If you’ve gotten used to the “EZPass” way of paying tolls here in New York, the traditional coin-toss is suddenly stressful in other places. More than a few times on this trip I’d rolled up to tolls, put my card in, had it not accepted. Fuddled for bills, scrummaged for coins, only to find that this only a place to grab a ticket. At one garage in Cordoba, I had a line of four cars beeping at me which was soothing. This morning speeding out from Pontevedra towards Santiago de Compostela I asked for money as we approached the toll. My older one asked: “How much?” “Look, just give me a big bill and leave it up here. I’ll get you back later.’ This, I was told, had been “rude.”
We’d gotten a late start as usual, and I was keenly aware that the site online had suggested the famous Cathedral would close at 2:30PM. I met some fugly traffic coming into town but eventually got the car settled at a public parking spot and told everyone we’d need to hurry if we were to make it on time. It was a schlepp up to the Cathedral and by the time we’d got there it was just 2:30PM. Fortunately, whatever had been written online was wrong. The building was open and we got ourselves in line to enter. As we turned the corner with the line I noticed at the entrance to the adjacent Cathedral museum, a site we wouldn’t have time to visit, a large photo of a woman looking up at God with the word fe written at the bottom. “Faith” would certainly be required to believe that St. James not only preached here but that his body miraculously returned here from Palestine after his death.
An urgent, living edifice, the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela breathed an immediate, rather than merely a historical relevance. Finally, a Church that didn’t charge us to enter. It reminded me of visiting a temple in Varanasi where the pilgrims were extremely serious about their devotions and where I’d felt out of place, in comparison. Eyes are bought upwards towards an elaborate orange, green and gold pattern in the ceiling. And the alter . . . what remarkable amount of Atahualpa-gold must have been melted to make this priestly backdrop. It isn’t hard to see why Luther and his cohort would have been repulsed by all this finery.
Outside, we hadn’t much time to explore further, and everyone was hot. Five or more hours of driving still lay in front of us. We opted, reluctantly, for one of the café’s there in the square outside the cathedral and had a middling lunch. They warned us that the food would take twenty-minutes, so I took a stroll around to the front of the remarkable sandcastle-like edifice with the stone, quarried locally which seemed a different hue, a different consistency than the ones in Castile. One after another, groups of the athletic faithful charged into the square with cheers and Galician bagpipes playing in accompaniment. It occurred to me that this must be tradition at the end of the arduous pilgrimage, like the boisterous crowd in Goya’s Pilgrimage to San Isidro.
Friday, 8/27/21
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