Marysol, Spain

French Way from Pedrouzo.

“This time I’m only here to meet some friends. I’ve just arrived from Catalonia and I’ll walk with them to Santiago, so I have no fresh stories, but I can tell you some from other… ‘Caminos’. Once, in Pamplona, at a private hostel, I was alone with this German guy, just he and me and the whole night ahead. He ended up really drunk, falling asleep and, of course, snoring like a rocket. When I got tired of staring at the ceiling, I grabbed the mattress and moved it to the kitchen floor to try to get some sleep. He appeared not before long. He had just woken up and wanted to ‘dance with me’, he said, ‘only that’. I said ‘thank you, but no, thank you, maybe tomorrow,. Now it’s time to rest so you’d better go back to your room, to your bed… whatever’. He insisted for a while, and when he realised that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted because, by that time, I was lying back on the bed, he, instead of giving up and going back to his room, he just… well… he just lay beside me, not on the bed -thank god- but on the floor, snoring again, this time, right into my ear. In the morning, when he woke up, that poor man didn’t even know how to apologise. He only remembered bits and pieces, but he was so ashamed, so embarrassed, that he could barely speak. We ended up crying, hugging each other, comforting each other. He had been there for a week, alone, drinking like crazy. The hostel owners knew it but said ‘and what do we do, throw him out?’. He never told me, but I think he was escaping something, something he couldn’t fix, maybe at home or maybe in his life, I don’t know And another time, in Navarra, I went into a church, just to have a look and, listen, I’m not religious or anything but, after a while, I began to cry; inconsolably, like a little girl. I couldn’t stop, and couldn’t get it. It was as if I had been there before. I sat on a bench, closed my eyes and this clear image just popped into my mind: an old and rusty door, closed. A woman who happened to be there approached me, trying to comfort me, I guess. She showed me the place and, to distract me, gave me a religious brochure. On it, on the cover, there was an image of a cemetery and the door was, exactly, the one that I had just seen in my mind. Can you imagine the look on my face?”