The Camino offers a couple of alternative routes to Sarria; one, a little longer, takes you past the historical Monastery of Samos and the other passes through the town of San Xil as well as oak and chestnut forests. I chose the second route and the first part of the path was spectacular it has to be said, the fog covered everything and you couldn’t see more than ten metres ahead of you. On one of the steep uphill slopes towards one of the villages I came across on the way, I ran into Santa Claus, the German. I hadn’t seen him for a while and the first thing he did was check that I had my rucksack on me. He told me he had been struck down with a bad cold and that he was finding the walking tough so he didn’t think his feet would carry him much further than Sarria today, about fifteen kilometres from where we were. I’m amazed by this endearing old man and the outrageous number of kilometres he puts in despite his age. I excused myself and told him I was in a hurry to get to Sarria, wishing him all the best as well as a speedy recovery from his cold.
In Furela, ten kilometres after I left, I stopped off to have a hot Cola Cao and a bite to eat. The fog had given way to persistent rain which left me drenched to the bone so it was almost a mandatory stop-off. The place was tiny and there was hardly any room at the bar, but there was just enough space at one of the ends which I squeezed into to the annoyance of the guy to my left, as I apparently ruined his little moment of morning bliss given the look he threw my way. What can you do. Far from asking what the fuck was wrong with him, which would have been quite apt in my opinion, I smiled and said good morning. I’m in such a good mood that it’s sickening, I know. The pieces of the puzzle all fit together nicely after a conversation I overheard between our main man and the bartender. He’s a veteran. A Camino professional. “Yea, I’ve been here every year around this time for five years now. Don’t you remember me?” - he asked the bartender, who unconvincingly replied that now that he says it, his face does ring a bell. A classic…
Each and every person who does the Camino is themselves and their circumstances, but inevitably there are many that can be grouped into very specific types of personalities, easy to recognise in our everyday lives without the need to throw your rucksack on your back and come all the way out here. On other occasions I may have mentioned the competitive pilgrim or the professional comedian, you know the one who feels obliged to say something funny every time he opens his mouth, but the veteran pilgrim is also quite identifiable and no less boring. And when I say veteran pilgrim, I’m not meaning to get at the countless number of people who do the Camino over and over, even every year, as a way of life or because they like it, it makes them feel good or because of a promise or for whatever reason. I’ve met a few of these people and the majority of them are still very curious on the first day every time they start a new Camino and have the same desire to meet new people to share the experience with and to learn from. I’m not talking about them.
I’m talking about the pain in the backside who comes here as if he were a veteran of the Vietnam war to boast about his achievements and show off his supposed decorations. “I’ve done the Camino five times now. Let me tell you…” No no, it’s best you don’t tell me, I’ve heard this one before and I think I fell asleep after five minutes. I’m referring to those who look down on the newbie, those who are annoyed by everything everyone else does because you have to do things their way. Those who tell you what’s right and what’s not acceptable. Those who assume the moral authority to tell others what they have to do and where they have to go. Those who remind you that experience is a plus, when they’ve likely spent all their life doing the same thing in the same way without taking any risks that could plunge them deep into anxiety, only moving a centimetre along the straight line that is their peaceful existence. There may be those reading these lines who think I’m some sort of manic sociopath who must be walking the Camino alone, but in my defence I’d say not at all; I’ve had some great company up to now and I think I’m making life-long friends. It’s definitely clear that a lot of the people I’m meeting here have things in common with me, even if it doesn’t seem like it!
After leaving Furela and our beloved veteran, I ran into Tim from Kentucky and Michael from Boston. I walked and chatted with them but I soon had to excuse myself as I sped up my pace to reach Sarria as quickly as possible. Before reaching the town I tried phoning Zach a few times but with no success. I wrote him a message but didn’t get a reply either, which made me think that maybe they were taking him to Lugo or he was already being seen at the hospital.
When I arrived in Sarria, I went straight to the health centre and asked for Zach, giving the details of his ailment. They mustn’t have had a lot of Americans come in with the same issue lately as they knew who I was talking about straight away and said they would call the doctor who dealt with the case to explain what had happened. She confirmed that the enema from last night hadn’t worked and that even if there weren’t any other symptoms to make her think it was something very serious, given the number of days without any progress, the best thing for him would be to go to the hospital and have some X-rays done to look at the area in more detail. So she told him to go to Lugo first thing in the morning and, as she understood it, that’s where he would be.
I took a taxi outside the health centre after negotiating the price of the journey and we set off for Lugo. Just as we were leaving Sarria, I got a message from Zach telling me that he was in the town, along with his exact coordinates, and that he didn’t want to go to Lugo until I arrived. I asked Suso, the taxi driver, to turn back and off we went to pick up Zach. As we arrived at the hotel where he was staying, he looked a little scared. He asked me if I think it’s a good idea to go to the hospital or if it would be better to continue the Camino and gave his lazy guts some more time to work. I told him that it would be best to go to the hospital if that’s what they had recommended in the health centre and that I was sure it would all be for nothing but they were best-placed to tell us that in Lugo.
We arrived at the hospital in Lugo at around three in the afternoon. Suso left us his business card in case everything was over quickly and we wanted to go back to Sarria to continue the stage or to spend the night there and start the Camino again tomorrow. We went straight to A&E and I explained the problem to the receptionists, as apart from Galician and Spanish, they naturally didn’t speak any other language there. They asked for Zach’s passport and American health card and told us to take a seat until we were called over the tannoy. It crossed my mind that we’d need to pay close attention if we wanted to understand when they were requesting our presence. Thank God the American’s name isn’t too long or complicated to pronounce because if we were meant to take the hint by how they pronounced Berkshire, Zach would be left dying in the waiting room without any medical assistance.
A very nice nurse took us into a small room where she asked us what the problem was. I repeated everything again and translated some of the questions that the nurse asked Zach. After that she asked us again to wait for the doctor on duty to call us. There were people with all types of ailments in the new waiting room, some of them pretty bad. I don’t like hospitals at all. Pretty much like everyone I suppose. As soon as I see a doctor in uniform, I get all worked up and feel ill. Almost everyone in my family works in a hospital and I think the fact that, for years, all sorts of disasters have been discussed over meals as if it were the most natural thing, might have had something to do with it. Zach wasn’t exactly beaming either so we started to chat and joke around to try to lighten the situation. At one point they called Mr. Nicasio Díaz and Zach asked me if they’d said ‘quesadilla’ on the tannoy or if it was just him. The poor guy has survived on fruit juices the last four days and hasn’t eaten anything solid so as not to exacerbate the situation but now he’s seeing and hearing things. I told him that if he’s a good boy and keeps his part of the deal then they’ll give him quesadillas for dinner.
After waiting for half an hour they called Zach over the tannoy, or that’s what we understood anyway, and we went into a consultation room where the doctor on duty examined the American and asked him a series of questions that I translated. The doctor filled out his medical record after but for now she prescribed a new enema with a longer tube than the one before. Turning to me, in the capacity of translator, she added that it didn’t seem like anything serious but that it’s obviously been a while since anything happened and they’d need to keep an eye on him.
From then on a couple of very nice nurses, one from Gijon and the other of Aragonese origin, were in charge of the operation. The Aragonese nurse discreetly asked him how it was possible that he’d overlooked the problem for so many days. The Asturian nurse, more direct, asked how he could go so many days without crapping. “But don’t worry, you’re in good hands. There isn’t a patient who can resist my enemas. I’ll be finished with you in fifteen minutes” – she said as she handled the solution that would supposedly put an end to the Kentucky guy’s worries. I couldn’t stop laughing, partly because of what the nurse said and partly because of Zach’s terrified look, as he didn’t understand a word of what was being said and all he could see was a nurse talking a foreign language with a higher tone of voice than normal who was preparing a Satanic liquid in a bag with a tube of a certain length hanging from it, which was inevitably going to end up inside him.
The nurses asked me to leave the bathroom where we were, unless I wanted to witness the show. I gladly went for a walk around A&E, hoping that it would all be over as soon as possible. I returned to the bathroom where we were just as the nurse from Gijón came out and shouted to the rest of her colleagues: “Panic’s over girls, we’ve unclogged the United States!”. I couldn’t help but smile and go up to the nurse to ask her to verify the good news. She confirmed her words, saying that we had indeed got the best of him and that from now on it would be plain sailing. She asked me to give good old Zach ten minutes and then put my foot under the door to see if he was still breathing. I hesitated for a few seconds because if the miracle-cure had indeed worked, as the nurse said, I sensed that going inside would be like going into a sewer with no breathing apparatus. After giving him a few minutes, I half-opened the door and rather than seeing Zach sitting up with a beaming smile on his face, I went in to find him still in the operating theatre, looking annoyed. The Asturian nurse had declared victory too soon and it was actually nothing more than the solution itself that had been expelled.
At that moment, as I stood before that scene of helplessness where one is caught hiding his crown jewels, I knew that the friendship between myself and the American would be long-lasting, whether we liked it or not. Having lost all dignity and admitted defeat, my comrade-in-arms was, in that instant, pledging fraternal loyalty and if Zach had have been a Navajo Indian, he would have slit his wrists with a machete to seal the deal. The scene inevitably transported me to a time in the past when I walked in on one of my best friends in the bathroom in combat position. Stunned as I was, I asked a patently obvious question: “aren’t you taking a crap?” To which my friend replied matter-of-factly: “yea, what’s wrong?” I went to a fee-paying school and that didn’t seem one bit normal to me so, a little irate, I replied: “what do you mean what’s wrong, close the door for fuck sake!” To which my friend retorted, with the same calmness: “no, sure I’ll leave it open and then we can talk”. Despite the years of loyalty declared, it wasn’t until that moment that I realised that this was a real friendship. By opening those bathroom doors, the last stronghold of his privacy, my friend was opening the doors to his soul, letting it be known that we were equals and that with me there was no need to pretend or hide as we were cut from the same cloth and it was no use pretending we weren’t: our strength left us through the same hole after all…
Nothing more happened for the rest of the afternoon so the on-duty doctor decided to arrange some X-rays to try and see what’s going on in Zach’s lower belly, which isn’t looking good. Given the fact that it was early evening and that there had been no response to the shock treatment, the doctor told me that her idea is to keep the American in for at least tonight to see if there’s any progress. This latest news left the guy from Kentucky a bit downbeat. He’s aware that something isn’t right and even if this isn’t a new problem for him, especially not when travelling, the amount of time it’s taking on this occasion is exaggerated and not one bit normal. His plans can also be added to the list. We are around one hundred and twenty kilometres away from Santiago and if he has to spend tonight in hospital, tomorrow’s stage is in danger. He’s taking a flight back to the United States from Vigo early on Monday morning as he has to work in Lexington, Kentucky, on Tuesday which means that Sunday is the last possible day to reach the Galician capital. Assuming all goes well, he gets out tomorrow and we can start walking again first thing on Friday morning, we would have to average forty kilometres a day to reach the Plaza de Obradoiro on time. I tried to cheer Zach up by telling him it was very doable and that with the amount of kilometres we already had behind us, there was no need to worry. He knew the only thing he had to worry about and I told him that I wanted him to give me a surprise tomorrow morning when I came through the door of A&E.
Zach thanked me and insinuated that I’d already done enough, he’s well-looked after here, and that I shouldn’t worry about him and go on with my Camino, as he’s sure everything will be ok. I answered that whether he likes it or not, he’s my friend and I don’t go leaving friends behind. We walked into this hospital together and we’ll walk out of it together too. He’s in my country and I’ll do everything within my means to make sure nothing bad happens to him. And if he doesn’t like what I’m saying, he shouldn’t blame me, rather his Hollywood counterparts and their strange interpretation of what constitutes friendship which I’ve been force-fed since I was a kid, and even today, with the likes of The Goonies, The Lost Boys and things like that…
After saying goodbye to Zach, I left the hospital and took a taxi to the hotel in Lugo where I’d be spending the night. Asides from the twenty kilometres that I walked today, soaking wet in the rain, I was left worn out by the afternoon and the stress in the hospital. I needed to go out and get some air. On the way into the city, a good few kilometres’ journey, I thought about destiny and if things just happen or if they have some sort of explanation even if it’s difficult to understand. One of the reasons why I’m doing the Camino is a good friend who sadly left us some time ago and who I wasn’t able to help in those tragic circumstances, even though I wanted to. Now the Camino has brought me to Lugo hospital with an American guy I met a week ago but with whom I have a lot of things in common, despite the fact we grew up thousands of kilometres apart. I thought about my friend and I felt good; for doing the right thing, for being at another friend’s side, this time a new one, when he needed it most. As he always did with me. And even though he’s not with me in person anymore, I felt that he was very near, like on so many other occasions…
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario