Spanish Steps by Moore Tim

Author:Moore, Tim [Tim Moore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2005-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

Ten

The clouds were still wisping past the moon as I buckled the saddle, frogmarched from slumber by swishes and shuffles and the slam of the big front door. When at length the sun nosed above the horizon it was the first time we’d cast long shadows up the camino, into the wheaten wilderness ahead, instead of back down it.

There was sun and wind and photosynthesis, and the haunted song of unseen, cowering birds, but there was nothing else. No sane soul would have located a refugio out here, so it wasn’t an especial turn-up to find the inverted eggcup of Arroyo de San Bol under the management of a scarily blank-faced young German. He was standing solemnly at the doorway when I arrived, lured by the promise of elevenses and a bathe in a spring that my Confraternity book credited with healing powers.

‘You English expect magic water,’ he said slowly, addressing himself to the little red book in my hand. ‘But it is not magic. It is only water.’ His gaze moved sluggishly towards Shinto. ‘Last year one monkey like this ate here a young tree.’

‘He won’t do that, honestly. It says here you have coffee?’

‘Yes. But it is not magic. It is only coffee.’

The refugio was a marvellously idiosyncratic structure, and scrutinising it I was able at least for a moment to view its caretaker’s auspicious behaviour in the same light. The domed interior had been painted as a star-clustered night sky, and each of the half-dozen beds beneath was immaculately topped with a crest-adorned blanket.

‘So – how many pilgrims did you have to stay yesterday?’ I enquired brightly as my host stooped silently over a camping-gas stove. No electricity here; and, as the Confraternity guide had stressed, ‘NB: there are NO sanitation facilities.’

‘One.’ He sounded as if he’d much rather it had been none. My coffee was ghosted on to the low table before me. What a time of it the two of them must have had together, out here in a million acres of inky nothing, either side of this table with a packet of Marie biscuits and a candle.

‘I am here all the summer,’ he said, pacing behind me as I desperately urged my coffee to cool. ‘Every summer.’

For two minutes he paced as I puffed and stirred and sipped. Then he sat down on the floor beside me, cross-legged beneath the dome’s apex. ‘My name is Udo,’ he whispered, and struck a match. He was still watching it burn at the end of an outstretched hand when I upended searing caffeine painfully down my throat, tossed a couple of euros on the table and marched briskly out into the sun.

I was reasonably eager to put some camino between me and Udo, and for once Shinto seemed to pick up on the urgency. On we scuttled, through a silent town wedged in a hole in the plain, along a hillside Monet-spattered with poppies, to a lunch spot beneath a Gothic arch of heart-stopping scale and splendour.

I read as we ate.

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