The owner of the hostel in Frómista where I’m staying also runs a restaurant about a hundred metres down the road where she recommended I have breakfast. Two euros fifty for a coffee with milk and a pastry. And another two euros if I want orange juice. I think it’s bloody ridiculous that they charge you this for breakfast in a little town in Palencia, but I didn’t have much choice. All the cafés in the small towns the Camino passes through rip the piss with the pilgrim, who is very good and doesn’t complain. Or rather, as naive as the average European citizen. We all have to eat and pay bills. But that’s the Camino de Santiago and the Euro for you and there’s not much we can do about it. One day we awake to find that where we used to pay two hundred pesetas for a beer, we’re now paying two euros, and to top it off we’re meant to be grateful for the two zeros being shaved off the price. Like with everything else. And our salaries are the same, of course. We were earning too much back then for not lifting a finger you see. It’s a good job the banks appeared, grinning from ear to ear, to give us the money we needed to fulfil our dreams as otherwise I don’t know what would have become of us. And we continued dreaming bigger and better as we weren’t going to let our neighbours get the better of us. Ah, the good old days! I got myself into debt once. It was twelve years ago when I went to Stockholm on Erasmus and I hope I don’t have to do it again for some time. The investment was worth it but the headache paying back the money gave me was so bad that I told myself never again, no way José. That’s why I don’t have a mortgage and I don’t understand how there are people who happily take on thirty year mortgages…
In the hostel restaurant I was served by a stocky waiter with a red face and saggy cheeks. His face reminded me of that of a basset hound. I ordered a coffee with milk, a piece of homemade sponge cake and an orange juice. I thought his accent sounded Basque so I asked him where he was from. He told me he’s from Bilbao but that his mother’s side of the family is from Palencia and he’s been in Frómista now for many years running this business. Keeping this conversation going with the waiter was hard, as hard as it is for a spectator following a rally between Federer and Nadal from the back of the court. He kept walking up and down the bar, as if he was Groucho Marx. I followed him with my eyes as I dipped my sponge cake into my coffee, trying not to drip it on my trousers. When I asked for the bill, I was told almost six euros. After recovering from the blow, I told him that the woman who runs the hostel had told me that it would cost no more than four fifty with orange juice and he replied, very dignified, that that isn’t so and that she’s not very up to date with the restaurant prices. I paid it reluctantly and when I went back to the hostel, the owner asked me how breakfast was and I told her expensive. She wanted to know how much I paid and when I told her, she told me very calmly that her brother has “no bloody clue about anything”. She took out some coins from the till to give me the difference from the price she had given me earlier and in a calm voice announced that she was going to phone her twin right now, who is the waiter seemingly, to give off to him for his slip-up. The nice guy from the restaurant is going to have a few strips torn off him, I thought as I went up to my room. I have a feeling that the female twin got all the personality when they were born. As I opened the door, I was engulfed by hurricane-like yelling coming from the reception: “Noooo, I told you four fifty and you just charged him whatever the hell you felt like!!!”…
Today’s route was very easy, twenty kilometres walking on flat ground which meant I could recover from the excesses of previous days. I did my first stop off of the day in Población de Campos, three and a half kilometres after I started, to have a Cola-Cao. There was a reporter on the TV programme Comando Actualidad (Current Affairs Command) interviewing a scrap dealer. I almost choked on my Cola-Cao with one of the questions she asked him: “don’t you go crazy when you start earning money?” This question left me a bit bewildered, but not any more so than the owner of the cafeteria: “the stupid bitch, go crazy she says; sure what does a scrap dealer earn, idiot! Looking towards me, the waiter told me that he also goes a bit crazy, but when the bills start to come in and he has to pay them. And the ones from Comando Actualidad had better not come here because he might also go crazy if they start asking stupid questions like that.
Just as I was leaving the town I met Wu, a Taiwanese guy. He’s a cheerful chap no more than about twenty-five years old. Even though he’s thin, he’s wearing a rucksack that looks to weigh about ten kilos and a plastic bag that he’s carrying in his hand and looks quite heavy. I asked him what he’s carrying in the bag and he told me it’s his food for the weekend. Apparently last Sunday he couldn’t find any shops open when he wanted to buy something to eat and so this weekend he’s not going to get caught out again. He can’t quite understand why retailers in Spain rest one day of the week and asked me if the problem is that we Spaniards don’t like earning money. I explained to him that money, for many people, is a way of living, and living well if possible, not a means to an end. And resting forms part of this scale of priorities, as without any days off, how the hell would we be able to enjoy the money we earn? I think that Wu must have thought this logic was a right load of nonsense. He didn’t refute the idea of a rest, despite asking me, with his eyes looking as if they were about to pop out of their sockets, if it’s true that we have a siesta every day. I’m beginning to realise that the siesta thing really intrigues the Asians. What Wu doesn’t understand is how we can have the shops closed and such a high rate of youth unemployment at the same time and so he asked why all the unemployed young people aren’t employed while the shops are usually closed so that they are always open and the young people are working. Two birds with one stone, according to the Taiwanese guy. If we handed Wu the Finance portfolio, I think he’d put an end to the crisis in two days.
I said goodbye to Wu in Revenga de Campos. He took a chocolate bar out from his plastic bag and gave it to me as a little present. I could have got the potato omelette or a whole kilo of uncooked rice so I can’t complain. I went over to the local church and rested for a bit as I devoured the chocolate bar. Afterwards I set off again at a good pace. Before reaching the next town, I passed by the diversion to Arconada and Santillana, two towns in Palencia. I couldn’t help but remember the 12:1 qualifying match against Malta that put us through to the final of the 1984 UEFA Cup in France and the unfortunate mistake by the legendary goalkeeper from San Sebastian in the final against the hosts. A blip which just didn’t do justice to that great goalkeeper’s career and achievements, without whom Spain wouldn’t have reached the final of the championship. But that’s the way we are in this country, when we win it’s everyone’s achievement and when we lose we blame those responsible, which, funnily enough, is never us.
I did another stop off in Villalcázar de Sirga where I had a bit of empanada in a café and visited the Church of Santa María la Blanca, which is really the size of a Cathedral and was built by Templars whose knights still manage it today. Once there, the one in charge of stamping my pilgrim passport suggested that I start to get two stamps per day or I would run the risk of not getting my certificate in Santiago as they might suspect that I did the journey by car. I was stunned. This obsession with titles and documentation in Spain has reached even these heights. I very politely told him that if they say that to me in Santiago, I’ll gladly put my feet up on the counter and ask them to tell me which pedal causes blisters that I have on the bottom of them and on almost all of my toes; the accelerator, the brake or the clutch. I didn’t hang around and got back to the walking as the clouds above me didn’t look good. My efforts were in vain as a terrible hailstorm took me by surprise on my way to Carrión de los Condes.
When I arrived in the town I sat down to rest in an arcade where a man from Bilbao, who goes by the name of Tario, was passing the afternoon. When I asked him what type of name that was, he told me that he is simply a poet without a name who follows the sun because he’s a solitary man. And so from the abbreviation of sun, poet and solitary in Spanish, he got the pseudonym Tario which is how he usually introduces himself, unless it’s the Guardia Civil asking. The poet from Bilbao offered me a glass of wine, which I willingly accepted. He was telling me that it’s the third year in a row he’s going to Galicia to spend the summer and, when he tires of it he’ll go back north towards his Basque homeland to then continue walking as he has done for the last six years uninterruptedly. I was interested to know how he does it and he told me with a small incapacity benefit of three hundred euros a month, a good mattress, tent, stove and two dogs to keep him company and sometimes act as central heating. I imagine that the three litres of wine that he confessed to me he chugs back each day help him to live this type of life as well. And to not get too cold. All of his belongings fit into a pram which he pushes around every day until he reaches his next destination, which varies according to how far he feels like walking or how comfortable he is in one place.
Tario likes poetry but he hasn’t published anything. According to what he tells me, there were a lot of reasons and pressure for him not to publish. He was pursued until he gave up and decided to get out of the way so as to be left in peace. I asked him where these pressures were coming from and he told me it didn’t matter, as no one was going to believe him. Nonetheless, so that I could understand what he was talking about, he explained a supposedly similar case to me which happened in the 1970s. At that time nappies arrived on the market and soon after, a woman who said she had patented a reusable nappy gained certain notoriety, which according to Tario meant the ruin of the inventors of disposable nappies. That woman was never heard of again and the new product was never put on the market. Tario asked me if I got what he’s saying and I told him I did, despite the fact that I think this sort of thing is completely normal, but the less said about those who come up with such dirty tricks the better. "They manipulate us”, the poet from Bilbao pointed out.
After conversing for a while, I excused myself and asked Tario if he would be around after dinner so that we could have another glass of wine. He pointed to his tent and pram, sitting in a green area opposite us and told me he wouldn’t be very far.
After leaving my rucksack in my room and having a hot shower, I went for a walk around the town and bought a good bottle of wine to share with Tario. I also stopped off in the pharmacy to get some indigestion tablets as the pilgrim’s diet gives me a bit of heartburn at times. As I went into the pharmacy, I thought I saw the Irish girl Alyson with her American friend Hilly. They were buying plasters and also some product for chafing it seemed, as when I walked in I interrupted the pharmacist explaining, using mimes to help, how to apply the lotion if the irritation was on the inner thighs. Alyson recognised me straightaway and went bright red, as Hilly, who speaks Spanish, asked the shop assistant to quit the explanations given the embarrassing situation and put the lotion and plasters into a plastic bag for them.
After saying goodbye to the lovely Alyson and Hilly, I headed back over to the entrance into the town where Tario was to chat with him for a while. He was having an animated conversation with a woman beside him who had taken her dog out for a walk and, at first, I got the distinct impression I was interrupting something. I asked them if this was the case and they told me it wasn’t so I offered them each a glass of wine. Tario, used to another type of wine, polished his off in almost one go and before we knew it, we’d finished the whole bottle as the poet from Bilbao told us about his lifestyle and experiences which he speckled from time to time with little verses from his own creations: "sólo sé, que sólo sabe, lo que se besa”, which roughly translates as “all I know, is that you only know/taste*, what you kiss”. I remained very serious when he spouted this at me and I told him I hoped he wasn’t declaring his love for me, a comment that drew a roar of laughter from Tario as he poured us another glass of wine, this time his type. The neighbour from the town, Patricia, excused herself and said she had to go as she wanted to watch Eurovision to see Spain’s performance. Patricia lives alone in a two-floor house with quite a few rooms and told Tario that he could knock on her door if he’s cold later on or if there’s any other problem. I think there’s something in this and that Patricia is asking for company and this is her way of making it known to the poet from Bilbao, who flashed her a charming smile, clearly flattered by the offer.
I stayed there talking with Tario a little while longer until it got dark. He was telling me that he’d had a difficult childhood. His father killed his mother not long after he was born and was put in jail. Tario was put in an orphanage where he suffered all sorts of abuse and beatings were the only form of communication which, according to him, crushed his will. His problems only got worse as he got older.
He heard voices which told him to do things he didn’t want to do and he fell into a deep depression which put him in hospital for a year. He got incapacity benefit and continued with the treatment under medical supervision, as otherwise he wouldn’t get the benefit. One fine day, six years ago now, he got fed up of being stuffed full of pills and not ever feeling like doing anything, so he put everything he needed in a pram that he found abandoned on the street and started walking. I don’t have any way of corroborating what he’s telling me, all I have is his word, but he says he hasn’t relapsed since and has never been so happy in his entire life. He has everything he needs with him and for the first time, he’s able to enjoy the feeling of being free. I imagine that the vast majority of medical specialists, if not all of them, will think it’s an outrage that Tario is out here walking without being clinically supervised, and even more outrageous that he’s drinking as much as he is. But the person I met is someone who has never had anything but knocks in this life and is intelligent, sensitive, likely frightened and who flees and isolates himself so that no one can hurt him anymore. This is someone who maybe we should listen to more rather than stigmatising him for having a mental illness. After all, all the material possessions this man needs to be happy fit in one pram…
I thanked Tario for his company and his honesty, left some money with him so that he would be a bit less hard up this month and set off, wondering if it would take him long to go to Patricia’s house and ring the bell so that he could watch what was left of Eurovision with her. I think a bit of TLC as they let their fears drift away would do them both a bit of good…
*A poetic play on words in Spanish as the verb ‘saber’ means both to know and to taste.
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