The Stick and the Shell

As he bowed his head, the shells he kept hanging from his hat clinked. A sound as familiar as his own breathing. His swollen feet, covered with bleeding blisters, screamed at him that it was time to stop. A long stage that day, fortunately almost all in the plains.

He sat on a rock, he leaned on his cane. “My gnarled brother,” he told “it was another tough day.” He had gotten used to talking to himself, not feeling the pain, the broken bones. He was used to the blazing sun, the heat and the cold, the pouring rain. All that day it had rained too, gently and slowly, without cold and without wind, a fine and inexorable rain that had soaked the felt of his cloak. Now the rain had stopped and the air was getting fresher every moment.

He drank a few sips of water from the pumpkin. Gestures that became mechanical, repeated uninterruptedly since he had taken the via Francigena, up to the terrible passage of the Pyrenees, and at the meeting of Ponte la Reina, with the other pilgrims together with whom, then, he had traveled the sunny paths of the plain. There were many who made the same journey, finding shelter in the monasteries. He had left in the spring, marching all summer, and now, in the autumn, he was almost at the end of his journey. A journey undertaken in the year of grace 1369, to fulfill his duty towards Our Lord Jesus, to test his resistance, and for … for something that he still could not define. Perhaps it was his father’s voice that accused him of his inability to be a good blacksmith. “Be at least a good Christian, go on this trip, get out of my face, you are not doing any good here.”

Those who came back spoke of an immense square, crowded with people, of a majestic cathedral. “Santiago is like a home, its atrium can accommodate hundreds of us. There, God is close to us, we can feel his breath, his power.“

He looked up, as if recalled by something, perhaps a noise, a flutter of wings. He blinked. He closed his eyes and opened them again. Up there, where until a moment before he could only see the darkening sky, he thought he saw someone, overlooking a bridge that was no longer there. “It’s not there because it never was, Jacopo. You are tired, you need to sleep.“

****

John looked down from the freeway overpass. He didn’t even know why he had stopped the camper in the emergency lane and got out without the glow-in-the-dark vest. He grabbed the railing and leaned out. His wife, from the passenger compartment of the camper, shouted: “What are you doing, what is wrong?” He heard her shrill, frightened voice, perhaps fearing a foolish gesture of him, a sudden suicidal rush. But he didn’t even think about jumping.

Down there were only cans, plastic bottles, leaves scattered in the tangle of brambles. Yet John felt magnetized as if someone were calling him from there, as if, under the overpass of a Spanish motorway, there was the meaning of his life. Right there, he told himself, passed the ancient path of pilgrims marching towards Santiago de Compostela.

****

Curled up in his damp cloak, Jacopo stretched out on the grass. He was alone on the path well marked by the many feet that had trodden it over the years, just as he wished to be in that last stretch that brought him closer to his goal. “Walk, walk, Jacopo, you got lost in the meanders of your heart, but then you found yourself”. Perhaps, he told himself, he was not an incapable slacker as his father said, perhaps, simply, God did not want him to become a blacksmith. Maybe He had something else in store for him. He had to sleep, because an important day awaited him. The next day he would get up at dawn, eat his bread, and walk the last part of the journey. With strength, with courage, with confidence, as if he were walking not towards Santiago, but towards the future.