Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago Paperback - 2006

Excerpt

1.



Along the walls of the church in Navar, there are oil paintings of saints instead of windows. Yellow bones in tarnished reliquaries, faded plastic flowers, and plaster statues crowd tables pressed up against the stone walls. Since the only light in the dense darkness comes from the candles reflecting off the swirling columns of the gold altarpiece that stretches to the ceiling, objects emerged from the murk only as I passed by them, disappearing again as I stepped away. The cool dampness turned the layer of dust on my skin into a paste.

I knelt in the back of the church, my forehead on the top lip of the smooth, varnished pew in front of me. The wood was hard against my forehead, but not rough or uncomfortable, and after a while it felt as though my skin had begun to wrap itself around the pew, and that the wood had begun to mold to my head. I hadn't noticed that the evening's pilgrim's Mass had ended. I'd been crying for a long time, and I was startled and confused when I first sensed a gentle hovering presence all around me. Then I heard rubber soles squeaking against the stone floor.

Five or six old Spanish women in black cotton housedresses and thick glasses, with wrinkled necks and lips fallen in on themselves, crept down the aisles and slid across the pews toward me. Their backs hunched over in the light cardigan sweaters they wore to take the chill off in the still church air. They held rosary beads and pocketbooks close to their bodies. Very slowly and wordlessly moving closer, the women were encircling where I sat, until they stopped, scattered in the pews twelve or so feet from me.

The women said nothing, never got too close. They didn't make any motions to comfort or interrupt me, and though they could not know why I was crying, they did not ask. They did not know my father died one year ago on that day, or that all day I had steadfastly refused to think about him. Instead, I spent the afternoon as I walked along the Camino de Santiago, an old pilgrimage route in northern Spain, seething at the sun that burned the backs of my legs no matter how much sunscreen I put on, the prickly heat that erupted all over my belly no matter how long I soaked in cold water, the landscape with nothing tall enough to create shadows long enough to walk under, and the sky without a single cloud in it. There was nothing I could do to make it rain, to create shade, to cool the sun. I could not move the Camino under the trees in the distance. I could not move the towns closer together. I could not tell my father the things I wanted him to know, and I could not apologize for the many things I said to a sad, sick man.

A year had gone by and I could not change any of it, even if I worked very hard, was kind to strangers, begged God. I tried all those things, but I still quivered with regret all the time. I didn't know why I'd ever thought that walking four hundred miles to look at the supposed remains of Saint James--believed to have been washed ashore in a stone boat on the west coast of Spain after his death in Jerusalem--was a good idea. I didn't think I believed in God, let alone all these trappings of the religion I grew up with, for I saw little evidence to prove that God exists.

The women in the church did not know any of this. They just sat, breathing deep and long sighs, murmuring as they said their prayers around me, clicking their rosary beads as they settled their heavy bodies into the pews. Slow breath in, and a pause. A steady exhale. A rest. And then it began again. Their steady breathing steadied my own, and with ragged gulps I stopped crying. Just as slowly and silently as they came, they made their way away from me and out the door.

I sat in the pew for a few more minutes and watched the gold light at the front of the church pulsate through the remnants of tears in my eyes. Alex walked over, slid down the pew to sit next to me and said, "There's a wax effigy of a saint in a glass coffin in the back of the church . . ." His voice trailed up in a hopeful question while his eyes, which change from blue to green depending on the light, searched my face from behind his glasses. Everyone comforts in his own way; Alex's way usually involves the absurd.

We walked back to the pale effigy with disheveled black wig and faded clothing. I smiled for him. Then we pushed the door of the church open and stepped into the sunlight, still blinding even in the evening, reflecting off the paving stones of the square.

With the dark cloth of their dresses contrasted against the bleached yellow-gold of the buildings and street, the old ladies stood in a circle talking. The circle opened as I walked past, and the women, with jaws firmly set, looked at me.

One of them nodded very slowly. It was not a nod of acknowledgment, but a continuous nod, one of agreement.

I often wonder now what the woman was saying yes to, what that nod meant. I didn't wonder then. Yes meant yes, and for that moment, it made sense.



2.



Though I was in a strange world on the Camino, with a foreign language and foreign food, odd experiences and odd people, the strangeness of it didn't bother me too much. In some ways I had been a stranger to myself for many months.

I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, but didn't really understand or care about anything I read or heard in class. I slept sixteen hours every night and lived on Cheerios, pizza, and ice cream. Whole days went by during which I did nothing but sit on the couch. I didn't watch TV or read or nap. I just sat. I wasn't sad or lonely or angry or happy. I was doing surprisingly well after my father died, I thought. I didn't feel a thing.

He died in June after three months in the hospital for sepsis, but he had been very sick before that. He had been in the hospital on six different machines and twenty different tubes before, and I had thought he was going to die then, had steeled myself, but he didn't die. The strangest part of that spring was that this hospitalization felt exactly the same to me as all his others, only the end result was so different. I was well rehearsed in these long hospitalizations, had over twenty years of learning how to make the lump of anxiety in my stomach sit quietly, of splitting my practical and emotional lives between the private and almost secretive world of sickness and the outer world of school and friends and jobs. But I didn't know how to respond when he actually did die.

And that I was relieved, and that I couldn't feel sad because I did not miss him because I was angry at him, so angry at what he had become and what I thought he had done to everyone in my family--this left me without knowing what to think of myself. It was easy not to love while he was still alive, but what did it mean to not love when he was dead? To be glad that my mother's house no longer smelled like illness? To be relieved? It's not that I didn't know what to think. It's that I could barely stand what I thought.

The more compassion and kindness people shared, the more I began to avoid people, all people, spending more and more time on my couch, the weight of shame pinning me down. Even this, though, didn't register as a feeling. It was physical--a heaviness in the diaphragm and bowels, relieved only by the thought that I didn't have to take the bus down to Long Island that weekend, that I didn't have to go between worlds, between the world of books and blooming crab apple trees and the world of beeping machines and foul smells and the heavy mix of fear and longing that it end. The two worlds didn't seem to understand each other at all and I was tired of splitting myself in two.



A friend from divinity school mentioned one day that she wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago. I'd never heard of it, and I'd read only a single book about pilgrimage that fall, but I decided that walking to Santiago was exactly what I should do. I had no idea why I wanted to go on a pilgrimage to a Christian holy place, since I didn't believe in a God I would want to spend energy and money trying to get to know, especially after having just witnessed what I considered his creation gone wrong. Of course, this was assuming God had even created any of this, for he didn't seem to have much power or desire to intervene. Nevertheless, I bought a guidebook on the Internet and explained my incoherent and ill-formed plan to Alex.

Alex and I began dating in our junior and sophomore years of college. He went to law school immediately after graduating because he thought it was expected, and because he believed it would make his parents happy. This trait of his, the desire to make others happy even at the expense of his own happiness, means that he often takes on burdens that shouldn't belong to him. He didn't like being an attorney, finding the confrontational aspects of it exhausting and the wool suits entirely too constricting and itchy. He moved to Somerville when I started divinity school, and within a few months Alex was making the biweekly bus trips with me.

He was sitting on the floor playing a video game, rocking and careening back and forth as his buxom female character fought off attack dogs and bandits. His broad swimmer's shoulders were hunched over the game controller.

"Spain, huh? That sounds cool. I like sangria." He paused to have his character pull out a bazooka. "And naps. They take siesta every day. I want to go, too."

"This is not going to be a vacation. This is a pilgrimage."

"Yeah, that sounds good. I like religious stuff. All those weird relics. Jawbones and kneecaps. Oh, shit." His character fell into a lake of fire.

"I really mean it, Alex. This isn't going to be like Prague, where you can just drink absinthe and go to pornographic puppet shows. We can't just stop in the middle and go to the Costa del Sol and get drunk every night. I am going to do this." My voice got louder as I spoke, almost shouting.

Alex turned around to face me. He furrowed his thick eyebrows, and light brown hair from his deep widow's peak flopped across his forehead. He spoke quietly. "And I want to help you. I know you're serious, and I want to go with you. I don't want you to be all alone. I'd worry about you." His crooked teeth broke into a small smile.

"What about your job?"

"Well, I know I definitely don't want to be a lawyer the rest of my life. Maybe I'll figure out what to do as a pilgrim. I know you don't believe me, but I really want to do this. I think it sounds great. I want to be a pilgrim. And I'd miss you and never sleep if you went alone."

"Well, if we go together, I'm in charge. I'm in charge of the pilgrimage."

"I'll be your Sancho Panza," he said mildly. He turned back around and started a new game.



That spring I carried my guidebook everywhere like a security blanket. I fell into step one day with a professor on his way to class, and showed him the book. "Are you going as a pilgrim or as an anthropologist?" he asked.

"A pilgrim," I said immediately. I was surprised at my answer though, because to be a pilgrim meant I believed in something, or at least hoped in something. I didn't know that about myself just then, along with a lot of other things I didn't know. The more I sat on the couch trying not to think or feel, the more disconnected from reality I became. My mind began to play weird tricks on me, and there were times when I sat there and could not quite figure out who I was or if I had any connection to the person I thought I had been. If I sat long enough, I began to doubt that I could actually know what was real at all. Those feelings of utter disconnection from yourself and the rest of the world, while scary, aren't uncommon in the first weeks or months of grieving, but at the time I didn't know that. I thought I was going crazy. And so the fact that I had enough hope to fly across the ocean and walk across a country to an ancient holy site I didn't believe in was a happy surprise, for hope is the belief that things can change. I wanted things to change.

Pilgrimage's emotional center is hope. One journeys perhaps out of devotion, or a longing for adventure, or, in my case, a confused and even desperate searching, but at the emotional heart of all those things is the idea that things can change for the better if one is willing to go somewhere else, a place where other people have gone with great hope, too, and been changed. But while I knew that I thought of myself as a pilgrim, journeying somewhere in search of something, I couldn't tell you what that something was.

When we left for Spain, all I knew about the Camino was the information from one guidebook describing its landmarks and history, another guide describing the pilgrim hostels and dining options in each town, and a pretty good understanding of the predominant theory on pilgrimage. I didn't talk to anyone who had actually done the Camino, nor had I even thought to read any of the many first-person accounts. I didn't know what to expect, and I suppose I actually expected both very little and a life-altering experience at the same time.

Two years through Harvard Divinity School and less than one year after my first and only significant personal loss, I frantically typed my last term paper three hours before our plane left.

"Just write a conclusion," Alex shouted from the bedroom as he shoved a random assortment of clothing into my bag for me. "It doesn't have to be good, it just has to pass."

I ran down the hill toward school in the sweet late-May air, past the flowering trees and under yellow-green leaves that had just opened in the blissfully long New England spring, shoved the paper under the professor’s door, turned around, and ran back up the hill. Sweating and heaving, I got into the cab Alex had waiting at the curb. And without realizing it, I was a pilgrim.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“Thoughtful and refreshingly unpretentious . . . her insights continue to resonate for days after you’ve finished reading.” —Washington Post

“A haunting, beautiful book about mourning, loss and rediscovery . . . rich in detail and sweetly concise.” —Relevant