricks? 

Tons of people do, for whatever reason. Even fellow nuns do. I asked Miriam to tell me some tales. In a sunny and sweet way, she narrated a hair-raising account of repeat rejection.

In Navarette the sisters found no convent, so they went to the public albergue. There were two beds available. They were the only two women in the place, plunked down in a roomful of bicycle boys fragrant with pub-fumes.

"I couldn´t do it. I know what Providence is. I am grateful for the albergues and the volunteers. But I just couldn´t stay there," Miriam said.

Some would say these nuns are too high-strung and demanding, that the Camino is meant for flexible people willing to take what´s offered. But these two are already flexed right to the breaking point. They´ve been inside their convent walls, in silence and prayer, for decades. Their camino is an extraordinary change from the close-knit, exclusively feminine world they inhabit. A pack of bikers is tough enough for any modern woman to cope with, much less a vowed religious. (Although when I consider it, a vowed nun is not so different from a camino biker. Both groups tend to run in gender-specific packs and wear matching uniforms. The nuns wear loose gray and white habits; the bikers stuff themselves into Spandex sheaths spangled with lurid advertisements. Both fashion statements would seem to reinforce celibacy.) 

Back in Navarrete the sisters packed up and headed for the church. An old man outside told them they were welcome at his house, to come over after the 8 p.m. Mass. Which they did. And when they arrived, the old man´s son met them at the door.

He told them to go away, that they couldn´t stay there.

It was after 9 p.m., too late to find anywhere else. The sisters walked out of town, found a soft spot in a vineyard, and slept under the stars.

In Burgos the sisters met with the superiors of three different religious congregations. They toured the grounds, had tea and biscuits, were asked to pray that the aging orders would receive more young vocations. And then they were told "good luck" and "good bye." Offering rooms to wandering nuns isn´t part of some orders´ traditions. 

Still other places were wonderfully welcoming: the priest at Los Arcos found them a place to stay for three days while Sister Miriam recovered from a pulled muscle in her back. All down the camino, families opened their doors and their cupboards to house and feed them. Hospitaleros, bartenders, priests, and fellow nuns phoned around town to find spare rooms. Someone came through almost every time, they said.

They were on just such a search on Friday in Fromista, when I met them first. I was there with the guitarristas, and the two sisters sat quietly in the pews, their backpacks off to one side. One of them had a terrible cold. They waited to talk to the priest about where they might stay, but the priest was on vacation. Three local nuns sat in the pew behind theirs, but they didn´t have any guest quarters at their convent, they said. Instead, they directed the travelers to a cheap hostel in the square.

I would´ve brought home at least the sick one. (I hardly ever go to Fromista these days without bringing home some pilg who´s been hard done-by in that town. What´s up with that, Fromista?) But on Friday I went there with Fred. His car was packed full of guitars and guitarists, leaving no room for even the smallest nun. We gave the sisters some money so they could book into a pension or the cheap hostel. Then we rolled out of town.

Sister Miriam left her sniffling companion at the church and went to find shelter. The cheap hostel was full. The pilgrim albergue was full. The sun was going down. Sister Miriam sat down on a bench and thought about crying. A lady sat down next to her and said hello. The nuns spent that night in the gazebo behind the lady´s house. 

And yesterday they arrived here at the Peaceable, having walked all the way from Carrion de los Condes. The dogs adored them. Tim was smitten. Even the greyhounds ventured out to look them over. Soon our clothesline was hung with the various oddments of hand-made habits. They sang a pretty French song to bless our dinner. When they did the dinner dishes they also scrubbed down the countertops, swept the floor, and picked the black stuff out of the blender-blade attachments. In the wee hours I heard their voices speaking low in the salon, intoning together the night office of prayer.

They are sweet, joyful people. Having these ladies stay was like having fresh flowers delivered to the house.

So next time nuns ask to stay at your place, bring ´em home. They promise to pray for you when they leave the next day. And if their prayers are anywhere near as powerful as their charm, you´ve got nothing to lose.

(And even if nuns don´t figure into your daily round, you still can pray for them. I promised to ask all of you to pray for the Contemplative Community of St. John. So do that, OK?)

Antoine Update

Thank you, darling blogsters, for all the prayers and kind words.
We didn´t know how draining it was, just having a newly bereaved person in the same house. Trust me: you don´t have to have ever met the deceased, or know or care for or love the one who´s lost his partner. Just the rawness of pure loss generates its own mad horror, with or without words or language.

We really did not do much to help Antoine, the man mentioned in the last post. He only stayed here one day and one night. We treated him like just about any other pilgrim, only gave him a bit more affection and attention and food than the usual. On Sunday morning he was gone off to Palencia city with Esteban, where Antoine´s son and brother-in-law were to meet him at the mortuary.

Once the car pulled away, I let myself cry. I have no idea how funeral directors and morticians and hospice ministers handle the strain of that kind of shock and loss so near, so often. Paddy and I were pretty well exhausted by less than 24 hours!

We haven´t heard any more from them, but for one abortive attempt, in rapid French, for road directions. We don´t even know Antoine´s last name, much less his phone number or email. But Antoine has our contact info. I hope he will find this blog, because it´s important he know what people all over Spain and the world are doing for him, and for his wife. Her name is Marie-Claire, he told me. She was a great singer, a lover of Russian choral music. She belonged to a choral group in their hometown. It was a Russian Orthodox hymn the two of them sang at the Capilla de San Roque on Saturday morning, just before they set off from Finisterre. She didn´t sleep well the night before. She was tired. She should not have been driving...

Antoine said he´s not a Christian, but Saturday night he asked if he could spend some time in our parish church. Oliva gave us the keys. Milagros gave him a candle to light, and she made sure the place was locked up after he left. Someone asked Don Santiago to say Sunday´s Mass for the soul of Maria Clara, and the comfort of Antonio. And so he did.

Saturday night, Federico was at work, too. Fred´s an orthopedic doctor back in Wisconsin, but on Saturday morning he was at the accident scene in rural Palencia. He helped pull Marie-Claire from the car, and tried to stabilize her while waiting for the ambulance to come. He went over the checklist and signed the certificate once she was gone. He spent his afternoon with Antoine at the hospital afterward. He delivered the man to our house, then shifted back into his Camino Guitar Impresario Mode. He got a Massachusetts guitarist to Villacazar de Sirga just in time for the scheduled concert at Sta. Maria la Blanca, and had the evening´s Mass said for the sake of Marie-Claire and Antoine. (Fred is amazing.)

And once the blog below was written, my friends at the pilgrim office in Santiago de Compostela got to work. They looked up the pilgrim credentials, they hustled over to the cathedral office, and the Monolithic Catholic Institution everyone rails against worked like a well-oiled machine to celebrate a beautiful memorial Mass for "la peregrina Frances."

 Here´s the email I received from a member of the Archconfraternity late Monday evening:  

"Dear Rebekah,


Don Jenaro celebrated Mass at 7.30 this evening in a full Cathedral. There were seven priests including one bishop concelebrating, all from Ourense. The Mass was the Mass of St Jacob and therefore in the liturgical red vestments of the martyr. There was a magnificent floral decoration of Madonna lilies in front of the altar, as there had been a large society wedding at the Parador yesterday. The perfume filled the transept. Joaquin was at the organ and at his best, while the Cantor a young man of 30-35 yrs of age lead the assembled with a strong yet gentle voice. During the communion he sang very softly "Soul of My Saviour" to Joaquin's accompaniment. It was a peaceful and moving pilgrim's Mass.

Soul of my Savior sanctify my breast,Body of Christ, be thou my saving guest,
Blood of my Savior, bathe me in thy tide,
wash me with waters gushing from thy side.

Strength and protection may thy passion be,
O blessèd Jesus, hear and answer me;
deep in thy wounds, Lord, hide and shelter me,
so shall I never, never part from thee
 Guard and defend me from the foe malign,
in death's dread moments make me only thine;
call me and bid me come to thee on high
where I may praise thee with thy saints for ay.

We are with you in the suffering of this family. May they find consolation. "

Hey. With these kinds of benefits, maybe being an Archiconfradia member isn´t so bad!

Add to this all the prayers, thoughts, energy, and kindness offered near and far, and this dear departed pilgrim can (hopefully) marvel from her present position the decency of the pilgrim family in specific, and humanity in general. Meantime, don´t stop "holding up Antoine to the light." I think he´s going to need a lot of brightness in the coming days.

And pray too for Fred. He´s been through all kinds of hell, and he just keeps rolling along in that time-honored yet deadly American Way.

Oh, and just so you know:  This morning we found a 10-Euro bill in the donativo box. Apparently left by Antoine, even after washing-up the evening´s dishes and sweeping the kitchen, he still left a contribution toward his keep. A pilgrim indeed.

Dark Fiesta

It´s a bittersweet fiesta this year in Moratinos. We celebrated a new Santiago in our church, but the camino brought us brokenness, too.

Fiesta weekend in Moratinos is an anniversary to us. It was at the fiesta of 2006 we first saw the neglected farmhouse that became The Peaceable. Two years later, we opened up our house on fiesta weekend to welcome all the neighbors in to see what we´d done to the place. Last year, Moratinos fiesta was the debut performance of what´s become Camino Guitars, a concert series that´s going on now in three locations on the Camino Frances.

This year´s fiesta Mass was extra happy, because our little Santiago statue took his place up front at the Iglesia de Sto. Tomas. Throughout the week I biked back and forth between the church and Segundino´s carpentry shop, choosing the wood and drawing pictures and demonstrating just where on the church wall we might put the little shelf with the saint on it. Segundino delivered, above and beyond what I could have expected -- a triple-arched pear-wood perch that´s securely bolted onto the wall, with Santi himself safely bolted down, too. Milagros brought in two little vases with carnations, to stand on either side. I put a beeswax candle, (sent from California by Kathy) by his elbow, and he was good to (never) go. Don Gaspar duly sprinkled him during the big Mass. Santi himself looks a little embarrassed at all the fuss.

Milagros says this is the first new saint installed in a good thirty years. He makes her happy, she said, because a new saint means Moratinos is going to survive. You just don´t see new saints in dying towns. 

But while the procession and prayers and music were going on, something else happened nearby.

Out on the N120 two-lane, a French couple from Lyon were zipping down the highway. Inside the backpacks in the trunk were two fresh Compostela certificates, dated Thursday. They´d finished their long pilgrimage, a trip they´d done over several years, one two-week chunk at a time. At dawn they´d held hands in a little church in Finisterre and sang a hymn. They got into their rental car and headed east toward France and home.

Hours later, along the Meseta road between San Nicolas del Real Camino and Moratinos, their car veered off the road and rolled over. The woman died. The man was not hurt.

Fred (aka Federico the Mad Guitarrero), stayed with the man from the moment he came upon the accident scene -- it was Fred who brought the couples´ belongings here, and drove the man along behind the ambulance to the hospital. Fred made sure the man was checked-over by a doctor. Then they went to the Tanatorio, the mortuary, and got Antoine started on the mountain of paperwork and decision-making that awaits him. Then Fred brought him back to Moratinos.

The man, Antoine, is here with us now. He is numb, red-eyed, eating everything we put in front of him. He´s keeping busy, clearing out his backpack and his wife´s, wondering what to do with her shoes, her walking stick, the things she packed herself this morning, but will never touch again. He´s washed the dinner dishes, taken the pills the doctor gave him, scrubbed the black stains off his shirt and shorts. He´s made the telephone calls. He told his five-year-old granddaughter what happened, but she doesn´t understand, he said.
 
His son will come tomorrow from France.

The neighbors were upset that we didn´t tell them sooner what was going on -- but we didn´t know, not til much later, after the accident when Fred brought Antoine here. Nothing much can be done on the weekend. There was nowhere else for the man to go, at least nowhere a compassionate person would leave him. It´s good he´s been on the Camino, and still has his full pilgrim flexibility. None of us speaks French. He has little English. His Spanish is about as good as ours, so we struggle along.  We try to engage him when he´s open to that. But we know he´s got to be left alone, too.

The neighbors, once they knew, were eager to lend a hand.
Oliva and Justi gave us the church keys so Antoine could go there and pray.
Milagros and José came over to offer whatever help the man might need. Later on, Esteban showed up too. He  offered to drive Antoine to Palencia in the morning. Esteban knows his way around that city, and it´s an offer Antoine may have to accept -- he´s got to be at the Tanatorio at 11:30, and we don´t know which of the several funeral places to go to.
Antoine couldn´t decide yet.

I took Esteban to the gate. "I can´t imagine," he said. "To suffer such a loss, in a land that´s not your country. In another language. The poor man."

Over at the plaza the Mobile Disco tells us "Tonight´s gonna be a good night."
This year we won´t dance. We don´t want to leave Antoine alone.
He´s asleep now. I think he will be alright.
Tomorrow is on its way.

Alone Again, and Sweetly So

Tamara de Campos, one of many places visited last week

Not much posting to be done today. I´m afraid I´m fried.

The past week was a lot of fun, with Miguel Angel around in addition to the usual round of neighbors, pilgrims, and other summer adventures. Kim left us a few days ago, and is off to the east to live her soulful camino. We met Federico and the guitarristas and some Americans for a feast of roast suckling lamb in Villacazar de Sirga. Miguel´s sweetheart Nathalie came on Saturday, and we all went off for a day in the Cantabrian mountains, scoping-out yet another spectacular old pilgrim path -- this one called the Ruta Vadinsiense. Massive mountains, switchback narrow roads, a very near miss on one bend...

Our pilgrims included a Brazilian fashion model, and the return of Frederic, the angelic Popeye lookalike. He is now hard at work over at the Italian albergue, having joined the pack of strong men from Brescia who are bashing up the ground and installing a septic system. Una spends hours there, bullying the men and keeping the worksite free of field mice and stray sandwiches.

One of these days we´ll have an albergue in Moratinos, but it´s a slow business.

Around us the fields are checklists of straw-bales, or great mourning congregations of drying, blackened sunflowers. It´s the in-between time now, after the harvest, before the plowing and seeding, time for welding and repairing the machinery that bought the farmers these quiet days.

Today is extraordinarily quiet, if not silent. No one but us is here at The Peaceable. Miguel and Nathalie left yesterday, and Frederic went this morning to join the Bruno Crew. Not even Kim is about.

It´s been about five months since Patrick and I were alone in our house. It is delicious, I gotta say.

We went to Sahagun this morning. I got a haircut, Paddy bought some more brushes and paints. The Kangoo got a much-needed oil change, and new brake-shoes.(we drove over that mountain and back with very bad brakes, I am told. I think brakes are a good idea.) They washed the car, too. I didn´t recognize it at first, until I saw the dog-nose smears on the inside of the window glass.

We sat at a terrace table outside Cafe La Rueda and drank Tonicas. The Plaza Mayor is heaving these days, full of leaping children, staggering pilgrims, fashionable folk from Burgos and Madrid and Bilbao come back in their summer frocks to visit the abuelos on the family farm. All the little pueblos are in full fiesta-mode, including ours: this weekend it is. We have a guitarist coming to play the Mass on Saturday... more company in the house. We´ll roast a leg of lamb and dance the neighbors ´round the plaza, under the leafy trees we trimmed together back in March.

Til then we are keeping to ourselves. I am sleeping deep sleeps. Paddy is out in the patio under the flyscreen, listening to radio broadcasts from the York horseracing meeting in England, playing great big Tchaikovsky on the stereo so we won´t hear anyone at the door.

Which is closed, for now.
We are tired right down to our bones.

Next camino starts up there someplace!

Old, older, and downright primitive

Me and my friend Miguel Angel went this weekend to Salamanca, I city I love and he had never seen. I love showing people I like around cities I love. The new person sees things I overlook. They marvel the same way I did not so long ago, at the food and buildings and sunlight and people. They just generally remind me of how cool it is to have places so marvellous in such easy reach.

Salamanca was its usual beautiful self. We hiked around the city´s Siamese-twin cathedrals: a smaller, medieval cathedral built in the 1100´s stands right up against what was supposed to be its replacement: a towering limestone Gothic pile from the glory days of the 1500´s. It took forever to finish the new place, and people just didn´t have the heart to tear down the old one, so they just knocked out some of the walls in between and kept them both. The "new" one is still used for worship. Both are popular for "showcase weddings" on weekends, and we witnessed at least five nuptials going on while we nosed around at the thousand-year-old murals and tombs of knights and abbesses. (One of the wedding couples chose a priest rather fond of the old fire-and-brimstone. His high-decibel exhortations followed us down the medieval cloister-walk and into chapels where  Comunards boiled up revolutions, centuries of university students defended their doctoral theses, (Salamanca is home to the second-oldest university in the world!), and Mass is still said a few times each year in the ancient and outlawed Mozarabic Rite.

The place is a huge museum of bygone glories. It is beautiful and full of people, but they weren´t there to worship God. They, like us, were tourists, having a look at the wonders wrought by mankind during the spectacular years of Spain´s greatest power. And there´s nothing wrong with that. (Just don´t go there if you want to meditate or pray. People who attempt such anachronistic behavior will be photographed without mercy by the tourist throng.)

We left the city at mid-morning and headed north to Zamora, a sort of miniature Salamanca on the Duero River. We didn´t go to see the town (even though it´s another big favorite of mine), but to visit San Pedro de la Nave, a "pre-Romanesque" church 10 km. out among the sagebrush badlands west of town.

The building is made of all kinds of rocks and stones stacked together into a small church of simple elegance. Windows are tiny slits. Outside, the stone walls are carved with dozens of crosses -- the graffitti of illiterate monastic vandals, probably carved there long before anyone thought to build a church or start teaching classes down in Salamanca. Decorations are simple stone carvings of grapes and wheels and faces. This church was built by Visigoths, a tribe of early Christians who took over Spain after the Romans pooped-out, and took up where the Romans left off when it came to winemaking and grape-growing. The grapes worked their way into the sculptors´ repertoire -- bunches of grapes, leaves and vines are standbys of Visigothic church art.  Spain was full of vineyards until the Moors invaded and overran most of the peninsula -- and the Arabs don´t drink alcohol. The vineyards vanished... almost. And so did grapevine carvings.

San Pedro de la Nave was built in the 7th century. It´s stood for 1,300 years. It, too, is a tourist attraction, but no one but hard-core architecture nerds like us makes the trip. The people of tiny El Campillo, still use the place for their parish worship. It gives me the wim-wams, being in a place so old.

But something older still stands in an empty lot adjacent to the church. A skinny tree trunk, four-stories tall, is erected there. All the branches are stripped off but a few at the very top. And up there among the bare limbs hangs a dummy, a crude human figure.  I thought I recognized what it was, from some long-ago sociology class. I asked Javi, the young man who showed us the church.

"That? Oh, that´s a custom of the pueblos around here. On May 1 there´s a fiesta, and we burn down the old tree. We set up a new one, put a new dummy in it, leave it up there til the next May." He was very matter-of-fact about it. He didn´t offer any further enlightenment.

Unless I am mistaken, the people of rural Zamora are celebrating a primitive holdover of a pre-historic "burning man" ritual, just as the crops are taking hold out in the fields each spring. It dates back to tree-worshiping Celts and Druids, who sacrificed actual people to ensure fertility in their crops and barns and homes. When that proved messy or wasteful or distasteful, substitution was made.  

It´s not hard to see how early Christians made the jump from sacrifices in the trees to a man nailed to a cross. More substitution. But to see the old, old San Pedro church there, alongside a ritual that reaches even more deep into the past... well. It took my breath away. So much history, ritual, culture, symbolism, and artwork, hundreds and hundreds of years´ worth, in one day´s drive.

Back into the car. We headed out on the two-lanes through Zamora, then Valladolid, then Palencia province, through dusty backwaters, past ruined castles and adobe ghost towns. We stopped in a place called Castroverde de los Campos, and had two rounds of small beer. Miguel Angel picked up the tab: three Euros. Miguel Angel lives in Paris, where he´s used to paying three times that price for the same stuff. He thought there was a mistake. Then he thought he´d died and gone to heaven.

So here I am, so heavenly minded I am no earthly good... Excitement round here is provided yet again by Murphy Cat, who ate some rat poison, fought for his life overnight, and is now clawing his way slowly back from the brink.  We also are undergoing repeat visits from Jackie, an enormous Leonnese Mastiff dog who lives at the pilgrim hostel in Terradillos and walks with the pilgs to Moratinos... and then hangs out here for hours before his people come to collect him. We call him Hoss. He´s a whole lotta dawg.

And if I may once more venture into church territory, I hope all you readers who donated to the Peaceable in the past few months will look at the picture here. The little image is made of pear-wood. It´s Santiago Peregrino, carved about a century ago by a Compostela pilgrim from southern France or northern Spain. It´s primitive, but I love it. We bought it from an Irish antiques dealer a month ago, to install in the parish church of Moratinos. Our church stands dead on the Camino de Santiago and hosts pilgrims every day, but has no Santiago figure in its collection! Your donations, combined with a few other donativos, helped to bring this little man to our church. Hopefully we´ll have him safely installed in time for the Moratinos fiesta in a couple of weeks.

Thank you, generous readers.