Lost Souls on the way to Burgos - Part 4
Deviations from the righteous path
Out of the land of doom, the sun was shining again and we left common mortals behind by forcing our way to Arre, a small town with no character at the entrance of Pamplona. The night spent in the municipal hostel was a nightmare. The only other residents were a big bunch of local school kids, who were a real blast of noise and chaos. The only episode I have not erased was asking Seyi to close the door of the dorm, just to be answered that the door was closed already… Even our ears, which were trained to stand the snores of the loudest pilgrims, could not filter out such a highway of decibels…
Such a painful endurance earned us some points in our negotiation with the gods, so that for the first time we found ourselves with a positive balance in our ethical bank account, where sins are balanced by pious acts of expiation. Meeting two south-american priests along the way and behaving like good pilgrims pushed our credit further up into the green. It all culminated when we reached the top of a hill and found one of those crosses in memory of someone who had died along the way. It was then with utmost disbelief that I saw my fellow companion joining the two pastors in a fully-fledged rosary to the soul who laid buried at their feet. Such a re-enactment of Seyi’s pious upbringing, did not fail (and in the literal sense…) to bring its immediate fruits. A sunny day, beautiful landscapes and, alas, so many cherries that we were soon hitting our overdraft limit once again, not only for the sheer quantity of food ingested but also for the sensual greed with which our fingers incessantly plucked those divine fruits.
Despite some internal bubbling in the stomach, this open challenge to nature was however left mostly unpunished. As any good educator knows, establishing a precedent can be the beginning of a dangerous snowball of unacceptable behaviors. Being our heroes fallible humans after all, the lack of constant reminders on what constitutes the Right Way could led them astray from their final destination. The “Outer Path” is indeed overly marked (sometimes we could find as many as 30 yellow arrows to highlight a single turn), so that the Maker run out of paint for the “Inner Path”. It was for this reason that our two fellows, now lacking any clear direction from above, were drifting dangerously toward perdition.
Having reached the next village of Puente de la Reina, the bad pilgrims could be seen mixing with the local population during a beer festival. Despite his best effort, the “peregrino” could however still be spotted by its peculiar style, characterized by the lack of color matching, flip flops combined with white socks and the un-missable stinky T-shirt. Another peculiar trait of pilgrim parties was that they tended to end with a last minutes rush to the hostel to comply with the egalitarian rule that everyone who’s not back before ten must be locked out. This was not at all a bad practice, at least if we consider that my standard way of getting up at 6am was to be violently shaken by my travel companion, who was constantly panicking because everyone else already left for breakfast. The only times I managed to escape his painful clutch was when some other democratic pilgrim (God bless his soul) hit the light at 5.30am. A scenario, which, I dare say, was not unusual.
The bad pilgrims were now on highway to hell (sometimes walking along a motorway, to be precise). Our names were now whispered and feared along the path. No one could overtake us without impunity. We started making some bad friendships, to hang out with beer drinkers and hotel dwellers, to stop and talk to people. I even gained a solid reputation as a cook by the sole skill of being Italian and this did not fail to put us into trouble when we had to run away from a group of hungry girls, who were somehow impressed by my dexterity in the kitchen department. Luckily for them, they never got to actually taste my improvised concoctions..
Worst of all, we now could often being heard saying to people “Buen Camino”, a void formula we had tried to avoid as a plague since our times at Roncesvalles, where we slipped out from the back door only to escape from a volunteer in a red poncho repeating such expression of bad omen to each single person setting off under the pouring rain.
It was about time for the Master Puppeteer to pull a couple of hamstrings…
