On the Way: Roncesvalles to Burguete
After a restless night, Richard and I awoke early. I left a bundle of clothes and some books at Roncesvalles to lighten my pack, and departed. It was a warm morning. On my left on the way out of Roncesvalles, I came upon a cross in the twilight. It is called the Cruz de los Peregrinos. It is a nineteenth century replica of the 14th century original, which was destroyed by the army of the French revolution in 1794. There stood the substitute cross, on a stepped foundation, among a copse of beech trees, as it has for decades. The cross is splotched with moss and lichen, silently beckoning prayer from the heart of the pilgrim. Ave crux spes nostra!
I traveled on a trail, by the carretera, under a tall canopy of trees, to the left of a rock fence which separated me from farmland, through fluttering white butterflies, and the bleating of nervous sheep. The land of Navarre lay before us as Richard and I headed to Burguete, the town in which we hoped to eat some breakfast, for everything was closed when we left Roncesvalles.
Leave Ronces-valles
D
Cruz de los Peregrinos
Into the village of Burguete
D
Iron Cross of Santiago
M
Church of San Nicolas
Aymeric Picaud tells us in his Pilgrim’s Guide that after the valley of Roncesvalles, “lies the land of the Navarrese which abounds in bread, wine, milk, and livestock.”
[i] That was true then; it remains true today. The Navarrese, Picaud also tells us, eat using communal dish and cups, use their hands, and “if you saw them eating, you would take them for dogs or pigs in the very act of devouring.”
[ii] If this attack upon the Navarrese was once true, it certainly is no longer, at least not from anything I saw that day or ever in the Spanish regions of Navarre.
Only three kilometers ahead of Roncesvalles Richard and I came upon the town of Burguete (in Basque, Auritz), a town with only one main street lined with houses. The houses were in a Pyrenean Basque in style, and bore façades decorated with escutcheons carved in stone. We passed by the Church of St. Nicholas, tried to enter but were unable since it was locked. We continued through town and stopped to take a rest and wait for the local panaderia to open. The man across the street told us it would open at eight, and it did. The temperature dropped and we were cold as we waited in the street.
At the panaderia we had café con leche and a chocolate-filled pastry. The proprietor was an elderly and ugly man, with graying hair, a white beard, and a very large belly. The bar was attached to the living quarters by a door. The proprietor’s daughter, a very attractive young Basque girl with reddish-blond hair, light brown eyes and matching skin, came out of the home to help her father attend to his customers. Without hesitation she planted an affectionate kiss upon that old man, and I considered how she would never have kissed the likes of him, but for the fact he was her father.
I I I
Si illos comedere videres, canibus edentibus vel porcis eos compu-tares
Through
Espinal
k
San Bartolo-meo
Over the Alto de Mezquiriz
(922 m.)
Crossing the río Erro
By Mezquiriz
On the Way: From Burguete to Zubiri
After breakfast we crossed the street and took farm roads over some arroyos and through the pleasant land of shepherds and ranchers. The foothills of the Pyrenees stood to our right and to our left as we walked along the valley between them. The land was hilly, and the road followed the lay of the land. The road was generously sprinkled with sheep droppings and cow dung. We passed one sheep ranch, where a Basque shepherd dressed in blue shirt and wearing a blue hat was goading the sheep with the help of his sheep dog. He gave us a greeting as we traveled by his home. Eventually, we reached an intersection where four dirt roads met, and we took the road that went south and downhill into a town nestled in a valley.
The town was Espinal (in Euskera, the language of the Basques, Aurizperri). Espinal, or if you are so disposed, Aurizperri, is an ancient city, founded by Thibault II, the king of Navarre and count of Champagne (1253-1270). St. Bartholomew is patron of the town, for so is named the parish church, a modern high-roofed structure with a flagstone bell tower. By the church we took a right on the main carretera through the town. Richard pointed out that the clock on the church tower read ten ‘til twelve, but it was actually nine twenty-two.
We had learned the day before of the foolishness of travelling without food, and so we stopped at the store at Espinal for provisions. There I bought some fruit and anchovie-stuffed olives, some juice, paté, bread, ham, and cheese. I also bought some laundry detergent. It was needed since at Roncesvalles I had reduced the change of clothes I was carrying with me.
Out of Espinal we climbed up a hill on a dirt road, and took the right fork through some barbed-wire fences. The hill is called the Alto de Mezquiriz, and it is dotted with avellanas, hardy hazel trees, the ubiquitous beech, and firs. The woods here, they say, are populated by deer, and the waters by trout. The Alto de Mezquiriz is the watershed of the Arce and the Erro Rivers. Once atop the hill, we bore right, followed the fence line on our left, and headed north. We crossed a wide field, through and under a barbed-wire fence, and through a wood by a dirt trail, which crossed the carretera. The path then alternated between cement and dirt, eventually it went downhill, crossed a stream, and hit the highway which led to the town of Biscarret.
Bisca-rellus
Through
Ureta
Into Viscarret
Through
Linzoáin
By the
Pasos de Roldán
Over the Alto de Erro
(801 m.)
puente del Paradiso
Into Zubiri
We walked through Biscarret and travelled by an unkempt and locked cemetery established in 1931, and from there uphill to the small town of Linzoaín. We travelled behind the town uphill by an old weathered farmhouse, with rough stone lintels and quoins, green shutters, and a red tile roof. Beyond the farmhouse, the uphill path was strewn with rocks, and boxwood grew aggressively to the right and the left of us. The footpath eventually led us into some woods, principally of pine.
Under the shadow of the pines, we came upon some Spanish women on holiday. It was hot, even in the shade, and the elder of the two was not particularly modest, for she had dispensed with all her clothes above the waist but her brassiere. But it presented no occasion of sin, rather an occasion for revulsion, for she was very fat and had a very shapeless body.
Further on, as we topped the hill, a gentle breeze blew. We took a fork to the right heading uphill, and crossed a dirt road to another trail which led through the shade of scented pines. The breeze quit, and it grew hot again. On the right of the trail, we came upon three large slabs of stone, about a foot or two high, and eight feet long, called the Pasos de Roldán, or Roland’s Steps. Richard sat upon the largest one. Following a brief rest, we climbed again to the top of the Alto de Erro. From the height of the Alto de Erro, we descended into the valley of the Arga River. We soon departed the company of the woods of fir and beech, passed an abandoned farmhouse of stucco and stone, whereupon we saw the town of Zubiri below us. The town is known as Zubiri in both Spanish and Basque. In Euskera, Zubiri means “Bridgetown.”
The bridge for which the town is named is found at the town’s entrance. It spans the Arga River, and makes claim to many epithets. It is known as the “Bridge of Paradise,” perhaps because of its view of the Rio Arga valley, the Esteríbar. The bridge was called the “Bridge of Hell” by the 17th century Italian priest-pilgrim Dominico Laffi because it was at one time under the control of ruffians headed by the renegade nobleman, Don Caime, Lord of Torbaca. It is also referred to as the “Puente de la Rabia” from the legendary belief that animals, not excluding humans, passing it three times would be cured of rabies.
[iii] As I passed over the bridge, I thought of the time when my daughter was potentially threatened by rabies several years ago. I trusted God and Louis Pasteur, and things turned out well. I did not know of the Puente de la Rabia then, but had I known of it, I would most surely still have trusted God and Louis Pasteur. My daughter would have much preferred walking over this bridge thrice, than to endure the regimen of rabies vaccines.
I learned, however, that the bridge itself was not the magic against the dreaded hydrophobia, but a saint’s intercession was. According to popular legend, the relics of the fifth-century virgin and martyr, St. Quitera, were deposited and later found here. She is the patroness of those bitten by rabid animals, and one may recognize St. Quitera in iconography because she is always shown with a dog on a leash. To answer the question of whether a Quiteran relic found its way to Zubiri puts us in the realm of the fabulous, not necessarily false, but with only the most scant historical evidence to support any answer. In any event what is known is that the Gascons in Airie, France, claimed to be the depository of her relics until they were scattered by rabid Huguenots, whose spiritual madness St. Quiteria was unable to cure. Quiteria is said to have been the daughter of a Galician prince. She left her home to escape a forced marriage and her father’s demand that she abandon her love of Christ. Her paterfamilias had her traced, and he found her at Airie, only to have her head severed from her body, a foolish pagan paternal custom. Moderns have far outdistanced the ancient pagan in morality, for today we do not let fathers kill their daughters with a sword. They were blind and thought it civil and legitimate; we now recognize it as a barbarity. Be we ought not to be too self-satisfied, for we have of late developed and legitimated the foolish custom to let the materfamilias kill her daughter with a cannula. We label it as civility; we ought to recognize it as a barbarity.
I I I
I walked into Zubiri like an old man, crippled in my knees and toes, and in extreme pain for I had the remnants of the battle of the Pyrenees in my joints. It had grown hot, very hot, and the sky was cloudless. We walked by a church in Zubiri, dedicated to St. Sernin, originally of Toulouse, and martyred by Romans through the services of a bull. Mithras, not Christ, won the battle that day. There is no need to talk about St. Sernin now, however, as I will say more about him in Pamplona, since St. Sernin’s main church is there.
Past the church we stopped a woman in a car and asked about lodgings in the town. She pointed close by to a hostería on our left, and to our right to the pilgrim refugio and a hotel far down the road.
I voted for the hostería close-by. Richard did not like the looks of the hostería, and wanted the hotel, which was white and modern. The pilgrim refugio was filled, we learned, so it was not an option. I gave in to Richard and we began the half-mile walk to the hotel. The heat was stiffling on the pavement, and I cursed my feet for they only allowed me to hobble, and even at that very painfully.
We learned that the hotel was full, and it could not accommodate us. At the bar we further learned that it was an unseasonably hot 38° C, for it was the topic of conversation among the men in the bar who were drinking an (I thought) unseasonable brandy and playing cards. I sat on the bar and translated the measure into Farenheit on a napkin, and it proved to be 100.4° F.
As we sat in the bar, it became clear that the last half-mile proved too much for Richard. At the bar he showed signs of heat exhaustion or heat stroke. I made arrangements for him with the owner of the hotel, who drove us to the very hostería Richard had wanted to avoid. I said I rode in a wheeled thing, but charity overrode any vow and my conscience was and is absolutely clear. I had not vowed to take no wheeled thing if it meant the injury of any fellow pilgrim.
M
St. Sernin
The hostería was clean and perfectly fine; Richard’s earlier fears had been without basis. However, the manager, a fine and proper Spanish woman, seemed hesitant to take us in. She did not care to have a sick pilgrim on her premises; but I talked her into it, though it took all the suasion of my Spanish language and diplomatic arts. Richard took a cold bath, drank liquids, and slept. I went to my room. I had intended to snack on the bread, and ham and cheese I had purchased at Espinal. In the heat of the walk from Espinal to Zubiri the bread had hardened, and the ham had cooked and was very stiff and dry. Had I an egg in my pack, I’m convinced it would have been cooked. I nibbled on what I could, but threw most of it away. I then slept.
I I I
After I awoke from my nap, I had a dinner of vegetable broth, bacalao in a garlic and tomato sauce, and a bottle of Navaresse wine. I made arrangements for Richard to be shuttled by taxi to Pamplona in the morning. I also arranged to have the doors opened for me in the morning (for the hostería shut them at midnight). The manager would not entertain the notion of me departing at 6:00 a.m., and I had to satisfy myself with a plan to open the doors at 6:30 a.m. Richard went to sleep, and I for a walk by the Arga River. He dreamed of things domestic, and I met the Man of the River.
I left the hostería and walked toward the Puente de la Rabia. Before the bridge, I turned left toward the banks of the río Arga. There, a distance from the bridge, I sat down and decided to let the Arga speak to me. I listened to the gurgling of the river, which tumbled over rocks and rushed past fallen branches, as it washed along the banks toward the famous bridge. The water has spoken thus for years, but its voice is still young; for the words it used to speak to me were yet carefree and sprightly and even irresponsible. How many pilgrims have sat here, and heard this youthful vigor of the waters of the Arga?
As I looked at the bridge in the evening twilight, I saw a group of young girls in tight blouses cross the bridge out of town. A short time later, I saw an old man cross the bridge towards the town. He wore a white shirt, grey pants, and he had a blue jacket draped around his right arm—his hand was in his pocket. He stopped at the prow of the bridge, and looked upstream at the Arga for a time in silence. He noticed me and looked at me ambivalently, for his thoughts were somewhere else. Then he turned and crossed the bridge toward town.
I walked to the bridge and to the prow to see if I could see what the old man saw, and I think I glimpsed the shadows of his youth in the upstream waters of the Arga. For as the waters hurried downstream toward the bridge, I also saw the gentle, but inexorable purl of time and coming of age, and I felt there in the air the old man’s wistful, melancholic sense of loss of spent youth. And I grew sad, for I shared the sorrow he had left behind.
I I I
It grew dark as I stood there on the bridge, and I was met by a man who thought himself a legend, for he called himself the Hombre del Rio, the Man of the River Arga.
The Man of the River was Basque. He came from town and crossed the bridge on his way home. He was drunk, and very jovial, and he began to talk to me. He introduced himself as Toño. He was a man in his early 40s of medium height and narrow-shouldered. His face was tanned, and it was further darkened by a day or two’s worth of stubble. He wore a blue and white striped sleeveless shirt. He had a tatoo on his skinny arm that looked like an anchor without a center.
Knowing I was a pilgrim from another place, he spoke to me of many things, but he vacillated between trust and distrust in his manner toward me. He told me he was an anarchist (as many Spaniards do without meaning it one whit). He spoke of how had uneasy relations with the people of the town, for he told me in a belligerent tone that there were more hijos de puta or whores’ sons in Zubiri than windows. He lived in the house across the bridge with his dog, Thor. He pointed to his home, an old structure of rock, and told me it had once been the prison for the town.
He then talked to me of his legendary status.
“I’m called the Hombre del Rio,” he boasted.
“Why?” I asked
“Because I once jumped off this bridge into the Arga and came out unhurt.”
He told me how his friend and he had been drinking, and how his friend was driving him home. The friend lost control of the car on the Puente de la Rabia and wrecked it against the bridge’s low parapet. He sat upon the wall to decide what to do, and, being drunk, he lost his balance and fell backwards into the Arga. And though the drop was plenty high, and the water shallow, he avoided all injury except a minor scratch to his arm. This won him the acclaim of the town and the epithet, the hombre del Río, and he was very proud of that badge. With as much solemnity as if he were pointing to the spot where a martyr had shed his blood for Christ, or where a peace treaty ending a global war had been signed, he showed me the exact spot on the bridge where it happened.
Thor barked at us intermittently; it was late, he was hungry, and his master was ignoring him. His master’s repeated orders to shut up were obeyed, but soon forgotten. Toño finally relented to the barking, and as he left to feed his dog, he invited me into his house to have a glass of wine.
I accepted the invitation, though with trepidation, as I recalled the comments of Aimeric Picaud. The information was dated, but I had nothing else to go by. He called the people of Navarre barbarous. “Their face is ugly, and they are debauched, perverse, perfidious, disloyal and corrupt, libidinous, drunkard, given to all kind of violence, ferocious and savage, imprudent and false, impious and uncouth, cruel and quarrelsome, incapable of anything virtuous, well-informed of all vices and iniquities.” The Navarrese “also make use of animals for incestuous fornication, show their genitals to each other, and they affix a lock to the rear of the mule or horse so only the owner of the beast can have access to them.” Picaud concludes that the Navarrese would “kill a Frenchman for no more than a coin.”
[iv]But I was curious, and I judged that I could best Toño in any fight if he had any strange ulterior motives, and so I accepted. I was taken through a seedy and cluttered apartment into his dingy kitchen. The air in the place smelled slightly foul, for the kitchen was unclean. He sat me by a dark, wooden kitchen table by the stove. I looked about the place and was struck by inconsistency, a blend of old and new, and nothing seemed to tally. Above the television were stacked books by classic authors, never opened and never read, for they were still wrapped in celophane. The TV was on, and Mrs. Doubtfire dubbed in Spanish was playing. In front of Mrs. Doubtfire, Toño smoked his Ducado cigarettes and shared a glass of rosé wine with me. The wine was not good, but tolerable. It must have been cheap, as I noticed a number of empty bottles about the place. We drank out of coffee cups with Looney Toon characters on them.
He talked of pilgrims and of Santiago. He told me of the time he had given shoes to a barefoot pilgrim from France, who stood before his door in winter. He told me how he had sheltered a group of pilgrims from Cuba another year. He can now tell a future pilgrim of how he drank wine with a pilgrim from America.
After a cup of wine, I begged leave to depart, for I had an early morning and the hostería had imposed upon me a curfew. We walked across the Puente de la Rabia to a local bar, whereupon we parted—friends—and I went to the hostería to bed. I sent the man of the river a post card when I got to Santiago as I had promised.
Pro uno nummo tantum perimit Navarrus aut Baselus si potest Gallicum
k
[i] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 94.
[ii] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 94.
[iii] Laffi, at 113-14.
[iv] Melczer, Pilgrim’s Guide, at 94-95.
