LITMIR.BIZ

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to translate it. He smiles: “There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.”

      I no longer need to pin my hopes on a Damascus moment or some or other revelation on the road. I’m glad I came across le Buddha’s words before starting the Camino.

      * * *

      In 1999, my first girlfriend gave me a small Buddha statue as a gift. She apparently came across it in the caravan of some old lady who was a freelance fortune teller. It was a nice round, fat Buddha (is there any other kind?), with long earlobes and the smile of someone experiencing enlightenment with a capital E in his every cell.

      But what made this particular Buddha so distinctive was the Afrikaans phrase on the statuette: VIR GEWIGSVERLIES (for weight loss). I was a bit surprised by the Afrikaans: the Buddha was still a bit of a cultural oddity for the volk, especially in earlier years.

      The poor Buddha has been no help at all for weight loss. On the contrary, since the late nineties I’ve become something of a weight gainer, and I don’t mean like a Bulgarian Olympic muscleman with bulging veins. (I don’t blame this on the Buddha.)

      In that same year, my girlfriend left me after just five months. I didn’t see that one coming. I was only nineteen after all, young and naïve. My over-emotional response was really not necessary: I stormed her bookcase like a tarantula on tik to reclaim my books, ran sobbing to my Volkswagen Chico, and only realised when I got there that I’d left my keys on her bed.

      It was also not necessary to sit her down on a seaside bench a week later and read long paragraphs from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning out loud, to the soundtrack of screeching seagulls and the ice-cream cart’s tinkling – my desperate attempt at using the insights of a Holocaust survivor to breathe life back into a feeling that had clearly died within her. Oh well. As Kevin Kline’s character says in the movie Life as a House: “Hindsight. It’s like foresight without a future.”

      When all my attempts had failed and I’d felt sorry enough for myself, my buddy Langes and I started experimenting with weed. “Experimenting” may sound a bit sinister, but it wasn’t like that at all. I’d been Mr Exemplary at high school and hadn’t so much as touched a cigarette, a beer can or a girl’s hand. So the first ten times Langes and I smoked weed together, I didn’t even know how to inhale. I puffed, at best, which naturally didn’t get me high in the least. I don’t know whether Bill Clinton was lying, but I can honestly say about my first attempts: “I didn’t inhale.”

      I also acquired a small Zen garden, one that fitted easily into a flowerpot on my desk in my student flat in Summerstrand, Port Elizabeth.

      A few months later, when I’d got over the worst of the break-up, I was sitting in the office of the festival newspaper Krit at the KKNK, typing a review with one hand, with a brandy and Coke in the other. Next to me actor Lochner de Kock, who had popped in, was speaking in his best Sarel Seemonster voice, much to everyone’s delight.

      My cell phone rang. It was my mother, who was phoning to tell me she was at my flat “to clean up a bit”.

      I got such a fright I sobered up instantly. My mother cleans well, for which I was deeply grateful as a lazy, spoiled student. But she’s also inclined to scratch around. Forensically. And on top of my bookshelf was an FNB bankie full of weed.

      I had hardly registered this when she asked, “Erns, when I dusted your bookshelf I found a little bank bag full of … seeds. Is it dagga?”

      The lie just rolled off my tongue: “No man, Ma. They’re seeds for the Zen garden on my desk.”

      “Oh, so how’s it going at the KKNK?” she wanted to know next.

      * * *

      The afternoon at Beilari is quiet. I shower and wash my clothes. That’s my fate for the next forty days – on the Camino you wash your own clothes. By hand, or you cough up a few euros to use a washing machine.

      This is something I’m really looking forward to: the simplicity of washing my own clothes by hand, as often as possible. I never do it at home; my hands usually only work on the laptop.

      I while away the rest of the afternoon sitting at the table with Josele and some of the other walkers. There’s an esoteric painting on the wall depicting a shell with a person standing in the middle of it. Two lines coil from the person’s left leg and head, to create a kind of labyrinth and also to form the shell’s inner lines.

      It looks like something nice to try and draw. I may have no talent for this, but I do have some time on my hands. While everyone around me is chatting about logistics, or wondering about wi-fi and how bad tomorrow’s walk across the Pyrenees will be, I try studiously to copy the painting into my diary. I’m not going to become an artist overnight, but I’m quite satisfied with the result.

      * * *

      Entry in Moleskine diary

      It’s just after five, and I’m sitting alone on the back terrace of a small French deli. I spent €6,50 on a workmanlike baguette with salami and an awesome artisanal beer – Bob’s beer – a light-coloured beer, deeply workmanlike. A child is laughing in the background, there’s French music on the speakers, a sort of Piaf Lite, and you know, life is good, as Liezel van Beek said after the Fish River hike: we live, and that’s enough.

      * * *

      After my break at the French deli, I still have half an hour to stroll around Saint Jean before I have to be back at Beilari for our communal evening meal in the garden. I step into one of the souvenir shops and buy two pens and a new aluminium coffee mug.

      The girl behind the counter speaks English and mentions how popular the Camino has become in recent years, even now in May. Just yesterday, 500 walkers started their Camino from Saint Jean alone.

      I walk up along the Rue de la Citadelle to the gate of Saint James, through which walkers starting their Camino at three other points must also pass. At the gate, someone’s graffiti: “Le voyage est la seule chose que tu payes et qui te rend plus riche.” Travel is the only thing you pay for that also makes you richer.

      This is deep rural France, pastoral scenes wherever you look. A short distance away a rugby team is training – must be the town team.

      It reminds me of the local teams from my youth in the eighties: Old Collegians (OCs or Ousjas), Swifts and Despatch. My father was a teacher in those days and school psychologist at Daniel Pienaar Technical High School in Uitenhage. On weekends he was also a rugby referee, often for club matches.

      I attended many of the local derbies at Uitenhage’s Central Field, as it was known then. I’d sit among the spectators and watch my father in action. They’d complain about the ref and make all kinds of comments about him, not knowing his son was right among them.

      It was only years later that I realised how privileged I had been to watch players like Danie Gerber and Frans “Domkrag” Erasmus playing club rugby.

      Fists would often fly during these matches, especially when Despatch and OCs faced off. Inevitable, with hotheads like Adri Geldenhuys and Armand du Preez in a ruck.

      But no one could touch Japan le Roux – at one stage captain of Uitenhage’s first rugby team. Japan, a firebrand of an eighth man with a fine blond fringe, had a unique trick: he would go down with the scrum, but as soon as the men had locked he would drop to the ground, leopard crawl forward and punch the opposition’s hooker in the face. The scrum would obviously collapse, but Japan would have had enough time to leopard crawl out of the scrum backwards. He’d then look up innocently from the back and ask the referee what had happened.

      Japan got his comeuppance one evening years later when he knocked a referee unconscious during a match. I wonder where Japan is these days?

      * * *

      I walk up to the Citadel, a fort built in 1628. There’s an information board here listing facts about the town and the origins of the Citadel. I catch myself jotting down Go-type notes:

      •King of Pamplona, García Ximénez, founds

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