Lawrence Block - Step by Step

“What you told me to say.”

“Say it,” I said, and she did, and I sighed. “I can’t be entirely sure,” I said, “but it sounds to me as though you asked him if he was having his period.”

“Oh, God. I’ll bet that’s why he turned red.”

“I imagine it is.”

“I feel terrible,” she said, and left the table, only to return a moment later looking even more disconcerted. “I went to apologize,” she said, “and I think I just made it worse, and I can’t understand it.”

“What did you say?”

“Just, you know, that I was sorry if I embarrassed him.”

“You said that whole sentence?”

“Well, no,” she said. “Of course not. I just pointed at him, you know, and said ‘ Embarazada .’ What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“First you asked him if he was having his period,” I told her, “and then you told him he was pregnant. Drink your coffee, will you? I think we’d better get out of here.”

The real reason our Spanish never improved was we only used it when we had to. We saw a lot of it on signs, and got reasonably good at making out what they said. And I developed a certain proficiency at reading El País, or at least those articles on subjects with which I had some familiarity. (I couldn’t have made sense of the financial reportage or the essays on Spanish politics if they’d been written in English, so how could I expect to grasp them in Spanish?)

But as far as the spoken Spanish language was concerned, we weren’t that much more adept at the trip’s end than at its onset. And that’s because we rarely had occasion to speak Spanish. We used it to order food, to secure a room for the night, to determine whether to go left or right, and, one memorable afternoon, to get directions to a pharmacy. (After a night in one of the less salubrious refugios, I’d acquired head lice. I didn’t know what to call the little bastards, so I made do with pantomime, which I’ll leave to your imagination. Worked like a charm — and so, thank God, did the stuff they sold me.)

All of that rarely amounted to more than a few sentences per day, and they tended to be the same sentences over and over. The rest of the time, when we weren’t getting a room or ordering a meal, we were walking with only each other for company. We did a lot of talking while we walked, but, curiously enough, the lingo we employed was English.

And when we talked with other pilgrims, other peregrinos walking the Way of St. James, we spoke English with them, as well.

After we left the train we’d taken from Zaragoza, and after a night of unaccustomed luxury at the parador, we walked on toward Puente la Reina, where we could connect with the traditional pilgrimage route. Halfway there, we stopped for the evening at a roadside inn, after a long and arduous morning on the road. There was a TV in the dining room. We walked in on a news bulletin on the most recent ETA bombing, which threw an eloquent hush over the room there in the Basque country, and then the feature resumed, and we gazed up at the screen, where Jeff Bridges seemed to be speaking Spanish.

It was a dubbed version of Eight Million Ways to Die, the lamentable film made from a book of mine and released in the States (as into a sea of popular and critical indifference) five years earlier. Around us, people resumed their conversations and paid no attention to the movie. I can’t say I blamed them.

At Puente la Reina the next day, we officially became peregrinos, and found out what we’d been missing. Someone steered us to an office where we were supplied with official peregrino passports, yellow cardboard affairs designed to be stamped at the various refugios we’d pass through along our way. When we reached our destination, this would serve as proof to the church officials that we had in fact traversed the route from point to point, and thus deserved the promised plenary indulgence.

(That, back in the day, had been a major selling point of the Camino de Santiago. Get there and all your sins would be washed away. You’d have a clean slate — which, given the history of human behavior along the pilgrim route, would very likely be covered with fresh celestial chalk marks by the time you were back home.)

Our particular party, composed as it was of a lapsed Catholic and a secular Jew, hadn’t made the trip in fear of hell or hope of heaven. All the same, we shared a pragmatic view of the prospect of a plenary indulgence — to wit, Nu? What could it hurt?

If any of our fellow pilgrims had come seeking a remission of sins, they kept their hopes to themselves. We met a good many of them over the next two months, and had brief or lengthy conversations with a fair number of them, and I can’t recall a single one whose motivation was traditionally religious. Typically, our fellows felt impelled to walk the walk, and did so without talking the talk; they were only occasionally Catholic by birth or upbringing, attended any church infrequently if at all, and had become peregrinos in response to some inner prompting which they were hard put to define.

Still, one did hear of pilgrims whose motivation was religious, and who were seeking something in the nature of absolution. We were told more than once of a priest who walked all the way from his church in Germany, crossing the Alps en route to the Pyrenees, and then continuing all the way to Santiago — barefoot. I couldn’t begin to guess what he’d done to justify imposing such penance upon himself, but I suspect there’s a whole generation of altar boys who could shed light on the subject.

I can’t say we got to know any of the peregrinos terribly well, and I find it difficult to summon up any names or faces. I remember a pair of Englishmen who were covering the route by bicycle. They were in no great hurry, which explains how we were able to keep up with them for a while, but eventually they got a day or two ahead of us, and after that we never saw them again. I think they were the ones who first told us that a special church council had established that bicycle pilgrims would receive absolution for half of their sins.

There were quite a few Dutch heading for Santiago, and of course they were all fluent in English, as well as French and German. (And, I would have to suppose, Dutch.) Dutch pilgrims didn’t fly anywhere, or begin the trek with a train ride. They just packed up their things, walked out the front door and down the well-scrubbed stoop, and kept on walking.

As did the two Swiss priests, two brothers who might even have been twins, who had walked all the way from Switzerland. They were well up in their sixties, tall and thin and enviably fit, striding confidently over hill and dale. We never spoke with them, but we had heard tell of them a few days before they caught up with us, most likely from the English cyclists. Then one day we saw the two of them, and then that day or the next they passed us, and we never ran into them again.

Lynne likes to characterize our great stream of pilgrims as a sort of fluid community, flowing toward Compostela. In many of the refugios we’d find a guest book, not unlike what one finds in, say, a twee bed-and-breakfast in Bucks County, where visitors could inscribe their names (“Henry and Claudine Thorpe”) along with their addresses (“Pratt, Kansas”) and their comments (“Loved the chintz bedspread — and oh, those cranberry muffins at breakfast!!!”). There were precious few chintz spreads or breakfast muffins at the refugios, but the guest ledgers were to us as fire hydrants to dogs, affording the opportunity to sniff out the spoor of those who’d preceded us while we in turn left our own calling card for those following in our wake.

In addition, a form of bush telegraph kept us current on other fellow travelers. Before we’d passed the central plains of Castile, we began to hear about a Welsh family, a couple and their two children, who would have been remarkable enough in any event — they were, as far as we knew, the only pilgrims brave enough to bring their kids along — but who became genuinely famous, in an admittedly limited circle, because their party included a donkey. They’d bought the poor creature when they crossed the border, and reports indicated it was doing a fine job of toting their gear, and occasionally their children. Sort of like a shopping cart, Lynne observed, but one that ate grass.