Chapter 16: Lionel Messi

Spain. Bienvenido, peregrino.

Spain.

It is the night of the second semi-final Champion League contest between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. I’ve made friends with a group of ten or so Spaniards coming out of an auberge in Jaca. We’re in the northeast, on the far less-traveled Aragon route, also known as the “silent route.” My group is not.

Only a few of us knew each other before the walk, but now we’ve become a rolling caravan of tobacco, blisters, laughter and beer for breakfast. The one woman who doesn’t drink with her tobacco leads the hungover through yoga in the mornings.

We’ve trekked through the hot, flat plains of Enériz, rimmed with mountains to the north, and the intermittently paved Roman road. We’ve spent the night in Arrés, where an old-time hospitalerio banged his fist on the table to tell the room where to accent Arrés and show, by way of white-knuckled percussion, that the “R” was not in any way a French “R,” which he demonstrated with equal verve and another pound. Speaking only for the hospitalerio, I will not make either of those two mistakes again. In fact, I will never repeat the name of that magical hilltop town for fear of getting it wrong.

Besides a couple of us trickling down from the Arles route over the Col de Somport, this stretch of Camino is almost entirely walked by Spaniards. The “Camino” implies a single road, but there is actually a network of them, each accommodating a logical route: up from southern Portugal, four routes flowing down from France, one that runs along the northern coast, another from Barcelona, another from Madrid. They keep the last two separate for entirely different reasons. There are smaller tributaries to these routes as well, and because many pilgrims walk directly from their homes, like I did, in principle, the whole map of the actual “Camino” route looks like the back of your retina.

As far as I can tell, other than the last 100 kilometers where you can pick up your Compostelana, the pilgrimage’s certificate of completion, few Spaniards want anything to do with the four-week traffic jam of foreigners who come crashing into Spain from southwestern France. Aside from the main route, the Camino remains a source of deep national pride, and walking it for the young is a rite of passage. That’s what my friends tell me over morning beers anyway.

Some of my new friends are headed home the following morning, but tonight there is a face-off between the country’s great sports rivals, two of the best football teams in the world. The bar bristles with an electric impatience to get the game on, and food and drinks ordered, and everybody wants everything all at once. With a room full of background assistance from the patrons, the bar owner stands on a chair and fusses with the large screen television to get the channel for the broadcast. A hassled – I think extremely unpleasant is probably the gracious word here – waiter serves us all the nine-euro pilgrim’s menu. We share the garlic soup they love in Spain and then the ohmygod churrasco ribs that are traditionally eaten for three days straight, in private, without a napkin. My group passes around different brands of cigarettes like we’re on a currency exchange.

The Spanish are doing their best to speak the official language of the Camino, which means communicating in one way or another with your fellow walkers. Everyone is patient with me, and I do my best with my seven verbs and thirty-two nouns. I have. I want. I like. Show me. A restaurant. A bed. A bank. “Please,” but mostly “excuse me” and “I’m sorry” and “can I pick up the last round?” There is a universal language around bar tabs and being the included foreigner that requires no translation.

With the waiter I point to pictures on the menu and make a thumb’s up, and sometimes I think I can’t communicate with somebody across the table, and I have to resort to half-smiley faces only to discover at odd times that we share a second language. God, the relief. It’s like pulling on a lawnmower cord for a half an hour while your neighbors watch from their driveway, but then the mower roars into life, and in the end you win. Very satisfying. Aside from dignity management, these inter-language connections are wonderful in the purest sense of the word. They are exactly why I wanted to learn a foreign language other than Bartab.

Now, I am no great soccer fan, but I know enough to blow through my self-imposed pilgrim curfew to see this one. The auberge has been buzzing with it the entire afternoon. Manchester United have already beaten their semi-final rival and secured a place in the finals. I also know that there are both Madrid fans and Barcelona at the table, which has a car crash, rubberneck sort of appeal.

There are some serious regional tensions in Spain. I learn about them after asking someone why every highway sign in Spain is written in two languages. No, really. Every hundred miles there’s a new second language. At any moment either half of the table could declare independence.

Barcelona scores first, and a huge cheer goes up.

There is, as expected, a generous sampling of pained moans and gasps as well. For the Madrid fans, it’s like watching their dog get run over in traffic. Even the yoga instructor’s loyalties are out on the table. I am the only one who has zero skin in the game. Other than taking a moment to express my sentiments about winning a ninety-minute contest by penalty kicks, I’m happy when anyone scores. Yay!

Until.

It happens immediately after the first goal. I have taken the worst chair, the one with its back to the large screen television because, well, I don’t speak Spanish, and I know very little about soccer other than what I remember from playing as a nine-year old, when my coach asked me in front of all the parents and children, and not softly either, to “stop running after the ball like a chicken with its head cut off.” That is the exact quote. Fall of ’73. Nixon is still president. A good coach can make such a long-term difference in your life.

And I am craning my head backwards towards the television in one of those yoga poses where you risk slipping a disk – learned it from my new friend! – and suddenly The Moment unfolds.

At midfield, Lionel Messi nonchalantly passes the ball to his teammate. At first, it’s like they have all evening to work the ball downfield before someone kicks it wide for the thirtieth time, and the whole thing starts again. But this time the ball is sharply flicked back to him as he makes an abrupt start for the goal, and then he is off full tilt. He’s running “downhill” as they say in real football, and he is not focused on his feet learning how to dribble getting there.

As he hits full stride, the defenders watch from their heels, beaten at the start, hypnotized. They are pinned in their tracks the way you freeze when some martial artist spins a full 360º before kicking you in the head. They are so busy watching the little guy’s magic trick – the Atomic Flea, they call him – that they forget it’s their job to stop him. “Your job,” someone in the room from Madrid reminds them.

Messi threads his way through six – count ‘em – six defenders by his lonesome, faces off with the goalie, shoots and scores with that head-down, jerky contraction that short guys have when they kick a ball really, really hard. And in it goes, to the right side of the hapless goaltender, who wonders to this very day what happened to his defense, and how they could have betrayed him so biblically.  

Most professional athletes will never have a moment like this no matter how deep into a Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's “flow” they get. Honestly, it is as if Messi rode in on a motorized skateboard. To untrained eyes, mine, he could repeat it a hundred times in a row, and still they wouldn’t be able to stop him. I ask anyone who will listen why they don’t just have him do that over and over the rest of the match.

But most of all, and this is the thing, there is the eruption of Messi’s smile afterwards, and jumping onto teammates, and the eternal, locked-elbow arms of exultation. Thanks, but no thanks, Csikszentmihaly. I don’t want “flow.” I want that. I want what Messi’s having.

I imagine all the Camino pilgrims arriving in the great Praza do Obradoiro in front of the Cathedral in Santiago exactly like Messi, charging around each other’s abandoned backpacks, their arms locked-elbow and exultant, young and old sliding on their knees, healthy and lame, foreign and domestic, Madrilenian and Catalan. The divine soccer pitch! A vision of the hereafter!

Exactly half of my Spanish friends decide they’ve witnessed a miracle, and for once I’m not buying the drinks. Then there are even more beer and ribs, and I’m telling you – with all thirty-nine of my Spanish words – that you haven’t been to Spain until you’ve drank yourself under the table with bottomless packs of foreign cigarettes[1] and ten Spanish friends watching their teams kick it out. I don’t even remember who won the match. It hardly matters, and it was very hard to follow the announcers from under the table.

I had no idea how much I loved Spanish people.[2]

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[1] Melanie does not know about this by the way and may get wind of it about the same time that you do. That’s why this leg of Camino is called the “silent route.”

[2] That aren’t waiters.

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