Petra's Ghost Page 6

  “I was wondering if you might see if my friend is still sleeping?” Daniel asks her, plastering his best winning smile on a face lined with stress. “Her name is Ginny. She has a backpack same as mine.” Daniel indicates his turquoise pack still propped against the couch.

  “There are no more women left,” the German lady says as she picks up her hiking poles from a sizable unglazed urn at the top of the stairs. For a second, Daniel thinks she means in general. As if all of her sex has disappeared off the face of the earth, or at least off of the Camino. She misinterprets his reaction as a challenge.

  “Check for yourself,” she says, indicating the open door to the bedroom.

  Daniel walks over and has a look inside. There are four beds in the small room. Only one appears slept in. The others have rough grey blankets pulled up tight on the bed frames, the pillows undented. Somebody must have made up the other bed, Daniel thinks although that doesn’t make a lot of sense. The sheets were stripped and washed daily in the albergues, not for aesthetics, but to avoid the much-feared spread of bedbugs. It was redundant to make your bed.

  Daniel rushes out of the bedroom and catches the German woman as she is making her way down the stairs. “When did she leave?” he asks her, leaning over the banister.

  “When did who leave?” she says, looking up from the landing, annoyed at being delayed.

  “The other woman who was with you, in the ladies’ quarters. She came in late last night with me.”

  “There is no other woman. Only me,” she says, turning to continue down to the ground floor. He listens as her hiking poles click away like a metronome on the hard tiled steps.

  Daniel returns to the bedroom and looks again, scanning the floor, the deeply recessed window. He checks under all three of the beds as if Ginny were a misplaced sock. Nothing. He finds another bird’s nest built above the inner door frame with two black swallow silhouettes painted on either side. They are rendered shadows of the real thing he had imagined in the common room this morning.

  Leaning against the wall, he feels the cool adobe plaster against his temple. The angle gives him a new perspective out the window. He sees the sharp edges of black metal steps hugging the outer wall of the albergue. Stepping out to the hallway, he tries the door that he previously assumed led to another bedroom. Opening it, he is hit by the bracing freshness of the outdoors. A fire escape criss-crosses its way down to spill out in a side alley connected to the main street. He braces himself with one hand in the doorway, looks out across the rooftops of Azqueta to where the Camino exits the village and disappears in the distance. He tries to picture Ginny darting out into the night without him, vanishing into the air where the sky meets the trail, with that dark figure floating above the fields behind her.

  Like the shadow of a bird in flight.

  The road to Villamayor de Monjardin is even steeper than the road to Azqueta. Daniel’s shirt is damp with sweat despite the chill of the morning. On the outskirts of the village, he passes by a thirteenth-century pilgrim fountain no longer in use. Under a set of impressive double arches, the water stagnates in a murky pool. A white film floats on top and the odour is not a pleasant one. It doesn’t improve his headache.

  Walking alone with only his own thoughts, he cannot help but become obsessive. He turns over the events of the last few days in his mind, like numbers to a combination lock. There must be some logical sequence to explain things, he thinks. Mistaking Ginny for Petra or hearing screams that aren’t there, both of those could be written off to tired eyes or a suggestible mind.

  Seeing the wretched creature in the farmer’s field, though, now that’s a whole other level of madness. Daniel wants to blame the wine fountain, dehydration, fatigue, anything for that. Anything, that is, except the failing of his own mind. And yet, that laboured breathing in the corn, the tongue bloated and black in his flashlight beam. He could have sworn to it. As he would have sworn to what he’d seen hovering on the outskirts of Azqueta just before he slammed the door of the albergue shut behind him last night.

  He can’t imagine Ginny going back out into the night after seeing that half-human thing following them. And she must have seen something. She was obviously frightened. In his experience, a woman doesn’t normally repeat the phrase “Oh shit” over and over like a mantra unless something is definitely out of sorts. Why did she leave the albergue without him? And what if something had happened to her? He’d overheard a conversation that morning in the albergue about a woman who’d gone missing on the trail. Perhaps what they’d seen was somehow responsible. It sends his worry up another notch.

  All of this is coursing through his mind as he comes to the gates of Monjardin. Above him, a high rock wall spirals around the conical peak that holds the ruins of the village castillo. Daniel can just make out the remains of the castle keep from his vantage point as he mounts a wide stone staircase to the village square. He wonders who the Castilians had sought to keep out with the sharpened rock edges notched into the top of the defensive walls. Who, he thinks — or what. When he cranes his neck to get a better look, a fresh burst of pain blossoms in his brain. He still hasn’t gotten that coffee he needs, or any food, and as he tops the staircase to the Plaza Mayor, it doesn’t look like he’s going to get either. Everything is closed until lunchtime. He has missed the morning rush. The plaza is abandoned, except for a man with a painter’s cap sitting at a round zinc table in the sun. He is eating a large banana.

  “Hellooo, Daniel,” the Dutchman calls out to him. He takes one last bite and then tucks the banana peel away into the zippered pocket of his hip belt. Daniel hadn’t realized the Dutch were so careful with their trash. Must be the influence of his Canadian friend, a people more likely to crush a hand in a bench vice than litter.

  “Hello, Rob,” Daniel calls back, relieved to see him. There are times when it is good to be alone on the Camino. This morning isn’t one of them. He waits while Rob straps on his backpack and walks over to join Daniel in the middle of the square.

  “Here, I cannot finish this.” Rob holds out a large coffee in a travel cup to Daniel, mostly full. There is a God.

  “Thanks,” he says, taking a deep swallow. It burns going down but tastes brilliant. Black and highly caffeinated, just the way he likes it when he needs to clear his head.

  “Where’s the Canadian sister-friend?” Daniel asks, trying to stay casual, as the two walk in the direction of a yellow arrow painted on the cobblestones. It takes them toward an alleyway off the square.

  “Oh, her,” Rob says, shrugging his shoulders. “She has left the Way to be with her family.” He leans on his wooden walking staff, a piece of leather at the top looped around his wrist. “Some are like this here. A princess pilgrim.” He gives Daniel a wink.

  Serious pilgrims make fun of the ones who can’t make it on the Camino, people who hire a service to carry their backpacks or who are too squeamish to stay at the albergues and opt for hotels. Even Daniel had spent a night in an upscale casa rural with a turndown service once after a particularly difficult day. He hopes the Dutchman didn’t see him.

  “That’s a shame,” Daniel says, identifying with the sudden loss of a walking partner. He watches for the next waymark and finds it placed high on the brick wall of a private home built off the alley. The sign has a bright yellow scallop shell with ribs fanning out from the base on a blue background. Someone told him the direction of the ribs points toward the cathedral in Santiago, but he’s not convinced. Rob has now pulled a chocolate-covered Danish and another banana out of his backpack for him. The man is like a walking grocery store. Daniel accepts each offer of food with gratitude. The roar in his head retreats with each well-appreciated bite.

  “And what about your Ginny?” Rob asks him, turning the subject around.

  “Don’t even ask,” Daniel says.

  Rob nods his head as if agreeing to something, and perhaps he is. The two men exchange a silence that speaks volumes on the complexity of women. Crossing onto a rural access
road, they leave the village behind.

  “Rob, would you mind if I asked you something?” Daniel begins. He needs to talk to someone about this.

  “Ask away, my friend. Although if you are wondering if I sell drugs because I am from the Netherlands, the answer is no. A man asked me this in the queue for the showering once. It offends me.”

  Daniel thinks of the Spanish guys and decides offensiveness in a shower lineup knows few limits on the Camino.

  “In all fairness, I hadn’t been thinking of that, but good to know,” he tells the Dutchman.

  “Then what is it you wish to ask?”

  Daniel hesitates for a moment then dives in. “Have you been seeing anything strange-like — on the Camino?”

  “In what way strange?”

  “Something not easily explained.” He can’t believe he is saying this. “A manifestation, for example.” Daniel is not sure if the Dutchman will understand the rarely used English word, but he surprises him.

  “Do you mean like these people who see the image of the Virgin burnt into their breakfast toast?” Rob asks.

  “Uh, I would say no,” Daniel says, relaxing a bit. The Dutchman has that effect.

  “This is good. I am not liking believers in such things. They are too religious for me,” Rob says.

  Daniel agrees. Growing up in the country that he did, Catholicism is a big part of who he is, but he wears his faith like a comfortable coat that has seen him through a few winters. Anything flashier than that, his granny would have said, smacked of grandstanding or even worse — Presbyterianism.

  “I mean more like an apparition,” Daniel tells him. This time he has stumped Rob with the unlikely word. “A ghost,” he clarifies, feeling like an idiot.

  “Oh, a ghost. Boo, and like this. I understand. Now this is something the Dutch know something about. Much more than drugs.” Rob glances over at Daniel and asks, “Do you know of De Vliegende Hollander?”

  Daniel doesn’t speak Dutch, but he took some German in secondary school, and the two languages are similar. He makes an educated guess.

  “The Flying Dutchman?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Rob answers, impressed. “In the Netherlands we don’t have just one ghost but a ship full of them.”

  Daniel doesn’t know what he would do if he had to deal with an entire boat crew of what he saw last night. He is not interested in finding out. “Isn’t the Flying Dutchman after being a harbinger of doom?” Daniel asks him. He knows the legend. Any sailor sighting the ghost ship would soon find himself sleeping with the fishes, literally.

  “Yes, doom, but more than this,” Rob explains. “If asked, the crew of De Vliegende Hollander will send messages.”

  “To who?” Daniel asks. Then wonders if he is setting a poor example in English grammar.

  “To the dead, or perhaps to the living because you may soon be dead,” Rob says, smiling.

  “Aye,” Daniel says, mulling this over. “But surely the crew is being punished? Forced to sail forever, never making port. Why would they trouble themselves with the sending of messages?”

  “Even the damned need a purpose. Don’t you think, Daniel?”

  Daniel doesn’t know what to think. He’s not sure how the Flying Dutchman relates to his situation. It is, after all, just a myth. But the story passes the time, two people shortening the road, as his grandfather had said.

  “Surely,” he says. Though Daniel is honestly sure of nothing. Feeling unmoored from reality, like the fabled ship set adrift, he is circling an endless course around what happened last night, just as he does around the day of Petra’s death.

  Rob hands him his wooden staff to hold and reaches inside the front of his jacket. After a bit of searching, he pulls out a burnished copper heart a little bigger than the average coat button.

  “My wife gave this to me before I left for the Way. It stays on like this.” Rob shows him how the small magnetic back piece holds the metal heart in place on the breast pocket of his shirt. “It is to protect me, my health, my spirit.”

  Daniel hasn’t seen a heart like this before, but he has an uncle who swears by his magnetic copper bracelet for his golfer’s elbow. It was the kind of jewellery that was supposed to ward off everything from high blood pressure to hemorrhoids. He was not sure where you were supposed to wear it for the latter.

  “Does it work, so?” he asks Rob.

  “It does not matter if it works,” Rob tells him, putting the heart back under his jacket, taking back his walking staff. “What matters is my wife believes that it works. And so, I am protected, by something I cannot see or understand. Do you think this is any stranger than finding the Virgin in breakfast toast?”

  “A little less strange.”

  “I agree,” Rob says, and they share a smile. “In any case, the world is full of curious things,” Rob says, adjusting his cap, looking out at the long trail spread out in front of them.

  As far as they can see, well-ordered rows of plucked vineyards line either side of path. This is the beginning of Rioja country. The fall air here still holds the heady scent of a few wizened grapes left behind on the bare web of vines.

  “Do you see the ghost of your wife, Daniel?”

  It takes him a moment to realize what the Dutchman has just said.

  “No. I mean, I don’t believe so,” he stammers, not sure of the answer. And then, “How were you knowing about my wife?” He is fascinated more than suspicious.

  “I sometimes have a way of knowing such things,” Rob tells him.

  “Curious things, so?” Daniel asks.

  “Curious things,” Rob confirms.

  Daniel goes along with this. Maybe Rob had met up with Ginny and she had told him about the ashes. He wants to ask, but decides to let it go. After all, he might have given his widower status away himself without knowing it. There are those who are highly astute at reading other people. He can imagine the Dutchman would be one of them, his empathy that well-developed.

  They skirt the sinking rubble of a ruined agricultural outbuilding. The Dutchman reaches down and picks up a small stone piece that has fallen onto the trail. He walks ahead to a cairn set up at the crossroads. The stones are piled next to a display case filled with aged flowers in a dusky vase. Daniel stands a respectful distance away though he can still see the two dates separated by a dash etched into the glass. Birth and death.

  “We all are having our ghosts, Daniel,” Rob says, as he stoops to place the stone at the base of the cairn. “The question is not if they exist.” He rises and leans into his walking stick with both hands as he turns to address Daniel. “It is what message do they bring.”

  The two start back on the rolling path that cuts through an infinite earthen carpet of spent vineyards. When Daniel passes the cairn, he crosses himself without thinking.

  They stop to eat their lunch in a grassy spot just outside of Los Arcos. Daniel has a huge cheese bocadillo that he bought from a take-away in the busy market town. The woman behind the counter had used a whole stick of bread to make it then warmed it in the oven. The grease from the rich, tangy manchego soaks through the paper it is wrapped in. It tastes better than anything he has eaten yet on the Camino, and he savours it slowly.

  Rob has finished his packed lunch already, a picnic reminiscent of the day Daniel and Ginny had met him at Santa Maria de Eunate. He had insisted on sharing his fruit again. Daniel initially protested then ended up taking an apple anyway. Now the Dutchman lies under a wide-trunked tree, relaxed in the grass. He uses his backpack as a pillow, gazing directly up into the blue of the sky, laughing lightly under his breath.

  “You don’t find this funny?” he asks Daniel, hands laced beneath his head. Directly across from them is a cemetery with an ironwork entranceway. The arch is inscribed with Spanish words. “You understand what this means, yes?” he says, gesturing to the inscription. When Daniel doesn’t respond, Rob consults the Google translator on his phone and reads aloud the English result. “You are what I was, and
will be what I am now.” He bursts into fresh laughter as he drops the phone back in the grass.

  “I reckon I’m not in the mood,” Daniel says, apologizing. He takes the last bite of his sandwich, resists the urge to lick his fingers.

  “But this is the most depressing thing I have ever heard,” Rob says, wiping his eyes, still chuckling.

  Daniel had heard the Dutch had a peculiar sense of humour. He’d watched a subtitled film once from the Netherlands with Petra and hadn’t realized the dark story of a family caught in an avalanche was a comedy until she told him afterward.

  But there is more to his attitude than a lack of appreciation for Rob’s black humour. He has made the conscious decision to put last night behind him. He needs to focus on what he’s here for. To get serious, or he’s going to lose more than his mind. When a slight wind threatens to blow the greasy sandwich paper away, he wraps up his apple core and throws it all in a plastic bag. “I think I’ll go back to Los Arcos to light a candle,” he says, hoping Rob won’t take his departure the wrong way.

  “For your wife?” Rob asks. The Dutchman doesn’t sit up, just lies still with his hands folded across his chest.

  “Yes,” Daniel says. “Perhaps I’ll see you in Torres del Rio.” This is where Daniel plans to stop and stay over for the night. Rob hasn’t shared his plans.

  “Perhaps you will,” Rob says, closing his eyes now like he might take a nap. “Goodbye, Daniel,” he says. “Good luck with your ghosts.”

  “Slán, Rob,” Daniel says, reaching for his backpack, then putting on his hat. Rob doesn’t ask for a translation of the Irish word for goodbye. Some phrases are understood no matter where you hail from.

  After taking a few steps in the direction of town he turns around, walking backwards as he speaks. “And Rob …”

  “You’re welcome,” the Dutchman says without opening his eyes. The breeze blows a piece of grass into his beard. He leaves it there, content.

  It is only a couple of minutes to walk back to Los Arcos. Daniel’s breaking his own rule about never going back on the Camino though he doesn’t feel too badly about it. It was great walking with the Dutchman, but he needs to be alone with himself for a while. Alone with Petra. He still hasn’t found the right spot to spread her ashes. Then again, he’s not sure how hard he has been looking.