Day 28: Grado to Paradise, inside and out (24,1k)
- Frida Stavenow
- Oct 4, 2022
- 5 min read
The next day I walk with Waffles for the first twelve kilometers to a cafe, where we have the standard tortilla and cafe con leche plus a positively nonstandard walnut-aniseed pastry that tastes like an artisanal McDonalds pie. Then we split up to do our due solitary diligence and I try my best to create a sense of isolation on a route that turns out to be extremely saturated. There’s pilgrims everywhere! Carajo, this is supposed to be the primitive route! Not the Santiago Highway! I pass everyone then get exhausted with myself and sit down at a spring in the shade of some eucalyptus trees and let everyone pass me again. This works out better and I get some time with my thoughts.
I think about how everyone we meet are mirrors to us and how some mirrors show you more than others. At the moment, Waffles is making me think a lot about what I used to be like at 25. And though some of it, like I said earlier, I’m happy to have outgrown… there are some things that I start to feel like maybe I abandoned a little too hastily.
Like my idealism. My purity of heart. My faith in love and music (to quote The Libertines, my teenage favs that Fake Vegan and I have been singing since Llanes).
I feel like the world did a bit of a number on me between 25 and 35, resulting in the loss of these qualities. In fact, I felt like I should lose them. Especially the relationship I had in my early thirties made me question what the hell was wrong with me that I could mistake something so “dysfunctional” for love. And I still feel like the end of that was a tragedy. We were so in love. It felt so much like home. And living with it was absolutely, one hundred percent, positively impossible.
He did have addiction issues. Mental health stuff. Diagnoses. A constantly changing regime of medication, never slept through a whole night, broke things in anger. I thought we could make it anyway. We couldn’t.
Maybe these are circumstances that fuck people up. That twist everything. I don’t know.
But I came out of that relationship with a whole new way of looking at what, previously, I’d thought of as love. Instead of ideas like soulmate and destiny and meant to be I was talking about trauma bonds, gaslighting, anxious-avoidant dances of death.
It sucked. I mean that’s an understatement. It broke my heart, fully. It made me wonder if what I’d previously thought of as just a funny meme wasn’t the truth:
But I found no other way of explaining how our love could have imploded like that. Or why nobody wanted to publish my books. Everything I’d believed in so passionately suddenly seemed like it was just… madness.
Flaws of character. Stupidity. Delusion.
So I tried to correct for these faults in my personality. I felt like the world was telling me: you’re too naive, you’re too poetic, not structured enough, too passionate, too unrealistic.
I felt like I had to grow up. So I did. Or I tried to.
But walking with Waffles has reminded me of what it was like to be those things. Because I see them in him.
And they don’t feel like flaws. They feel like virtues. Worth protecting, if anything. Certainly not like something that has to be beaten out of him, like I beat them out of myself.
Maybe I was never too anything. Maybe I just didn’t have the luck. Maybe I didn’t need to change.
Maybe I still don’t.
Anyway. After this we find Heaven. We’re meant to reunite at a hippie albergue (communal vegetarian dinners, meditation room) in Salas, but a few kilometres before I find him under a bridge, where he’s recovering from having seen a snake. So we walk together again and before we know it we’re in paradise.
It’s hard to explain how I know this. There’s a green valley on the left with a river and mountains behind it. Around us a small village of those ridiculous stilt houses (hórreos, we are later told) and endless rows of voluptuous, almost vulgar pink flowers that I remember my mother telling me were called “Lejongap” (Lion’s Mouth) but which PictureThis tell me are called Hummingbird Fuchsia. Appropriate for paradise. The hairs on my arms stand up in all the right ways, I slow down my steps and before I know it, I’m at a sign saying albergue. According to my guide, there shouldn’t be one. But here it is. We see just bushes, a path leading up into the green grass.
“Let’s enquire,” I say to Waffles. “We can always leave if we don’t like it.”
Well. The path leads to Eden. A sheltered garden full of figs and walnuts and roses and old stone buildings. A fluffy cat luxuriates on a chair in the sun. Next to it, a curly-haired dog snoozes calmly. There are even those knitted chairs hanging from the ceiling that you see in fancy hippie resorts the world over.
Almost in a trance, we enter the stone house in the middle. “Camino magic,” I whisper into the silence, when suddenly, two wooden half-doors fling open and a smiling Spanish woman appears. Claudia. It’s €16 a night for a dorm. I paid €15 to get bed bugs and watch people get robbed in a mouldy basement in Santander. We’re in.
It’s still only two in the afternoon so we spend the next few hours lazing about in the sunny garden, playing with the cat, writing letters, talking shit. Around four, we go on a reconnaissance mission of the surrounding area for potentially taking a little break from our Camino the next day. To, um, trip. We find a green field sheltered by hazelnut trees, a river where the clear water runs fast over mossy stones and fallen trees give the space an already trippy magic.
It’s been decided. We shall stay, and we shall drop.
In the evening, we have dinner with a charming Italian gentleman whom we passed around nine in the morning just outside Grado. I’d liked him already as we walked past, and am delighted he’s our only company in this house of Asturias dreams.
And sure enough, he turns out to have lived a life of great adventure, mysterious business and many women. “An ageing Don Juan,” Waffles describes him, which is entirely apt. Neither of us can believe it when he tells us he’s 72, but then, of course he is. Thirteen years into his second marriage (“She used to work for me,” he answers my nosy question about how they met; “And now you work for her,” Waffles insightfully remarks.), he’s here to walk off the beer weight (“alright, beer and gin and tonic weight”) he’s amassed from enjoying la dolce vita a little too much with his big international family in Madrid.
We drink wine and talk about our wild and unwieldy lives over delicious, home-cooked cream of pumpkin soup and (I’m sorry!) beef stew. I feel bad for the cows but there was no vegetarian option. Ok, there was tortilla. But come on.
Other than this impromptu cow murder support, it’s the best kind of Camino night. Don Juan goes to bed after dinner, and me and Waffles go out onto the magical terrace to play chess but instead end up talking about how we’ve helped each other like ourselves better (me for him) and remember the yearning, irrational little heart inside (him for me, but you already know that).
“You haven’t actually lost your faith in love, though, have you?” he says after I finish.
“No,” I have to reply, after looking inside for real. “I guess I just came very close to feeling like I should.”
I mean. What else do I want from the Camino? Faith in love and – not music, because I am not, after all, Pete Doherty – but writing. Art. For its own sake.
I had lost that, or at least come very close to. And now I feel that I have it again.
I think tomorrow will be a good trip.
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