Pilgrim's progress: on the road to Santiago

Christian Century, Nov 15, 2003 by Kathryn Harrison

THE ROAD to Santiago de Compostela heads west, relentlessly west, toward sunset and toward death. Centuries earlier, a pilgrim would sell all his possessions, divesting himself in anticipation of a journey he didn't necessarily expect to survive or complete. I have traveled the road three times before. This time my daughter is with me.

On one of the first days we come to a stone fountain on a hilltop, and a plaque, translated as: HERE ROLAND FELL. On either side is a vast army of tree trunks, frozen and alert, and then the ground drops away into mist. Sometime around A.D. 780, after a successful campaign to subdue the Saracens, Charlemagne returned to France with his foot soldiers. He had liberated Spain from the infidels, following the exhortations of three visions of St. James, who promised him divine assistance if he waged war on the Moors. St. James was as good as his word: the walls of Pamplona fell like those of Jericho, and other impossible victories followed. The vanquished Saracens provided the gold that financed the building of a great cathedral in Santiago. But Charlemagne's ironies were ambushed in the Pyrenees, where Roland fell. There the king picked up and carried the body of the dead hero, his anguished cries echoing forward through the centuries, seeming, like the mournful bells of the animals we cannot see, to rush past me in the fog.

"Roland died in this place," I tell my daughter, huddled by the water fountain, shrouded in her dripping poncho. She nods. He is a name, no more than that, but the stone bearing his simple epitaph is pitted with age and conveys a heavy grief, enough to prophesy all our ends.

"Do people walk the road backward?" Sarah asks, her eyes closed.

"I don't know," I say, misinterpreting the question to imagine a pilgrim headed west while walking literally backward, facing the road he has covered rather than the steps he anticipates. "Maybe someone has, as a form of penance."

"Why would that be penance?" Sarah asks, after a silence.

"Well, I don't know--not seeing where you're going would make it harder."

She laughs. "Mom," she says, "I meant starting in Santiago and heading back this way, in the opposite direction as ours."

"Oh, I don't know. I don't think so." Curiously, it's harder for me to imagine walking east, toward sunrise and birth, rather than west with my face averted from sunset and from death, the bright fire of the sun god's chariot descending into the waves with a hiss.

Overwrought by this long day, I am more than usually attuned to the topic that consumes me: mortality, the impossible and inescapable truth of human life. How can it be that we are souls trapped in flesh, spirits bound to matter? These bodies we have, the same that grant us every pleasure and every perception, fail us; they break down; they age and die. Isn't that why we walk this road--to rehearse the awful truth we know and yet cannot believe? And I've upped the ante this time, I think, watching my firstborn as she sleeps. We weep at the birth of our children in part because it's death we bring into the world--creatures whom we love as we love ourselves, or even more, regarding them as purer, innocent and vulnerable. And yet flesh of our flesh heading inexorably to the same destination.

How often do we, as parents, leap to the last and most dire bargain, even when it's not required? My life for hers; take me, not my child; take my kidney, my lung, a lobe of my liver--what price could be too high? I watch Sarah turn in her sleep, wind the shroud-like sheet around her legs, but only for as long as I can stand to. Then I unfold and drop the heavy blanket over her body, and change her from prophecy back into a little girl.

Years earlier I walked this road alone with similar fears, similar thoughts. I remember a day when snow fell and I felt my solitude keenly.

There is no one in sight, and much as I try to stop hearing them, my footballs repeat the syllables--no one, no one. The dark gathers theatrically, inspiring visions of a Red Riding Hood wolf, walking upright and speaking the language of men. Out from behind a boulder or a tree trunk he springs, lecturing before devouring me. "Foolish girl," lie scolds, "who walks through woods alone." Inside him, squashed against the hot red walls of his lungs and heart, I meet my grandmother, a woman who was easy prey for no creature.

The moon has risen, nearly full. Under its light the night is vast and absolute, the night of nothingness, of annihilation. Wolves: How alive the idea makes me feel, hurrying toward safety, quivering in my own flesh, almost running now under my heavy pack, feet sliding on loose gravel and stones, eyes stinging with snow. The moon has done this: changed the road from gray to silver, carried me from day to magic morbid night.... Shadows bloom with teeth and tongues and slaver; the shining road is ever steeper; inside my clothes I'm wet with fear, and my thoughts have collapsed into the flat recitations of the doomed. It will be over quickly, I tell myself, not like my mother's cancer or my grandmother's falling heart, not like dying by degrees of despair.