Read Online Off the Road by Jack Hitt - Free Book Online Page A

gleam;
    he
slices downward through the coif and hair
    and
cuts between the eyes, down through his face,
    the
shiny hauberk made of fine-linked mail,
    entirely
through the torso to the groin,
    and
through the saddle trimmed with beaten gold.
    The body of the horse slows down the sword,
    which, seeking out no joint, divides the spine:
    both fall down dead upon the field’s thick grass.
     
    As the battle raged, Oliver
pleaded with Roland to call Charlemagne, until it was too late. When the
fighting turned against his men, Roland gave a blast on Olifant so powerful
that his temples burst. In his death throes Roland cracked Durendal on a stone
so no Saracen could carry it in triumph, and then he fell. After Charlemagne
hastened to this ridge, he saw red pastures below, drenched in his men’s gore.
The enemy had vanished. Charlemagne sank to his knees and so moved the heavens
with his plea for revenge that the late afternoon sun, it is said, held its
place in the sky and lit the Spanish plains until Charlemagne caught the
Saracens and carried out a final furious slaughter.
    For pilgrims, the story was
important, and vice versa. Along the road the song was performed by itinerant
musicians called jugglers, and it became enormously popular. The pilgrimage and
the song also introduced new ideas into Christian thinking at this time. The
constant skirmishes with the Moors just off the road to Santiago had put the
pilgrims, and subsequently Europe, in contact with a novel Arab concept—the
jihad, or holy war.
    After three hundred years of
pilgrimage and fighting Moors, the lessons were learned. This new idea tried on
different accommodating theologies until it became a Christian virtue. The Arab
jihad was Europeanized into the Christian Crusade. In 1095, Pope Urban II
called on Christians to retake the Holy Land from infidels. Four years later Rome’s flag flew in Jerusalem.
     
    On the field in the valley,
a stone marker announces the spot where Roland and his men engaged the
Saracens. A nearby highway provides a short walk into Roncesvalles. This little
village —no more than a hundred people—is a few houses, two bars, and an
Augustinian monastery. A knock at a door of the chapterhouse puts me in the
orbit of Brother Don Jesús. A short bald man with a quick chaotic air, he is in
constant motion.
    “Pilgrim. Pilgrim. What a
surprise. How good this is,” he says in fast, clipped Spanish. He herds me into
his private office and eases me into a comfy chair. From somewhere he produces
a clipboard and shoves a questionnaire in my lap. I am being polled. The
monastery wants to know about the pilgrims who pass through. I am asked where I
am from, where I started, how I heard of the road. The critical, final question
asks my “motive” for walking the road. I am provided four possible answers:
     
    ■ religious
    ■ cultural
    ■ historical
    ■ other (explain)
     
    That fourth option looks so
sad and out of place alongside the first three. I check this box and write in
Spanish, “I’d have to write a book to answer this question.” Don Jesús reads
it, laughs, and playfully snatches the clipboard from me. Apparently he doesn’t
care for polls.
    “You are a pilgrim. We have
been welcoming you for a thousand years!” Father Don Jesús throws his arm
around my shoulder and squeezes my neck.
    At evening, he says, the
church still rings the bell, the last call for pilgrims to find their way out of
the mountains and into the shelter of the monastery. I ask him if he has any
pilgrim’s passports lying around.
    “Of course. We have no
problem. They are here.”
    I tell him that I had met a
Madame Debril on the other side of the Pyrenees and that she had told me it was
pointless to walk without one. Don Jesús looks up at me through caterpillar
eyebrows with a pair of warm, conspiratorial eyes. He pulls out a fresh
passport and makes a show of applying an intricate stamp the size of a silver
dollar. Sometimes I can’t understand