by Beat Sterchi
—He’s just here for Spreussiger anyway, the randy sod, said Hofer.
—Well, if it’s that, let him at least screw her good and proper. Hügli gathered the cards together. So she leaves the rest of us in peace.
Rötlisberger laughed. See what you’ve done now? Hey, Aschi... God Almighty, Ambrosio! What’s up with you?
—Here, Gilgen, flowers! Ambrosio stood in the doorway with a bunch of gladioli.
—Him too. And what do you want? asked Buri.
Ambrosio had stripped off his blood-drenched clothes in the changing room. The sodden material had stuck to his arms and legs. He had stood under the shower for a long time, sniffing at himself, and cursing the sweet bloodsmell. Then, without getting annoyed about the placement of the mirror, which was far too high for him, he had combed his strands of hair. And he had emptied out his locker. Number 164, going, going. He had torn up his card and watched the pieces flutter to the ground. His rubber boots would be going to Piccolo, everyone else would get a knife each.
Ambrosio had stood in front of the dustbin. He had taken a deep breath and smelled the blood on his work clothes: fresh blood, dried blood, decomposed blood. And only then had he thrown his clothes away.
He had gone out into the main passage of the abattoir, for the first time without lifting his head to look at the clock, and after a trial period, notice during the first year of employment is two weeks. It must be given at the latest on Saturday for the Saturday but one following, and should take the form of a registered letter, and then for the last time he had got up on tiptoe and posted his card once and for all into the clocking-in machine at the entrance of the slaughterhouse, and then he had gone on to the kiosk, the kiosk at the main gate of the armaments factory. Big Gilgen had told him to buy flowers. Lots of fresh flowers, he had said, don’t forget the flowers, Ambrosio! and for certain overriding reasons, both employee and employer may terminate their contract with immediate effect, and now the little Spaniard stood in the canteen doorway, and saw tin bottles, the glasses, the landlady, the smoke and all the faces. He saw the way they were looking at him, some in disbelief, others in outrage, and once more the thought crossed his mind that they must have colossal quantities of snow under their skin. Un montón de nieve. But the little fellow had stopped playing the foreign worker! How about a little respect? Why is he standing there like that? A bit of chat, some incomprehensible witticism, OK, but this dumb insolence! What’s wrong, what’s the matter, what do you want? Did he know it wasn’t quite the thing for Italians just to wander off in the middle of slaughtering, until now things had been run in a fairly orderly way, so it was appropriate to say something now, and what the hell was he up to, what was he thinking of, what was he playing at, and what if everyone, and what if the regular butchers among them didn’t, and then he popped up in the bar in his Sunday clothes just as if nothing had happened, flaming cheek, yes, that’s right, cheeky little bugger, and it wasn’t as though he was the only one who something had ever happened to, accidents did happen, and worse ones than just his finger too, and he should stop playing the innocent, and really he was just laughing at them the whole time because it was them who were doing the brunt of the work, and Ambrosio’s head tilted further and further over to the side. So many serious words, so many mouths moving at once, and all on his account, and the whole thing somehow underlined by the screaming of the pigs, but he handed Gilgen the flowers, bracing the yellow petals with one hand, and he moved up a chair and sat down where no Italian, no Spaniard, no Turk and no Yugoslav had ever sat before: Ambrosio sat down at a table in the slaughterhouse canteen, and for certain overriding reasons, both employee and employer may terminate their contract at any time. Overriding reasons are taken to refer to circumstances in which either party, for reasons of morality, or otherwise in good faith, finds the continuation of their relationship impossible, and Ambrosio rubbed his hands, ordered a beer, birra, cerveza, and said not a word besides.
—Until now, you’ve always drunk your Chianti in the changing room. Intestine-man Hans-Peter Buri choked and coughed. Why do you have to come in here, and inflict your Italian on us in the only place we’ve got left?
—Anyone would think the Spaniard had done something to offend you personally.
—You stay out of it, Fritz! You especially! You’re off your head anyway. Whose job is it they’re taking now, eh? Whose? It’s yours, not mine!
—Well, Christ, what’s that to do with Ambrosio?
—And what if all the foreigners show up here? Pretty Boy Hügli had stood up. If you can’t play a quiet game of cards in here, because they’re monkeying around, the way they do in the changing room now, then where are you going to go then?
—Then it’ll be too late! Buri too got up. Then we’ll have been had again! And Hofer said:
—Quite right!
Huber too pushed his chair back, agreed with Hofer, waved his wallet at Frau Bangerter, and said, as he put the coins on the table, that Ambrosio was just running away from hard work, and that was the doing of those two gentlemen, their influence. Left to himself, he hadn’t been a bad lot.
But they would see, said Hofer, it wasn’t all over yet by any means.
*
One o’clock.
Drops of rain on the glass roof.
On with the show.
We start in the killing bay.
Piccolo, Luigi, Fernando, Pasquale, Eusebio and me.
In the pig-killing bay.
Get rid of those bloody ciggies!
Krummen.
Sí, sí. Bene, bene!
The killing bay is at the back of the pig slaughterhall. It looks like a stage covered with tiles. A white, walled-in platform. When it’s clean and empty, it looks harmless enough. Menacing in its sterility. There’s something about it, this bay.
—Get the first lot in!
They’re screaming. The other side of the sliding door.
There are drains all over the floor. I’m standing on the middle of a huge kerbstone. If you turn on the tap, the pigs will start to flow.
This is where the slaughtering line begins. On the left is the scalding-tub, behind that the dehairing machine. Then chutes of iron tubing. Work surfaces. Hydraulic hanging gear. The empty spreaders like great coathangers on the overhead rail.
Krummen prowls.
Luigi and Pasquale and Piccolo are in the first waiting pen.
High-pitched squealing, interspersed with grunts.
Where are the rest of them? Huber? Hofer? Hügli? Buri? Überländer?
The sliding door opens.
The first of the pigs.
They stop, sniffing. They are a refined country breed, with long ears above their eyes. Their pink snouts tremble over the ground. Examining every square millimetre.
They don’t like it.
Too late.
Others are coming after.
The shouts of the drovers: hey hup! Yahfucka sow! Porca miseria!
Piccolo and Pasquale are armed with lengths of rubber hose, Luigi with an electric goad. It’s a kind of staff, like a battery torch, with two electrodes at the end. On contact, the pig gets a slight shock, squeals, and jumps in the air. With any luck, in the direction you want it to go in.
Pasquale! Pasquale! Attenzione!
The herd is trying to do a U-turn.
Porca miseria! Pasquale lashes out. With rubber boots and rubber hosepipe. They leave red streaks.
Hans Locher is the man responsible for knocking them out. He’s a company man. Supervisor. He stands waiting in a corner of the killing bay, checks his firearm, and picks shells out of a box. Little copper cartridges that he slips into his right trouser pocket.
We catch the pigs.
By the hindlegs.
Cemented into the walls of the killing bay, at 3-metre intervals, about half a metre off the floor, are a set of hooks.
A rope round the ham, the iron ring at the other end onto the nearest hook, and you’ve tied your hog.
You rar
ely succeed first time round.
The trick is to loop the rope just in front of the pig’s hooves, get it to take another step, and then not to let go.
If there’s no hook to hand, we have to drag the struggling creatures across the floor. For metres. And they fight for their lives. You hurt your hands.
Luigi is the expert here.
He can lay two loops at once, and catch a pig with each hand. They set off in opposite directions. Luigi stands in the middle and laughs.
Or he plays the torero.
Hey! Hey!
Locher yells at Fernando, who’s lamming into a screaming pig with his rubber piping.
Not like that! Maybe they do that where you come from. These sows here, you just catch. I’ll silence them. And no kicking. Got it?
Alwess you gomplain!
And suddenly I’m in the middle of it.
Yah, get those sows on the hooks!
I’m a stoker on the ship of Death. Only, instead of coals, I lug struggling pigs.
Krummen’s standing by the scalding-tub, checking the temperature of the water. He looks up: What about the frigging butchers? Where’ve they got to?
He holds the thermometer in his left hand, his right is digging into his trousers.
Someone’s to go to the canteen.
If the gentlemen require personal invitations.
And get Hugentobler out of the chilling-room!
The tied pigs are all higgledy-piggledy. They try to pull free. Hindlegs kick air like machine parts, tighten the ropes around the trotters.
The smell!
Grunting and shrieking, in all kinds of different pitches. Those animals that are trapped underneath others sound weak and miserable. Hoarse. Slobber froths over their jaws. Many of them piss and shit over each other and themselves.
I’m on the trail of the last pig.
It dodges the noose, runs off, at a canter, drops back into its wobbly trot. Turns its fat, low-slung rump to me.
Sometimes pigs walk like prostitutes: High-heeled, dainty footed, hip-swinging.
Missed again.
Bastard.
I can see the pigskin through the bristles. Dry, light pink, floury.
I give it one with the rope across its back.
The pig’s got a damaged ear. Docked, as a distinguishing mark.
A pig that escapes castration by not dropping them both into its scrotum gets given a mark in the cartilage of its ear. Its flesh can stink, can be as inedible as a ram’s.
The last pig’s been tied.
Now here comes Locher.
He clears a way through the grunting pigs’ heads, and gets into position to shoot. He stands in the middle of a bunch of them radiating out from a hook.
Squealing.
Those screaming snouts between stretched-out trotters.
Locher puts the muzzle down on its neck, and the pig flattens itself to the ground, then Locher climbs the ridge of fat behind its ears, his hand is steady, the steel moves on the flat skull, carries on, to just above the eyes, there Locher adjusts the angle, and the black bolt-hole is bang in the middle of the head. Alas, poor pig!
Who will remember it with affection and gratitude?
The funeral will not take place. Not even family and a few close friends.
I’m coming.
I pull my apron back, and put a basin down beside the throat of the keeled-over pig to collect its blood.
It’s stiff.
My left knee is on the pig’s neck, with my right boot I block its snout, with my left hand I pull its upper foreleg back.
I stick it.
I push the knife in flat, aim it towards the tail, and give the point a quick turn.
The blood spurts up in a red arc.
The pig is held as in a vice.
I am the vice.
I move the vessel to catch the blood. The flow will let up after fifteen seconds.
Locher has carried on shooting. I move on to the next sow.
The others have been busy too. Little red fountains bubble up out of the pigs.
And Krummen’s shouting again.
I kneel on my third pig.
What’s going on in the canteen?
After just three, four pigs we are covered in blood.
The air is red.
*
—That’s just it. Pretty Boy Hügli interrupted Huber and Hofer in the little canteen. Ever since that Tyrolean began swaggering around as if the whole slaughterhouse belonged to him, ever since then there’s been a devil of a mess here. Just look at him! Half drunk at this time of day. But big as you are, said Hügli, getting up on tiptoe, big as you are, you’ll be out on your ear!
—I’m not drunk.
—Tell that to Hugentobler, not me.
—Je ne suis pas soûl.
—Why talk like a drunk then?
—J’ai dit que je ne suis pas soûl. Gilgen spoke quietly. And as for being thrown out of here, Hügli, I tell you something else will happen before that.
Huber pushed Hügli away from Gilgen, and the employee is under contractual obligation to observe scrupulously the prescribed working hours, and the big bodies of the butchers bulked in the doorway, the higher pitched squealing of the pigs indicated that work had begun in the killing bay.
—We ought to, said Fritz Überländer. Go on Gilgen, Ambrosio, get changed. Come on! For Chrissake! What are you shaking your heads for? Then at least you come, Fritz, don’t you start too!
—Give Krummen my regards, replied Rötlisberger and swivelled right round on his stool, smoking. Huber and Hofer, Hügli and Buri were still all standing in the doorway. Well off you go then! Chop chop! Or are you planning on spending the night there? Knocking Ambrosio’s one thing.
—I’ve just about had enough of you, you old fool. Pretty Boy Hügli took a step back inside the canteen, and called Rötlisberger a stupid, ancient, veal calf. A calf that thought itself smarter than a cow. What a sheep’s prong! In fact, the old triper was as thick as a bull’s pizzle. The biggest pizzle in the world, said Hügli, and Buri wheezed, joined in, he was a right fool, and why wasn’t he glad to be able to work at the new machine, what was he being so pig-headed about? He didn’t have any right to talk such tripe. And where had he been yesterday when they were dunking the student in the blood-tank? Buri asked old Rötlisberger. Eh, where? Why, he’d been hiding behind a salt barrel, giggling like a little girl. That was Rötlisberger for you. A two-faced bastard. Exactly! said Hofer, there was Bössiger already running down the passage towards them, and old pork-belly here was still shouting: grab his willy. And now that little idiot of a student had been seen around again, and apparently he was taking photographs.
—Well, now all the scum’s risen to the surface, hasn’t it? Rötlisberger laid his BRISSAGO in the ashtray, hooked his thumbs in the bib of his apron, and spat at Hügli’s feet. Why, your face is still green, you slime-shitter! Rötlisberger stood up, Hügli retreated. Have you any idea how long I’ve been working here for? That should give a man the right to open his mouth, eh? Now get out of here. Huber and Hofer withdrew, Hügli and Buri followed.
—You’re yellow, and you’re green, like double-slimed pig’s guts! Rötlisberger shouted after them. Take a look at your snot-rags some time. You think that’s just your snot in them. Well, I can tell you the last of your calves’ brains have just been blown out between your fingers! Yeah, God! Snot-brains! And you’ve got terminal hair loss. Who was it held your potato heads with pincers and boiled them in nitric acid? Eh? Any calf’s head’s got more jelly between its ears than you have between the lot of you! Stupid jackasses! While Rötlisberger roared after them, he stood stiffly upright in his wooden clogs, rowing in the air with his arms, as though he had trouble keeping his balance.
—Gah! Go crawl back up his arse, you stacked-up lymph nodes! What do you know about breeding animals, you bunch of mercenaries! You wipe your pustular spleen-tongues round your dribble-noses, and you imagine you’ve spoken! You couldn’t stand
as godfathers to an erysipeletic pig, in fact you’d better look out in case they take you for pigs, so watch out for the man with the gun-gun! But then again you’re so stuffed with cotton wool anyway, they could smash you on the head with a forehammer, and you wouldn’t blink! But you just wait, he slaughters best who slaughters last!
Shaking their heads, and stabbing at their temples with their fingers, the men had tied on their aprons. They joined the bloody welter of the killing bay late.
Rötlisberger giggled. He tucked his head in, swung a fist to and fro in front of his body, stamped a clog on the floor, and sloshed back through a puddle.
—There, that’s settled their hash! That did me good, he said, as he sat down on his chair in the canteen. But what’s with you two?
Gilgen was bending over a bag on the floor between his feet, a red-and-green-checked sports bag. Ambrosio was blowing smoke rings.
—Did I say an untruth? asked Rötlisberger. I had enough. And now I feel like a beer.
Ernest Gilgen sat up, looked at the old triper, took the wrapped flowers off the table, sniffed them and said:
—Tell me, Fritz. Are there any goods left?
—Anything left in the pens? Yes, they unloaded an emergency. Why?
—What is it?
—A cow, said Rötlisberger. What else would it be?
—What kind? A Simmental?
—No, it’s a little black thing of an Eringer. But what the devil’s going on now?
—An Eringer in the pen! Gilgen had leaped to his feet. Fritz! An Eringer! That’s just what we need! Nom de Dieu! We’ll drink to her! What was it you said out there a moment ago? He slaughters best who slaughters last.
*
On your workplaces, get set, go!
Krummen strode along the slaughter line, and circled the newly installed intestine-washing machine. His rubber apron smacked against his boots. He looked at the waiting containers, and kicked at the empty trough.
—I want pigs hanging here! Why aren’t there any pigs up yet? Those bastards! I’ll show them! We start at one o’clock here, sharp! This isn’t fucking Butlin’s! We’re butchers! Krummen went to the back of the scraping machine. The first pig carcass was turning in its drum. Krummen pushed the speed setting to maximum. You gentlemen seem to think this here is a drinking club! The machine’s roar intensified, and inside, the pig’s feet drummed against the metal walls as it was hurled around, and the men straightened up, listened, scratched their necks. Buri and Überländer exchanged looks, Pretty Boy Hügli squinted at Krummen, said nothing, but his nostrils trembled and dilated, as though to smell their fill of gunpowder, because pigs are stunned by: the ‘poleaxe’ or ‘knocking-hammer’, the ‘bolt-axe’ (an axe with a gouge-fitted bolt), the ‘slaughter mask’ (also with bolt), the ‘captive bolt-gun’ in which a bolt is fired into the brain by a small quantity of explosive, and the ‘electric clamp’ which quickly knocks any animal unconscious by means of an electric charge to the temple, and only Pasquale, Eusebio and the apprentice were left in the killing bay. Holding onto ropes and knives, they stood in a blood bath. Time and again they were vigorously baptized red, till they looked like Roman legionnaires standing in the pit of a taurobolium, where once men refreshed themselves with the blood of a bull killed and stuck in seven places on a metal grating over their pit, but Eusebio and Pasquale and the apprentice could draw little strength from the pigs’ blood which stuck and crusted on their fingers, itched on their faces, and ‘Zap’ high-pressure cleaner: the logical way to achieve the outstanding sanitary standards demanded in today’s meat trade. Utensils, tables, walls and floors are speedily and effortlessly cleansed of all traces of fat, flesh and blood. In the case of especially unyielding deposits of dirt tucked away in corners, we recommend highly effective ‘Zap’ cleaning agent, and the first scalded pigs were about to arrive at the bottom. Thereafter, at intervals of forty-five seconds.