My hands were cracked and red, my face peeling from the sunburn, and the backpack felt as though it weighed a ton. Yes, it was better to walk with nothing.

  If I ate in the morning, I was hungry all day. So I didn’t eat yogurt and nuts and fruit until the afternoons. The villages and towns were shuttered for siesta anyway.

  The fountains in each village were always quaint and inviting. I’d fill my water bottle, knowing I would be water-safe until the next one.

  Ali started taking buses frequently, and Carlos became difficult. At one point I asked Ali to take my backpack for me to the next village. I immediately began to stumble, was uncentered, and lost my balance with no weight on my back. I had no control over my ability to walk and found it curiously difficult to go on. With the burden of my backpack lifted, I felt the freedom to allow myself to feel anger at some of the people in my life. There were unresolved issues with them, as well as in my family, and I allowed myself to look at some of them. I found myself realizing how I had contributed to those conflicts. And then I realized that each person had been a mirror and teacher for me to know myself better. That was what family members did for each other. That was why families were the formal education for each member before entering into the world. And I believed each member chose to be born into the family to serve the others. I would try to remember that whenever an argument fraught with emotion and uncommunicated feelings happened when I returned home.

  The farmers along the way talked with discouragement over the price of wheat and the lack of rain.

  I could feel the energy field of the Camino as I walked from Belorado on to Villafranca. Butterflies surrounded me. They were purple and pink and white and black and orange and yellow. I thought how they had previously crawled as caterpillars before becoming free and so exquisite. They were joyous and contributed beauty to all who thrilled to them. I still felt like a caterpillar. When would I become a butterfly?

  I walked about twenty-two miles a day. I could feel a gentle magic occurring, almost too gentle to realize. The press seemed to be tiring of following me. One photographer took a picture of me hanging up my clothes and departed.

  I revamped my show as I walked; I designed a perimeter fence for my ranch and thought of new ways to obtain financing for character-driven films, which were so hard to get green-lighted. I would spend some money on a remodeled bedroom and maybe do a small show on Broadway. Underneath all my thoughts about my life in the world back home was the new world inside myself.

  A man in a wheelchair sped past me going about twenty-five miles an hour. He was paralyzed, and I came to see later that he depended on people in the refugios to take care of his needs. Sometimes they did and sometimes they ignored him. I wondered what his karma was.

  I met a woman named Baby Consuelo, whom I’d met in Brazil years before. She was a singer and did just that as she walked. She was much faster than I, and I never saw her again until the last day.

  Then I came into San Juan de Ortega and realized why the press had seemed to dissipate along the Camino.

  There were two hundred of them waiting for me at the church. Ali and Carlos were waiting there too. Carlos came to meet me and told me that the priest had offered the journalists an interview with me in return for a donation to his church. I told Carlos to tell them I didn’t think it was fair. He readily accommodated and told them off, including the priest.

  The priest offered me garlic soup, which I refused and continued on my way.

  Somewhere outside of town I lay down under a tree and fell asleep with my hat over my face.

  John the Scot came in. He told me that I had known some of the priests in my days as the Moorish girl. He said they were innkeepers in those days. They traveled up and down the trail gossiping. They provided meals and entertainment for pilgrims. Then they took to selling religious artifacts, which they claimed would protect the pilgrims. The pilgrims paid exorbitant prices for artifacts that were worth nothing, but they were too embarrassed to turn them down. Those innkeepers were priests today!

  He said I had known Carlos and Ali along the trail. Ali had been a Moor who authentically converted to the Christian religion. She had lost her parents during the conflicts, and he,John, had taken her in and given her sanctuary. I had helped her reach France, where she became Carlos’s ward. He gave her some land. He fell in love with her then too, but his duties to the Christians forbade him the consummation of that relationship. They remained dutiful to each other, and as everyone returns to old haunts, they came together in this lifetime again.

  Then John said, “You have a theme here which you must be noticing. It is the theme of lovers not loving deeply enough because of powerful prejudices. Those prejudices tainted the ability of each lover to reach completion in himself … including you.” That had been true with the king and again with Palme.

  John went on to say that the man in the wheelchair was in an extended episode of madness. He had been a cripple in each lifetime and had vowed to continue his dedication to his malady every century. John said he was a Christian version of a Buddhist monk who believed suffering was the path to God and that it also amplified the compassion of others. This repeating of a lifetime experience was a little like the situation of the Dalai Lama, always coming back to do the same thing, like reading an important book over and over.

  He said Carlos had desired a unification of the sacred trails both in France and in Spain under the protection of the Knights Templar.

  He said that Anna had been a tutor of mine when I was very young in the land of the Moors, and she was reenacting that same role for me now.

  He told me that Mme. de Brill, the awful woman at the beginning in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port was what he called a sin eater. “She eats other people’s sins so that the Camino will be easier for them. She is the gatekeeper at the border between France and Spain. She has been doing this for centuries. That is the reason for her negative attitude. She takes on other people’s sins.”

  John ended with telling me I would have a disturbing encounter with someone in a refugio some days ahead and I should react as I wanted, but he would explain the reason for it later.

  I could see that John the Scot was my real guide along the Camino. He had done the same for me in the past. I couldn’t explain how it worked or why. I was to learn that later too.

  In Burgos, a man approached me with the gift of a new staff. It had a ring of silver around the top and the bottom. I hesitated. I didn’t want to give up my old friend.

  The man led me to a very well laid out refugio with a dining room. He had prepared food for the pilgrims who had arrived there that day. I was now wary. I didn’t want to be impolite, but I wondered what the catch was.

  Carlos and Ali trailed in, and we sat down to eat. The garlic soup was more oily than usual, the bread three days old, the wine sour. There were cans of sardines, which we had to dig out with knives because there were no forks. I wondered if this was a joke.

  The man hovered as he watched us eat. I couldn’t do it. I finally said I couldn’t eat during the day. He frowned.

  I had a decision to make about the new staff. My old one was like a sorcerer’s crooked stick. So familiar had it become that to walk with it was like walking with my kindly grandfather. But I knew the new one would be better for my back because it was strong and straight. Ali, as yet, didn’t use a staff. Carlos had one of his own.

  I stood from the table, walked with both staffs for a moment, and made a decision. I would give my old staff to the priest of the previous town. Perhaps he could use a trusted friend, but I didn’t want to retrace my steps to his church.

  I heard a commotion and looked outside. Another group of press people had gathered, and beside them was the priest. I walked outside and presented him with my old stick. He turned it upside down, bent it, laughed, and discarded it. It made me angry that he didn’t respect what a friend it had been to me. Carlos sidled up to me. “He is dishonest inside.”

  I didn’t stop for questions or pictures and walked on, leaving my old friend, the sorcerer’s stick, behind. It was hard for me to do. I had emotional attachments to many things, always wondering if I would need them in the future. Then I remembered a dream I had had once. I was the keeper of the records in some vast library of scrolls. I would often lend out the scrolls to people who wanted to study them. When the high commissioner of the library asked me for a detailed record of my inventory, most of the scrolls were not there. He was very angry. I vowed that would never happen to me again.

  Now, I walked with my new staff, thinking about my relationship to things and how I would feel if I were a true refugee who had nothing. On one hand, I would feel liberated; on the other, I would feel deprived. Life on earth lay somewhere in the middle—the middle way, as the Buddhists said, comparing the concept to a harp string. If it is strung too tight, it won’t play; if it is too loose, it hangs. The tension that produces the beautiful sound lies in the middle.

  I wore my hat at all times now because the roots of my colored hair were growing out and I was embarrassed.

  Ali and Carlos argued about his wife. They overlapped each other when they argued … something about his wife being fat and nobody likes fat people. Carlos was autocratic with Ali and she was petulant. Ali said she had forgotten her watch and ran back to the refugio to retrieve it. She returned later to say it had been in her bag all along. As I left a refugio every morning, I was also afraid I would leave something necessary behind.

  Huge raindrops began to fall. I saw an isolated phone booth. I called my friend Anne Marie in California. She said she had played a previous message of mine for my daughter, Sachi. She said Sachi had cried because she didn’t understand why I was doing this. Sachi never understood me or the search I was on. Well, I thought, who could understand it?

  A squall came up. I put on my yellow poncho. The Camino was now pitted with holes and crevices and stones that shifted under my feet. The smell of sweat and dust was accentuated by the raindrops and wind. I had no spatial understanding of my backpack in the wind and rain. It blew from side to side. I tottered off my center, but loved the feeling of being safe under my waterproofed poncho. I slid down hillsides and worried about missing the yellow arrows. Ali had a Gucci-designed poncho over her, while her double-decker Maxfield’s tennis shoes collected mud up to her ankles. Carlos strode forward with his Basque determination, making me giggle. None of us fell. There would be no press for a while.

  A few hours later we stumbled into a small bar. I didn’t know where we were. The bar was crammed with men, smoking and yelling at the ever-present bicycle races on TV. I couldn’t hear myself think. The proprietress brought us coffee. Ali looked into her cup and screamed. There was a fly in it. She was horrified. Carlos commanded her to say nothing, reached in, removed the fly, and put it on the counter. The proprietress was mortified and gave Ali a fresh cup.

  A conversation then ensued with Carlos and Ali discussing the “common” people. I couldn’t decide who was taking which side. Carlos seemed imperious, and Ali personally affronted. Carlos said he couldn’t bear the behavior of common people. I then launched into a description of my trip in 1973 to China, where the imperial elite like him were sent down to the communes to learn the wonder and glory of growing a tomato. He said, “Well, there’s something positive in everything.”

  Ali then piped up, “Well, I didn’t come all this way to make a promenade, then find it so grueling, and then end up with a fly in my coffee.”

  “No,” said Carlos, “you were careless not to see the fly in your coffee.”

  “No,” said Ali, “the proprietress was careless not to see it was there when she served it to me.”

  I was confused. The fly was on the counter, and Ali had a fresh cup.

  Carlos then said, “You drink the coffee, the fly is in it, and down it goes.”

  “No,” she responded. “No, not down it goes. And that is the difference between you and me.” Then she gagged and blamed it on the fly and said she was sick.

  The fly was in the trash by now, but that didn’t stop them.

  “I was freezing in the refugio last night, but I would rather have died than place the blanket from the shelter over me.”

  “Yes, well,” said Carlos, “I gave you my sleeping bag. You refused that too. So you were cold.”

  “Everything around me is unclean,” Ali went on.

  “It’s not so bad,” said Carlos. “You must learn to be one of the people and not so spoiled.”

  I was really confused now. Neither liked the “common” people, but that must have been a good excuse for arguing.

  The fly-and-common-people argument went on for an hour. Perhaps they should have married. I felt myself silently point my finger at them with the other three pointing to myself.

  I walked outside. The squalls were over. The peaceful stillness belied that the storm had ever happened.

  I now had blisters upon blisters. I needed to puncture them and sew them up. I needed to take a hot shower. I needed to be alone in a bedroom. I needed to feel my hair clean. I needed to look in a mirror. I needed to rearrange my tapes and determine if they were even recording. Somewhere in Burgos I found a hotel and checked in. Ali and Carlos, determined to be one of the common people, said they would find a refugio. I remembered a remark the playwright Clifford Odets had made to me as he lay dying. “You have no idea how much pleasure there is in things no larger than a fly’s eye.”

  In the luxury of a small hotel room, I washed all my clothes in hot water, took a long, hot shower with real soap, washed my hair with real shampoo, sat on a private toilet, and tended to my blisters. I realized they were so bad because my weight had shifted while using the new staff. Then I had an interesting thought: Wisdom was represented by what we stood upon—our feet. That was why saints had their feet washed by others who were in the early stages of enlightenment. The feet took energy from the wisdom of Mother Earth and put us in touch with our own balance. Did the saints ever take an oxcart when they walked the Camino? Would taking a bus represent the modern version of an oxcart?

  I thought about the fact that I was born under the sign of Taurus. I was an earth sign. An astrologer had told me that Taurus people like to run with ankle weights on because they are fixed earth people. A Taurus has earth-based wisdom, while still commanding the issues of love, beauty, and sensuality, because Taurus is ruled by Venus. I came into this lifetime as a Taurus, born at the end of April, to deal with the issues of physical love and balancing the energies of masculine and feminine. Taurus was the most dense of the signs, which meant I wanted to experience the primal identity after incarnating into the earth plane. I elected a difficult physical life because I was a Taurus. And I was a Scots-Irish Taurus. John the Scot had said the Scots-Irish were the masters of the Sorrows. What did he mean? We were certainly mad and riotous. Was that to deflect the sorrow? And on what was the sorrow based? I shouldn’t confuse sorrow with depression. They were very different feelings.

  I lay back in the privacy of my soft bed with actual clean sheets and fell asleep. John the Scot didn’t visit me. Instead, I had my recurring dream about the gorilla. The monstrous gorilla was chasing me. He chased me around the world, in various countries, up and down mountains, over hill and dale, until finally I found myself at the edge of the world. I knew I would either have to jump over the precipice in order to escape him or turn around and confront him. I chose to confront. I looked into his eyes and said, “What should I do now?” He answered me, “I don’t know, it’s your dream.”

  Was life my gorilla? And was it saying to me, “It’s your dream. Do what you want with it”?

  11

  Through San Juan de Ortega, the city of Burgos, Castrojeriz, Frómista, Carrión de los Condes, and on, to Sahagún I walked, sometimes with people, sometimes alone. There were beautiful and refreshing fountains in each village, where I stopped to drink, think, and enjoy. As if on purpose,John the Scot didn’t visit me. I was on my own with my understanding. Ali and Carlos were now on their own pace too, away from me. I wondered when I would say good-bye to them for good. I always had a problem leaving people. I felt guilty about leaving people behind. I knew we all had our own journey, but part of being successful was being out in front and leaving others behind. I noticed that the wealthy pilgrims always moved faster because they were more goal-oriented. They didn’t seem to become the Camino, or the path beneath their feet or the countryside or the sky or the flowers and wheat and clouds. They never seemed lost in the moment.

  Some of the pilgrims said they could tell whether I was staying in a shelter or not by my familiar clothes hanging on the line outside.

  A doctor tended to my blisters, and I tried to give him a thousand pesetas. He wouldn’t take the money. Instead, he went away and came back with flowers for me. “When one walks for God, they shouldn’t be charged,” he said. “They should be rewarded.”

  I approached a wooden obelisk just outside of a small village. Carved into it was ULTREYA.

  The city of Burgos was saturated with history and art. At the entrance to it, outside the walls, stood the ancient remains of the Hospital de San Juan Evangelista, and adjacent to it was a silent and comforting Benedictine monastery. I crossed a moat by a tiny medieval bridge and found myself in a medieval city. Here, in the grand cathedral that dates back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, lies the tomb of the legendary El Cid. I reveled in the antiquity of this magnificent Gothic structure, thinking I had probably been here centuries before that!

  Between Burgos and Castrojeriz, I crossed territory that is famous for being one of the most difficult stretches on the Camino. I climbed the hills steadily, crossing the upper part of a stream coming from the Corrales de la Nuez, which were farmsteads, and reached the height of the first meseta, the dry Spanish plains, very like a desert of wheat fields and very poor.

  I was suddenly into my next level of tolerance.