***
We have 25 kilometers to go. We do not yet know what a kilometer means, in terms of distance or in terms of distance before breakfast, or in terms of distance in the heat. But we cross a bridge over a river, look back at a hulking Cathedral. It shrinks behind us. It’s almost 6:00 in the morning, and we know that we have 25 kilometers to go. We look for signs and they go fast while we discuss Jackson Pollock paintings and her cousins in Israel and Goldman Sachs. At the top of a hill I see the gradations of color in a single wheat field that unfolds below—red and green and gold. Blue, almost. Only five kilometers to go. The land falls—we see a thin spire in the distance. That must be our town, I say, or she says. We walk with the spring of knowing that we will get there soon, and we get there soon, but it is not our town. Our town is three more kilometers, and we learn what a kilometer means when it is unexpected. It means we become angry and thirsty and things get blurry in the heat.We learn then never to say, I think we’re close. Never say, only five to go. All the towns in Spain look the same from a distance—a spire, some stones, a shady lane of trees. So never, ever say: that must be our town.
***
I read Anne Carson at night, and she writes about the Camino in stunning photographic stills. I try to copy her in my notebook, and at breaks I write fragments. Frómista, June 22: Slow morning. Café con leché, 2.50. Alex tells story about magical school. Dehydrated. Anne Carson is in France and everywhere there is water. Here there is no water, we are obsessed with the lack of it. She sees a drowned dog. I see no drowned dog, but as we walk into Carrion de Los Condés, parched, we see a dead cat with its entrails spilling out like a ball of fleshy pink yarn. Alex says she hates this place. We stay in the albergue with the singing nuns. That sounds pleasant but the place is strange. The nuns are young, from South America. They do not stop smiling and trying to help us with things. I tell Alex I feel sick and one of them appears with broth. I do not know why but I hate her. We gather with other pilgrims to sing songs in different languages. I hate the voice of the nun with the guitar. I hate the voice of the old Italian man next to me. Everything sounds like a low whine.We go to mass because someone says it’s Corpus Christi tomorrow and we’re doing a Catholic pilgrimage so we might as well. My dad was an altar boy. He still crosses himself in airports, but he says he hates church. I used to beg to go to church. My mom made me watch a documentary about the evils of organized religion instead. Today, religion feels disorganized—maybe because it’s in Spanish. I understand the part where they talk about the body and the blood. Tomorrow they will take the body and the blood and parade it through streets scattered with flowers. Today they invite us to share in la sangre y el cuerpo. I don’t. I think about the sun-dried cat carcass.
***
Outside Léon, a maze of overpasses and car factories disappears into Alex’s family tree. I learn everything. Her aunt Petra’s bangles clang and her cousin Diana is losing her hair in big clumps. Her grandfather ate diamonds in South Africa and took them in his stomach to Israel. He still rises at 5 a.m. and writes his plan for the day in cursive. He likes figs. She was a chess prodigy. I used to play soccer. She misses chess but I don’t miss soccer. I had trouble with my mom in ninth grade. I still have some trouble with my mom, but less. We talk about that. I have some trouble with my dad. We talk about that. We list all our kisses. We walk into Léon and heat ripples, heat ripples. Sweat drips off my skin onto the dust and I wonder—is there any verb for heat besides rippling?
***
In Léon, Alex sleeps and I sit alone at a bar with my book. An Irish guy sits down with me. He buys me a glass of wine and asks what my luxury item is. I tell him peanut butter and he laughs. His item is a copy of The Corrections. I am also reading Jonathan Franzen. He asks me if I have seen love on the Camino and I say no. He has, and he tells me stories about people writing messages on walls and walking backwards for each other. I decide on the basis of the wine and The Corrections that we will fall in love on the Camino. But it is already 9:00. I ask if he will be in Hospital del Orbigo the next night. He says yes. I say, see you soon. He is not there the next night, or the next. I think maybe he’s a day behind, or a day ahead.
***
After Léon: Trobajo del Camino. La Virgen del Camino. Valverde de la Virgen. We practice self-denial, make it our art. We give up wine and chocolate and soap. Three days without coffee. We want to say: we did this. We walked across Spain, and it wasn’t the coffee. We joke about doing penitence like medieval pilgrims for the excess of our college lives. We are both on intimate terms with gluttony, so we try to out-walk him. What we learn: gluttony keeps pace with us, in new forms. We do not eat chocolate or drink wine, so we gorge on warm milk and bread. We eat three bread baskets near Palas del Rei and try to hike after lunch. Alex almost throws up. The heat stays still.
***
The day with the Roman Road breaks us. 33.5 kilometers. We leave at 4:00 and hike in the dark with a cell phone flashlight. By 10 we are hungry, an irritating belly hunger for bread and peanut butter, and there is no town because the Roman road only goes through ruins. They do not even look how ruins should—just stones on the side of a regular road. Some tracks and the whistle of a passing train remind us how slow and small we are.It rains. Finally, the water we were desperate for, except now it comes in floods. We bicker about breaks. My toes ache cold. There is a town—a spire, some stones—but it is not our town. We do not even walk through it. I can’t do this.Alex’s blister pops. She sits down on the side of the road and I am afraid she will cry and add tears to all this water. She doesn’t. She says, Sophie, why the fuck are we doing this? We get there. There means a hard bed, and we sleep.
***
I have a hard time expressing affection, which is something we talk about, but in Triacastela it is easy. We eat raspberries and the sun is intoxicating. Alex is strikingly beautiful and sometimes I am jealous but not now. She laughs with her hands and knows how to make people feel comfortable and tell stories well. I take a picture so we won’t forget the table where we’re sitting and reading but mostly not reading. The clothesline, the grass, the raspberry stains. It’s almost too sweet, but I do remember to tell her I love her just then, and think that I should remember more often.
***
When we arrive in Santiago we don’t even realize that we’ve arrived. We come to a side door of the Cathedral and it looks like any other church. The front is covered in scaffolding, so it looks even worse. We have no cash, which in the morning seemed poetic and is now just problematic. My blister pops. We are too late for seats at the pilgrims’ mass. Somehow, we find ourselves laughing because we never cared much about Santiago anyways. So we go to an ATM, and sit down in a café.We eat vegetarian food and drink coffee with thick whipped cream. And then we ask each other why we walked across Spain to get to a church we didn’t care about. 500 kilometers. 311 miles. We have walked roughly the distance from San Francisco to LA—my hometown to hers. This is also the exact distance zebras migrate each year across Namibia and Botswana, the longest terrestrial migration known to man. But the zebras are going somewhere. We are at yet another café.But there’s something. Later I will try to write what it is—thousands of words about the fog in the morning, the insides of churches, praying in gardens, our blisters popping, Hungarian folktales, things moving forward, true tiredness. But in this café it’s laughing with Alex and coffee with whipped cream.