Iacobus (16 page)

“I had already guessed that, so it’s of no great surprise,” I replied. “But you should know, Count Joffroi, that I still don’t know how to do miracles, and His Holiness will have to settle for the speed at which my feet and the sharpness of my eyes can perform. I only need to know one thing from you before asking that you disappear from my sight: How can I request help if I need it? As you can see, I’m not carrying any weapons.”

“We will know,” he replied, turning around and walking away. “We will always be watching you.”

“Thank you, Count,” I said as a farewell.

And the echoes of my voice faded out in the naves of the temple but not without me noticing an acute tone of fear in my last syllable. Was my Order also behind that threat or was it the exclusive work of the Pope? In either case, I couldn’t request help from anyone.

It took us three days to reach Montpellier and another ten to get to Toulouse, visiting the tombs of St. William of Arquitaine on the outskirts of Gellone — who died fighting the Saracens —, of the Martyrs Tiberius, Modesto and Florence, buried in the Benedictine Abbey of St. Thibery along the banks of the River Herault, and of St. Saturninus, confessor and bishop, who suffered martyrdom tied to fiery, untamed bulls that dragged him along stone steps, shattering his head and spilling out his brains.

I worried about the influence that all of these gruesome stories might have on Jonas’ young mind. Even though I was making sure to tell him other types of stories and sow good seeds in his mind, the time for his full initiation had still not arrived, as he was still a few years away from becoming an armed knight (his origin was officially unknown, and although this would be resolved sooner or later, it would still be a while before he could wear the armor and accessories, handle a spear, and above all, learn how to wield a heavy sword made of good Franc steel). Unfortunately, his training at the Monastery of Ponç de Riba made him very vulnerable to the striking and seductive deeds of saints and martyrs, most of whom if they had not been simple warriors whose battles favored the Church wouldn’t have even been Christians, verifying that the long arm of the church had modified their lives — always almost pagans or initiated members —, to conform them to the holy Roman canons.

Jonas’ religious fervor grew as we progressed along our pilgrimage and in line with the number of tombs we visited but my concern peaked when, upon reaching Borce at the end of August, at the foot of the Summus Portus, I found him hiding a piece of bacon in his bag that a kind woman had given us when we asked for food for the love of God and of St. James.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him as I pulled his hands out and opened his bag to look inside. After moving two or three things out of the way that were covering the surface, I was hit by a foul stench: Several days worth of putrefied food was rotting in the bottom of his bag. I had sensed that something was up and had been waiting for the time to catch him in flagrante delicto. “And what is all this?”

Not a flicker of shame or fear crossed his childlike face, where fuzz covered his upper lip and jaw line. Rather, I felt a wave of obstinacy, of offended stubbornness as I stared at him.

“I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

“Really? You’re letting all that food, that is so difficult to get, go to waste, and instead of eating it, you’re throwing it in the bottom of your bag like rubbish.”

“This is a matter between myself and God.”

“What nonsense are you talking about?” I bellowed with fury. “We walk without taking a break from sun up until sun down, and you, instead of eating to regain your strength, waste food. I want an explanation right now or you will feel the softness of this rod on your skinny backside!” And I pulled a long, flexible branch from a beech tree that was on my right.

“I want to be a martyr,” he mumbled.

“You want to be a what?”

“I said that I want to be a martyr!”

“A martyr!” I shouted, while a wave of good judgment advised me that I either calmed down or I would lose more than I would gain with that damn boy.

“Suffering and martyrdom are routes to perfection and closeness to God.”

“And who told you that?”

“They taught me at the monastery but I had forgotten about it,” he said as way of excuse. “I now know that my life only has one purpose: to be a martyr of Christ and die purified through suffering. I want to wear the thorny crown of the chosen ones.”

My amazement prevented me from swearing. I told myself that that son of mine was desperately in need of good military and courtier training. The trouble was that we were surrounded by mountains, between Borce and the village of Urdos — which could be seen in the distance —, about to leave the Aspe valley to climb the summit of Summus Portus, and I couldn’t give him that kind of training in this environment. I had to solve the problem using some kind of ruse. It’s never a good idea to do things without having first anticipated all of the likely moves of the game.

“O.K., boy,” I said in the end. “You can be a martyr. In actual fact it’s an excellent idea.”

“Really?” he asked suspiciously, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Yes. I will help you.”

“I don’t know, I’m not sure … Your sudden change of attitude seems very strange, sire.”

“You shouldn’t be suspicious of someone who just wants to help you successfully reach the gates of heaven. So, starting today, and taking advantage of your weakness, since you haven’t eaten in several days ….”

“I manage fine with bread and water. That’s all I have,” he said quickly.

“… starting today, you will carry all of our possessions, mine and yours,” I said, hanging my bag and tin from his shoulder. “And to complete your ordeal, you will not ingest any type of food or liquids. The bread and water has finished.”

“I think it’s best if I do it my way,” he murmured.

“And why is that? What you are actually searching for with this sacrifice is death. Did you not say that you wanted martyrdom and the thorny crown of the chosen ones? Well, as far as I know, martyrdom is the unnatural death of Jesus Christ. What’s the difference between dying today and dying tomorrow? Time doesn’t matter, what matters is the amount of suffering that you can present before the Court of God.”

“Yes, but I think it will be more worthy if I do it my way. The agony will be slower.”

I wanted to give him a resounding slap on that stupid face of his but I pretended to be taking his words into consideration and weighing up the pros and cons of each option.

“Fine, do it your way. But if you have bread and water, you should at least make yourself bleed. You already know that it is a foolproof way to avoid sin and maintain the purity of the soul. I’m sure you saw how the disobedient monks bled in Ponç de Riba.”

“No, I don’t want bloodletting,” he said hastily. “I think that carrying all this weight and maintaining myself on bread on water until my death is sufficient.”

“Fine, whatever you want. Let’s carry on walking then.” We left the valley behind and climbed the path to Fonderia. At midday we walked through the Espelunguere jungle and crossed the river, heading towards the Peyranere slopes. We couldn’t have picked a better time to cross the mountains and enjoy the splendor of nature; we were surrounded by large pines, firs and beeches, poplars and wild roses and were accompanied by Pyrenees Ibex, squirrels, deer and wild boar. Following the same path in winter, though blizzards and snowstorms, would have been suicidal. Nevertheless, many pilgrims prefer to because the risk of coming across bears or thieves is greatly reduced.

We walked all day, using the infinite silhouette of the splendid Peak of Aspe as our reference, that cliff of sheer, pointed rock that guides the steps of the pilgrims to the highest point of the summit, the Portus Asperi or Summus Portus, which is where the real Way of the Apostle begins. We had barely put a foot on the summit, when Jonas, exhausted from the effort of the climb, the weight of our frugal belongings and the days of fasting, fainted.

Fortunately, a short distance away on the downward slope was the Hospital of St. Christine, one of the three largest pilgrim hospitals in the world —, the other two were the Mons Iocci, on the route to Rome, and the one in Jerusalem belonging to my Order —, and while Jonas recovered from his martyrdom and his wishes to wear ‘the thorny crown of the chosen ones’, I had to search for accommodation at the inn in the nearby town of Camfrancus
(14)
.

The physicist who examined him at St. Christine’s said that he would need at least two days to recover his strength and continue the Camino. In my humble opinion, a good meat and vegetable stew and half a day of sleeping would have been enough for a full recovery but as I was only supposed to be a noble knight who was doing the pilgrimage to Compostela in poverty to be forgiven for gallant debts, it was not in my jurisdiction to give medical advice.

As I had nothing else to do, early the next day I followed a pass down to Jaca, with my brimmed hat pulled down to my eyes: I remember that on that day the sun was shining even brighter than the sun that had accompanied us throughout our journey. It was my intention to thoroughly examine the land and not miss any details that could be useful. I told myself that, logically, it would be there, at the start of the Camino itself, where signs should begin to appear, or the necessary keys to interpret those signs. It would have been absurd of the milites Templi Salomonis to distribute their great wealth along a long and busy pilgrimage route without establishing the language needed to recover it at the beginning of the route itself.

I left the course of the River Aragon to go into the town of Villanua. I’m not sure what made me stop there but it was a bit of luck because inside the small church I found a black image of Our Lady. An intense happiness took over me and filled my heart with joy. The Earth, the Magna Mater, radiates its own internal forces outwards through veins flowing under the ground. These currents were called ‘Earth Snakes’ by the ancient cultures, that had since disappeared, who used the color black to represent them. The Black Madonnas are symbols, signs that indicate in these Christian times, and only for those who know how to interpret them, where these internal powers emerge with greater strength. Sacred, arcane places, beautiful places of spirituality. If one day man no longer lives in direct contact with the earth and therefore could not absorb its energy, he would lose himself forever and would no longer form part of the pure essence of the Magna Mater.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, still, absorbed in my thoughts, meditating. For a few hours I recovered myself, I recovered the Galceran who had left Rhodes to find his son and learn new medical techniques, I recovered internal peace and silence, my own inspiring silence, from which flowed, like a prayer, the beautiful verse of the poet Ibn Arabi
(15)
: ‘My heart holds everything …’. Yes, I told myself, my heart holds everything.

I didn’t reach Jaca that day, of course, but I did the next day, when I crossed the river by a stone bridge, leaving Villanua to my left. I entered the city through the Gate of St. Peter, following the pilgrim’s route, and I came across a clean and welcoming city, although too noisy. It was market day and people were milling in the square and under the arches amid a deafening noise and a great clamor, shoving, name-calling and bickering. However, all external perception was put on hold when I suddenly saw the tympanum of the west door of the cathedral, the access for pilgrims who went there to pray before the statue of the Apostle and before the relics of the holy martyr Orosia, patron saint of the city.

It was not the superb eight-armed Chi-Rho
(16)
that caused my stupor but rather the magnificent lions that flanked it because besides their incomparable perfection — I had very rarely seen them so beautifully reproduced —, both of them were roaring, for whoever knew how to hear them, that the building contained ‘something’, ‘something’ so important and sacred that one had to enter the premises with their five senses wide awake. The lion is an animal with solar significance, closely linked to the concept of light. Leo is also the fifth sign of the Zodiac which means that the sun passes through this sign between the 23rd of July and the 22nd August, that is, the hottest and brightest time of the year. In the universal symbolic tradition, the lion is the sacred sentinel of mysterious knowledge, whose cryptic representation is the black snake. And indeed it was a snake beneath the lion on the left, or more precisely, the lion on the left appeared to be protecting a human figure holding a snake. The lion on the right, meanwhile, was crushing a bear’s back with his paw, a symbol, due to their lethargy, of old age and death. But the most interesting part of all was the tablet at the foot of the tomb, with the following engraving:
Vivere si queris qui mortis lege teneris. Huc splicando veni renuens fomenta veneni. Cor viciis munda, pereas ne norte
secunda
(17)
. What else could that call be referring to — ‘If you want to live, you, who are subject to the law of death, come pleading …’ —, if it was not the beginning of the initiation process? Was Jaca not the first city of the sacred Camino, marked from the sky by the Milky Way and followed by millions of people since the world was made? St. James was no more than the Church’s explanation for a pagan phenomenon with very remote origins. Long before Jesus was born in Palestine, humanity had been traveling tirelessly towards the end of the world, to the point known as Finisterre, the ‘End of the Earth’.

What was the important thing that the Cathedral of Jaca guarded inside? I had no choice but to enter and look for it since it was clear that the lions could be a clue for something but would never reveal a secret. I went from one side of the temple to the other, sniffing around every corner, every pillar, every column and every ashlar, and I finally found it next to the cloister, in the Chapel of St. Orosia. Nestled in a nook hidden by the shadows was a tiny seated statue of Our Lady, holding a cross in the shape of a Tau! I say that it was a statue of Our Lady because it was presented as such, although I had never seen a statue that was less sacred or less adorned with symbols of her greatness. It was a young woman, dressed in court robes, with her head encircled by a vulgar ducal crown and a sly smile on her lips. Her whole body language, with her stiff torso, her legs exerting force on the ground to hold the weight of the cross, and that way she was sitting on the edge on the bench, her whole attitude, I believe, was intended to showcase the Tau, pushing it forward as if to say: ‘Take a good look, look at this cross that is not really a cross but a sign, think about it, I’m putting it right in front of your face’. I made a good note of everything I saw and happily followed the path back to my inn.