Ten Thousand Ways to Santiago

About the Book

E. C. Curtsinger, Ten Thousand Ways to Santiago

This comic-romantic-comic-tragic-comic-adventurous poetic novel takes its characters, with the reader tucked in among them, on an eight-hundred kilometer journey from the Pyrenees and across northern Spain to Campostela, the “field of stars” where, as every Spaniard knows, the great apostle James was buried. The road they more or less follow is the medieval pilgrimage route, still in much use and highly advertised by Spain today, to the holy city of Santiago.

“The Camino sometimes shaded off to disappearance in the intricacies of Spanish landscape. Along highways, dirt paths, and river banks, through rock and mud, past villages abandoned or scarcely alive, into cities and farms and plains and forests, up mountains and down carved sides of hills, the Camino drew to itself the well-shod feet of one more walker on the pilgrims’ way.”

He is Paul Shaffer, an American loner in pilgrim costume and a big pack on his back. Paul camps in the snow one night and, mourning the death a year or so ago of Angelique Roussel and remembering her purity and her beauty, he makes a campfire and, not too nearby, a snow statue of Angelique. Two big French boys come by the next morning and rob Paul of everything but a toothbrush. They leave him naked in the Pyrenees. Pilgrimage has long been seen as a metaphor for life. The novel begins with a child asking her mother “Ou est Dieu?” Sabelline Soudant, her sorrows showing, says “He’s in heaven. Where He belongs.”

Sabelline is an actress in a French troupe whose theater burned down in the middle of a play. The troupe, traveling with their families in an old and wildly painted bus, is headed for holiday in Spain and the naked beaches of Ibiza. The bus breaks down. Paul, feeling reduced almost to nothingness and wearing only a couple of pine twigs, is a failure at hitch-hiking. He’s welcomed by the troupe. “What better way to start a world than with bread and sausage and unknown soups and children and a fire and a bus like a ship gift-wrapped in rainbow ribbons and a little man on top of it munching a sandwich and staring down?”

The little man is Yanny, the troupe’s poet, actor, handyman. Yanny is at the heart of the novel and seems to suffer the joys and sorrows of the troupe. He. looks through the costumes and baggage on top of the bus, then holds up a clownsuit. Tosses it. “Down the wind-clown came, dancing, fighting the air, kicking it.”

Paul wears the costume for most of the journey. He makes friends and enemies in the troupe. He gradually takes on the name of “Campo,” the former wearer of the clowny cloth.

The French troupe--two dozen or so--has a beaucoup of secrets, joys, liaisons, private wars. Monsieur Soudant, Sabelline’s father, usually called “Gramps,” lives in pipesmoke memories of his triumph in Faustus two decades ago. Gaston Mertot, the elephant-size owner of the theater, hasn’t spoken since it burned. He stalks through the novel like the gross and silent guilt or conscience of the troupe. Was he--is he?--in love with Alexis Poof, a beautiful flame-haired actress? Sabelline blames Gaston for the fire and the death of the original Campo, her former lover. Pier Bodu--actor, bold seducer, adventurer--contrasts with Paul Shaffer’s softer ways. Emil Berne is a stagehand, a big good-natured fellow handy with an axe. Sabrine de Luz, a young actress, likes to climb trees and sing old songs of the Auvergne. People watch her in the trees, her sunlit legs “like rays from a splendid bottom.”

Louye Lessard, a crafty stagehand, is a dead shot with a rifle and supplies the group with rabbits along the way. Rabbit soup, rabbit sandwiches. His wife, Helene, is pregnant, and Louye looks ahead to the birth so he can see who the baby looks like. “A man’s wife is his castle, and somebody’s bee