A good taste in the mouth doth take away the bad
The meal last night at the Albergue Arco Iris was excellent. A mountain of fine pasta followed by pork steaks and salad. And the wine flowed. I didn't mention it before, but at the Albergue Meruelo when we asked for more wine a reluctant half bottle appeared. Here there were bottles of red all over the table. And good company: Jack the hippy Kiwi; Isabelle, a Francaise, whom I hadn't seen since my first day; Gai, the Israeli girl who had played the violin on the cliff top; a young German woman, Frederika; and an American couple. A very old Spanish grandmother presided over the table, forcing more food upon us. At 21€ for the demi-pension, the Albergue Arco Iris offered the very best of Spanish hospitality; at €25, the Albergue Meruelo, the worst.
As I walked into Santillano a flight of pigeons circled endlessly, changing colour as their wings caught the sunlight. A tall stand of gum trees stood incongruously outside the medieval town, eucalypts that sometimes find their way anachronistically into novels set long before the introduction of the trees into Europe from Australia. The eucalypts abound in Spain. Someone told me that they had once been thought to provide useful lumber, but had proved unsatisfactory and were now a nuisance. Mind you, I pass plantations of them, so they must be used for something.
I came upon Jack and Gai again, busking in front of the Romanesque church, their pleasant music sometimes shattered by the cracked chimes of Catholic bells, so different from the music of an Anglican peal. A guard stood outside the church trying to distinguish between the faithful few and the enterprising tourists feigning religion for the day to get in for nothing. For it was Sunday.
Santillano is a beautiful medieval village, once described by Jean Paul Sartre as the most beautiful in Spain. I strolled around the cobbled streets, intending to take it easy, for it was a day of rest. It was very touristy: I gave the Museum of Torture a miss, and I decided against the Orgasmo ice cream.
And then I ate an ensalad mixte, a salad which is a meal in itself, lettuce, tomato, olives, asparagus and tuna.
After lunch, I walked leisurely up the hill, and out into the country for 13 kilometres, until I reached the town of Cobreces, where I am staying at an albergue attached to a Cistercian abbey.
For a time I walked with a couple from the Czech Republic. I asked them about the break-up of Czechoslovakia. He said it had been motivated mainly by Slovakian politicians, and the people of the Czech Republic were not happy at the time. There had been no referendum, although he thought the Slovakians, but not the Czechs, would have voted about 60% in favour of separation. Now he conceded that it had worked out rather well, and that relations were good between the two countries.
In the evening I attended Vespers at the abbey. It was sung, by 22 monks in all, mostly old, some ancient, but a few young, novitiates perhaps, judging by their simpler garb. The one concession to modernity was an electronic board, rather like the one in a metro train which tells you the next station, and in this case, it gave us the name of the next psalm, and once or twice it displayed the whole service in order, like all the stations from the beginning of the line until the terminus. But on one occasion it went quite wild and seemed to reel off all 150 psalms and dozens of hymns and cantos at once, and I was reminded of a bus driver at the end of his route in earlier times, as he rapidly wound the roll to find the next destination.
At the end of the service, we all sat in silence for at least 15 minutes, some of the monks kneeling, others sitting, all praying or meditating or thinking. I wondered whether any of them were having doubts, but were too old to act on them.
No comments:
Post a Comment