The Pilgrim’s Prescription
The spider bite appeared on my foot in Barcelona, shortly after our group viewed the gleaming sword of St. Ignatius. I did not remember encountering any arañas on our pilgrimage so far and the rooms were surprisingly upscale. Googling my ailment felt like a fainthearted gesture somehow, as we followed the path of a soldier-turned-saint who had once insisted his doctors saw off a protruding leg bone—while he observed.
By Rome, the bite had grown into a brooding purple bruise. Ice, suggested Veronica, a chemistry teacher from a Jesuit school in Cincinnati. Rest, added a social worker from Detroit. So later that night, I dutifully held an icy bottle of purified water against my wound. My roommate Beth, a fellow English teacher from Chicago’s Southwest Side, kept vigil over me, despite my urging her to go sip Limoncello with the others at a café.
I was putting the “grim” in pilgrimage, I feared, as my left foot continued to swell. Every time a fellow traveler suggested visiting a clinic or Italian farmacia with the green cross on its sign, I insisted it was not so serious. After all, I had no fever and was ambulatory.
One white-hot morning in Rome, we pilgrims gathered in a corner of St. Peter’s Square. Matt, an athletic fundraiser from Milwaukee, handed me a tube of ointment. “Silver Sulfadiazine,” he said. “Helps with soreness.” He did not have to point at his own prosthetic leg. Matt’s wife was also a marathoner, so the couple understood blisters.
My face reddened. Matt’s offer was sincere, but I suddenly wondered if I had deserved to come on this trip. My husband stayed at home with our children, and my Italian father, Sergio, had recently died without ever returning to his native country. Standing in the July sun, I felt like a fake pilgrim.
Shame comes naturally to Catholics, and I was forging innovative varieties of it. Earlier in the trip, I may have hexed myself. While visiting the border of Spain and France, I stared up at the serrated mountains and wondered if anyone in our group would have an illness or minor accident (I had chaperoned many school fieldtrips). Shaking off the perverse thought, I lined up to view the “Dark Madonna and Child” of Montserrat, at whose feet Ignatius had surrendered his sword.
At the beginning of the trip, in Basque country, we toured Ignatius’s family castle in Loyola. In 1521, after the Battle of Pamplona, the injured soldier recovered there, and experienced his famous conversion. The medieval castle contained at least one cannon concealed in the stone walls for defense, though the tour guide did not connect that to the spiritual struggle that led to Ignatius’s bedroom conversion. I could not forget the idea of the cannon turned inward, battling with something contained within his own walls.
The swelling had advanced to my ankle by our last night in Rome. Group photos taken on the rooftop of the Jesuit curia show a glimpse of the wound’s reddish orange echoing the hues of the sunset. That night, we feasted on an exquisite meal of fettuccini ala Bolognese and creamy tiramisu. As we stood to leave, a pragmatic vice principal from Indianapolis looked at my foot and said, “Just lance that sucker.”
The suggestion was well-meant, but I bungled the maneuver using the needle from my hotel sewing kit. Googling from the slate bathroom floor, I finally confronted my predicament. This is NOT a spider bite, warned online medical sites about MRSA. My mind flashed to a communal footbath on a Barcelona beach after we had waded along the Mediterranean shore.
The next day, I hobbled to a farmacia with a neon green cross and waited in line to consult the pharmacists. In pidgin Italian I said, “Mangio Cipro?” – literally, “I eat Cipro?” I carefully pronounced “ci” as “chee” when saying the name of the powerful antibiotic recommended on the websites.
The lab-coated pharmacists managed to refrain from laughing. They agreed that I should “eat Cipro,” and magically dispensed it on the spot. As I walked back out to the sidewalk, I knocked back two pills with water.
The night before, we had gathered for mass in the airless room where St. Ignatius spent his final years. Hunching low in the dim chamber, we listened to Father Todd, a wise Jesuit from Cleveland who told us how Ignatius had blamed himself for illness that prevented him from returning to the Holy Land. As consolation, the Basque saint wrote more than 7,000 encouraging letters to Jesuits working in poor cities worldwide.
Sweat stung at my eyes. Saints should not have suffered self-doubts, at least not after their conversions. Second-guessing was for mortals like me. A veteran teacher going into my 15th year at the same school, I adored my brave creative students and colleagues. I had not expected my professional life to revolve only around a high school, though, and wondered if I had written 7,000 pages, could I have distilled them into the novel’s perfect 350?
Finding commonalities with a saint felt contrived, especially to a former suburban girl like me who knew my local Starbucks baristas by name. Yet I could not resist identifying with a self-doubting warrior who had starved himself for a while and experienced an epiphany based on a book (Lives of the Saints for him; The Moviegoer by Walker Percy for me).
Thirty years before, I suffered another injury on the same foot, a stress fracture during my sophomore year of high school (my first tour of duty, I sometimes joke). Months of anorexia had weakened my bones, and one day as I stepped onto a gravel running path in tennis Adidas, I felt a small defiant snap.
St. Ignatius’s shoes are displayed in the room outside his deathbed, where we had taken communion. Against a simple background of stone bricks, the battered slippers are reassuringly brown and dull. Sometimes I doubt the authenticity of famous people’s effects—like the putative sword in Barcelona—but these look real, unassuming, as they blend in with the road.
