The Gift

"These things, these things were here and but the beholder
  Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
  And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet."  

              - Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Hurrahing in Harvest" 

A chill that speaks of autumn gives way to the strengthening sun. From mid morning, as I walk, migrant workers move through roadside vineyards, hefting heavy, laden baskets shoulder high. Ahead, the approach to the village is splashed with crimson where fruit has fallen and been crushed by turning wheels. The air is suffused with the aroma of fermentation, the smell of La Rioja in harvest.

Beneath my feet the track puts on a mantle of asphalt to become the Calle de Esperanza. I pass through shaded streets, by stone houses bearing the coats of arms of long-dead inhabitants, to a white-walled cemetery where the asphalt gives way again to dust. Ahead the Way stretches westward to the horizon, through a patchwork quilt of red and brown where vines are arranged like neat, green braids, flecked with autumn red above soil of ochre and ash.

     “Peregrino”.

From behind the wall a sun-hardened man appears. Pilgrim, he calls me, recognising me as one of the fraying transients that for centuries have passed along this road.

He’s in his, eighties, I’m sure.  He wears an old suit jacket over his bare chest and his face is like dusty, figured mahogany, so perfect an echo of the landscape surrounding him that he seems other-worldly. He moves towards me, rocking from side to side on worn out hips, gesturing at me with an outstretched arm.

     Wait.

I’m surprised at the strength of his grip as he grabs my shoulder. Even as I tower over this man, I feel a wave of fright at this unbidden contact. His hand finds my own and I feel him press something into my palm as he closes my fingers into a fist and holds it in a rough grasp.

     “Un bolso”,  he says, nodding along the path. “Por el Camino”.

     A gift. For the Way.

He turns away and moves towards the village; a tarnished smile, then his arm raised in a rearward salute. I open my hand: three walnuts, hard and gnarled. Beneath the shell, sustenance. For the way.

I gaze for a while at the old man’s gift: the recognition and kindness of one who had nothing else to give.

Turning towards the afternoon sun, my vision blurs to a corona of gold.