“If (the) love feels too tight, it isn’t your size.”
Day 20 is a different kind of day. I wake up and all the people in my room at Casa Flor in Pendueles have gone. I’ve slept so well. I’ve been so warm and dry. But more rain is forecast, today and tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and for another seven days after that. I think of the shoes I left soaking downstairs the night before. Not only did it rain on everything, but my camelback water system also broke, flooding my bag from the inside as well. So things were a little wet. I feel medium motivated to get up. In the guidebook I read there’s an albergue in 15k and another in 30k. I should go to the one in 30k. But oy vey. The rains.
I’m still in my room packing-panicking (standard) when Flor enters at 8:30, carrying a heap of fresh sheets and singing along to a Mexican opera song coming out of the tinny speaker of her mobile phone. “Hola mi amor!” she greets me, which at this stage I will take. Maybe the only amor that is my size is the kind of spread-out, platonic, non-exclusive amor that can be equally applied to nieces, cats and displaced albergue-cantina hosts? I mean if so I’m rocking it. I guess it’s all about definitions.
Sometimes I feel like all life is is a long walk of shouting “THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!” until you find someone who says “I FUCKING KNOW! WANNA HANG?” and then you do. Like this brilliant drawing my first boyfriend drew me:
[I can’t find it on my phone but take this placeholder as guarantee that it was indeed fantastic]
Not to go all emo on the Camino but it’s like Conor Oberst sang on his magnum opus Fevers & Mirrors:
Now there still is hope, I can be healed, there’s someone looking for what I’ve concealed.
Which is like heroin for your whiny little soul when you’re sixteen. And then you grow up and learn this is basically the definition of a trauma bond. Thanks, life!
Maybe this blog should’ve been called Emo Pilgrim. Maybe I need some black lipstick. Maybe if I just stop tanning it will all be okay.
Anyhoo. Eventually I leave both my customary morning blues (or reds, if you’re a Holly Golightly kind of vibe) and my Mexican surrogate mom and walk on.
It’s sunny for three minutes and then starts raining. I get to a camping by a mountain, and a sign that says Cafe open! It’s a permanent sign so I feel medium trusting. But I walk up, and find basically the Cafe of My Life. On a hill, overlooking wild, abandoned beaches. The sun comes out again and a double rainbow stretches out over the roaring oceans below. I have a creamy coffee and a chocolate pastry and continue thinking about my future career as the go-to mushroom translator of southern Mexico. Still holds up.
I decide to stay in the albergue at 15k, and call up to make a reservation. With this sorted, I stay another hour at the cafe, looking at waves and working out the main beats for my ayahuasca camp novel and caffeinating myself some more. I even connect my iPad to the Wi-Fi. It’s like being visited by my real world self.
Eventually, I walk on through green fields of cows and horses, past some cool natural rock pool-geysers called bufanas, above a beach that looks worthy of Alex Garland and through the cutest imaginable little villages full of flowers and stone houses and wooden verandas.
By afternoon I arrive in Llanes, where I check into Albergue La Estacion with Gertrude and New German and then head to a mad Chinese bazaar where I briefly lose my mind with Brainy British Transplant but manage to eventually buy some colour-coded post-its and a pencil. I take them on a writer’s date to a cafe overlooking the ocean, where I spend another two hours so immersed in five-act structures and midpoints and character arcs that I emerge feeling like I’ve drunk two bottles of wine. But I’ve only had a beer and a tortilla sandwich, and though it’s a fancy place where the cheapest dish (calamari) is €15, this off-menu request only costs me €6,50. Love it when posh people are people too.
It’s getting chilly and I’m in shorts and flip flops but stroll along the streets that still have sunlight until suddenly I find myself outside La Chocolateria del Paradiso. With a name like that, how can I resist? I enter and it’s a very civilised affair. Round mahogany tables with chairs covered in cloth. Heavy curtains from floor to ceiling. I sit down in a grey velvet sofa and order a cup of thick hot chocolate and a plate of churros. I ask the server if they have any blankets, gesticulating to my bare legs, and he looks like I’ve asked if I can move in. I guess maybe only all cafes in Sweden have them?
The other guests – exclusively local – are all in long trousers and down jackets. There are families, old ladies in fancy earrings, men in felt hats. All looking so very serious as they dip their long fried dough sausages in chocolate. I love Spain for this.
The churros are magnificent. I eat them while reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a book about writing, which I thought I’d read already but which blows my mind as if for the first time.
Look what pretty things she writes:
My friends turned me on to Kierkegaard, Beckett, Doris Lessing. I swooned with the excitement and nourishment of it all. I remember reading C. S. Lewis for the first time, Surprised by Joy, and how, looking inside himself, he found “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” I felt elated and absolved. I had thought that the people one admired, the kind, smart people of the world, were not like that on the inside, were different from me and, say, Toulouse-Lautrec.
And, on just writing:
“Do it every day for a while,“ my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.
This is what makes me catch up on the blog. That quote is why I started it. Piano scales. And it’s working. Words are flowing. Maybe I can even make them flow in ways that can make me feel like there’s a place for me in the world after Santiago, too?
After finishing the churros I walk back to the hotel, where one of my favourite pilgrims – a very funny British guy – has arrived. We chat about the reasons he’s a vegan as he stuffs his mouth with some chorizo he needed “for protein” and then play Shithead with a cheat from some place in England I’ve never heard of. Surely, it’s your play after you pick up!? One person (ok, it was me) mentions The Libertines, so before bed I get to be a jukebox for two minutes, which significantly improves an already good day.
