It’s early in the morning. The clouds are low, there’s a chill in the air, the birds are singing. I’m walking out of the Tuscan town of Sarzana with the Frenchman Hervé de Lantivy, his crutches beating time on the Francigena, the Pilgrim’s Way.
I’ve come to Italy to walk with him for a couple of days and make a programme about him for the BBC.
In 2021 he walked from his home in Brittany to Santiago de Compostela. Now he’s embarked on a new pilgrimage, again to Santiago but this time starting from Rome. 3200 kilometres. On one good leg, one prosthetic leg and crutches.
”I was in the army, serving in Lebanon. I had a week’s leave and a group of us went to Cyprus where we hired motorbikes to explore the country. A car pulled out and hit me. I went flying over the top and hit the ground. I didn’t black out but perhaps that was even worse because the pain was excruciating. I was taken to a military hospital. And had 12 operations over a period of two years. In the meantime, I left the army, set up a landscape gardening business and got married. But my damaged leg kept getting infected and, in 2018, when an infection rose above the knee, there wasn’t any other solution and I requested a complete amputation. A few minutes before the operation - I don’t know how or why this idea came into my head - but I made a promise: that if I managed to walk properly again, I would walk to Santiago.”
After the operation, he quickly mastered walking with an artificial leg but threw himself into keeping his business going.
With hindsight, he says, he should have accepted the psychiatric help he was offered. “Being amputated isn’t easy. There’s a part of you that’s already in the coffin!” he laughs. “And when you look in the mirror, it doesn’t look good. I’ve always refused to use the word ‘handicapped’ but that is how I felt. When I got my first prosthesis, my physiotherapist Stéphanie filmed me to encourage me, to say ‘look Hervé, you’re walking’. I watched the video when I was alone in my room and I broke down. My left leg was a metal tube and it would be for the rest of my life.”
His problems accumulated. He kept them to himself so as not to worry his wife and four children. In October 2019 he had a burnout and tried to commit suicide. It was one of his sons who found him.
“When I came round, what I felt was an enormous feeling of shame for what I’d done because of the effect on my family.” After several months in a psychiatric hospital and a lot of support from his wife and children he remembered his promise. And set out for Compostela.
“The Camino saved me,” he says. “It was my resurrection.”
Every morning he prays the rosary once he’s out on the road. “Hail Mary, full of grace – those few words are so strong,” he says. “Full of the grace she possesses and that she has given us. The Hail Mary is the most beautiful of prayers.”
As he walked the Way, there came to him a sort of grand simplification. The noise and confusion dispersed and he saw the goodness and beauty of the world. In acts of kindness to and from his fellow human beings, for example, or in the rediscovery of his five senses. As though the Way was bringing him out of a sort of long Covid of the soul.
The Camino is a leveller. All pilgrims are equal. “Class distinctions disappear,” he says. This is true. It took me a long time to discover that Hervé is a Viscount. “We’ve all got a pack on our backs and blisters on our feet,” he says, though he, haha, has 50 per cent fewer than the others. He was very judgemental before, he tells me. Not any longer.
Above all, The Way taught him to open up. To confide. Even if that took time.
“On the Way, people came up to me a lot to confide in me, to tell me about their problems. There was something about seeing me walking with my artificial leg and seeing that it was hard for me that made it easier for them. It was frustrating, though, because once they’d told me about their problem, we’d do a selfie and that was that. They’d leave and I hadn’t confided in them. But in fact I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to speak. Out of pride. And a bit out of shame. I couldn’t find the strength to unload this burden weighing down on me.”
And then an angel appeared. Or perhaps it was just a woman. Some time later he was sitting on a bench feeling sorry for himself and she came and sat beside him. “Is it your prosthesis that is making you sad?” she asked. “No,” he said “it’s my attempted suicide.” He told her everything and afterwards, he says, he felt free.
<em>‘Hervé’s Way: the story of a one-legged pilgrim’ on Heart and Soul from BBC World Service will be available on podcast from Friday 24 May 2024.</em>
<em>(Photos of Hervé de Lantivy by John Laurenson)</em>
