Marumi Man

Marumi Man was right-footed, but he always tied his left shoe first. His laces were intricate lattices fortifying dirty boots. The dirty boots wrapped muscled calves. People think of the calf as one muscle but it’s not. There are the lateral and medial heads, the soleus, the tendons. People simplify.

Every hour, on the hour, Marumi Man unearthed a snack from his large pack: trail mix, or something brightly packaged. He never finished it in one go. When the packet neared empty, he held it up and banged it with his free hand, a powdered rain falling into his open mouth. He nodded to each person he passed on the trail, and grunted politely, but never engaged. Part of this was, I’m sure, the language barrier. Later I would begin to inadvertently mimic the way he inclined his head in response to passing hellos, as if in apology for not speaking Spanish, or English.

And of course, Marumi Man wore a pale red Marumi puffer jacket, sun-bleached and mended in mismatched patches of light green and grey. In fact, I never saw him out of the jacket, even when resting or making camp. I wondered if it were part of his skin: an exoskeleton without which his innards would slide wetly down his legs.

I followed Marumi Man for four days along the Camino de Santiago. On the fifth day, he died. Maybe. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For eight hundred years, pilgrims have struck out across the mountains, fields and scrubby plains of northern Spain. Westward the many tributaries converge on Galicia, where a shrine to Saint James awaits the pious. I was not the first man, however, to come to the trail in search of something other than God. John Adams, Brian Aubert, Colm Tiarnan: so many doubting men had written of their journeys. Before I left Norwich, I printed their accounts on the back of scrap paper from work and bound them together. This Holy Book, with its alternating pages of testimony and lumbar spine exercises, was a great solace in the cold, high Pyrenees where few pilgrims travelled. But it had thinned. The trail through south-western France had not “smelled redolent of lavender and calamint” – it smelled of diesel from ageing tractors, and cow shit – so Tiarnan’s essay I repurposed as tinder. As for Adams, the less said of his dribbling the better.

These men shared a common flaw. All wrote too well, and if a situation did not justify their lavish attention, they would adjust it until it fit. Such is the way of poets: over time, you realise writing is a game of parallel construction. The literary universe never quite meets reality. Reality was this: the trail had waxed and waned beneath my feet, brown dirt morphing into yellow gravel, into cobbles. New wildflowers burst from the sidings, in fuchsia and orange, then receded from existence. Some sunsets scorched the horizon, others barely brushed it. And always the same sky, pale and European. But no poetic epiphanies or encounters with the divine.

And then I neared the end. At that point no map was necessary. White signposts were driven regularly into the ground, the straw-coloured scallop insignia of the Way fighting for space with a palimpsest of black marker. Messages scrawled in Sharpie, describing nearby towns and hostels, or advertising YouTube channels. The only record of a thousand prior pilgrims. Nevertheless, I checked off my progress on a print-out. Seven more days, give or take. Unless…

By a battered wooden rest bench, sprouted through with uncut grass, I pondered the map. What if I turned off at León? Went via the Primitivo? The oldest section of the Way, now out-of-favour. It would add only a few days. But Angela, would she understand? Or, would she care if I returned a little later than expected?

Thank God I decided to detour, or I would never have found Marumi Man.

In my journal that evening the word “balanced” appeared a dozen times. By trade I’m an exercise physiologist, which means I fix people who have broken down after years of neglect, and send them on their way knowing full well I’ll see them again soon, and they won’t have followed any of my instructions. That was my excuse for pursuing Marumi Man. You see the crippled casualties of modernity all day long, you notice when someone comes along unburdened. Yes, Marumi Man was poised, robust, but more shone through than pure physicality. His every step up the rugged and twisted mountain path through the Hospitales betrayed an inner equanimity. When he stopped by a tap to fill his bottle, only to find it rusted shut, he didn’t simply wrench. No, he leaned his entire body in just the right way so as to lever it open with minimal force. Not a drop missed his bottle.

All his motions I noted down. Through comparison he brought a hyper-awareness of my body. No longer young, the muscles in my legs had faded, and my mental image too had atrophied. I felt as if I were learning to walk again, each step a conscious contraction and expansion, a deliberate exercise of tension and release. Far from being exhausting, this was liberating. My body came alive again. I don’t recall consciously deciding to follow Marumi Man. Perhaps it was magnetism, the intoxication of new feeling. I found myself speeding up, slowing down, and resting in time with his rhythms. All day the sky was a hazy white and the sun more sensed than seen, and the arrival of darkness was startling.

That evening at camp my notes soon filled the final pages of my now water-stained and bleeding journal. On the most monotonous segments of the track there had been little to do but think, until those thoughts seethed and threatened to boil over if not enchained to a page. But I had so much to record. So I started writing in the margins of the Holy Book, describing, in exacting detail, the actions of Marumi Man. My role was not to interpret: I’d learned long ago that intellectualising the world was a dead end. All those dead philosophers stacked beside my bed had nothing to show for themselves but dust. No, the truth could only be learned through osmosis: the careful encoding of raw facts and impressions that gradually seep into the mind. It was lucky that Marumi Man, too, was camping the Way. These days it was harder and harder. Many of the vacant lots and bordering forests had been sold off by the cash-strapped Spanish government – there was no room for the public commons under austerity. The new owners had built cheap, prefab bunkhouses for the influx of international pilgrims, or worse, simply put up a gate and charged for use. But after the plane ticket, walking gear, and food, I had little to spare in the budget on which I had haggled with Angela for weeks.

“It’s too much,” she said, looking at the colour-coded spreadsheet. “We can’t afford it.”

I was already tasting bile. Any mention of money bouldered into confrontation, no matter how good our intentions. It was one of those constants of our marriage.

“I have to do it right,” I said.

“And the next thing, and the next. They add up, grand ideas.”

So I watched the meek sunrise through the fine mesh door of my tent, and waited for Marumi Man to break camp.

That day, the second, Marumi Man began to blur. At first I thought it was my vision. As we walked over the Roman walls into Lugo, and a bar of reception returned, I Googled my symptoms in a panic. Pored over advice on dehydration and malnutrition, read about type 2 diabetes and cataracts. But I felt otherwise fine, and the rest of the world was as crisp as ever. Individual leaves on the green-grey linden trees jostled for my attention, but Marumi Man receded into pale, coloured blobs. The harder I strained the less I saw. The blurriness could be offset only by keeping closer and closer to him, and I shouldered the risk – Galicia was only days away. I had limited time to glean what I could.

Just after midday, the path dropped down into a kind of trench, walled on both sides with mottled stone. The temperature dropped, and the shade was a relief, but my heart raced each time Marumi Man drifted out of sight. I walked for a while beside on older man, whose clipped grey beard masked his mouth, so that his voice always seemed to be coming from someplace else.

“English?” he tried, after a failed attempt in French. I nodded, anxious not to be bogged down.

“Which trail did you take?” he asked.

From my pocket I pulled my credencial and handed it to him. He studied the stamps for a moment, then whistled.

“I’m too old for those mountains. I started in Pamplona”.

Even that seemed a stretch for this man, whose breath laboured on the slightest incline. I was in no mood to talk, but he, Henri, was, and he didn’t seem to need much in the way of reply.

From what I gathered through his thick accent, he was a widower, and had been for quite some time. After his wife’s death, his daily life had collapsed to a point. Rarely did he even leave his apartment in Rouen – with online delivery this was easier than expected. One day, he put on his tattered jacket to go out and see his grandchildren, and found that he couldn’t. His hand refused to turn the doorknob, and he shook and shook. For a period of months he suffered intense agoraphobia that no psychologist could touch. His daughter was good, at first, but tired eventually of cramming her family into his studio apartment for visits, forcing his eldest granddaughter to sit on the kitchen counter, legs dangling. She stopped visiting. His son helped as much as he was able, despite his own issues since his mother’s death. The Camino was his son’s idea, in fact, after he was laid off in the self-inflicted panic of recession.

“My son was more religious than I,” Henri said. “I guess I was caught up in the excitement”.

I had lost track of Marumi Man some minutes ago, and Henri walked slowly. Had he stopped to rest? Or camp for the night? My mouth was dry. Catching up felt more and more essential. But Henri continued to speak about his son.

Together, they booked flights, marked maps, and one day, Henri found himself outside, practising with a pack and walking cane, following his son round and round the park.

“Do you have any children?” he asked. I shook my head.

“They can be—”. He seemed to struggle to find the word in English. “Disappointing.”

Two weeks before they were to leave, his son pulled out. He had met a girl and was consumed by her, barely taking the time to reply to Henri’s text messages. When he did find the time, the replies were curt and distracted.

So there was Henri, by himself, a whole country away, and nearly at the finish line.

We re-emerged from the trench into a small town. An ice-cream cart promised a stamp on your credencial with any purchase, and Henri indicated he was going to stop and rest a while. With a sense of relief, and one eye on the blurry figure of Marumi Man, who had reappeared in the wide boulevard through the town, I went to continue.

“Before you go,” he said, grabbing me by the arm, “Have you found it yet?”

It took me a moment to understand the question.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “You?”

He turned to me with red eyes.

“Soon, I hope.”

By the third day, Marumi Man began looking back over his shoulder. He never saw me. I made sure of it, lingering just around the previous bend, then hurrying to catch him up. I have often felt disconnected, like my mind is separated from the world by three inches of glass. The pursuit seemed to diminish this distance. My thoughts were simpler and fewer, focused as they were on a single goal. But my back and shoulders ached from the tension, my knees seized with lack of rest. The only time I could relax was when a group passed us by. Anonymised by their bulk, surrounded by plausible deniability, my pace could steady. Unfortunately, the sort of man who chose the Primitivo preferred solitude. These groups were few, and mostly blocs of monks. Their heads, shaved and white, their robes, muddy and tattered around their feet. Moving with an inner purpose.

It would be so simple to be reduced to religiosity. How beautiful to wake up each day and feel sure of something. For a few months, years ago, I attended services, at the little parish church not two minutes from my house. The priest, Father Jacob, welcomed me with open arms. He had yellow teeth, laughed too loud, and clapped with his hands cupped so that they boomed through the dark, red brick interior. He saw in me a “fellow seeker”. Well, I guess my questions proved the wrong type of seeking. After a while, he stopped greeting me so warmly. He could see, I’m sure, that while I puppeted my body through the motions well enough, my mind was a great way off.

These discursive thoughts continued throughout the day. It was a long, winding walk through low hills, and as the sun sank lower in the sky we chased our shadows and then ran from them, over and over down the switchbacks. Camp, a farmer’s fallow field with a single water tap, was a relief despite its modesty. But seemingly moments after I inchwormed into my sleeping bag and plunged into sleep, movement woke me again. Marumi Man was out of bed, a torch beam lancing across the handful of other tents and the dark overhanging trees. I watched him quietly pack up his gear.

Usually I organised my bag slowly and carefully, but at the speed he was moving I had no time. As he walked out the gate, I had finished haphazardly bundling my sleeping bag and clothes. My tent came down as quickly as I could manage, and I stole off after him.

Those few hours that we walked together, or rather, crept together, in the pre-dawn light, through the little silent towns with their smokestacks and pilot-light windows, were some of the happiest in my life. Marumi Man’s shoulders were a little tighter than usual, and his head swivelled back and forth, scanning the trees that towered on both sides of the trail. A man’s mettle, I believe, is apparent not in how he handles the everyday, but how he confronts the dangerous unexpected. Marumi Man’s manner was still so self-assured, so precise. When I jumped at the cries of tawny owls in their their high, dark branches, he was still. My envy only grew stronger.

In the dark, it was much easier to stay out of visible range. The crackling of branches in the breeze more than masked my footsteps. Yet Marumi Man’s blurring form was even more difficult to follow. The colours and shapes I had become so intimate with were melting into the environment, diffusing like a drop of ink in water. My focus on his dissolution was absolute, and as the hours wore on it was all I could think about.

I remembered a story, from way back in university. My roommate’s partner at the time was obsessed with pop-science, the kind communicated in magazine articles of less than five hundred words. She had a fact for every occasion. One of those people for whom conversation was a game of recall, a chance to dredge up any relevant snippet and hold it out, waiting to be praised. This smug habit continued long after her relationship with the roommate ended, and ours began.

We were trying on each others’ glasses, sitting on mismatched stools at the kitchen bench.

“This reminds me of that experiment. With the trick glasses.” she said.

A researcher of perception jury-rigged a pair of glasses to turn the world upside-down. For days, the poor subjects wore these glasses non-stop. They suffered intense disorientation. Bruises blossomed on their shins from unexpected obstacles, and they found it difficult to look at even their intimate partners, whose features, so inverted, became alien and strange. But then, whether it took three days, or ten, each subject woke one morning to find their vision returned to normal. The glasses were still fixed firmly in place, but their brain had somehow rewired the neural pathways of perception. The world was back right-way-up.

The scribbled observations that filled the Holy Book attested to my belief in my own senses. That they were stable, and true. Seeing Marumi Man blur ever further destroyed this confidence. Perhaps it was not he who was blurry, but rather that everything else, the whole world outside of him, had lost all sharpness.

When I next rounded a bend, he was gone. The sun was higher, and lines of packs dotted the walls beside the bunkhouses along the road as walkers breakfasted. My chest tightened. Had I miscalculated? Had I lost him? But no, there he was, sitting on a berm beside the trail, gasping for air. A young woman wearing a small day pack and exercise tights stooped over him, her hand on one shoulder. She was loosening his straps and dialling on a phone with her free hand, thrusting it into the sky in hopes of a better signal, turning. Then she saw me, and waved frantically. The ground swallowed my feet and frosted over. Green shoots shot from the earth, ensnared my legs, brown and hard like vines. I now understood how Henri had felt the first time he tried to leave his apartment and ran up against that invisible barrier. The woman was gesturing and pleading in German, or Austrian, brought to tears by her frustration.

A loud bark behind me - one of many strays that lived on the theft of unsuspecting pilgrims. It was enough. I startled, and the momentum carried me unsteadily over. Never had Marumi Man been so close. The wealth of new information was overwhelming. His clothes, I could see now, didn’t fit him very well: he seemed to shrink inside his jacket and hiking trousers. His posture and balance had vanished, slumped there, head lolling to one side. His traps were uneven, the right clearly bigger than the left. It was so obvious now. I imagined him taking each step with intense concentration, willing his body into submission. Anything to mask all those deficiencies.

He was moaning in Japanese, eyes lidded. It made no difference whether we could communicate or not. His skin was grey and clammy, and his chest barely rose with each laboured breath. I went to offer him some water. When his eyes met mine they widened like an animal in a trap. Blood-shot, dilated eyes. He fainted.

The ambulance screamed out of a side access road soon after. A pair of paramedics shooed us away with weary professionalism. Pilgrims collapse on the trail often. Their incessant search can override all sorts of bodily warning signs. The German was too shaken to speak. She just shook her head at me and set off down the path. One of the medics had rolled up his sleeves and was pumping on Marumi Man’s chest. With each compression the lights of the ambulance flashed red and blue. With each compression, Marumi Man became a little less blurry. I could bear it no longer.

In another day, I would pass the monastery of Santa Maria, that rag-tag assortment of architectural styles. Then to Melide, and then, Galicia. It was easier to walk now, with a lighter pack. I’d left the Holy Book next to a water fountain. All those careful notes, worth nothing more than death by the side of a footpath. A line of wind turbines brushed the sky on my left. Round and round they spun, and I continued down the path.