SARDINES
The Burial of the Sardine (El Entierro de la Sardina): An annual Spanish tradition celebrated on Ash Wednesday that parodies a funerial procession and culminates with the burning of a sardine, marking the beginning of Lent.
It begins as mere coincidence, happening just enough for me to notice but not nearly enough to raise suspicions. The glimpse of a distant aunt who had passed away two years ago, only I see her, clear as day, spotted through the condensation of a bus window. I think nothing of it. But then it becomes a mother catching my eye on the other side of a tube platform. She does so mere hours after her son, a long-lost friend, breaks the news of her death in a text message I never bring myself to open. The unidentifiable queen my phone informs me was found butchered outside a nightclub in Argentina last week, only I swear it is her who almost collides into me swiftly descending into the Oxford Circus tube station. That mother once again, only this time at a bus stop just outside Hackney. The month brings them on in swathes and I can do nothing but gawp and stare and wretch and blink and doubt and then gawp and wretch some more.
Winter is a tiresome creature, a patch of time the ghosts seem to favour for their locust- like swarming.
I try everything to exorcise them. The Chilean gardener next door tells me that the only way to rid oneself of the spirits is to press them against your back, to allow them to use your spine as a foothold up to heaven. I never venture close enough for them to try it. An ill-advised acid trip on a grimy roof at a colleague's engagement party does not produce the answers I long for either. I even find myself staring down at the sludge left behind in my stained mug one morning, praying against all odds that the herbal residue will reveal something, anything, but to no avail.
The day I see Ernest Hemingway on the TFL, rounding the corner with strained grunts and perspiration at the corners of his mouth as he struggles to catch the Circle Line at Embankment, I know something has to be done.
I take it as an omen, a sign that it is time to reluctantly turn back to the homeland, my not so beloved España. Only a quixotic pilgrimage worthy of my ancestros can rid me of this ailment.
‘Perhaps it’ll do you good to spend a few days here,’ my mother crackles over the phone. ‘Plus, the sardine burial is coming up, and you know how your grandmother gets around this time of year...’
Once in Madrid the purging begins. I stumble my way through the Retiro park, the old plaything of the Versailles-deprived peninsulan princes, on the hunt for the fountain of the Fallen Angel. It is said to be the only statue dedicated to the devil. As I watch his mouth curved into an immortalised scream, I think of the carps the size of babies that live in the park lake, how occasionally they get smacked by the oars of the innocent rental boats passing by, how they float upside down to the surface, discombobulated, their mouths gaping too.
I try my luck with the dark paintings of Goya, down endless flights of stairs, feeling lightheaded and irritable in dimly lit museum rooms. The brushstrokes look haggard, shrieking in a way that cannot quite be put into words. I imagine Goya painting directly onto the walls of his house in fits of madness and how the pieces had to be cut out of the plaster to be mounted onto canvases. He also painted a sardine burial, I remember. I wonder whether he would’ve enjoyed the company of my grandmother, if he too was drawn to people with similar streaks of darkness.
I even seek out the Valley of the Fallen, a mausoleum for those who perished in the war—somewhere I vowed never to visit and that is said to stink of death. The queasy bus ride up the mountain along the rickety, patchy road alone has bile tensing at the base of my throat. I watch a woman with lines carved so deeply into her flesh they must perforate the bone weeping softly in her seat. Two young boys, barely teenagers, clad with thick bracelets the colours of the national flag and the name of an emergent political party shove each other around playfully and speak in rapid bursts of city slang.
I do all this, the most symbolic my country has to offer, and, yet, still, I find myself itching, itching, itching...
I do not go to the bullfights—I do not trust myself to be able to stomach it. And anyway, it would be too on the nose, surely.
Instead, I beg my father to play those dark ballads on guitar I hated as a child, the ones full of shadows and stories of ancestral cousins killing each other and lovers in arms, forged in music and blood. The folklore about those scorned seems to me the most likely to placate the gods and to keep the ghosts at bay.
I continue this quest (for a quest it must be called!). I tick things off the list. I hope beyond hope. I let myself believe. This will make the spirits go away. It has to.
I do all this. All this and more. And I put off calling my grandmother. Mi abuela.
My grandmother, who loves to play with thimbles and proudly proclaims that we are descendants of King Felipe el Hermoso when in reality she comes from a mundanely arid village bordering Portugal and spent most of her childhood witnessing soldiers throw bodies into the river. I think of how she was forbidden from attending university for me to be spending my time refusing lines of coke off student loan forms and giving girls hickeys in Ivy League bathrooms. I try not to think of the energy I waste trying not to feel guilty about it.
‘Mi amor,’ my grandmother once began her clandestine confession. ‘Te quiero tanto que daría mi vientre por ti’. I love you so much I would give up my womb for you. How could I ever reconcile with such a sacrifice as that?
The sardine burial is a sordid affair this year. As always, the ridiculous little coffin is paraded through the streets of the city holding what I can only imagine is a replica of a small shimmery fish. The cobblestones threaten to roll my ankles and my grandmother clings onto my arm ferociously like she will never let go. Sometimes I convince myself that she has been coming to these processions since they first began in the eighteenth century and that she is the only person who holds all of its secrets, thought she deigns to tell no one. I have to stop myself from snorting with laughter; as amusing as this dirge feels it is nothing if not solemn affair for la abuela.
After the sardine is burned my grandmother will take communion during Mass. The days are ashy and seagulls, lured by the promise of rotting fish, fidget, trying their best not to shriek. Indulgence is over, abstinence begins. I am reminded of the archaic story we were told as children at catechesis, the fight between Sir Carnival and Lady Lent. I did not linger long enough to find out who wins though I have my suspicions. The procession continues through the city towards the river and all the while, I cannot help but think maybe it is this monstrous sardine I must bargain with.
The city’s river, that never has any water in it anyway. The river that is forever dried up, how charmingly biblical.
Delicately lukewarm, underwhelmed, and feeling appropriately sorry for myself, I make my way back to London. Walking through Gatwick I notice no ghosts in my peripheries. No mothers, no family friends or queens glaring at me silently forever seeking the answers I simply cannot provide.
The rattling of the Jubilee Line makes me almost utter a half-yelp of triumph. I do not know how long I have managed to stave them off, but the sweltering air of the underground feels clearer, lighter even, without the presence of the spectral.
Maybe I’ll take a bath tonight. I muse on all the possibilities that this torrid evening holds, the sardines of Spain are lifetimes away. Swerving a corner, I see an unknown person watching me, curled up in the shadows, looking like an old bullfighter who died lifetimes ago.
A tip of the hat with grimy nails, a serious grin, and an unadulterated utterance (part blessing, part curse): ‘Vaya usted con Dios’.
May God go with you.
Sofie Cristobal, 21, between London - UK & Madrid - Spain ✯ IG: @sofie.cristobal
“Literature master’s student interested in depictions of my home country Spain through the eyes of others.”