Petra's Ghost Read online

  The parish church borders on the main square. As Daniel approaches the entrance, he can see a man in a worn green suit standing outside. A long white beard rests on his chest. Keen eyes betray his age as far younger than one would suspect. A rolltop backpack sits broken down next to him, hung with the white scallop shell that marks him as a pilgrim. The iron-bound exterior doors of the church are opened wide, but the man’s dusty felt hat is upturned on the concrete stoop. It blocks the way in. You can’t pass without paying the toll.

  Daniel has heard about the homeless that walk the Camino. They stay in many of the albergues for free or a modest donativo. Spain’s unemployment rate has been shockingly high since the recent downturn. Many people are victims of the country’s tanking economy. This man appears to be one of them, walking the long road to Santiago just to put a roof over his head each night. Daniel reaches into his pocket for a few euros but finds nothing but the twenties he got out of the bank machine in Estella. He digs deeper and actually pulls out lint.

  With embarrassment, he steps over the hat and into the doorway, trying not to look at the man or at his fedora sparsely filled with change. As a result, he smacks his shin on the door jamb and starts off his visit to the Church of Santa Maria with a string of swear words in the vestibule. If the homeless pilgrim is off-put by this, he doesn’t say so, only stares at the ground, his long, carefully trimmed beard tucked covertly under his chin. Behind it, he is probably laughing his ass off.

  Once recovered, Daniel stands up from rubbing his shin and starts down a poorly lit hallway leading to the sanctuary. It takes awhile for his eyes to adjust, but eventually he is aware of musty woollen tapestries that line the walls on either side. Each one depicts one of the stations of the cross, Christ heavily burdened with a heavy wooden crucifix in most of them. When Daniel reaches the last station, he realizes only seven of the fourteen images are depicted. That means the tapestries are probably pre-seventeenth century. He can’t remember why the Catholic Church decided to increase the number of stations of Christ’s agony in the last few hundred years. Not enough suffering, he gathers.

  He exits the corridor into a small narthex with a marble font mounted on the wall. When he dips his fingers in the holy water he leaves a piece of lint behind in the basin. Fishing it out, he touches his forehead with the furry drops then steps inside the nave.

  As is the case with many churches of the Baroque era, the wall behind the altar looks as though lava from a gold volcano has erupted and hardened on every available surface. The overall effect appears cheap to the modern eye though it surely would not have been. Local nobles made hefty donations to finance both the precious metals and the artwork for a church like this one. This got them not only bragging rights and a good pew, but also a shortened term in purgatory, sometimes even a free pass if the priest was feeling generous.

  Daniel looks closely and can see some classical as well as Romanesque features in the interior, meaning the church has had several incarnations over its long lifetime. His first work as a civil engineer had been in Italy and France, restoring architectural relics like this one to their former glory. Or at least to the point where they wouldn’t collapse on the people inside. Petra had been there on a gap year after university, studying religious art. They had met when she couldn’t get a pay phone to work and he had offered up a coin. Life is such a matter of chance. It feels so long ago. Ancient history, like the Roman columns he can still see hiding inside the open door of the sacristy.

  Electronic candles light up the altar rail. As he approaches them, he remembers he has no change to put in the metal slot to turn one on for Petra. He wonders briefly if the homeless guy would make change. The fake candles flicker, seemingly to mock him.

  He sits down in the front pew feeling useless, unable to do anything for the living or the dead with his lack of small change. The artwork of the reredos behind the altar towers above him, its subjects either in abject suffering or blissful adoration depending on their position in the Christ story. A painted wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, her sacred child on her lap, smiles benevolently from her section of the screen. Daniel uses his secondary-school Latin to decipher an inscription written underneath the two of them. “I am black, but I am beautiful.” Looking back up at the blue-eyed Mary and her pale skin, he figures he must have made a mistake. Although, a morena or dark Virgin was probably closer to the truth if you looked at the racial makeup of Nazareth at the time of Christ. Daniel had seen a black Madonna once before in Switzerland, but they were rare. White Christianity preferred porcelain-skinned mothers of God and favoured Jesuses that looked like West Coast surfer dudes taking a year off college.

  “They painted her white.” A voice comes from behind Daniel.

  He turns around to see a woman sitting in the pew. He hadn’t noticed her when he came in, but she must have been there all along. He would have heard her sit down.

  “The Virgin Mary,” she continues, when he doesn’t respond immediately. “She used to be black, el Virgen Morena, but they painted her and the baby white in the 1940s.”

  Daniel turns back to review the small but exquisite statue. He gets up, his mouth held in a tight line. The gold-plated altarpiece looms above him, while the filaments in the fake candles crackle faintly with electricity. He moves into the woman’s pew and leans in, whispering fiercely in her ear. It is the question he has wanted to ask ever since he woke up this morning and found her gone.

  “Where the hell have you been, Ginny?”

  Passing through the Portal de Castillo out of Los Arcos, they are still arguing.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, not for the first time.

  “Cop yourself on,” Daniel says to her. “You saw someone running across the path, same as me.”

  “I did, but it was just someone fooling around. I don’t know what the big deal is.” Ginny walks and talks quickly, kicking up gravel.

  “The big deal is that you were ready to shit yer caks. And so was I,” Daniel says. This isn’t even an Irish saying. Daniel picked it up when he worked construction one summer in Newcastle-on-Tyne in northeast England. He doesn’t usually resort to such grand displays of coarse cultural idiom, but he’s upset.

  “I was just tired,” she says, sounding like she still is.

  “Is that why you were after running?” he asks, taking her elbow, stopping her from walking on.

  “I was running because you were. You frightened me, Daniel.” She adds lightly, “You’re sort of frightening me now.”

  Daniel sees his hand holding her arm, becomes aware of the tense set of his jaw, the threat of his body. He feels a hot bloom of shame. He’s never been the type of man to be rough with a woman.

  “Sorry,” he says, releasing her. Neither of them says anything. They start walking again. When they pass the cemetery, Rob is long gone. The wind has already erased the flattened grass where he took his catnap.

  After a few minutes, Ginny breaks the silence. “It was just the wine and the night playing tricks on you.”

  “I know what I saw,” Daniel says emphatically, but now he is no longer sure.

  “Do you want to hear about Torres del Rio?” she tries. “They have a Knights Templar church there like the Santa Maria de Eunate. It’s even smaller, but the original …”

  “I don’t want another feckin’ history lesson, all right?” Daniel shouts, stopping on the trail, surprising himself. His anger carries on the wind between them, whistling through her. She closes her eyes, as if to absorb the force of it, then opens them, annoyed.

  “Listen, Daniel. I just went on to the next town, like we said.” She’s trying to talk him down, despite her crossness with him — a gift many women seem to possess in abundance, in his experience. They should use women more often for hostage negotiation.

  “We did say we were going to Villamayor de Monjardin?” she says. “Didn’t we?” She waits for him to answer.

  After a few beats, he does. “How can you rem
ember the feckin’ names of all those places. I forget them all once I’ve passed through.” Except Azqueta. It’ll take awhile for him to forget Azqueta.

  “Look, Daniel. I like walking with you.” She glances down at her feet and then back up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun, no saucy baseball cap today. The light freckles across her nose set to multiply. “But I’ve been walking for a long time without anyone.” She hesitates like she wants to say more, but doesn’t.

  “You shouldn’t have gone off on your own like that,” he says in a normal voice, more in control now. “It wasn’t safe.” This is the true source of his anger. He’d been worried about her. He expects her to be touched by his concern. He couldn’t be more wrong.

  “Is that what this is all about?” Ginny demands, her own fury starting to loosen. “This ‘little woman’ thing again, unable to protect herself alone on the big bad Camino?”

  “Sure, I didn’t mean …”

  “Because I tell you what, buddy, I am fully capable of walking the Way by myself.”

  She leans down and tightens the lace of one hiking boot. Daniel watches as she ties a fierce double knot.

  “I saved for two years for this trip,” she says, standing up again. “Piled up my vacation time, paid someone to take care of my damn cat.” She pokes a furious finger in his chest.

  Daniel has seen his sister in a state like this on occasion. Not usually directed at him, thanks be to God.

  “And then you come along with all this bullshit trying to scare me.” She yanks the hiking poles from the side of her backpack, almost breaking the strap.

  Daniel gets out of her way, afraid he may be on the receiving end of one of the poles’ pointy ends.

  “There is no way anybody or anything is going to stand in my way of finishing this — of getting to Santiago,” she says, leaning into him, so close he can see the flecks in her hazel eyes. Then she turns and storms off and away from him, her hiking poles flying in front of her in a blur.

  “Aw, don’t be like that, Ginny,” Daniel says.

  “Piss off,” she calls back over her shoulder.

  “Sure, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  She speeds up and around the corner of the next bend in the trail, kicking up dust behind her.

  It mustn’t have rained here like it did when I came out of the Pyrenees, he thinks. The ground here is bone dry. He realizes that they have walked straight through into a different climate zone. This is what Daniel thinks about as he watches her leave him — the weather and the trail — rather than wishing she wouldn’t go.

  They are all gathered around a table at the local hotel in Torres del Rio, a Spaniard, two Austrians, some Americans, and Daniel. There’s a young pretty French girl, too. Daniel had thought she was from France, but it turns out she is Québécoise. For a country with a population less than the state of California, those Canadians were bloody everywhere.

  The wine flows freely, but Daniel stops at one glass. He learned from that fountain. The others are already getting loud and animated with the vino tinto, a delectable red wine you can buy in this region for less than the price of water. None of them are staying at the hotel, including him. They all have bunk beds at the albergue across the street, where they paid for the supper at the hotel restaurant when they checked in. Each has a pilgrim dinner voucher for a meal that will probably consist of an overdone piece of pork and a smattering of soggy french fries. Coming from a race of people that lived through their share of famines, Daniel doesn’t care much what is served, as long as there are potatoes.

  The French girl gently touches his forearm with long tapered fingers, leaning in close to say something. She smells earthy and warm, a faint hint of smoke in her hair. He makes sparse conversation; although, later he will not remember about what. Looking out the broad window at the front of the restaurant, he watches the late-day pilgrims trudge up the brick-paved road where the Camino runs outside the door of the hotel. The light is fading, and the pilgrims appear like sepia versions of themselves, walking with heavy steps up the incline.

  He is watching for Ginny, focusing his eyes across the room into the increasing dark as each tired shape moves past the window. He looks for her baseball cap or the distinctive gait of her walk. He scans for a silhouette that matches what he knows of her, soft curves blending with hard lines of muscled determination.

  He keeps having to apologize to the French girl, asking her to repeat what she is saying. It is not the first time. The Spaniard across from him reaches across the table for his attention.

  “And you, my friend, will you go to Finisterre?” he asks, his large square teeth bared broadly. The French girl drops her hand from his arm and grins in return. Daniel has never seen people smile as much as on the Camino.

  “Finisterre?” Daniel asks. He has missed this conversation as well. They are going to start thinking he is partially deaf. “It’s on the coast, I understand.” Daniel has heard of the Spanish beach town. The name means “end of the world.”

  “It is only a three-day walk from Santiago. The original destination of the Camino. They worshipped the sun gods there long before Saint James.” The Spaniard looks around the table, knowing he has the floor. “Some still do.”

  “The most western point of Spain, is it?” Daniel asks, always thirsty for facts.

  “The worshippers thought it was, but they were wrong,” he says. “But it is beautiful there. Much better than the walk into Santiago, filled with fat people and graffiti.”

  Daniel has heard this about the final stretch before the Holy City. That it would be overrun with churro vendors and souvenir hawkers. It was said to have a bit of a carnival feel, like Coney Island for Catholics.

  “I would love to go to Finisterre,” the French girl says, lifting one perfectly arched eyebrow.

  “Then it is settled,” the Spaniard booms, pounding his fist on the table. “We will all go.” He orders another two bottles of vino tinto for the table, as he strikes up further conversation with the French girl. She beams at him with wine-stained lips, leaving Daniel to his distracted mood. He reckons a woman can only fathom so much of a man’s inattention.

  Excusing himself, he gets up and goes to the bar to get a Coke. When the bartender pops the tab, he glances out the window to the top of the street, sees a humble stone church. It is shaped like an octagon.

  “Is that a Knights Templar church?” Daniel asks the bartender.

  “No entiendo,” the bartender says, obviously fed up with tourists who refuse to learn Spanish.

  But Daniel knows that it is. He recognizes the octagon shape, just like Santa Maria de Eunate. He also recognizes the shape of the person sitting on the ground outside it.

  Bolting out the door, he leaves the unimpressed bartender and his Coke. He slows as he approaches the church, afraid to spook her. He is trying to make amends, not convince Ginny he is the madman she has probably decided he is. As he gets closer, the seated shape takes on details in the fading daylight. A shabby green suit, a white beard, an old fedora hat held out in sunburnt hands.

  “Buen Camino, Americano,” the man says. His missing teeth make the words come out with gummy consonants. Daniel stares at him dumbfounded. He had been so sure. Maybe he needs glasses. A weak lamp turns on above the church door.

  “No Americano. Irlandes,” he says, finally finding his Spanish. He doesn’t know why it is important to make the distinction to this man. To let him know where he is truly from. But somehow it seems important to be brutally honest in this moment, as the sun begins to disappear behind the octagonal church and the man smiles up at him with his young old eyes. Daniel sees the upturned hat up close now, dark with sweat around the band. It is empty. He drops his dinner voucher in it and walks back to the albergue, no longer hungry.

  When Daniel falls asleep that night, he sees Petra lying in the tall grass like the Dutchman. He is leaning over her, playing with her hair. He closes his eyes to heighten the sense of touching the rich strands, buries
his mouth in the nape of her neck. She brings her lips up to brush his ear, whispering something, but is cut off with a rough inhalation of breath. He raises his head and opens his eyes to find that she is choking, and it is not Petra after all.

  It is the figure from the cornfield, and he sees his own hands surround her throat, strangling her. Choking off the message she wants to give him.

  CHAPTER 5

  Torres del Rio to Logroño

  DOWN A FRESHLY SWEPT side street in Viana, Daniel Skypes his sister over a wide-mouthed cup of café con leche and a cooked brunch. The day is warm and he sits outside, close to the doorway of the cantina so he can still catch the free Wi-Fi signal.

  “What are you eating?” Angela asks.

  “Tortilla,” he says, lifting the oval ceramic plate up for her to see through the video feed.

  “Sure, that looks like an omelette.”

  “’Tis,” he tells her, shovelling another forkful into his mouth for effect. He is trying to convince her he feels more normal than he does.

  “Are you certain you’re okay?”

  “I am sure, Angela.”

  “You’d tell me if you were feeling poorly, Daniel?”

  “Jesus, Angela, will you lay off,” he tells her, not really snapping, but coming close.

  “All right, all right,” she says. “No need to give out to me. I’m just the long-suffering sister, you know. Taking your phone messages and doing your dirty work.”

  “You were born for the dirty work, so you were, Angie,” he says, teasing, trying to make up for his earlier shortness. He props the smartphone against his coffee mug so he can have both hands free to finish his tortilla. “Now, what’s this business about Gerald?”