by Beat Sterchi
*
Twelve twenty-five.
And out again, through the driving passages.
A rat and its terrain.
I’ve got itchy feet.
I feel like kicking something. A football. A hundred thousand times. Till my leg drops off. Or punching a sack of salt down in the storeroom, blindly, with both fists. Or half a cow in the chilling-room.
Fucking abattoir.
Now my hands and forearms are dry. I can feel them in my trouser pockets.
A train on the tracks.
Expresses. Intercities. And always passengers who haven’t sat down yet, or who have already got to their feet. The trains are long. Longer than the pens, the tripery, the ramp and the weighing house put together.
I wasn’t hungry again.
Didn’t feel like lying down either.
I couldn’t have slept properly anyway. But it still does me good, shutting my eyes, taking the strain off my back. On the wooden slatted floor in front of the lockers in the changing room.
Not today.
In the changing room Luigi, Piccolo and Fernando will be rapping their cards down on the bench now. Without Ambrosio. They laugh and shout over their lunchtime card games. Sometimes they quarrel, then they look upset.
At the rear of the abattoir, where small livestock come in, the pigs are huddled together, grunting and squealing. They’re pushing against the bars.
Just you wait.
At least they’re squealing.
Here, it’s only the animals you hear. And the rattling and humming of machines, the shots, the trains. You never hear the people.
Yes, you do in the break.
And at lunch, when the beer starts to flow.
Everyone gets their marrow tapped here.
Their most precious, innermost resources.
Till they all slink around, with their tails between their legs.
Who do you think you are?
Why even try and hold your head high?
Something special, ha!
Every bit of self-confidence is scraped away.
Systematically.
They throw us a nice bone now and again.
Arf – arf!
Blood!
Somebody went crazy here.
The outside wall of the cattle slaughterhall is covered with blood.
It’s a bull!
Someone has drawn the outline of an enormous bull. The legs galloping; the head lowered to charge; the horns like antlers. The furious bulge of the neck. The swinging balls.
I don’t believe my eyes.
There’ll be hell to pay for this.
On the lawn in front of the administration building is a sycamore. I lean against the roots, close my eyes, open them again.
The bull’s still there.
I shut my eyes again, and lay my head against the tree-trunk. I can see so many things that way. Whole heavens. I press the backs of my forefingers against my closed lids. Stars flare and fall. Squares, like a chessboard, whirling circles: There’s a kaleidoscope in me. If I push harder, it all turns red. Luminous figures. A reservoir of shapes.
The ground is wet.
On.
It’s a good bull.
Krummen mentioned something about an emergency slaughtering. Someone must have phoned.
Will it be another one for me?
Hey, lad!
There’s another sick cow in the pen outside. I’ll bring it in, and you can slaughter it.
And you can slaughter it.
Can I? May I?
Should I say thank you?
The honour. I am to slaughter the sick cow.
Such confidence they have in me.
Then again, no one else is allowed to go. They need everyone they can get for the pig slaughtering line in the afternoon.
I go past the pen. I don’t even want to see what’s in store for me. Big or small, horned or polled, black and white, red and white, brown, blue, black, green, half dead or otherwise, I don’t care.
So long as it isn’t another one of those half-gassed accident cows that they needed seven winches to tow out of their cesspit.
Why don’t the farmers cover over their shitholes, or at least keep a better watch over their animals.
I don’t want to see their stinking filth.
But you’ll do as you’re told.
Not much longer.
And you can slaughter it.
Yes, and I can slaughter it.
A scream. The scream of an animal in terror.
In the calf slaughterhall, old Rötlisberger is pulling a rabbit out of a cardboard box. He holds it by the scruff of its neck, hits it just in front of the ears with a sawn-off piece of broom handle, loops a noose round its rear feet, and hangs it up on the rack. The rabbit wriggles. It swings back and forth like the calves did before. Only harder.
Rötlisberger grins at me.
Yes, I’m a rabbit farmer.
In the box, a jumble of little bundles of fur: Belgian Giants, Pied and Black.
The sound of loud laughter comes from the canteen.
They’re drinking again.
Rötlisberger shakes his head.
Who?
Gilgen, Hugentobler – a whole bunch of them.
Is Gilgen back then?
And Ambrosio?
It must have been them who painted the bull on the wall.
On the outside wall of the great cattle hall, someone’s drawn the most enormous bull. In blood.
Really?
I saw it. It covered half the wall.
Well.
Rötlisberger shakes his head and smokes.
He’s in a bad mood.
Go up to people: Tell me about yourself! Tell me everything you know! I’d like to quiz Rötlisberger. Listen to him. Cow stories. Jokes.
Talking is hard.
The way those rabbits squeak!
Not for much longer.
I pull a black-and-white dappled one out of the box, and hold it out to Rötlisberger.
Hey! Not by the ears!
But you’re just about to...
Doesn’t matter. Not by the ears.
I pick up the rabbit by its scruff. It wriggles.
What shall I say?
Is there going to be roast rabbit at the Rötlisbergers’ tomorrow? Oh no. We don’t eat them all ourselves; I’m selling these to the Italians.
He’s a fast worker.
Some of them when he hits them relax their paws, others pull them in convulsively. The slit throats bleed. Feebly. They don’t overflow, the way pigs do. A dozen rabbits are hanging on the rack, wriggling.
Rötlisberger sharpens a knife.
There, now let’s pull the wool over their eyes.
Why do you leave a rabbit’s back paws on?
Why?
So you can tell it isn’t a cat. A cat’s got a different-shaped skull, less pointed, but when the head’s taken off, and you buy a bunny without paws, you’re buying a cat in a sack.
Now he’s grinning.
But surely not any more. Who slaughters cats nowadays?
Ha, if you knew. Be careful. His face is quite lopsided from talking with a BRISSAGO in his mouth.
You can hear the pigs the other side of the sliding door.
Ah, yes. If it weren’t for meat inspection, there would be some nasty goings-on. As there were in the War. How old are you now?
Eighteen.
You’re young. Cheer up! In the War, by God there were a few people around who couldn’t tell the difference between a rabbit and a cat. Or a calf and a dog.
I don’t believe it.
It’s true. Especially those big St Bernards, they were used in sausages a lot. You’ve got no idea how people used to tuck into dogs. Well, and in the War, even an old donkey on its last legs suddenly got turned into a little horse in the slaughterhouse.
The rabbits look cold without their fur.
How quickly their squeaking stopped. But the pigs, they’re still at it
.
If you ask me, there’s not that much wrong with it: meat is meat.
Yes, meat is meat.
And it doesn’t grow on trees, not yet anyway. While hunger, real hunger, nothing at all to eat, no bones, you know, nothing, absolutely nothing. That exists too, doesn’t it?
Suppose so.
Well. It’s true then.
Think of what dogs get to eat.
And cats.
Nothing but the best. Not just lungs any more. Liver. Nice cutlets. Lean mince.
Rötlisberger scrapes fat off the inside of a skin.
Yes, those bucks, they’re healthy. Plump. Get lots of parsley when they’re young. It’s good for them. Gives them strong bones. Vitamins.
He pulls the scraped skin over a hide-stretcher.
I think of the pig slaughter. What position will I be chosen for?
Everyone laughs at Rötlisberger. The way he sits on his VELOSOLEX in his leather jacket, his crash-helmet and his goggles. He needs protection. Wraps up against stone and asphalt.
They laugh at Hugentobler too.
Everyone laughs at everyone else.
Should I ask?
What is... Is it true that...? I mean... Is it true that...?
Rötlisberger stops. He looks up from his rabbits and looks at me.
I...
I can tell you, and who knows how long I’ll be staying here, but Buri talks a lot of baloney. If anyone listened to him, it might get quite ugly. Chicago this, Chicago that, at SWIFT & CO. we... He’s so much hot air.
Hasn’t he ever really been to America then?
Buri? And how! His left foot’s still there. Ha, you didn’t know that, did you? But that’s how it is. It was amputated. Exactly.
Buri?
A wooden leg.
So that’s why he limps.
No, he never talks about it. And he only changes when there’s no one else around. First in in the morning, last to go at night. Schnurri-Buri.
Rötlisberger slits the rabbits open.
Just think about it, God! He hates the foreigners. He used to be one.
They took everything off him in America. Everything.
Yes. I’ve seen a few go there. Like Buri. Before the oil crisis. Each of them a Columbus in his left foot, and another Rockefeller in his right.
Listen to me, lad. He missed once, when he was splitting oxen. Imagine: splitting oxen for days on end.
And the foot went.
And what did it teach him? Not this much. Not this much. Rötlisberger clenches his fist furiously.
Not this much.
The fool.
And now he brags. Prating on about SWIFT & CO.
There were a few others around, and they saw Chicago differently. Maybe it didn’t go to their heads quite so much. Progress, Christ! Progress! Straight into the jaws of death.
When our little association here used to be something like a trade union, there was this book. I remember it. It was green. Green as a cow’s stomach. It was called The Jungle. That told you what it was really like in Chicago. It was obscene. The biggest obscenity on earth. It wasn’t just oxen and swine that were slaughtered and broken up. The odd butcher finished up filling a can. Exactly.
Rötlisberger plucks the innards out of the rabbits’ bellies. Liver and heart are left in. He chucks the little grey-green sacs in the waste.
Buri’s got a wooden leg.
Time to start again soon.
His leg.
Just went.
Like Ambrosio’s finger?
Yes, it’s time to get back.
I wash my hands.
Rötlisberger sluices away the traces of his rabbit slaughter with a hose.
There, that’s that done. Maybe just time for a half at Rösi’s.
Rötlisberger dries his hands on his sacking apron.
Here, if you want a towel.
How did Buri take it?
Buri in Chicago.
And Ambrosio?
11
AFTER LIVESTOCK-DEALER SCHINDLER had taken him to the slaughterhouse behind the high fence at the edge of the beautiful city, how did Ambrosio’s engagement there proceed?
Smoothly and without complications. Bössiger inquired as to Ambrosio’s marital status, then said, yes, they preferred married men, because they worked harder, and would always agree to do overtime. Part-time Custom-butcher Überländer was paid an agency fee. The terms of the residence permit were quickly altered. Ah well, as it was the slaughterhouse, it would be possible to make an exception and turn a blind eye, said the official on the telephone.
What were Ambrosio’s first and enduring impressions of his new workplace?
The clattering of the bone-saws, the humming of the ventilators and coolers, the noise as a whole. Then the pervasive smell of blood. Also the posture of the workers as they went home at the end of the day, as bowed and stooped as if they had been on the losing side in a war.
Where was Ambrosio housed?
He and three colleagues shared a converted attic in an old tenement belonging to the company.
How was the tenement off for sanitary facilities?
They were inadequate. There was neither bath nor shower. Every Saturday, Ambrosio would go to the municipal swimming-baths for a thorough wash and scrub. He liked standing under the hot shower and letting the water patter down on his scalp. Soon he developed an insatiable urge to lather and scrub himself. To the amusement of his fellows, he was exceptionally painstaking in the way he styled his few wisps of hair, training them right across the top of his head with the help of pomade. The weekly visit to the baths became an indispensable ritual for him.
What were Ambrosio’s earnings like?
Compared to Coruña, very good. Other comparisons were at first not available to Ambrosio at all, and later not in sufficient measure.