Rich and Dave's song click
HERE
September 10th, 2011...
Viskarret is baking in the late-morning sun. On the counter of the only bar,
El Diario de Navarra tells of
Las Torres de Nueva York: Hace 10 Años..."
Señora and her daughter, whose joys are concealed only by matching scowls, are doing brisk business. They are serving bocadillos, tortilla con atun and alarming measures of deliciously brain-curdling Paxaran liqueur to the peregrinos of the midday tsunami.
"Es siempre lo mismo, always the same" laments the landlady when I ask her if it is always so busy: "despues de la una, nadie, nobody after one o'clock"...
fuente de peregrinos, Viskarret Photo PP
Peregrinos are like a wave, una onda, she says. Most will have left Roncesvalles at throw-out time, around 7 a.m. These are the stagglers...
There are walkers from Spain, France, Brazil, Korea and Australia gathered around a dozen plastic green and white Cerveza San Miguel tables. As if to make this an American day, we have fallen into happy conversation with Rich and Dave in front of the bar.
The rising caminante tide seeps from the loosely-designated drinking zone into public, and perhaps private, sectors of the Plaza Mayor.
Dave moves the chair, whose green legs are flexing disconcertingly in the direct sunlight, back into the receding margin of shade against the house next door to the bar.
With Paxaran-fuelled conversations clattering in the background, we learn that he and Rich are old pals, who, after high-responsibility careers in city government on the US West Coast, now walk long-distance paths in various parts of the globe. Their amiable, well-informed and gentlemanly manners engage us straight away.
We will meet them again, two days further along The Way; for now they don their backpacks, shake our hands, and amble westward.
Within minutes, we are the only clients left to give Señora and daughter a hand to stack the tables. The San Miguel van reverses up to the entrance. The bearded, beer-bellied driver carries two dozen crates inside, each time emerging with a cough and a crateful of empties. Then a red carton of Paxaran. He looks at his watch, lights a Ducado and disappears.
All noise ebbs from the square. As the sun hits the façades, the church tower bell clangs"La Una".
An amply-endowed lady of uncertain age appears in lilac night-time attire at the upstairs window. A man coughs loudly from the depths of the cavernous bedroom behind her. She through the Ducado haze which is emanating from within, then reaches out and pulls the shutter closed. This dislodges a fist-sized cast-iron bracket from the stonework, which makes its way to the ground. Its trajectory is obstructed only by Dave's plastic San Miguel chair.
The metallic meteorite punches a Paxaran bottle-shaped hole through the seat.
As we walk out of Viskarret, past the pilgrim fountain with its diminutive brass bird half an hour later, we spot the San Miguel van on the road below us, racing towards Pamplona.
A wisp of Ducado smoke escapes from the driver's window.
The Estacion de Autobuses in Pamplona provided welcome shade one concrete level below the esplanade.