Strong at the Broken Places: Part 4. Bilbao and After

I had to leave   early to walk to the bus station the next morning after ending my bit of the Camino de Santiago at Logrono in Rioja province. I was heading north to Bilbao on the northern coast of Spain to meet my sister before travelling back home to Ireland.   Light was just starting to trail ahead of the morning and wiry, delicate cats wound in and out of doorways like phantoms. Early morning workers walked along head down in a fug of early rising. My stomach rumbled in response to smells of coffee and bread wafting out from apartment blocks and early opened cafes. I passed camino walkers/pilgrims walking in the opposite direction to me and turned to watch them wistfully. I could see their scallop shells that quintessential mark of the camino bouncing up and down on their back packs, marking their identity as pilgrim, a walker of the way. I longed to go in their direction. Instead I turned back, hitched my back pack into a more comfortable position and turned my thoughts north to Bilbao. 

My sister and I were arriving the same day In Bilbao. She had travelled over from Australia to England to visit my parents. I had booked my outbound flight back to Ireland from Bilbao and we were both travelling out of the airport on the same day – myself to Ireland and her to England. So we were going to have couple of days catching up together in Bilbao. Bilbao is the largest city of the Basque country in northern Spain. It used to be the commercial hub of the Basque country due its port activity as it is situated near the northern coast of Spain. It experienced heavy industrialisation during the 19^th century for which it was known. A surge of tourism came with the opening of the Guggenheim museum in 1997. This radical museum brought a more visionary aspect to modern architecture and it is also considered one of the best contemporary art museums in Europe. 

Guggenheim Museum,Bilbao

I combed Bilbao with my sister eating up the streets by foot – another though albeit different type of camino to that I had just finished. We talked non- stop through the streets and cafes walking, eating and drinking up the miles. 

Bilbao

My sister had a step counter on her phone. We were agog to find that over the 2 days we were there, we had clocked up 10 miles walking a day. We tended to drift several times towards the Guggenheim museum revelling in the idea that were getting a 2 for 1 deal in terms of the fact that the  Guggenheim is both a feat of architecture and art .Our heads were permanently craned as we traced the sweeping curves and wave like dimensions of the building. Outside we enjoyed the playful sculptures such as a huge spider that looked as if it was about to lay an egg and the somewhat worn puppy dog sculpture – a large puppy made up of thousands/millions of plants and flowers – a little scrubby in places – as if he had just returned from a foray in the forest.

Puppy by Jeff Koons

We sampled the Basque version of Prosecco, a slightly sparkling, very dry white wine with high acidity and low alcohol content, called txakoli. We were amused by the eye rollings and sighs that our attempts at its pronunciation evoked in the waiters and others attending on us at cafes and restaurants we stopped at on our ramblings.  During our time in Bilbao, our conversation would return many times to our parents, namely our father as if unbeknown to us we were foreseeing what would happen later that year. 

Later on that year back in Ireland at work in the nursing home, I was sitting briefly at the nurse’s station acutely aware of my throbbing feet – taking a few seconds before ringing the doctor to come and see a sick resident. I took a slug of water from my water bottle and my eye fell on a postcard propped up amidst all the detritus such a forms, stethoscopes, envelopes, rosary beads, hastily scribbled notes and such   that accumulate in a busy nurses station where there are plenty of nooks and crannies   to stuff things, not having time to put them in their proper place. It was the post card I had sent fromViana, one of many I had written whilst sitting on the sun warmed wall watching the swifts wheeling overhead. As I read it, I was immediately transported back to the sunflower warmth of the sun on my face and how warm the stone under me had felt as I snuggled into the seat cut into the wall surrounding the cathedral. It was if that post card was like a door into a wonderful Narnia heaven like land, I recalled that feeling of languor and pleasurable anticipation of an enjoyable afternoon and evening ahead.

Guggenheim at night

And then even later on in the year when my father was failing fast I recalled the eccentric patron at the first albergue I had stayed in at the beginning of the camino in St Jean de Pied de Port and what he had said wildly waving his arms in the process – that you cannot control or break the camino for it will break you.As Ernest Hemingway put it in his novel “A Farewell to Arms” as it hurtled towards its pithy and heartrending finale – “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places”. How right that patron was about the camino and how right Ernest Hemingway was about our own camino or way in life. I had yet to realise that when I was doing that first third of the camino to Logrono and unaware of what lay ahead later that year.

And finally as autumn took hold that same year, the evening before my father died, he was lying in his bed downstairs, gazing out of the window. At that stage he was not talking and I looked to see what he was looking at. It was a magnificent sunset set in a   mackerel tinted and textured sky which in all the hustle and bustle of what was going on with looking after him, I had not noticed. He was looking at it as if he too, like myself that day at the nurse’s station with the postcard, was recalling something.  As if he too saw swifts wheeling acrobatically above on a sunny May afternoon and felt the sun warming his face, leaving a feeling of languor and peace and he had not a whit to worry about except where and what to eat on a sunny evening in a northern Spanish town on the Camino de Santiago – the Way of St James, my father’s name. Maybe the  door into his own  Narnia was that beautiful evening lying in his bed looking out of the window out onto that sunset as he was making his own way, his own  camino out of this world……..   I would like to think so.

In memory of my father James Feeney who both ended and began his own camino on 10^th October 2016.