Ewing Campbell - The Burial of the Sardine

“The Burial of the Sardine"

African tulip trees in full flower line the waterfront of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, alternating with laurel and jacaranda to shade the wide promenade. Spring arrives early in the Canaries. Steep barrancos come out of the mountains behind the buildings, cutting gashes across the face of the city. This is the mythical Garden of Hesperides, Plutarch's Islands of the Blessed, where the marvelous might overtake you at any moment. Behold the Mercado Nuestra Señora de Africa. Its pink ocher façade and bustling trade could pass for sights at a Moroccan souk, and why not? This archipelago sixty miles off the Barbary Shore is close enough for windblown Saharan sands to create lovely beaches on the two eastern islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. But the market is not Moroccan or a souk despite the name. It is Spanish through and through, filling its own block opposite the Plaza Santa Cruz de la Sierra and resembling a Spanish bullring with arched entrance and tapas bars fronting the streets along its outer walls. Inside, it shelters fruit stalls and vegetable bins, sacks of grain and bulging panniers. The famous mountain-cured hams of Jabugo hang from beams overhead. Beneath them are baskets of fresh bread, great wheels of cheese in cloth slings, colorful island flowers, ristras of red peppers, garlic ropes; all this, and much more.

The fish market lies below in a cool cellar of stalls, where herring and mackerel with green chevrons rest on beds of crushed ice, side by side with cod, hake, eel, and octopus. You can see clumps of yellow roe the size of small plums lying in the cavities of hen cods and sea bass. A young man with quick hands and a thin knife prepares a grouper, scaling and gutting, wielding his knife faster than the eye can follow. Across from him, an old man clips the fins and tail of a fish before passing it over the counter to a woman paying her pesetas while a child scribbles his name on the frosted vitrine that displays the morning catch. The scene reminds me of a line from some obscure source: Here, within a half-submerged territory, a race of wretched ichthyophagi dwells upon mounds. But these ichthyophagi are hardly wretched. They dwell, not on mounds, but in stone houses with tile roofs and wooden balconies. Ornately carved and characteristic of the islands, the balconies shade narrow streets. Country houses rise on the mountainside to heights that give unobstructed views of the sea.

On the morning after Fat Tuesday, the streets have begun to empty as people weary from dancing retire for some rest. Carnival lasts more than a week on the island. There will even be a parade later in the day, but it is supposed to be a tranquil procession of floats, beauty queens, dancing groups, bands, and some clowns all of it free from the riot and license of the night that has just ended. Carnival comes down to us from the Middle Ages muted, much of its original force lost to the wearing away and changing needs of the passing centuries. Historically carnival served the purpose of releasing the year's tension, which accrued under repressive rule, whether secular or religious. Traces of its former role remain visible in parodies of official ceremonies, mock trials, executions, and funerals, as well as in other iconoclastic spectacles. If we try hard
enough, we can see its residual effects in professional wrestling, where lawlessness and the lower body are celebrated through an elaborate grammar of costume, gesture, and convention understood by all who partake of such events.

But the day after Fat Tuesday is a day of repentance for past excesses. It is difficult to think of another day like it when the arrogant and the humble become equals, forming silent lines in attitudes of repentance as they prepare themselves for the priest’s anointment of ashes on the brow. On this day the body -subject to disease, frailty, and hangovers- reminds us of our own impermanence. Time and the elements break it down, scatter it, and return it to the earth. Then nothing is left. Such thoughts are familiar to all who have celebrated and felt the oppression of taking too many liberties and certainly familiar to me as I stood at the zinc counter of a tapas bar built into the outer wall of the mercado. It was a bright, calm day in February, so Gran Canaria should have been visible rising from the ocean, but it wasn't. Covered by a haze that was itself invisible, the island seemed magically snatched away.

I was trying to cope with this sense of enchantment when I heard, coming down the barranco, a mournful ululation accompanied by a brass band playing a funeral march. The dirge and the keening came from the direction of Barrio Salamanca. I listened but couldn't figure out what was going on as the sounds drew nearer, slowly growing in intensity, moments drawn out through the wailing. So I crossed the barranco and walked over to the foot of Rambla de Pulido, where I stationed myself near the bottom of the rambla and waited to see what all the noise was about.

Before long, a troupe of mock bishops and weird acolytes appeared at the head of a cortège that was coming slowly down from the upper limits of the city, for a moment seeming to hang there without moving, then taking a halting step forward before coming to rest again in the middle of the pavement. Pallbearers carrying a huge board-and-timber sardine followed the bishops. Skillful artisans had labored long and lovingly to make a large replica of the small fish, which was highly stylized and yet realistic at the same time. The eye, the characteristic lines, and the curve of the mouth suggested the shaping hand of man in an otherwise naturalistic image. I saw hundreds of widows in mourning and black veils weeping and wailing in the wake of the sardine, their garments fluttering in the wind of lamentation and mock anguish that blew through their solemn ranks. There were widows in heavy make-up with the blue shadow of a beard running along jawlines glimpsed for a moment as a veil lifted in the breeze, and I was standing there trying to figure out what was happening.

The procession had descended at a painfully slow pace, one step at a time in halting exaggeration, and it had been going on for some time when I stepped into the long train of mourners. By entering the spectacle and letting the wind of lamentation blow through me, I had joined an ecstasy of sorrow. So there I was, tagging along while the band played its mournful tune and widows dabbed at the sweat and tears. Shadows showed here and there through a smudge of rouge on a masculine cheek, and in the middle of all this, I heard across the plaza the melancholy tolling of the hour. It was seven o'clock, and the February sun was starting to go down behind the mountains at the back of Santa Cruz. The movement had been so drawn out that evening had come on before the shuffling procession could reach the sea.

A mock ceremony was conducted at the water’s edge. Then the sardine was ritually ignited and launched. It burned furiously out on the water until its last flames began to die away, leaving only the ashes of the fish on its wooden float, and even that was soon consumed. Then with impeccable timing, a great fireworks display began in the full darkness of night.

Returning to my room later that evening, I thought about what I had seen, what I had entered into, the solemn parody on a day of repentance, the inverted roles of men who no doubt lived conventional lives throughout the rest of the year, the incoherent as semblages and forbidden glimpses revealed in the flutter of a veil, the mottled faces, the breaking down of order and decorum, and all of it celebrated finally in a display of fireworks.

That was no traditional Ash Wednesday preparing the way for Lent. The grotesque images and the mock funeral itself were emphatic elements of carnival. As well as celebrating the death of fat days, the ceremony had been an extension of what had been going on all week, and the implications death begets life were pronounced. For in the sardine we can see the ichthys, Greek for fish and a longstanding religious acronym and symbol. This very important act of ichthyophagizing dates from early ecclesiastical history, but what links the symbol and the reality is more than metaphorical. In a state of ecstasy brought on by acting out the funeral, the unconscious mind intuits a mystical relationship. Both carnival (with its saturnalian roots) and fish-deities originated in antiquity, when pagan gods, such as Dagon and Ea, were identified with fish. If we make an effort, we can see that ancient rites persist in current celebrations long after their origins have been forgotten by the participants and lie hidden from us in a remote past that is not easy to recover.

For years to come I would recall what I had seen and seek in such paintings as “The Burial of the Sardine” and “Drunken Silenus” an explanation for the emasculation featured in the ceremony, and yet wherever I looked I failed to find a clear answer. In the chaos of revelers one could see shared images of mortified virility, chaos, and crowns: in one painting a man impersonates a woman whose blonde plaits have been braided into a crown, in the other grape leaves crown the bald head of Silenus. These paintings delight in paradox, including a funeral procession with participants in festive dress; they blur the line between the sacred and the profane. The scenes appear to liberate the participants, for a brief time, from the ordinary constraints of their lives. Noting the contradictions, we might wonder if these ceremonies appeal to what we have long forgotten, even as it lingers unconsciously as vague intuition, ancestral traces, or nostalgic yearnings for a past when matters seemed simpler and better.

For years I would seek an explanation in the descriptions and analyses of others. D. H. Lawrence, that most opinionated writer, recorded examples of cross-dressing at Carnival on the island of Sardinia, but he offered no explanation for what he saw. Then one day, as I read about Babylonian reenactments of the world's creation, the meaning came to me. In order to reproduce primordial chaos, the king was publicly humiliated and a mock king enthroned; a scapegoat was killed to cancel the old year; and forces of destruction were overcome as order was restored. Suddenly those crowns of golden plaits and leaves took on new meaning for me. Sovereigns, as embodiments of virility, were emasculated when dressed as women; the sacrificed sardine was a scapegoat; the ceremony that broke down all order existed so that the world might be symbolically recreated by means of ritual gesture. I had come to Tenerife forewarned by Goya's painting, but the sardine's funeral went beyond what I had expected. And yet it was a place I had been before the site of symbolic renewal. Perhaps that's what we are supposed to take away from popular festivals. Perhaps they are meant to create the circumstances for starting over, to help us get past the old and go beyond our limitations. Perhap’s the islanders, whether in the Canaries or Sardinia, intuit this lesson better than the rest of us.