Thursday, May 31, 2012
The Heights of Santiago

I do make it to the Cathederal in time to hear lauds, and participate in the Mass that follows. It is in honor of the feast of the Visitation, when Mary, newly pregnant, went to see her cousin Elizabeth who, despite being childless and past child-bearing age, had conceived a child who would be John the Baptist.

Eight priests sing lauds and another four men --the sacristan, the homilist, the celebrant and a man in white robes assist at Mass. it is my last opportunity to give Santiago a hug, so I queue on the line. In front of me are a group of French tourists, taking photos and filming with a videocamera despite the sign stating that to do so is not permitted.

I have come to think that the compulsive taking of photographs is a sign of the anxiety of modern man. We want something we want something to hold onto to preserve whatever specialness we thought an event held, but by the time we get home and print the photos around they are insufficient to the purpose, and we are let down. I see in my own journey, coming to a close, a similar dilemma. Have I been transformed by the trip or have I merely been in motion?

At the end of the Mass I walk over to Archbishop Gelmirez' palace for my last contact with the Cathedral, the tour of its banquet hall, interior walkways and rooftops. The rooftops are called cubiertas, and they are stepped, because the Cathedral was a defensive redoubt against invasion by the Moors, the Visigoths and the Vikings, all of whom waged campaigns in Gaicia. The purpose of building a stepped roof was to permit the Cathederal to be defended more effecively than if soldiers could only defend from the ramparts. From the cubiertas all the rest of the Cathederal can be seen, including the two towers shaped like ziggurats. All of Santiago, too can be seen, as well as the countryside beyond.

The tour guide is extremely knowledgeable and adds a few facts to my knowledge about the Cathederal. The very large fob attached to the rope at the end of the reel from which the botafumeiro swings is called an alcachofa, the Spanish word for artichoke; the swinging of the botafumeiro on days other than the most holy days, is arranged by the making of a donation to the Cathedral of three hundred Euros. Also, with regard to the Cathedral bells, on Good Friday, the bells did not ring. Instead, the Cathedral decided to install a large carraca in one of the towers --a wooden rattle, whose grinding sound was deemed more appropriate to the solemnity of the Crucifixion than bells.

The tour over, I have a quick lunch and start to walk to the hotel with forty minutes before a taxi arrives to take me to the airport. However, two middle-aged women, pilgrims from Brazil doing the Camino Portugues starting from Oporto, ask me for directions to the Seminario Menor next to the Dominican convent of the sisters of Belvis, from whom I bought the cookies. They are a very long way from thre, and I have time and know how to get there directly, so I guide them there. The younger one of the two is sick with a bad sore throat and is having difficulty moving. The older one follow me, but at one point, just two streets before they would have arrived at the point where they could descend rua da Trompa and reach their destination, they fall back, and I lose them.

It is a moment worthy of the magical realism of South America: one minute I am taking two women pilgrims to a Dominican convent in an old part of Santiago, the next they have vanished. --Of I have gone too fast for them, which turns out to be the case. They have lost me, and I them: I find them getting directions from a woman who is passing by on her way to do an errand. I take the sick woman by the hand and gently walk her the two blocks left. I point out the convent and the Seminario Menor in the distance and tell them to follow the slope of the road: at its end is their destination. They give me weak smiles and go on. Soon they will be relieved of their distress.

I go to the hotel, take the taxi and get to the airport twenty-five minutes before check-in is to start. However, most of the passengers for the four-twenty-five flight are already on line. They have been waiting for the Spanish Aer Lingus personnel, who only start working at 2:30 p.m. When they come to me, they take my suitcase, but tell me my knapsack is too bulky, and I am obliged to discard clothes I wore on the Camino. Ultimately, though I get on the plane with my knapsack and my bag of books, no worse the triage.

The flight to Dublin is smooth, and I have a lively conversation with Sinead, a teacher of anatomy at the Medical School. Arriving in Dublin, I have the sense that I have already started my re-entry to the world I left behind, with its fast pace and attendant tensions. I go to the bus stop for the Air Coach, which I have been told to take, and there I see the airport chapel where I attended Mass the Sunday I flew in from New York and waited to change planes for Rome when I began my journey three months ago in March; where I asked to use the lavatory so I could freshen up a bit before the last leg of my journey to Rome, where Manuel Otero Mari picked me up, and I started my trek.

But I must move on to Dublin. There is a bus to take me to Ballsbridge, and I check into my hotel quickly. My room features a built in sauna for one person and a whirlpool bath. The American Embassy is a few blocks down from my hotel on Northumberland Street, as are many professional offices. I might be in Washington, D.C. from the look of the park across the street and the low-height modern offices.

The hotel recommends a bistro called Roly's, across the street from the embassy for dinner. And again, I feel as though I have already started my re-entry: the restaurant has two cookbooks to its name, it is throbbing with customers and the food is much, much more complicated than anything I have eaten for a long time, at least since the lunch I ate at Bofinger my last day in Paris. I have a leek soup, a lamb pie and an apple strudel, all good, but all enriched by the addition of butter or cream. The apple tart I order comes with vanilla sauce and ice cream and is more pastry and sugar than apple. In Santiago I had green apples from the fruit bowl the Altair set aside for guests to snack on. I am wondering where the nearest grocery store in Dublin 4 is, a neighborhood where houses are listed at prices of well over a million dollars.

I know I want to see the Yeats exhibition at the National Library, and visit Saint Patrick's Cathedral, where Jonathan Swift was the Dean; and I want to see my friends Grainne and Patrick and Niamh and Paul, but I am already feeling as though I want to cut short my stay in Dublin. The dinner at Roly's whose cookbooks emphasize the reasonableness of their prices, has cost me sixty-five dollars. Twelve days of this and I will blow my trip budget.