Therapy

immense Plaza del Obradoiro, looking up at the twin spires of the great Cathedral.
     
    We arrived on the 24th July, and Santiago was bursting at the seams. The four-day fiesta was already in progress, with marching bands, huge walking effigies on stilts, and itinerant musicians roving through the streets and squares. The pukka pilgrims like Maureen were swamped by hundreds and thousands of visitors, both secular tourists and pious Catholics, who had arrived by plane or train or bus or car. We were told the crowds were particularly big because it was a Holy Year, when the feast of St James falls on a Sunday, and the blessings and indulgences attached to the shrine are especially potent. I suggested to Maureen that we ought to see about getting accommodation without delay, but she was impatient to visit the Cathedral. I indulged her. It seemed unlikely that we would find anywhere to stay in the old town anyway, and I was resigned to going back to Labacolla for the night.
    The Cathedral is a bit of a dog’s breakfast architecturally but, as we say in television, it works. The elaborately decorated façade is eighteenth-century baroque, with a grand staircase between the two towers and spires. Behind it is the portico of the earlier romanesque building, the Portico de la Gloria, carved by a mediaeval genius called Maestro Matteo. It depicts in amazing, often humorous, detail, some two hundred figures, including Jesus, Adam and Eve, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, twenty-four old codgers with musical instruments from the Book of Revelations, and a selection of the saved and the damned at the Last Judgement. St James has pride of place, sitting on top of a pillar just under the feet of Jesus. It’s the custom for visitors to the Cathedral to kneel at the foot of the pillar, and place their fingers in the hollow spaces, like the holes in a knuckleduster, that have been worn into the marble through centuries of homage. There was a long line of people, many of them local to judge by their clothes and complexions, waiting to perform this ritual. Clocking Maureen, with her staff and rucksack and sunfaded clothes, as a genuine pilgrim, the people at the front of the line fell back respectfully and gestured her forward. She blushed under her tan and shook her head. “Go on,” I urged her. “This is your big scene. Go for it.” So she stepped forward and fell onto her knees and, with one palm pressed against the pillar, fitted the fingers of the other hand into the holes, and prayed for a moment with her eyes closed.
    On the other side of the pillar, at the foot, Maestro Matteo has carved a bust of himself, and it’s the custom to knock your head against his to acquire something of his wisdom. This was more my kind of mumbo-jumbo, and I duly banged my forehead against the marble brow. I observed some confusion between the two rituals. Every now and again somebody would bang their head against the pillar under the statue of St James as they put their fingers in the holes, and then everybody in the line behind them would follow suit. I was tempted to try slapping my buttocks like a Bavarian folkdancer as I paid homage, just to see if it caught on, but I didn’t have the nerve.
    We joined another line of people taking their turn to embrace the statue of St James on the high altar. The holy end of the Cathedral is an over-the-top fantasy in marble and gold leaf and carved painted wood. St James Matamoros, dressed and mounted like a Renaissance cavalry officer, charges with sword drawn above the canopy, which is supported by four gigantic, trumpet-blowing angels. St James the Apostle, swathed in jewel-encrusted silver and gold plate, presides over the altar looking more like a pagan idol than a Christian saint, especially as, seen from the main body of the church, he seems to have grown an extra pair of arms. These belong to the people who, standing on a little platform behind the altar, embrace him and, if they are pilgrims, pray for those who helped them on their way — the traditional “hug for St James”. Beneath the altar is a crypt with the small silver coffin containing the remains of the saint — or not, as the case may be.
    “Wasn’t it wonderful?” Maureen said, as we came out of the Cathedral, into the bright sunlight of the square with its milling crowds. I agreed that it was; but I couldn’t help contrasting the pomp and circumstance of this shrine with the small, austerely furnished room in the Copenhagen