Step by Step by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9780061721816
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

PEREGRINOS

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.

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