Anchoas y Agonia

Manuela stared out of the canning factory window and thought about Mount Buciero. That dark beast she had loved as a child was calling to her. Lying under the canopy of oak trees, she had been as oblivious to the chattering birds above her, as they were to her eight-year-old body on the ground beneath. She would lie motionless for hours in that dark, dappled green light, with sticks and leaves in her hair and earth on her face, listening to the breeze through the branches and imagining those strange sounds to be the voice of the mountain itself, whispering secrets to her.

Twenty years later, she was up to her elbows in anchovies. Along with the other 299 employees of the Grupo Consorcio Conservero Espanol. Anchovies followed her everywhere she went. She felt she could smell them constantly, even after three showers and incessant scrubbing. At night, she dreamt about them – either the aluminum cans or the damned fish themselves, fins flapping and tails flipping. In her more bizarre dreams, the fish donned top hats and tails and danced with canes.

It didn’t help that she knew that at this precise moment, her fat, lazy brother Ramon, whose bulging flesh and enormous head seemed to grow larger by the minute, was sitting on the balcony of her apartment, smoking cigarettes and no doubt eating anchovies from the can, dropping them into his mouth one by one and then belching, loudly.

Every night when she got in it was the same.

‘Hey Manueeeeela, pass me a beer would you?’ That same old greeting, as he sat scratching his hairy gut and leaning right back in the wicker chair to shout in through the open doors. Sweat droplets stood out on his forehead, catching the sunlight.

When his wife left him five years ago for another woman, he had packed his bags, deserted his fishing boat and turned up on her doorstep.

‘Just for a few days hermana’ he had wheedled, ‘the family is going crazy…Another woman! Can you believe it? I can’t believe she betrayed me like that. I need some space to think’.

Five years passed and he was still here. If she had had heard him murmur ‘for a woman!’ to himself once, she had heard it a thousand times. She didn’t blame Loretta, not one bit. He was her brother, but he was vile.

The bell sounded to mark the end of her shift and she headed straight to the washroom. The twins Maria and Solana were in there, heads close together as usual, as they scrubbed their hands.

‘But have you seen the way he looks at her when he comes out of the office?’ Maria whispered.

‘I know! Pure lust in his eyes! That man is crazy for her and she does nothing to stop it. In fact she encourages it. I feel sorry for that poor husband of hers, he has no idea’

Solana jumped as she caught sight of Manuela in the mirror, then placed her hand to her chest and heaved a huge, exaggerated sigh of relief. She slowly let the look of horror subside from her face.

'¡Dios mío! Manuela, don’t creep around like that! I thought you were…. Well, I thought you were someone else!’ She looked shiftily at her sister, her eyes popping.

‘Perhaps you girls should stop your gossiping for five minutes and then you wouldn’t have to worry so much’.

Manuela stepped into a cubicle and sat heavily on the seat. Every day, the whispering. And it wasn’t just these two - all the women in the factory were the same, it was like some contagious disease that struck them down as soon as they walked through the door. Whisper, whisper whisper. Gossip, gossip, gossip. They couldn’t help themselves.

Of course, the whispering had quickly become unbearable when her brother had first come to live with her. Alongside Ramon’s mumbled mantra of ‘For a woman!’ in her apartment, the words had echoed around the factory for weeks on end, drifting down the walls, snaking across the ceiling, sliding past her ears in the canteen. ‘For a woman!’

She flushed the chain and washed her hands as the twins reapplied their lipstick and fussed with their hair in the mirror. As she walked out through the swinging door she overheard Maria whisper:

‘Of course she has forgotten what it is like to be wanted… If she ever knew in the first place…That brother of hers, living with her all these years! It’s strange, no?’

‘I agree, I think there’s something strange going on there. She’s still young…still attractive…’ Solana replied, then giggled 'someone would have her...maybe.'

What did they know? Someone already did. She had not been alone for the last two years. OK, so it was complicated. There were other people involved, other hearts that would get broken if the truth came to light. She had been - she had to admit it to herself - deceitful. She had taken something which was not hers to take - lain with someone who, the next morning, had returned home to lie with someone else. Finally the time had come. A plan had been made.

Outside, the evening sun was half-hidden behind the hulking form of Mount Buciero. Manuela clipped on her helmet and climbed onto her scooter, staring up at the lush green mass. She did not want to go home. She did not want to see Ramon. She did not want to cook, then shower, then climb into bed, only to get up and come back to the canning factory tomorrow. She did not want to hear the whispers and the speculation about her. And she did not want to see another anchovy as long as she lived. And at last, she did not have to. Underneath her scooter seat was everything she needed, for now.

She swerved out of the car park, jaw set and eyes narrowed, her thick brows almost meeting in the middle. She sped out onto the dusty road that led away from the canning factory, past the beach and up into the mountains. It was no distance at all from Santoña and yet she had not been back since she was eight-years-old.

The patch of dirt she pulled onto did not seem a natural place to stop. It was on the brink of a lethal bend of the road, which continued its crazy zig-zag path even further up the mountain and all the way back down the other side of it.

The forest looked dense, impenetrable in fact, like you’d have to endure countless cuts and bruises and prods and pokes to get anywhere.
But Manuela knew from her visits as a child that this spot was different. The forest could be deceptive.

A clearing lay beyond the first line of trees, well-hidden and fringed with lavender, wild roses and thyme. She had once taken something she did not recognize home to her mother, to be told that it was ‘Scorpion Herb’. And hadn’t she loved that name! The image of the scorpion, hiding, clacking his claws and biding his time, then suddenly emerging, striking with his venomous tail and skittering away again, into the undergrowth.

She was early. A hawk flew overhead, its call - 'ke-ke-ke-ke' - making her jump. She decided to venture into the forest. Finding a large rock, she sat down just outside the dusty bald spot and rested her chin in her hand. She was finally leaving. She had started work in the canning factory straight out of school, aged 16. She had had her first kiss that year too, with a boy from across the street. He had held her hand and told her that he had loved her since they were children. She hadn’t known what to say and had started avoiding him.

Ten years later, a kiss at dawn on Berria beach had made her head spin and her heart thump. ‘So this is it’ she had thought to herself as her third cousin’s hair whipped around them in the breeze, her bangles making gentle chinking sounds, as she wrapped her arms around Manuela tightly. The sea had whispered in one ear, while Raimunda whispered in the other. ‘I’ll leave him, I will, I’ll leave him, I promise’.

On the strength of that whisper, Manuela had endured the anchovies, endured the fools at work and endured the pain of always coming second for the last two years.

‘Anchoas y agonia’ she whispered to herself, and laughed softly. All this 'for a woman'! That most hated of phrases in her family. Good God, they would be up in arms. But by that time she and Raimunda would be miles away and heading to Sitges. They could deal with the tourists and the travellers, deal with being the outcasts of the family, deal with anything, as long as they were finally together. She glanced at her watch. Any moment now. She waited, watching the clearing, imagining Raimunda picking her way through the trees, eyes down, hair across her face, bangles rattling.

An hour passed, then two, then three. It got dark and the strange sounds started to frighten her. No longer did the mountain murmur its mysteries to her. Instead, it mocked her but still she waited. She smoked cigarettes and hummed to herself, making excuses. She took a can of anchovies from her bag and ate them slowly. But deep in her heart she knew.

When she arrived back at her apartment, Ramon was asleep on the couch, beer can clutched in one hand and a rivulet of dribble slowly making its way down his second chin and onto his chest. She threw her keys onto the table and dropped her bag onto the floor. The noise woke him.

‘Hey Manuela’, he said to her back as she walked into the kitchen, ‘cousin Raimunda stopped by earlier. She left something for you. A letter I think…it’s in the kitchen. Pass me another beer, would you?’

She opened the fridge door and removed two chilled bottles, her fingers leaving clear oval-shapes on the frosty green glass. The blank envelope sat on the table. She walked back through and passed a beer to Ramon, who took it without a word, his eyes fixed on the TV. She imagined Raimunda’s sprawling scrawl on the letter back in the kitchen. She imagined the lines, the words, the phrases – 'he loves me', 'not yet', 'I can't', 'the family', 'for a woman'.

An hour later, when she sat on her bed and placed another empty bottle on the floor, her hand trembled as she ripped the envelope open. In the centre of the crisp, unlined page was simply one word.

‘Sorry.’