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

his fast Spanish, but just now our few
words flow with all the elliptical intimacy of two old buddies.
    “Ma-dame De-bril,” Brother
Don Jesús intones slowly. He smiles.
    “Madame Debril,” I say, and
smile.
    “Madame Debril,” Brother Don
Jesús says.
    “Madame Debril,” I say.
    Slipping his arm through
mine, Don Jesús escorts me out of the chapter house and into the open air. I
tell him that I am especially interested in the story of Roland. There, he
says, indicating an eleventh-century funereal chapel, that is where Roland blew
Olifant. The shrill winds that whip through the mountains and valleys here are
said to be echoes of Roland’s ancient blast. He points to an open area and says
that this is where Roland broke Durendal on a rock and where he died. A large
tourist bus pulls onto the gravel near Roland’s resting place and crunches to a
halt.
     
    Don Jesús drops me off for a
coffee and some breakfast at a restaurant next door. Trying to be polite to the
waiter, I tell him how enchanted I am to be in the place where Roland first
suffered at the hands of the Arabs and Charlemagne turned the road to Santiago into a European phenomenon.
    “Arabs?” muses the waiter.
    “Yes,” I say, baffled at his
confusion. “Arabs. Chanson de Roland. Road to Santiago,” I add, hoping
my collection of Spanish phrases makes sense.
    “There were no Arabs here.”
    I never know how to handle
this. When one is convinced one speaks with authority on a subject, there is
the tricky business of imparting this obvious (on your part) superiority
without coming across as supercilious.
    I tell him I had just read
the Chanson de Roland. He smiles to congratulate me on doing my homework
but ignores the arrogant implications.
    “Roland did not die in an
ambush of Arabs,” he says. I decide to play along.
    “So who killed him?”
    “We did.”
    “You?”
    “The Basques killed him.”
    Everyone in Spain issues warnings about Basques, and I had heard plenty before arriving here. They are
a notorious people —most recently for a terrorist guerrilla war against the
Spanish government. But, historically, they have always been enigmatic and work
hard at perpetuating their cultural reputation. Linguists who have mapped the
intersecting landscapes of language cannot place Basque anywhere on the map.
Its origin remains a mystery.
    A sardonic Englishman named
Richard Ford published an account of his 1845 visit to this area. He found the
Basque people inscrutable and their language outrageous—a people who write the
name “Solomon” but pronounce it “Nebuchadnezzar.” Ford tells the legendary
story of the Devil, who studied Basque in order to corrupt these people, but he
abandoned his effort after seven years because he had mastered only three
words.
    I look at my waiter and
automatically screw up a dismissive look, but he stops me.
    “When my father returns, he
will tell you. He knows the whole story. We are the only people who tell the
truth. The French, the Spanish, the Arabs, all lie about Roland.”
    Not long after, the waiter’s
father arrives. He is a short, stout man with a warm, inviting face. On several
occasions he stresses the depth of his knowledge of America.
    “I know who Nelson
Rockefeller is,” he says with a wink of braggadocio.
    He owns this inn but was a
teacher in Pamplona for most of his life. Before I can pose a question, he’s
launched into an excited explanation of where the Basques originated. I had
read theories alleging that the Basque might be of ancient Celtic origin and
another that suggested possible commonalities with old Hungarian. But both of
these apparently are wrong.
    “Originally, we were
Japanese. Thousands of years ago a group of brave warriors were banished from Japan. They wandered the earth and arrived here.”
    “Really?” I pipe up, not
able to disguise my incredulity even behind the thick blanket of a foreign
language. I look again at my new acquaintance—an old white man a