Louk, the Dutchman I'd walked with for the first two days out of St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, must have thought I was the dopey naive American incarnate: I'd come without a sleeping bag (several guidebooks suggested that they were a good idea, but not required), my pack was too heavy, and now this--THIS!--I'd walked into Spain without a single peseta.
      I don't know what I was thinking, except that perhaps Roncesvalles was a town, not just a monastery. I had visions of the way tourist towns go: restaurants that honor Visa, Coca-Cola machines, and a convenient ATM installed in the side of a church. After all, at the monastery in Samos, there's a gas station; in one of my most beloved photos a shrine of the Virgin rises above an overloaded dumpster. Somehow, to my dismay, Roncesvalles has remained pure.
      We'd crossed into Spain on a Saturday. Even if the villages we passed had banks, it was Sunday, and everything was closed.
      At lunchtime in Linzoain, a weensy village that venerated St. Saturnine, Louk said, "Good thing I am taking care of you," and bought our bocadillos with the pesetas he'd had the foresight to change back in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port. I let him chide me, although I would have liked to point out that he wouldn't have gotten his sandwich exactly the way he wanted it if I hadn't ordered for him. Louk knew a lot of languages, but not a word of Spanish.
      From around the corner came a romero, a gypsy, with a rucksack. He sat down next to us at the picnic table. I'd dealt a little with gypsies in Seville the year before. If they managed to get their sprig of rosemary into your hands, you were doomed until you gave them money. Of course, I knew all about the practice of mistrusting gypsies, but for El Americano, gypsies were mostly theoretical rather than the nuisance Europeans had made them out to be. I watched Louk shut down, as I fearlessly made conversation with the stranger, practicing my Spanish and asking curious questions. He was a curiosity. First of all, he was wall-eyed. Second of all, he was traveling alone, something I don't think many gypsies do. Most importantly, he was a pilgrim, but traveling in the opposite direction, away from Santiago. The perversity thrilled me.
      "I'm going to Rome," he explained. "I hope to be there by Christmas." He'd left Santiago on July 25, St. James's Day. He showed me his compostela, something I looked forward to getting myself. He had a pilgrim's passport, he was for real, but he was going to all the places we had already been to, and he was eager to tell me about all the places I'd be going to.
      He pulled out a folded, tattered list of refugios he had stayed in. He began to rate the hostels for me. He told me a tantalizing story about the hostel in Ribadixo, hundreds of miles away in Galicia. Next to it he wrote, "Dream of Peregrino." He said something about rowing out to an island in a river, where the refuge was beneath--what? I was struggling with my Spanish--a trap door? I imagined a wide lake, a castle in the middle, a boatman transporting Christians to safety for a coin. Arzua, muy mal. Puente la Reina, muchos gentes. All the way down his ratty sheet, he'd write in si or no. He handed me his list as a gift.
      I kept talking to him, and Louk looked askance. He didn't like my encouraging the gypsy, and kept studying his own little guide book. The gypsy, whose name was Jesús, wanted to know about the refugios in the other direction, what could he expect? Did he have to pay? Would they understand his Spanish? He asked me, "How do I say this in French?" and wrote on a slip of paper, "Could you please give a pilgrim some money?" In English, sounding as naive as I could, I asked Louk, "How do you say this in French?" Louk narrowed his eyes and slipped on his backpack. "I am going to get a head start," he said. "Since you are so fast, you will catch up to me soon."
      The barkeep came out, perhaps out of concern for me, left alone with the gypsy. I wondered whether Jesús could see it, was he used to it, did he always get this wherever he went?
      In the Middle Ages, gypsies surged into Spain because of the Camino de Santiago. The Pope had given the king of the gypsies a piece of paper to carry with them, giving them access to every inn and church along the way. "Please take care of these good people," it said. "They are God's children, and there will be a reward for your hospitality in heaven." The gypsies took advantage of this letter for hundreds of years before anyone wised up. The barkeep wanted to know, Is everything all right here? Do I need to get rid of this guy for you? But what he said out loud was, "Anything else to eat?"
      I wanted to show I was comfortable with the situation. I had my backpack pinned beneath my knees and if he really wanted my walking stick, I'd find a new one eventually. "Cafe con leche, por favor," I said. I would catch up to Louk fairly quickly.
      "Un bocadillo de queso," said Jesús, and the barkeep looked at him. But he went in and made the sandwich.
      I turned to Jesús. He pointed at the slip of paper again. I said, "I think you say, 'Donnez-moi d'argent.'"
      "Bueno," he said. "Donnez-moi d'argent."
      "Si."
      He looked at me with those crossed eyes. "Si. Donnez-moi d'argent." I laughed, despite the situation. "Oh, I see." The barkeep came out with his sandwich and my coffee. "But you see, I don't have any. Truly, none at all. In fact," I suddenly realized in my absent-minded state, "I don't have any money to pay for this coffee." I must have looked panicky.
      This is when I experienced my first true Miracle of Santiago. Jesús, my gypsy friend, who had already given me his secret list of refugios, pulled a small coin purse out of his pocket and motioned to the barkeep, who stood in the portal of his little shop, draped with that curtain of beads meant, I guess, to discourage flies from coming in. He pulled out the pesetas and motioned at my coffee and his sandwich, "Todo junto," he stated, "all together." And he paid for my coffee.
      Essentially, a gypsy had given me money. The barkeep looked as astonished as I did.
      Jesús got up, slipping on his mulchila. "Gracias," I kept saying. "Buen viaje." He said the same to me. I turned, invigorated by unlooked-for generosity and cafe con leche, and scampered off, eager to catch up with Louk, to tell him about the miraculous occurrence.
      It wasn't until I caught sight of Louk on the road ahead that I realized that my pockets were full of francs, a currency now useless to me, but the very thing my gypsy friend needed.
      And the gypsy's gift was one that kept giving: the piece of paper with his scribbles and ratings turned out to be dead-on accurate. We learned to avoid the places he had written no beside, and sought out the ones he'd written si next to. It became known, among my fellow pilgrims, as The Gypsy's Guide to Santiago. Of all the pilgrims I met on the road to Santiago--the quack Italian bone doctor, the Madrid bullfighters, the French woman who carried all of her things in two shopping bags, the Brazilian pilot--the one who haunted me most was the cross-eyed gypsy, alone, walking against the flow. His goal had come and gone, and yet he struck me as the more authentic of us, the solitary sojourner who had turned desire into longing, removed the objective from his sight, and continued, anyway.
      From the very beginning of my journey, the road markers had constantly reminded pilgrims of how many kilometers there were to go. For the last one hundred, there would be stone markers announcing every single kilometer, like a countdown. It reminded me, among many other unpleasant things, of a dwindling T-cell count. It also warned us that we would all soon disperse, fly to our separate corners of the earth, and resume regular lives. One of the phenomena of the last five days would be the multiplication of blisters among my fellow pilgrims' feet. I took these wounds to be a sign of reluctance, of a resistance to the coming end of our journey, a statement, by the body, of its unwillingness to reach point zero.
      How free the cross-eyed gypsy must have felt, without the burden of those numbers.

      Since 700 A.D., pilgrims have been coming to Santiago from all over the world, walking the same path I'm walking, complaining about their feet, telling jokes with other pilgrims, looking forward to that day when we all arrive at the Portico de la Gloria in the cathedral and get our compostela, a certificate that, more or less, gets you a third off purgatory.
      But why were we still making the pilgrimage? I was so afraid that I'd be surrounded by religious fanatics, but so was everybody else. With a few exceptions, we were all agnostics, or unsure Catholics, mutually agreed that we're stuck with this religion, going to Santiago to find out if there was any way to make peace with it. Louk, forced into retirement by Shell Oil, was hoping to find something else to do with his life.
      For three days, we had walked along with five Belgian men, who mostly kept their distance in the evenings, but who were very talkative during the day's hike. I got to know Pietr well, one of the three who were taking orders from the other two. Every morning, the two order-giving ones, both short, blond, and taciturn, would say in Belgian (therefore I approximate), "O.K., you guys, time to get up, let's get moving." Pietr and I talked for three days about our mutual interests--opera, literature, travel, good wine.
      We passed by Irache, a vintner famous for giving free wine to pilgrims. You simply filled your travel cup with as much as you could drink, just as long as you didn't steal. Unfortunately, we'd arrived at nine in the morning. This didn't stop most of us. But when Pietr reached for his collapsible cup, one of the two phlegmatic blonds said, "No, stay away." Pietr frowned, and obeyed.
      I furrowed my brow and asked Pietr, "Why do you take orders from those guys?" Pietr smiled. "Well, you see, I am a prisoner."
      A prisoner? So were the other two men who were taking commands. No shackles, no firearms, who could tell? It seems a Belgian law that dates back to medieval days allows criminals to be punished by sending them to Santiago. My fellow Belgian pilgrims were doing penance, with the added punishment of fixing church doors along the way.
      "What did you do?" I asked Pietr.
      He never told me explicitly, although I heard further down the trail that all three were embezzlers. "White collar crime," is all he would tell me. "So," I thought it out, "if you're going to Santiago as a punishment, why am I going?"
      Pietr was amused. "Oh, Brian, you haven't heard?" He explained it to me: "When you reach Santiago to receive your compostela, you are also given a coupon from the archbishop. This coupon you may use to commit a murder." We all laughed. "One murder," he clarified, "or two armed robberies."
      The Belgians stopped in Viana that day, to fix a door. I never saw them again.
      My journal contains lots of reasons I was going to Santiago. For the cultural history. For the architecture, the exercise, the friendship. One murder, two armed robberies.
      The main reason, the dramatic one, the true one, however, had slipped away, because I was no longer going to die, at least not tomorrow.
      I'd watched my partner, Jeff, and many other friends make desperate moves to thwart death: They'd changed their blood, ingested the poisonous essence of peach pits, and submitted to the pharmaceutical shakedowns that can only be referred to as severe baroque--a word I'd use to describe the cathedral in Burgos, as well--only to succumb to the virus, anyway.
      I hadn't been sick enough to plunge into any of these risk-taking activities, but I had had my own crazy seat-of-my-pants lifestyle: no savings, no 401(k). I'd thrown all my money into travel: I'd gone nude water-skiing in Alaska, climbed down sheer cliff faces in the Italian Alps, and stowed away on trains into Portugal. Santiago was one more--or one last--notch in my bedpost.
      I'd also thought of The Canterbury Tales. The holy blissful martyr was said to heal the sick, if you came to see him. The cast of characters I met as I walked across Spain rivaled Chaucer's ribald gang, including Sandi, the completely deaf translator of four languages; Gabriel, the retired photographer of the great bullfighters; and Dani, the twenty-something Mallorquino who'd read more American literature than I had. Many pilgrims I met were going Arriving at the cathedral in Santiago, l to r, the author, Jean-Philippe, Matthias and his brother Andreas, Petra, Ana, and Marcos. in hopes of miracle cures.
      I had already had the miracle cure! At least I had had the miracle staver-offer, the antiviral cocktail of three blue tablets, one brick-red capsule, and one little white diamond that looks like the French Bar-Tabac signs I'd seen north of the Pyrenees.
      Another miracle that my dead friends could never have imagined is how painless these pills are. Clean as a whistle, although a two-month supply to be hauled over the mountains and across Spain did, for a while, seem heavy. But, in any case, no stomach-rotting failed remedies, no diarrhea, no headaches, no nothing.
      I am not usually a fan of miracles, or miracle-makers. Magicians dazzle me, all kinds. A skilled writer, an excellent musician, a good lover, a chef, the ones who overpower the senses and make my imagination go limp. Yes, I yield without hesitation to those with the power to allow me to slumber in the present without thought of past or future, because they don't need me to do any of their work.
      Santiago's miracles are more subtle. He awakens the imagination and revives the sleeper until the past, the present, and the future are all one.

In the Middle Ages, when a pilgrim came to Santiago, he made his visit to the cathedral, and then continued on to Finisterre, the end of the earth. There he would toss his old clothes into the sea and begin the long journey home.

      My backpack felt light. This was supposed to have been a grueling day, but I was full of energy coming into Burgos, and I couldn't figure out why. Twenty-eight kilometers must have been a miscount! I'd been so nervous about the toughness of the day's journey--and the lack of coffee--that I'd forgotten to put on sunblock.
      After a shower at the hostel, my German friend Petra and our Swiss friend Jean-Philippe went into town to shop for new walking shoes. Petra's husband, Matthias, and I suggested we meet them in the Plaza Mayor after we had visited the cathedral.
      It was only when we finally met up with the other two that I really started to limp.
      I ordered a fizzy lemon soda. Petra gave me an aspirin.
      "You look terr-EE-blay," said Matthias.
      "I feel terr-EE-blay," I said. "Did you find shoes for Jean-Philippe?"
      I was in pain, but I could see that the Plaza was pleasant. Everybody was out on it. Petra amazed me. She wore that damned Indian cotton-print skirt again; she always managed to make it look slightly different, hitching it up, pulling it in, accessorizing. She joked with me now and then about having her nails done or slipping out for a bubble bath or shopping for some high heels, but she loved this, the simplicity of it all. For that, I thought, she was a beautiful woman, one who can make a couple of bracelets, a little lipstick, and that same old Indian skirt look new every evening.
      In the Plaza Mayor, locals talked with their friends and had a glass of wine. There's no such thing as prime time television in Spain, and nobody seemed sorry about it. I wasn't.
      But I was hunched down. I must have let loose a groan, because my friends looked at each other with great concern.
      I started to shiver. I said I should go back to the hostel. Petra said she would go with me, since she wanted to get some food for the next day. Jean-Philippe said he and Matthias wanted to look in one more shoe store, but then they would bring some sandwiches back and we could have an early dinner and I could go to sleep.
      By then, the aspirin was upsetting my stomach. I followed Petra into the market just off the plaza. I felt achy and feverish. It must have been sun poisoning. Sun stroke or sun poisoning? I always got the two confused. In the alimentario, it was warm and airless. All the wheels of manchego cheese in the room were ripe. My ears began to buzz, and I got dizzy and started to sweat from head to foot. "Estoy muy enfermo," I said, calmly. I had a strange out-of-body look at the situation, which, my assessment was, could not be helped.
      This must be what happens, I thought, when you faint. I'd never fainted before. "Hay servicios?" No, there were no bathrooms, but perhaps in a bar down the street.
      Time was running out. I ran into the street, if only to get away from the warmth and the smell of cheese.
      Once out of the store, the dizziness increased, and I noticed a little kid riding on a dolphin-shaped mechanical ride, the kind you put a few coins in and it bobbles up and down to carnival music. This one played a relentless passionless incessant version of "There's No Place Like Home," over and over and over. It was like one of those over-the-top scenes in a Tennessee Williams play, in which the main character's sanity, exposed as a house of cards, tumbles down before your very eyes, and the demented calliope toodles on and on and the funhouse mirrors shiver and all the world is laughing and jeering and there's no exit from the room and then--
      And then I barfed into a planter. And felt instantly better.
      Petra saw the whole thing. She patted my back and handed me a third lemonade. She'd gone through with all her purchases, even though I was vomiting in public. What else could she do? She had a loaf of bread and three small sweet buns, a can of olives and a wedge of cheese. Ten minutes before, the sight of these things would have made me barf. Now that I had anyway, now that I'd gott en the poison out of me, I was starving. "Can I have one of those buns?" I begged her.
      I think it relieved her that she could do something. I kept saying, "I feel so much better. I feel so much better."
      We walked along the river. It was early evening. She wasn't saying anything. Looking back, I think she was terrified.
      I said, "I forgot to put on sunblock today."
      "Stupid boys," she said, blaming the foolish bravado of my sex rather than me, which didn't sound true to either of us. That's the thing about swearing off machismo: you can't depend on he-man bonehead courage, the fools-rush-in heroics of masculinity, to cover up for your idiocy. You yourself have to take the blame for your own bad judgment.
      The river babbled. Petra wanted to say something, I thought, maybe to soothe me, but she was at a loss. I was trying to think of something to say to reassure her that the illness was over, that I felt one hundred percent better, which I really did. She handed me a second sweet roll. "Brian," she said, reluctantly, "We think you should stop the pilgrimage."
      "Stop? Why would I do that? I just did a Stupid Boy thing, I just forgot to put on the sunblock."
      "We have heard about how you are dying."
      "Dying?" I sputtered, and stood stock still under a huge stone tablet declaring that it was here, here on this spot, that Franco took control of Spain.
      O, Peregrino.
      Suddenly, everything made sense. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I had told a fellow pilgrim about my HIV status. When was it? At the drunken dinner in the Basque village? Under the influence of pacharan, that devil's drink? It was Louk, the Dutchman, I was sure. He had fallen behind our group about a week before, because one of his feet had swollen up, and I'd probably told him when he was at his brattiest, complaining about being an old man. Probably I wanted to eclipse his little drama with my own, to shut him up once and for all (it never did work). But wouldn't I have told him the whole story?
      For weeks now, they must have been fretting about me, always watching the poor dying boy, who was always laughing and telling funny stories, but was secretly in pain and not long for this world. Smiling on the outside, crying on the inside. Oh, brother.
      I set her straight. I told her everything I knew. When I first planned my pilgrimage to Santiago, I thought it would be my last hurrah. My T-cell count had gone down to the level at which I had to start cutting back. I had imagined myself using the last of my strength to sojourn to . . . to do what?--to thank St. James, to thank somebody, for having been allowed, once more, the chance of a full, long life. What a nice bit of closure, I had thought, an ending that I could control, no matter what fate might ultimately deliver.
      But a year before the trip, I got into a study for the then-experimental protease inhibitors, the drugs that turned out to work like a charm. By the time I set out for Spain, my T-cell count had climbed to the point it had been years before, and, while my health had never been failing, I had become a pilgrim possessed of all the strength and vitality of a man who'd escaped death, at least for a while.
      Now, I told Petra, my pilgrimage was not to thank St. James for a life well lived, but for a second life, the one I didn't think I was going to have. "I can't quit now, Petra, because this is not the end for me. In fact, everybody wants me to start my life all over again."
      She had torn off a little bit of bread. She wasn't weeping, but she was full in the throat with a kind of joy that I hadn't experienced myself over this revelation, because it had not, until this moment, come upon me so dramatically, so collapsed in time. When I saw how she saw it--that I wasn't going to die, that I was going to live, I thought to myself, yes, you are right, what a happy ending it actually is. Let the new beginning begin. When Jean-Philippe and Matthias got back to the hostel (still shoe-less), Petra must have run out to tell them. They gathered around my bunk, where I'd already taken a sleeping pill in hopes of getting a long night's sleep, being surrounded, as we were, by a fleet of German cyclists. Matthias wanted to toast my long life--ugh, with pacharan. They were so relieved, they made me feel relieved for the first time in many years.

      A British naval captain gives a toast: "Sweethearts and wives," he begins, raising his glass solemnly. Then he shouts, "May they never meet!" and we all laugh and chug our pacharan. We were on a post-pilgrimage pilgrimage, all of us marveling at ourselves for having actually done it, all 600 miles of it, are we crazy or what? We were on the "Paris-Dakar" run, a long alley of bars named after cities along the course of that famous road race. The point is to have a drink in every bar along the street, the last at the finish line in Dakar.
      I looked down at the ground as I trundled off to the next bar, and it didn't seem important--paved, gravel, grass, mud--who cared now? It reminded me of Elizabeth Bishop's poem about Robinson Crusoe after he was rescued, how he had prayed every day that his knife would not break, but now it was useless, destined, at best, only for a museum.
      There had been an urgency to my life that, now that the danger has been (at least for the moment) avoided, baffles me. Growing old used to be an impossible object of desire. Now, the promise of early death has evaporated. Now, I am the cross-eyed gypsy going to Rome.
      Finding something on the other side of Santiago, something on the other side of HIV, is the challenge in a life that I had decided long ago was going to be miniaturized, but has suddenly telescoped out. Should I be sad about having an empty dance card?
      We were all a little sad on the Paris-Dakar, even though Jean-Philippe had bought us a bottle of pacharan and Petra had publicly incinerated her cotton-print skirt. Matthias and I took to commiserating about sex. "Look at the Brazilian." He points to a man we had dined with a week before and who had impressed me with his ability to speak several languages perfectly. He has reappeared at a table with a handful of beautiful women hanging on his every drunken word. "How does he do it?" Matthias wanted to know, searching for the right word in English, "With his four . . . four . . ."
      "Languages?" I offer.
      "No, Brian, women!" My pilgrim friends have accepted my homosexuality in this way: Brian prefers languages to women.
      Tomorrow we will have to go our separate ways. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims spent a year walking to the shrine, and then, unlike us moderns, who jump on a plane, had to walk all the way home. I wonder what that would have been like: the real point of the pilgrimage wasn't to arrive at Santiago, but to arrive back home. And going home must have seemed a lot harder, more of a penance, more of a sacrifice.
      I had walked 600 miles in two months, my own sacrifice to time. Now, time was not so much an enemy of mine, but a thing inside me like the virus. What I want to say is that it seemed strangely easier to live when there was no life left. Manners seemed absurd. So did conserving, waiting, restraining.
      "When it is finally seen," laments Matthew Stadler, a writer I admire, "childhood has a trajectory, a countdown aimed toward zero. This is the sickness of nostalgia."
      When we reach Santiago, or mandatory retirement, or the last T-cell, that point zero has to be a beginning, not an end. Like the wall-eyed gypsy, we must go back to where we came from, armed now, not with the joy of sacrifice, but only with the Dream of the Peregrino.

Brian Bouldrey is associate editor of Lit., the San Francisco Bay Guardian's literary supplement. He edited Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men, and the series Best American Gay Fiction. His most recent book is the novel The Genius of Desire (Ballantine). E-mail: wischixin@aol.com. The website of the pilgrimage itself: www.xacobeo.es