Had a weird dream last night, woke upsweep in its receding waters. Karen is on the floor in front of me, off to the right. Smiles and smokes cigarettes and she is laughing. I am more watching me than being me. Somewhere in the back of my head is this lack of understanding about why K and I are doing this hanging out together given the post apocalyptic stage of our relationship. Watching her emote smily ebullience, bright eyed giggles, guffaws, I find myself preoccupied with thoughts of the woman who lives in the apartment at top of the stairs. I think that this is my house, but I am not very certain about much at all. Go up there at one point with Karen and am surprised that I did not notice that the tenant living in this very narrow space is a tall, blonde woman who speaks only Castilian Spanish. Her hair is short, cut maybe just about at the level of her jaw line, and it is a bit kinked, her nose is pointy, stern, the look in her eye equally so.She has a child running around, the apartment is very small and she looks warily at me as I stand in the door leading from the stairs into her kitchen, K standing over my right shoulder.
The feeling left behind by the dream is one mainly of numbness, of observing some event with no ability to comprehend it, a vague and unsatisfying detachment. Like an ocean wave on the beach, the dream and its accompanying sensations comes in, crests, leaves.
Ended up walking for an hour and a half with a man from León today, a man named Santiago. In his early fifties, Santiago turned out to be a talkative, chipper fellow, good smile, a bit of a nerd, perhaps, glasses, maybe five foot seven, dark short hair with small bits of grey, clean shaven, the kind of guy who probably doesn't wear the pants in his marriage, gentle, smart. We spoke of family, of the Camino, of the economies of Spain and the United States. He told me about the canal that we were following, about how it was built some hundreds of years before for the transportation of cereals, wheat mainly. Found out that the Spanish name for weeping willows has the word llorando in it, crying. He has walked the Camino three times, but sometimes, as this time, he takes a bus from León a short distance, walks for three days back to his home as a form of recreation. He told me that I should not miss the famous Cathedral in León, the Sistine Chapel of Spain, he called it. And the museum, that also should not be missed.
Santiago turned out to be a warm, engaging man. Teo walked ahead, reading a paperback book that he picked up in an albergue a number of days back as he walked. The conversing with this seemingly kind and genuine man being a great way for me to spend an hour and a half, barely noticing the walking or the tenderness of my left ankle. We talked about earning languages, about his twenty-six year old boy, his only child, who has only biked the Camino. I guess that my Spanish must be improving, because Santiago speaks not a lick of English.
We walk to Frómista together, a town used by the Romans as a center for gathering, storing, and transporting cereals, as grains are referred to here, cereales. The name of this pueblo comes from the Latin word for cereals, frumentum. There is a set of locks on the canal here, built in the twenties, I think, impressive to wander upon in the middle of the fields of wheat. Moving into the small city, Teo and I decide to get some small groceries when we pass a tienda. Baguette, a bit of queso de oveja (sheep milk), orange juice, chorizo (like pepperoni, only thinner and bigger in diameter), a small bag of cashews, and we treat ourselves to only the second chocolate bar that we have purchased since getting to Europe, side weeks for Tdog, about three for me. At this point Santiago and we part company, as we head for a grassy area near the Iglesia de San Martin, a really lovely and restored looking twelfth century church. to rest and to eat. He hopes to see us up the road, at Carrión perhaps this evening, if we do decide to go another fifteen klicks.
It is a sunny repast. We allow our feet to rest, I drink a canned beer, we down the box of OJ, snack, split half of the chocolate bar, pretty much drooling and moaning as we do so. The trip has shed at least ten to fifteen pounds off of both Tdog and me. We agree that we spend most all of our days a bit to a lot hungry, agree that maybe this is best, maybe this is how most people, people who don't have difficulty keeping the fat off, live.
We do not, in fact, end up walking to Carrión, deciding that the best course of action is to not over walk my foot, that an increase of three or four kilometers each day until we get back up to about twenty-two to twenty-five per day is the correct choice. At about five o'clock we arrive at a very small town, about fifty people living there? It is called Villarmento There is only one albergue, Albergue Alemezar, and we hope it is open, as many do close seasonally, usually around the middle of October or shortly thereafter.
Our spirits rise as we approach the grounds of the albergue. There is a freshly chalked sign board out front that displays the services provided; beds are one of those services! We walk through the row of shrubbery and up to the door, the door is closed. We knock, nothing. We begin looking in the windows, around the grounds for signs of life. Nada. Then we spot a bag of baguettes on the table next to the door, squeeze one of them."Yo, dude," I say, "they're fresh. And the sign out front is newly written, hasn't been rained on. Somebody must be coming back soon." Teo says maybe it is siesta time. This makes sense to us, so we sit down in an area on the terrace, under a roof, behind some plexiglass walls, mostly out of the cold wind that is blowing.
After thirty or forty minutes we decide to walk around the grounds a bit, try to ascertain a bit better what our situation really is. It is at this point that we discover that the albergue itself, where pilgrims are housed, is a separate building, so that, relieved, understanding finally where the people must be, we walk up to the large, old, wooden doors to knock. Before we do so we see a wooden latch pulled down across the line where the two doors meet, closing them from the outside. The understanding that this means that no one could be inside soaks into us like a fine rain, pushing our satisfied grins back down into discouragement.
We lift up the wooden latch, walk in. It surely is empty. Yet after having searched the grounds for a place to sleep, finding a teepee with a mattress in it and two small casitas about eight by eight feet big, also with beds inside, all we really need is a tarp, or a piece of old carpet to keep warm, so that when we find two rooms of bunk beds and lots of blankets, we now have our plan B in place. We will sleep someplace, somehow on these grounds, depending on if somebody shows up or not.
It is getting colder an colder as the sun is now setting, maybe forty plus degrees outside with a wind. We grab five tea candles from inside of the casitas, bring them back to the covered area where our packs are, light them on the wooden table, warm our hands over them, laugh at our predicament, listening to music through the small speakers on his iPhone.
We found cases of pop out back earlier, but unfortunately none of beer. We grab some pop, eat the food that we have been carrying, leftover from the stop in Frómista, cheese, sliced, cured ham, jam, decide that surely, given that some of the machines inside the bar, coffee machine, cash register, are turned on, someone will show up within the hour.
Ninety minutes later, really cold, we decide that we will wait another half hour and then go sleep in the albergue. We will leave the empty bottles with money to pay for them and for one of the baguettes that we took, on the table where we have been seated. We go one more time, in full darkness now, to check out the albergue. We feel pretty good about our choice to stay in this place even though we are completely uninvited and it is borderline criminal, trespassing we suppose. By this time we have knocked twice on the front door of the house next door, receiving no answer, and we have asked both a local walking by and, believe it or not, the man at the little tourist office and no one has any helpful information for us.
Oh how I try and how I ache to find a peacefulness inside. Not even in sleep am I able to sidestep the longing for my connection to her. Like a determined bull, all horns, sweating, chiseled flanks, again and again and incessantly again it lowers its head, and too tired to properly raise and properly awe my red cape, too fatigued too deeply inside to continue avoiding its crushing, groin power. Knowing, or assuming anyhow, that this rough beast shows no loss of strength or energy while I falter, stumble, question repeatedly, a simple matter of time no before I can not outsmart, outrun, or out walk it.
Want to surrender, to just say "yes," to be free instead of being right, to fall backwards, arms out, into the warm waters of not knowing or of not caring. Yet I hear the solid striking of its front hooves against the compacted, dusty earth, near the sharp intake of breath as it readies itself again for another pass. My shiny, red cape is all that I possess as I stand, my feet hurting, my spirits sagging, in the middle of this enormous arena, thousands of seats arranged in tiers rising higher and higher, and every one of them empty, not one single soul in sight.
Once more we walk the grounds, full on dark now, about eight-thirty or nine. As we start walking the short space back to where we had been sitting to grab our belongings, bring them inside, we notice a small figure walking towards us, a darker, moving space in the gloom. In my best, apologetic, Spanish, I explain our predicament to this person, this woman, apparently the barkeep at this establishment. She tells us twice that the albergue is 'cerrada' (closed) for the season, that the next town is only eight klicks up the road. I say about three times, very respectfully, eagerly, pleadingly, "is there any possibility that we could speak to someone about being able to stay here?"
Finally she says, "look, tonight is the yearly town fiesta, but you could probably sleep in the 'salon' of the albergue, on the couches." She had just stopped by the place to grab her purse, left in the bar area. She leaves and we figure we just got the proverbial green light. Considering we had already decided to crash the joint, this was a big step up!
We move our stuff into the albergue, we light a fire in the glass fronted wood stove, wash our stinky socks, underwear, t-shirts, hang them to dry, make hot cocoa, drink it down with tea biscuits that we found half opened in the cupboard, and within an hour we have heat, firelight, at the small cost of a smoky interior, and are both reading our books and resting our sore feet. We shower, put on our soft, evening clothes, each find a bed in one of the two bunk rooms, lay out three blankets on each, as we can already see our breath in those back areas of the place. A small victory, perhaps, but one that, at this time, feels like reaching the Lost City of Gold.
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Location:Calle de Regina Franco,Sahagún,Spain
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