Finisterra

The French Way, as it is called, crosses over into Galicia from El Bierzo after the villages of La Faba and Laguna de Castilla, and you begin climbing. Maude had her old boots, veterans of many hill-walks in Provence and in the French Alps. Her companions from Paris were having a harder time, although Toby had walked in the Pyrenees and in the Yorkshire Dales; the other two had blisters already, and complained about their knees. It was June, but here in northern Spain the weather was unusually wet: for three days they had walked in the rain, wearing thick stiff green waterproof capes that made them look like walking tents. Plastic burkhas, making everyone identical. A soaked encampment on the move. Everyone carried a stout stick, and used it to push onward. At the mountain pass, they stripped off wet clothes before a fire in a hostel and ate caldo Gallego, sausages, fried potatoes; the rucksacks piled in a corner, the sticks beside the door like votives, steam rising from wet clothes, boots black with rain, their soaked tongues out to dry.

In one of the hostels there had been a wood stove. Otherwise, bunk beds in a cold barn, cold water to wash in. Her friends Evelyne and Marie-Jo complained often, wished they were back in Paris, but she stripped off and showered, shivering, to prove it could be done. At breakfast over café con leche and big loaves of bread, Toby said he’d had enough of that sort of thing in English boarding schools. She was the only one who had showered in icy water and rubbed herself dry with a scarf. She led the way up the next hill, walking on stones, up into the mist, towards the next fire, glimpsed as it rose above grey roofs, a thin wisp of smoke curling upward, not fog, not a bonfire, but a big wood fire in this high cold place, and miraculous quantities of food.

One step at a time, they came down the long slope of the mountain. Brown cows came towards them ringing their dull bells in fog. Invisible valleys filled with mist. Bushes of heather and broom, each twig holding a drop of water. Their wet feet squelched in their wet socks and boots. For Maude, the discomfort was welcome. Each step, with her growing blisters, took her further from what she did not want to remember. They walked with their heads down, plastic hoods drawn low. Then the rain lifted, and a country lay visible before them. Stone walls, slate roofs shining like wet stones on a beach, the grass full of bluebells, celandine, fox-gloves. A cuckoo shouted from a wood. In the villages, huge old chestnut trees spread their wide arms, ticketed like exhibits in a museum. A roadside milestone said, 130 km to Santiago de Compostela. Then 100. Then 50. They were, really, nearly there.

Pilgrimage: a journey towards the unattainable. Or, away from the unthinkable.

Toby slept in the bunk beneath hers in the last one of the refuges along the way; she bent, that last morning, to look down on him, his fair face with its red-blond tufts of hair against the sleeping bag he had pulled up to his chin. His rucksack open at his side, so he could put out a hand to protect it. His little black notebook, his special pen, his mouth-organ. His hand moved in his sleep. It was getting light, in the grey slow way of early summer mornings, hinting there would be sun later, to dry out the wet socks and underwear that hung off the backs of their rucksacks. She was stronger than he was, she could face into wind and rain and then burning sun. He tried to keep up with her, was probably in love with her; but at least on a pilgrimage, sleeping in hostels with dormitories, there had been no chance of having sex. He was younger, and half-English which made him younger still. He had been in one of those boarding-schools where boys beat each other and fell in love. He had parents who paid for everything. He had sisters. He was in Paris as a music student. She had met him on a bench, Place de la Sorbonne, where he was playing his mouth-organ in a vague way, looking out across the traffic of the Boul’ Mich’ as if he were in an English wood. She had liked his hands that could stretch over piano keys. She had liked it that he listened to every word she said. Also, he had money and paid for coffee and meals when they went out. He respected her for working in a tough school where everyone was an immigrant; he didn’t think of himself as an immigrant because his father was something in Brussels with the European parliament, and his mother was a Belgian journalist. Maude knew that what he liked about her was that she would do anything for a dare and that she was rumored to be good at sex, although that was out of the question, now.

She could not love him. She had tried, as she knew you had to try, to begin again, to trust, to believe. But it was not working. Perhaps it was too soon. On the Camino, truth came at you and would not be ignored, however inconvenient it might be. Marc was still beside her, every step of the way. At night, she still woke with the scream of brakes on the wet road, the sickening smell of burning in her nose. She saw the sky, from where she had fallen, as his motor-cycle skidded round the corner and threw him head-first into the wall. She was apparently a lone person, walking to discover who she had become and who she still might be; yet she was accompanied all the way by Marc, his face, his voice, his gait, more than she had been at any time since his death. There was no room for Toby, or anyone else, in her life at present. The road told her this, with each step. And yet, surely pilgrimage was for transformation, for movement on? Even, for miracles? She walked across Europe to its western tip in the company of people from all over the world who each had something to forget. But the walking was not doing it. What the walking was doing was drawing her into a solitude that might last forever. She could hardly speak for it. She could hardly look any fellow walker in the face.

When the sun came out, the earth steamed. They heard blackbirds, chaffinches, yellow-fronted warblers, an invisible cuckoo that called and called alongside them as they walked the edge of a eucalyptus wood, then an oak wood, with a woodpecker knocking his carpenter’s beak into an oak. There were streams rushing with all the recent rain, the fields were green as if it were still spring, and yellow broom and small hot-smelling pine trees grew along the path. Bees in the broom, and the scent of it on the air like cooked jam. They passed a man sitting on a low stone wall watching his sheep graze. A jay in the forest, flash of blue on the wing. She felt her certainty build in her in the silences. Maude knew, walking in front of Toby on the paved way through a village in Galicia in mid-afternoon, that here was where she would have to leave him. The journey she was on was hers, but it was also the journey of the ghost who walked at her side. Perhaps every person here on the Camino walked beside a ghost? She imagined the sight, if each ghost were to solidify and reappear: the legions of the lost.

In the evenings when they arrived in villages along the way, they drank Spanish brandy in bars where everybody was watching the World Cup. France versus Cameroon. Germany versus Australia. Spain versus the Czech Republic. When Spain won a roar went up. The French team, les Bleus, went home in disgrace because someone insulted someone else again. How typical of the French, Toby said. She called him a Brussels brat. He flushed easily, his skin gave him away. She was sharp with him, she knew, and regretted it.

She had agreed to do the walk part of the way to Santiago de Compostela when her two friends, the other teachers she worked with had suggested it, that it might be healing, these months after the accident, and she had rashly encouraged Toby to come too. The simple happiness of walking might just be enough for them, she had thought; but it was not. There was nothing simple about this, even though the days passed in a simplicity of movement, one foot after the other, up and down hills, following the simple mark of the arrow pointing always on. A pilgrimage was about change. It was about the truth and direction of your life. In the old days, it was about attaining purity, or at least emerging with your sins forgiven, a clean slate, but it was hard for her to believe in even after all the years of Catholic school. Maude knew that she alone would have to find the direction of her life; it would not be given to her. Also, that nobody walking this way was doing it without a desire to live: we are a company, she thought, that has turned away from death as a solution, and that is something. Even the dying – of old age, of cancer – were here, putting one foot in front of another. Or they were carried, on horseback, on donkeys, even by bus, to the one destination where the story of the travel-worn saint awaited them and they would stand in line to hug his effigy.

In Tricastela, where there were quarries, she had picked a small piece of limestone from the track and put it in her jacket pocket to carry to Santiago, the way the ancient pilgrims did before the cathedral was built, to contribute just one stone to its building. She had it in her pocket, coming into the city, she could feel its sharp edge through the cloth.

The bells of the cathedral rang out as they came up into the old city from the flat plains of its suburbs. The summer heat had arrived; it spread over the stones of the big square, it wrapped the far hills so that they trembled like a mirage. In the shadow of the great Gothic front built to hide the earlier Romanesque, at the bottom of the steep steps that were the last yards of the pilgrim’s way, she and Toby stood. They had come this far together. He had knelt in town squares to put Band-aid on her heels, wrap her feet in bandages. Once he even kissed her blisters, her walker’s stigmata. Breath upon raw skin, a coolness in spite of her urge to flinch away. At night, he had sat up late writing, while she had dreamed open-eyed on her bunk. She respected this quiet putting down of words at the end of each day. The little black book held truths she would never know.

“Why?” he’d said, in the milling crowd as they waited to go in, “Why, Maude?”

“Because it isn’t possible.”

“You’re telling me this now?”

“It’s now because I’m leaving. We have to say goodbye.”

“But, after all this?”

“Yes, after all this. Because of all this.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I have to leave.”

“I could come with you.”

“There’s something I have to do, Toby. I have to do it alone.”

“Well. Shit. I’ll miss you. Are you coming into the cathedral or not? Now that we’ve come all this way?”

She had not told him about Marc: now she knew that this was a crime against his innocence. But it had been impossible. The accident, the crash, had wiped something out of her that might never heal, she did not know, and Marc was dead because of it, and she had lived, and she had hoped, oh how she had hoped that she would be cured by this weeks-long immersion in the pains and hopes of all history; but she was not. She had asked the Camino to take it from her, her loss, and it seemed to have refused. She couldn’t ask Toby to do something that this ancient European ritual could not. She took the small stone from her pocket and laid it down. One small stone. One small person. But if you loved that person, they were not small, they were the world.

Marc, the thin back of him curved in front of her, the helmet he wore with his hair showing beneath; the wet road, after so much dryness; a sudden sharp bend, a skid, a letting go of gravity as it seemed, a soaring into air and then a fall. Not pain, so much as astonishment. The air knocked clean out of her, then rushing back in as vivid hurt. She and Marc had been thrown up like dice, allowed to fall where they could. And he had died of it, smashed to fragments of bone, and she had not. Incredibly, she had been thrown free of the bike and the road, to land scratched and torn, but hardly injured, in a big bush of elder, to hang there like someone parachuted from a height. The paramedics had found her, helped her down. Her ears buzzed, her skin was lacerated, scratches bleeding in long welts as if she had been whipped. But she was alive, and there had been that sheer astonishment and relief, before knowing that he was dead from hitting the road.

Together they went in to the cathedral, she and Toby. The huge beauty of stone and light took their breath and they were a small fragile human couple in a swell of feeling, carried along as the organ played and all the gold dripped downward from the high ceilings; like a marriage, she thought, like a mass marriage, everyone marrying everyone else, everyone caught up, helpless before this power of feeling that they call religion. She had never believed, except in this sense of the absolute, which was perhaps after all what religion was. She made her vow, absolute, in silence. Then she walked out of the cathedral and through the old town and took the road alone towards the very edge of the land, where it ended in rock, and where the ocean began, pounding up on the rocks, and the light over the water was endless, stretching all the way west to America. Finisterra. End of the land. Beginning of the watery kingdom at whose edge she would crouch as the white hands of the waves flew up over and over and her eyes were salt with spray and tears; waiting, for as long as it took.

He had followed her. He’d guessed where she would be going, apparently, and there he was, leaning against a rock, his back-pack at his feet. She was furious, that he had dared to do this: furious, and relieved.

He came towards her, slowly, leaving the back-pack like a stain against the paler rock.

“It’s something else, isn’t it?”

Together they contemplated the suck and roar of the sea, its burst of spray, its streaming in and out of holes in rock. Nothing but this, all the way to America. Nothing left of Europe; it was all behind them. She felt small, and confused. He put out a hand to her, but she did not take it. The noise of the ocean made speech impossible. At their feet, sand was sucked back and filled again and the rock pools appeared and disappeared with the pull and push of the tide.

She thought, there is no way back from this. So, what do we do? It was quite different from being alone here. It was annoying, maddening even, that there he stood, this lanky stupid English kid who hadn’t a clue how life really was or how you had to live it.

“Why did you come?”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

She shouted at him, into his face, “Why did you come?”

“Well, it’s the end of the old world,” he yelled back, “I had to see it, didn’t I?”

So, possibly, he had not followed her out of some babyish need, but had come of his own accord?

She turned back to face the gray sheets of the sea, mottled with color here and there, its pewter density. What now? Sea birds wheeled above them, gulls that seemed gigantic, sailing on the wind. You walked all that way, you did the pilgrimage, you arrived, you came past its end point to its very end, and what did you find? She turned, and went past him to sit on a rock, scuffing at the same with the toe of her boot.

“Where’s your back pack?”

“Over there, behind the rock.”

“I couldn’t leave you alone,” he said then, spoiling it all, “You know, not knowing if we’d see each other again, not knowing how you were.”

“Don’t start making speeches.”

“Okay.”

Silence. Then he said, “Hey, just, you know, we could be friends.”

She said nothing. Wind whipped at the ends of her hair, coming out from under her cap, the baseball cap turned backwards that she wore most of the time. “Friends?” It came out sounding scornful. Since the accident, she hadn’t been able to control the way she said things. It was like having one of those holes in the neck that people had – tracheotomies – and having to speak through that. Like ventriloquism, almost.

Toby said, “Yeah. Friends.” He spread his hands on his knees, bony coming out of his shorts, those long shorts English boys wore. His legs were thin and hairy, ending in his thick socks, large boots. He was such a mess, she thought. But one of his hands moved sideways off his right knee, and briefly touched hers, just for a second, and then moved back. But, bold, she thought. Brave, even. She knew she scared people, these days.

He said, “We could go back together. If you want.”

“Back where?” As if there was no way back from this end place, never had been, and you had to come here to find out.

“I meant, Paris. What did you think?”

“I thought – oh, forget it, it’s stupid. I thought – back in time, sort of, you know, before stuff happened.”

“What stuff?”

Putain, she thought, he is brave. And, I don’t seem to be able to get rid of him.

“My boy-friend died,” she said, “In a stupid accident. It was my fault.”

“How was it your fault?” They were not shouting now, in the shelter of the rocks. The sea did its thing just down the slope of the beach, and was not any more overwhelming; just a shoreline, just sea.

“Oh, shit, I guess not literally. But I wasn’t hurt, hardly at all, and he was killed on impact, so they said. We were on a motor-bike, his, going too fast round a bend. Now you know.”

Toby was silent. His fingers moved a little back towards hers, but didn’t touch. She looked at their two hands, pink and damp from salt and wind, and they looked like crabs, fumbling towards each other in the shallows.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I want to die too.”

Toby said nothing, but raised his head, so she saw his white neck with its freckles, the line of his jaw, its ginger fuzz just showing in the gleam of sunlight, the way the light on the waves showed color, there and then gone.

He said at last, “Yeah, I can see why you might. But you didn’t. You didn’t even get badly hurt, you said. Maybe that was because you were supposed to live.”

“Supposed to?”

“Yeah. Who knows? Why does this shit happen, some live, some die. I think, you were meant to live, and do stuff, and you know, have a life.”

“And he wasn’t?”

“He was the one driving, right?”

“Yeah, so what?”

“It was his call. His responsibility.”

“You mean, his fault?”

“I mean, he misjudged something. You didn’t. So, you shouldn’t start now. I think, personally, that you should let death find you in old age, planting your cabbages.”

“Planting cabbages? What the hell for?”

“Montaigne said it. I want death to find me planting my cabbages. Like, you know, in the normal course of things. Like, don’t go looking for it.”

“God, you do like making speeches.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “There’s a moment for it. Not all the time, I grant you. But sometimes. This is one of those times, so I’m not fucking going to apologize, because I like you, and I think – no, this isn’t another speech – we should get up off these uncomfortable damp rocks and go back and get some lunch in town.”

“Okay,” she said, because she couldn’t think what else to say, and because it sounded sensible, at last, and ordinary, and even do-able, and he wasn’t asking her to love him or anything impossible like that; and it was the only way, probably, to go back from this place where Europe and all she knew ended, and the ocean, if you stayed by it too long, would possibly just tear you apart. Turning their backs on it, they began to make their way, she following him, up the narrow path inland. She thought, we are walking like old people, as if we are tired out. The wind whipped at her hair ends, his reddish mop was ahead of her, a sort of beacon, they walked a little bent under the weight of their back-packs and behind them, there it was, the end place, the beautiful screaming ocean, empty of all human life, just fish, just speechless creatures, fumbling crabs.

As they came back into the town, where people surged back and forth, Peruvian pipe music filled the streets, the whole world seemed to have arrived, Maude knew that she had been there, to the end of things, and seen it, and that now there would be no more looking back. She took his hand, in a gesture of friendliness, and they walked in an easy silence to look for lunch.