Los Quatros Amigos

We four met by chance and circumstance, because of handwashed laundry and bad weather, and maybe fate. If you believe such things. On the Camino, you believe such things. And now we are reunited, yesterday exploring the extraordinary city of Seville (“Seville doesn’t have ambience. Seville is ambience”) today hiking the hills around Aracena, exploring the Gruta de las Maravillas.

We drink coffee and eat enormous slabs of bread and tissue-thin slices of jambon iberica. We talk sense and nonsense, the personal and the political, the charming quirks of language, the wounds of family. We make jokes. We make plans. It doesn’t really matter what we do. Whatever it is, we deeply and uncomplicatedly enjoy each other’s company. And it is both a surprise and not a surprise to us.

We four enjoy a special kind of friendship, a sudden, intense bond forged by a shared experience that bypasses the usual slow-building trust of everyday life. The bond is elemental. It is connected to a moment in time not the passage of time.

Those long, physically challenging days along the Camino Norte, the sweaty, painful privileged adversity of those days, stripped away pretense and forced authenticity. There was no energy left for posturing. We talked, yes. We told each other things we may have never said to others. We listened. And for hours we walked in silence because spoken words were not unnecessary When you see people at their low points—hungry, tired, sweaty, aching, vulnerable, cramped in a tiny room with iron bunkbeds—this may, in fact, be the best way to truly see them.

This friendship between Christina, Poli, Tino and me might have burned bright and then faded once the shared context disappeared. It did not. It will not. I just came here to say that, amid all the ugliness and hatred and distrust out there (you know the litany), there is the joy and beauty and friendship, however it makes its way into one’s life.

Con gratitud y de todo corazón, mis querido(a)s amigo(a)s.