Oct. 2009
This morning at the Lavern train station, a 15 min.
walk down the hill from the village, I encountered Pedro El Peregrino, an 80-year-old Asturian who has been walking around
Iberia, doing and redoing El Camino de Santiago for the last 20 years. He walks
his path to keep a vow he made praying to the Saint, when he survived a
terrible accident that almost destroyed his back. He promised to dedicate the
rest of his life to the Road if he recovered.
Bent, but bold and spry, with a well-trimmed salt and
pepper beard, he carries a backpack and shoulder bag, and pulls a cart with a
suitcase full of photos and clippings of his pilgrimage. His bright skyblue
eyes and coherent discourse reveal a man of joy, connected to life, with the light
body and wry smile of a 60-year-old marathon runner coursing with endorphins.
I share a train ride with El Peregrino and my friend
Vassilis, a Greek artist who lives in the train station apartment rent free in exchange
for keeping vigilance and watering the plants. On the train Pedro shows us some
of his photos and then brawny Vassilis describes his latest art piece. He’s
anxious to get to his studio, a warehouse in Hospitalet, where he’s finishing a
huge project - a “patera” – a lifesize replica of the boats used by migrant
Africans trying, dying to cross the Mediterranean. Waves of washed up dead lie
on Europe’s southern shores and unknown desaparecidos float drowned in the sound.
Vassilis shows me the drawings of faces he will place in his boat, a collage of
portraits, evoking the tragedy... The piece is destined for the Museo de
Imigración....
Oct 2013
The front page photo of today’s newspaper shows rows
and rows of open coffins in a morgue in Lampedusa; they look like wooden boats with
bodies of souls in search of the other shore…
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