Sitting outside of a small bar/restaurante, smoking, T is inside. We just consumed some amazing, delightful comestibles. Pulpo de Galega, Galician octopus, boiled, served over potatoes, 'distend' with pimiento (paprika) and slathered in olive oil. With pan, bread. And two bottles of vino tinto, claro, of course. We have walked up the last big hill of the Camino Frances, the way up and into O'Cebriero, a thousand foot climb over about eight klicks, maybe five miles. We dressed in our wet gear this morning before leaving, having been given warnings about snow having fallen here yesterday, and the forecast calling for more today. Yet, the gods be blessed, we had only sun and little wind, even as we climbed.
We entered Galicia today, the last of Spain's Autonomous Communities that the Camino passes through on its way to Santiago de Compostela. We have walked four hundred mikes now, and we have one hundred to go. Our spirits are high, our legs repairing; we are prepared now for the final assault, the final estapo, stage, of our journey to complete our quest. Here in Galicia, a land settled a couple of thousand years previously by the Celtic-Iberian peoples, it is remarkable to note the similarities to the other areas settled by the Celts-Western Ireland for example, the place that Teo will go in twenty days when I return to the US. They play Celtic music here, their own form of bagpipes blaring, Celtic knots in stone on the sides of buildings, a strange juxtaposition with what I have come to think of Spain as.
Sitting outside, my body temperature lowering quickly in the night time air, the fog (clouds?) blow by rapidly, smelling of wood fire smoke. Could it be the smoke itself that I see? But no, they mix, swirl, roll together in the same dance that they have performed all of these chilly nights for twenty, thirty centuries now. The buildings in this town of fifty people, O'Cebreiro, made all of stacked stone, every one. Even the municipal albergue, where we sleep tonight in a dorm room, bunk beds, sleeping forty, made of stone. Thus one, in fact, being only the second place since our beginning day in Roncesvalles, that provides no blankets. Fine for pretty much all peregrinos, who customarily travel with their own Saco, sleeping bag, but not as good for Tdog and me, given that we have none. Luckily the beds are pushed close together and in this way we can snuggle and we will sleep in double layers of clothes, hats and socks and gloves on, using the provided bottom sheet, and that of the empty beds above us, as covers. Things are getting colder. We get that. We are too close to be turned around now.
The atmosphere of this little Shangra La, this appearing out of the blinding sun and mist of the mountains village, is as of now most filled, like the Jack the Ripper versions of London that I grew up watching on TV. Figures appear, enter the scene, disappear again into the white smoke. Phantoms. A dream land of twisted shapes, dreams.
Speaking of dreams. It is fascinating how the brain works. Down deep beyond the reach of the conscious mind. I am one of those people who is awake much of the night, turning, moving, rearranging. My mind racing, fixated, obsessed. These last few weeks it is a blonde haired, wondrously blue eyed Alemana that I tend to think of when I am laying awake at night, rearranging my arms around my pillow, rolling my legs up or around, into the new and proper position. Yet when in dreamland my inner, deeper mind takes over. So that, for example, upon re embarking from Morpheus' realm this morning, maybe an hour before I arose, the movie playing in my head was not that of the being that I am pulled toward, but rather the one that I am running from.
The movie runs like this: I arrive home again from my travels, at my home that is not the one I recognize, yet within the context of this clip I know it to be home. K is there and hyper, friendly, her manners those that she so often uses after she so often strays, overly smily, her green eyes a glint, smile effervescent, effusive, contagious. She does not physically entice, but rather, in her carefully evolved and perfect fashion, accompanies me to the spot that she has arranged for me to sleep. 'Here,' she tells me, 'I have provided this for you, a safe place for you to be,' guides me through a farm like scene, to some shed, the light bright as though mid day, into the edge of a shed like structure, it on our right as we approach, lifts a flap of some kind, a blanket perhaps, a sheet, and shows me the place of my bed, the lower four feet of a partitioned space, a small hovel, knowing how and what I do, what I like. Grinning, her making-up face, her don't-you-want-to-be-with-me vibe.
This is how I awaken this morning, at eight. Yet from four to five-thirty am I am already awake, unable to sleep. I am writing, composing a letter to Julia. She has stated some obvious obstacles to any possible ability to our becoming close. The basics. The ones that fourteen year olds get but that, for reasons I have yet to grasp, escape me on the first pass through. Woe but that my family members could fill you in, and yet, try as I might, the obvious stopping points never come to me until after they are useful to me in any helpful way. Therein lies the problem.
My waking mind goes other places, seeks succor and solace and comfort in some one place, while my lower, reptilian brain directs itself, and therefore, undeniably, me, back to the predominate fixation, that which I know far, far too well. An illusion? A trick. A sleight of hand intended to distract in one direction while the real heart of the con is being achieved somewhere else. The reveal. And there it is-I am both magician and audience. I run the game and I am the mark at the same time. I cheat myself out of the option of running the course properly and then I make myself pay up at the end. A win-win situation for certain. But who, dear reader, is really winning? Who is footing the bill?
We checked out three different bars tonight. Three of the four that O'Cebeiro has to offer. Got a couple of cervezas in one, the telenovelas blaring, the local running the place mostly interested in taking to his friend who came in to hang. And another, also containing the bar keep, a fifty something hear old, and two of his pals. We did order a plato of queso de Galego y miel, soft, creamy cheese the consistency of ricotta, drizzled over with honey, a basket of hearty, brownish, square pieces of bread. It was delicious. We enjoyed it wholeheartedly, then paid up and left for our final stop of the night.
We returned to the establishment that we first visited upon our arrival some few hours before. Unable to get wi-fi any place, no bars or restaurants carrying it, we knew that it existed in the hotel part, upstairs. Because we did not want to spend fifty euros for the night, preferring the six that it would cost each of us to stay in a bunk in the municipal albergue, the bartender would not concede to giving us the password.As luck would have it, when we returned there, defeated in our attempts to secure internet access anywhere else, three Australians, a man, his wife, and her sister, who had already checked into the place, people we had met a few times along The Way, gave us the password.
Here we ordered a bottela de vino tinto de la Casa, dos copas, y un orden de pulpo de Galega, the above mentioned delicacy, paid homage to our electronic vices, and indulged. Seated next to the glass fronted wood stove, a rustic tone in the air, we supped and visited Bo with each other and with other friends, new and old. The octopus came, supple, hot, piled upon the underlying boiled potato pieces, and we drank the cold, dark red wine, shared the tender, purple and white pieces of fruit from the sea, spiced with salt, pepper and paprika, stabbed the small chubs of perfectly cooked potato, swabbed up the juices, the olive oil, with the dense yet fresh bread, listened to the various languages of the twenty or so persons gathered within the small confines of the bar, and thanked our good fortunes for the most excellent place in this wide universe that we had been blessed with partaking in.
I wrote back to Julia, acquiescing to her more rational, more complete understanding of the vibe between us. Acknowledging my own minuscule amount of filtering between what sounds great and what should be. She the German, practical in these ways, me the Latin, a bubbling over of potential paths, of magical thinking. I Skyped my mother. Teo arranged a using of two time share units that I own in Sunriver for MLK weekend, the recreational director for nine of his friends, three nights to spend upon his first few days back in country, with his girl, Veronica, with his best friend, a guy I pretty much consider my son, Dominic, and others, Josiah and his wife, Paige. Posted a blog. Started a new one. Checked my stats, almost twelve hundred page views in thirty five days.
And now I write to you from a crowded, bunk bed filled room of almost forty people, some snoring, or, as the Europeans call it, either mistakenly or because it actually sounds, onomatopoetically speaking, more correct, 'snorkeling' or 'snorking,' soft breathing all around, a communal rest fest. These co habitations are somewhat of a riot in the morning, as camineros rise at various times from fie to seven thirty, rustling and packing their things in the complete dark, some with head lamps, going to and from the few aseos, bathrooms, back into the room, drifting away to hit the trail T and I have developed the strategy of trying to be the last to rise, sleeping longer in this way and having less competition for the showers and toilets as well.
From where we sit now, seven twenty kilometer stages from Santiago, eight days to get there, Teo and I seem perfectly poised to snatch this one outright, to accomplish our goal of walking the Camino Frances. My feet have some soreness around my ankles each morning and a bit each time we start up again from a break,but I only ingest about three three hundred milligram ibuprofen each day now and anticipate taking none at all within three days. T is still taking three six hundred ones each day, but given that he has now gone, for the first time in some six or eight days without a serious tendon problem something that at one time you could both feel and actually hear, a crackling sound like static on the radio, coming from his left lower shins, he is close to good now as well. No, we are cracking this thing open, having our way with it now.
And inside I continue to refocus my mind from the myriad ugly scenes that play over and over in the backs of my eyelids when I sleep at night to more peaceful, peace filled visions. The deep hurt of the betrayals, the unending lies, the grief at the loss of the most present aspect of my world for these many shining years, seeping out like the tainted fluid of a ruptured blister, the skin on top ready to be pulled, the soft, new skin below already hardening, preparing to replace the old and to mark simply the most recent place that I have endured the friction of the rubbing together of my being with the unyielding, abrasive skin of another.
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