Land of the lotus eaters

Where your treasure lies, that’s where your heart be.

Those words are written on a piece of green paper in a little black bag that’s slung across my shoulder like a sash. The paper was given to me as a token at the end of a pilgrim’s mass, our first on the Camino, and the bag is always with me because it contains our passports, credit cards, a notepad and pen, our most important items. It’s across my shoulder now as we sit in another mass, in the town of Sahagun, in the chapel of the monastery we are staying, where the priest is again talking about treasure.

Where is your treasure?

Maybe God is trying to tell me something. I haven’t done a lot of mass but everytime I do these words seem to crop up. The first time I was asked that particular question was at the Harlem Gospel Church in New York, when I was in my 20’s touring with a dance company. I think it was summer but maybe that’s a result of watching too many Spike Lee movies. Inside the church was a preacher who knew Jesse Jackson, a gospel choir, locals and tourists packed side by side in the heat, and those words, half spoken, half sung, bellowing through the congregation. They had an impact on me, even as my fellow dancer and I attempted to exit the service early, bypassing a profoundly menacing look from the woman next to us.

She told me “no you aint.” and I told her “but I have to...” in a voice that was not big, and did not bellow. It whimpered out of me attempting to explain the pressure I was under to go to a lunch with a Brooklyn Academy of Music donor. We had been instructed not to be late, the lunch was very important and the service seemed to be going on and on.

Yeah I knew exactly where my treasure lay. In keeping my job.

We caught a taxi out of Harlem and arrived fashionably late to the ‘meet the artists’ brunch at a house on the edge of Central Park. A huge house it turned out, with a carriageway, nannies and servants, where the children were displayed then removed when you weren’t looking. A house where the staff shook their heads if you tried to strike up a conversation.

Where is your treasure?

We will leave this town tomorrow by crossing a stone bridge, the Puenta del canto (Bridge of songs), built in 1085. Charlemagne apparently fought the Muslims here. They came across the bridge at night and surprised the French who fled, sticking their spears into the mud as they ran. A forest of poplars grew where the spears were stuck, we’ll walk through it in the morning.

Inside the church the priest explains the Camino is a pilgrimage, not a hike.

What makes a pilgrimage? That feels active, not an external thing, a choice made consciously. The priest mentions whittling down your belongings to what you can carry on your back. Yes, that helps, to reduce to necessity what you have, each item in our packs weighed, measured for its service, looked over, considered. I pat my black bag protectively and our passports, wallet, kindle, notebook and Grip Plus Faber Castell Clutch Pencil (TM) move around under the weight of my hand.

Inside the church the figures of Mary, Jesus and the saints twist through gold, framing the darkness. I am sitting before them, we both are, you under duress. I feel your impatience like a ticking, fidgeting clock.

They speak the Lord’s prayer in Spanish with thickened English translations obscuring the words underneath. After a while your Mum approaches the altar to place the wafer on her tongue. The two of us stay sitting, watching the procession of locals and pilgrims who present themselves before the altar of Christ.

We are outside this ritual, starved of its fulfilment, because neither of us is baptised. Not that the priest would know but I assume it would be sacrilege to take communion. Your leg kicks the pew in front and I put out a hand to still it. I imagine the wafer on my tongue, the cheap tastelessness of it as food versus the richness of its symbolism, the hypothetical flavour filled with both yearning and judgement. I am outside this ritual yet somehow still involved in its trappings, caught in the gold filigree and incense smoke, transported across the vaulted ceilings as I watch. I recall how we were compelled to learn the Lord’s Prayer at school, I still know it word for word, just as I know the Jabberwock poem from Alice in Wonderland.

When your Mum returns to us from the clump of people in front of the altar, I see her holding the wafer in her mouth, letting it dissolve. The ancient being absorbed in the present, assimilated on her tongue, a ritual that has been passed down over hundreds of years, now housed beneath the vaulted roof of her mouth.

It strikes me as a very sensuous ritual, the placing of the wafer. I see that there is a choice to be made, whether to take it from the priest in your own hand or let him place it upon your tongue with his hands. I look at your Mum and for a moment I have impure thoughts (forgive me father), but it passes and I look around the church to distract myself.

I can’t meet the eyes of any of the saints.

Not Caravaggio, take another look...

Where your treasure lies, that’s where your heart be. Where is your treasure?

Sitting in my pew, head bowed beneath the gaze of the saints, I realise there is one thing in my pack that is unnecessary. A heavy item not used day to day, that’s not even been touched at all in the last week. It’s your first novel, purchased in Barcelona at the train station before we boarded the train to Burgos. Read twice by you, it now lies forgotten in my pack, replaced by the kindle.

You don’t want me to leave it behind and neither do I even though the weight is notable. It’s your first ‘real’ book. You’ve always been a reader but it’s taken a while to wean you off comics. Since you opened this on the train to Burgos you’ve read four other novels by David Walliams and have now graduated to the Percy Jackson series.

My own first novel was a retelling of The Odyssey for younger readers. I can still recall how it felt in my hands. I remember the characters, the Cyclops searching the wool of his sheep after Ulysses has blinded him. The lotus eaters, Circe, Scylla, Charydbus, fantasies and myths now woven into my flesh, my life. I hear the sucking of the sea, whirlpools in my imaginations, as giant tentacles snatch sailors from the decks of passing ships. I am tied to the mast screaming to be released, pleading, crying, on an odyssey of my own. My life in words. A book I remember ordering from book club, waiting for it to arrive and then tearing into the package, greedy for the fabulous stories it held inside. A book titled for the Roman name of its main character instead of the traditional Greek.

Ulysses.

Your middle name.

You’ve asked us a few times why we called you that and we’ve given you lots of answers. It’s a name that exists in your Mum’s family tree for instance. Also Samuel Ulysses Webber sounds cool, like a poet or a jazz musician. And it’s because of another book called Ulysses which I bought after winning a creative writing prize in Year 10 (just to mention).

Ulysses, or Odysseus as he is known by the original Greek name, was a traveller like you. 10 years to arrive home after the Trojan war. Wily, creative, full of pride (maybe) and questionable choices (undoubtedly) but courageous and favoured by the Gods. In the Merriam-Webster dictionary it states “an odyssey is any long, complicated journey, often a quest for a goal, and may be a spiritual or psychological journey as well as an actual voyage.” The Odyssey, Homer’s tale of Odysseus, is one of the oldest pieces of literature in existence.

The mass ends and I tell you not to say anything out loud in your relief, which you can tend to do. Like Ulysses calling out his name to the blind cyclops Polyphemus and getting himself in all sorts of trouble with Poseidon, you say things aloud that would be better kept under wraps. Released from mass you jump up and race outside and we all stand and start to file out of the church. We’ll go for a walk to get an icecream and some supplies for the communal dinner we will have with the brothers and other pilgrims before hitting our bunk beds for the night. Your Mum smiles, her wafer long gone and we walk out into a late afternoon sun that never seems to set. It doesn’t get dark until 11pm. We are always in bed long before that and wake up after sunrise so this particular odyssey is happening in eternal daytime.

You skip ahead. You’re so much faster already than you used to be, calf muscles outline the back of your legs where, with some pride, I notice your pilgrim’s tan, a browning at the back of the legs as our pilgrimage takes us west, followed by the sun. Tomorrow we will shoulder our packs and cross the bridge of songs heading towards Leon, where we’ll rest for a couple of days before we start to climb. The mountains wait, as does Galicia, land of fog and rain. Inside my bag will be a treasure, wrapped and cared for, an entirely unnecessary item which I carry willingly into a future I know little about.