The Pilgrimage

  Suddenly, a finger moves. The shoot no longer wants to be a seed; it wants to grow. Slowly you begin to move your arms, and then your body will begin to rise, straightening up until you are seated on your heels. Now you begin to lift your body up, and slowly, slowly you become erect, still kneeling on the ground.

  The moment has come to break completely through the earth. You begin to rise slowly, placing one foot on the ground, then the other, fighting against the disequilibrium just as a shoot battles to make its own space, until finally you are standing. Imagine the area about you, the sun, the water, the wind, and the birds. Now you are a shoot that is beginning to grow. Slowly raise your arms toward the sky. Then stretch yourself more and more, more and more, as if you want to grasp the enormous sun that shines above you, giving you strength and attracting you. Your body begins to become more and more rigid, all of your muscles strain, and you feel yourself to be growing, growing, growing--you become huge. The tension increases more and more until it becomes painful, unbearable. When you can no longer stand it, scream and open your eyes.

  Repeat this exercise for seven consecutive days, always at the same time.

  I opened my eyes, and Petrus was there in front of me, smiling and smoking a cigarette. The light of day had not yet disappeared, but I was surprised to see that the sun was not as bright as I had imagined. I asked if he wanted me to describe the sensations, and he said no.

  "This is a very personal thing, and you should keep it to yourself. How can I judge it? The sensations are yours, not mine."

  Petrus said that we were going to sleep right there. We built a small fire, drank what was left of his wine, and I made some sandwiches with a foie gras that I had bought before I reached Saint-Jean. Petrus went to the stream that ran nearby and caught some fish, which he fried over the fire. And then we crawled into our sleeping bags.

  Among the greatest sensations that I have experienced in my life were those I felt on that unforgettable first night on the Road to Santiago. It was cold, despite its being summer, but I could still taste the warmth of the wine that Petrus had brought. I looked up at the sky; the Milky Way spread across it, reflecting the immensity of the Road we would have to travel. This immensity of the Road we would have to travel. This immensity made me very anxious; it created a terrible fear that I would not be able to succeed--that I was too small for this task. Yet today I had been a seed and had been reborn. I had discovered that although the earth and my sleep were full of comfort, the life "up there" was much more beautiful. And I could always be reborn, as many times as I wanted, until my arms were long enough to embrace the earth from which I had come.

  The Creator and the Created

  FOR SEVEN DAYS WE CONTINUED WALKING THROUGH THE Pyrenees, climbing and descending the mountains, and each evening, as the rays of the sun reflected from the tallest peaks, Petrus had me perform the Seed Exercise. On the third day of our trek, we passed a cement marker, painted yellow, indicating that we had crossed the frontier; from then on we would be walking through Spain. Little by little, Petrus began to reveal some things about his private life; I learned that he was Italian and that he worked in industrial design.1

  I asked him whether he was worried about the many things he had been forced to abandon in order to guide a pilgrim in search of his sword.

  "Let me explain something to you," he answered. "I am not guiding you to your sword. It is your job, solely and exclusively, to find it. I am here to lead you along the Road to Santiago and to teach you the RAM practices. How you apply this to your search for your sword is your problem."

  "But you didn't answer my question."

  "When you travel, you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you don't even understand the language the people speak. So you are like a child just out of the womb. You begin to attach much more importance to the things around you because your survival depends upon them. You begin to be more accessible to others because they may be able to help you in difficult situations. And you accept any small favor from the gods with great delight, as if it were an episode you would remember for the rest of your life.

  "At the same time, since all things are new, you see only the beauty in them, and you feel happy to be alive. That's why a religious pilgrimage has always been one of the most objective ways of achieving insight. The word peccadillo, which means a "small sin," comes from pecus, which means "defective foot," a foot that is incapable of walking a road. The way to correct the peccadillo is always to walk forward, adapting oneself to new situations and receiving in return all of the thousands of blessings that life generously offers to those who seek them.

  "So why would you think that I might be worried about a half-dozen projects that I left behind in order to be here with you?"

  Petrus looked around him, and I followed his eyes. On the uplands of one of the peaks, some goats were grazing. One of them, more daring than the others, stood on an outcropping of a high boulder, and I could not figure out how he had reached that spot or how he would get down. But as I was thinking this, the goat leapt and, alighting in a place I couldn't even see, rejoined his companions. Everything in our surroundings reflected an uneasy peace, the peace of a world that was still in the process of growing and being created--a world that seemed to know that, in order to grow, it had to continue moving along, always moving along. Great earthquakes and killer storms might make nature seem cruel, but I could see that these were just the vicissitudes of being on the road. Nature itself journeyed, seeking illumination.

  "I am very glad to be here," said Petrus, "because the work I did not finish is not important and the work I will be able to do after I get back will be so much better."

  When I had read the works of Carlos Castaneda, I had wanted very much to meet the old medicine man, Don Juan. Watching Petrus look at the mountains, I felt that I was with someone very much like him.

  On the afternoon of the seventh day, after having passed through some pine woods, we reached the top of a mountain. There, Charlemagne had said his prayers for the first time on Spanish soil, and now an ancient monument urged in Latin that all who passed by should say a Salve Regina. We both did as the monument asked. Then Petrus had me do the Seed Exercise for the last time.

  There was a strong wind, and it was cold. I argued that it was still early--at the latest, it was only three in the afternoon--but he told me not to talk about it, just do exactly as he ordered.

  I knelt on the ground and began to perform the exercise. Everything went as usual until the moment when I extended my arms and began to imagine the sun. When I reached that point, with the gigantic sun shining there in front of me, I felt myself entering into a state of ecstasy. My memories of human life began slowly to dim, and I was no longer doing an exercise: I had become a tree. I was happy about this. The sun shone and revolved, which had never happened before. I remained there, my branches extended, my leaves trembling in the wind, not wanting ever to change my position--until something touched me, and everything went dark for a fraction of a second.

  I immediately opened my eyes. Petrus had slapped me across the face and was holding me by the shoulders.

  "Don't lose sight of your objective!" he said, enraged. "Don't forget that you still have a great deal to learn before you find your sword!"

  I sat down on the ground, shivering in the cold wind.

  "Does that always happen?" I asked.

  "Almost always," he said. "Mainly with people like you, who are fascinated by details and forget what they are after."

  Petrus took a sweater from his knapsack and put it on. I put my overshirt on, covering my "I LOVE NY" T-shirt. I would never have imagined that in "the hottest summer of the decade," according to the newspapers, it could be so cold. The two shirts helped to cut the wind, but I asked Petrus if we couldn't move along more quickly so that I could warm up.

  The Road now made for an easy descent. I thought that the ext
reme cold I had experienced was due to the fact that we had eaten very frugally, just fish and the fruits of the forest.2

  Petrus said that it wasn't the lack of food and explained that it was cold because we had reached the highest point in that range of mountains.

  We had not gone more than five hundred meters when, at a curve in the Road, the scene changed completely. A tremendous, rolling plain extended into the distance. And to the left, on the Road down, less than two hundred meters away, a beautiful little village awaited us with its chimneys smoking.

  I began to walk faster, but Petrus held me back.

  "I think that this is a good time to teach you the second RAM practice," he said, sitting down on the ground and indicating that I should do the same.

  I was irritated, but I did as he asked. The sight of the small village with its inviting chimney smoke had really upset me. Suddenly I realized that we had been out in the woods for a week; we had seen no one and had been either sleeping on the ground or walking throughout the day. I had run out of cigarettes, so I had been smoking the horrible roller tobacco that Petrus used. Sleeping in a sleeping bag and eating unseasoned fish were things that I had loved when I was twenty, but here on the Road to Santiago, they were sacrifices. I waited impatiently for Petrus to finish rolling his cigarette, while I thought about the warmth of a glass of wine in the bar I could see less than five minutes down the Road.

  Petrus, bundled up in his sweater, was relaxed and looked out over the immense plain.

  "What do you think about this crossing of the Pyrenees?" he asked, after a while.

  "Very nice," I answered, not wanting to prolong the conversation.

  "It must have been nice, because it took us six days to go a distance we could have gone in one."

  I could not believe what he was saying. He pulled out the map and showed me the distance: seventeen kilometers. Even walking at a slow pace because of the ups and downs, the Road could have been hiked in six hours.

  "You are so concerned about finding your sword that you forgot the most important thing: you have to get there. Looking only for Santiago--which you can't see from here, in any case--you didn't see that we passed by certain places four or five times, approaching them from different angles."

  Now that Petrus mentioned it, I began to realize that Mount Itchasheguy--the highest peak in the region had sometimes been to my right and sometimes to my left. Although I had noticed this, I had not drawn the only possible conclusion: that we had gone back and forth many times.

  "All I did was to follow different routes, using the paths made through the woods by the smugglers. But it was your responsibility to have seen that. This happened because the process of moving along did not exist for you. The only thing that existed was your desire to arrive at your goal."

  "Well, what if I had noticed?"

  "We would have taken seven days anyway, because that is what the RAM practices call for. But at least you would have approached the Pyrenees in a different way."

  I was so surprised that I forgot about the village and the temperature.

  "When you are moving toward an objective," said Petrus, "it is very important to pay attention to the road. It is the road that teaches us the best way to get there, and the road enriches us as we walk its length. You can compare it to a sexual relationship: the caresses of foreplay determine the intensity of the orgasm. Everyone knows that.

  "And it is the same thing when you have an objective in your life. It will turn out to be better or worse depending on the route you choose to reach it and the way you negotiate that route. That's why the second RAM practice is so important; it extracts from what we are used to seeing every day the secrets that because of our routine, we never see."

  And then Petrus taught me the Speed Exercise.

  "In the city, amid all the things we have to do every day, this exercise should be done for twenty minutes. But since we are on the Strange Road to Santiago, we should wait an hour before getting to the village."

  The Speed Exercise

  Walk for twenty minutes at half the speed at which you normally walk. Pay attention to the details, people, and surroundings. The best time to do this is after lunch.

  Repeat the exercise for seven days.

  The cold--about which I had already forgotten--returned, and I looked at Petrus with desperation. But he paid no attention; he got up, grabbed his knapsack, and began to walk the two hundred meters to the village with an exasperating slowness. At first, I looked only in the direction of the tavern, a small, ancient, two-story building with a wooden sign hanging above the door. We were so close that I could even read the year when the tavern had been built: 1652. We were moving, but it seemed as if we had not left our original spot. Petrus placed one foot in front of the other very slowly, and I did the same. I took my watch from my knapsack and strapped it on my wrist.

  "It's going to be worse that way," he said, "because time isn't something that always proceeds at the same pace. It is we who determine how quickly time passes."

  I began to look at my watch every minute and found that he was right. The more I looked at it, the more slowly the minutes passed. I decided to take his advice, and I put the watch back in my knapsack. I tried to pay more attention to the Road, the plain, and the stones I stepped on, but I kept looking ahead to the tavern--and I was convinced that we hadn't moved at all. I thought about telling myself some stories, but the exercise was making me anxious, and I couldn't concentrate. When I couldn't resist any longer and took my watch out again, only eleven minutes had passed.

  "Don't make a torture out of this exercise, because it wasn't meant to be that," said Petrus. "Try to find pleasure in a speed that you're not used to. Changing the way you do routine things allows a new person to grow inside of you. But when all is said and done, you're the one who must decide how you handle it."

  The kindness expressed in his final phrase calmed me down a bit. If it was I who decided what I would do, then it was better to take advantage of the situation. I breathed deeply and tried not to think. I put myself into a strange state, one in which time was something distant and of no interest to me. I calmed myself more and more and began to perceive the things that surrounded me through new eyes. My imagination, which was unavailable when I was tense, began to work to my advantage. I looked at the small village there in front of me and began to create a story about it: how it had been built, the pilgrims that had passed through it, the delight in finding people and lodging after the cold wind of the Pyrenees. At one point, I sensed that there was in the village a strong, mysterious, and all-knowing presence. My imagination peopled the plain with knights and battles. I could see their swords shining in the sun and hear the cries of war. The village was no longer just a place where I could warm my soul with wine and my body with a blanket; it was a historic monument, the work of heroic people who had left everything behind to become a part of that solitary place. The world was there around me, and I realized that seldom had I paid attention to it.

  When I regained my everyday awareness, we were at the door of the tavern, and Petrus was inviting me to enter.

  "I'll buy the wine," he said. "And let's get to sleep early, because tomorrow I have to introduce you to a great sorcerer."

  Mine was a deep and dreamless sleep. As soon as daylight began to show itself in the two streets of the village of Roncesvalles, Petrus knocked on my door. We were in rooms on the top floor of the tavern, which also served as a hotel.

  We had some coffee and some bread with olive oil, and we left, plodding through the dense fog that had fallen over the area. I could see that Roncesvalles wasn't exactly a village, as I had thought at first. At the time of the great pilgrimages along the Road, it had been the most powerful monastery in the region, with direct influence over the territory that extended all the way to the Navarra border. And it still retained some of its original character: its few buildings had been part of a religious brotherhood. The only construction that had any lay characteristics was the
tavern where we had stayed.

  We walked through the fog to the Collegiate Church. Inside, garbed in white, several monks were saying the first morning mass in unison. I couldn't understand a word they were saying, since the mass was being celebrated in Basque. Petrus sat in one of the pews to the side and indicated that I should join him.

  The church was enormous and filled with art objects of incalculable value. Petrus explained to me in a whisper that it had been built through donations from the kings and queens of Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany, on a site selected by the emperor Charlemagne. On the high altar, the Virgin of Roncesvalles--sculpted in massive silver, with a face of precious stone--held in her hands a branch of flowers made of jewels. The smell of incense, the Gothic construction, and the chanting monks in white began to induce in me a state similar to the trances I had experienced during the rituals of the Tradition.

  "And the sorcerer?" I asked, remembering what he had said on the previous afternoon.

  Petrus indicated with a nod of his head a monk who was middle-aged, thin, and bespectacled, sitting with the other brothers on the narrow benches beside the high altar. A sorcerer, and at the same time a monk! I was eager for the mass to be over, but as Petrus had said to me the day before, it is we who determine the pace of time: my anxiety caused the religious ceremony to last for more than an hour.

  When the mass was over, Petrus left me alone in the pew and went out through the door that the monks had used as an exit. I remained there for a while, gazing about the church and feeling that I should offer some kind of prayer, but I wasn't able to concentrate. The images appeared to be in the distance, locked in a past that would never return, like the Golden Age of the Road to Santiago.