The Pilgrimage Read Online Free PDF Page B

you the second RAM practice, he said, sitting
     down on the ground and indicating that I should do the same.
    I was irritated, but I did as he asked. The sight of the
    * There is a red fruit whose name I do not know, but just the sight of it today makes me
     nauseated from having eaten so much of it while walking through the Pyrenees.
    small village with its inviting chimney smoke had really upset me. Suddenly I realized
     that we had been out in the woods for a week; we had seen no one and had been either
     sleeping on the ground or walking throughout the day. I had run out of cigarettes, so I
     had been smoking the horrible roller tobacco that Petrus used. Sleeping in a sleeping bag
     and eating unseasoned fish were things that I had loved when I was twenty, but here on the
     Road to Santiago, they were sacrifices. I waited impatiently for Petrus to finish rolling
     his cigarette, while I thought about the warmth of a glass of wine in the bar I could see
     less than five minutes down the Road.
    Petrus, bundled up in his sweater, was relaxed and looked out over the immense plain.
    What do you think about this crossing of the Pyrenees? he asked, after a while.
    Very nice, I answered, not wanting to prolong the conversation.
    It must have been nice, because it took us six days to go a distance we could have gone in
     one.
    I could not believe what he was saying. He pulled out the map and showed me the distance:
     seventeen kilometers. Even walking at a slow pace because of the ups and downs, the Road
     could have been hiked in six hours.
    You are so concerned about finding your sword that you forgot the most important thing:
     you have to get there. Looking only for Santiago which you cant see from here, in any
     case you didnt see that we passed
    by certain places four or five times, approaching them from different angles.
    Now that Petrus mentioned it, I began to realize that Mount Itchasheguy the highest peak
     in the region had sometimes been to my right and sometimes to my left. Although I had
     noticed this, I had not drawn the only possible conclusion: that we had gone back and
     forth many times.
    All I did was to follow different routes, using the paths made through the woods by the
     smugglers. But it was your responsibility to have seen that. This hap- pened because the
     process of moving along did not exist for you. The only thing that existed was your desire
     to arrive at your goal.
    Well, what if I had noticed?
    We would have taken seven days anyway, because that is what the RAM practices call for.
     But at least you would have approached the Pyrenees in a different way.
    I was so surprised that I forgot about the village and the temperature.
    When you are moving toward an objective, said Petrus, It is very important to pay
     attention to the road. It is the road that teaches us the best way to get there, and the
     road enriches us as we walk its length. You can compare it to a sexual relationship: the
     caresses of fore- play determine the intensity of the orgasm. Everyone knows that.
    And it is the same thing when you have an objective in your life. It will turn out to be
     better or worse
    depending on the route you choose to reach it and the way you negotiate that route. Thats
     why the second RAM practice is so important; it extracts from what we are used to seeing
     every day the secrets that because of our routine, we never see.
    And then Petrus taught me the Speed Exercise.
    In the city, amid all the things we have to do every day, the exercise should be done for
     twenty minutes. But since we are on the Strange Road to Santiago, we should wait an hour
     before getting to the village.
    The cold about which I had already forgotten returned, and I looked at Petrus with
     desperation. But he paid no attention; he got up, grabbed his knapsack, and began to walk
     the two hundred meters to the vil- lage with an exasperating slowness. At first, I looked
     only in the direction