by Beat Sterchi
Behind the scraping machine, Huber and Hofer straightened their aprons. They had buckled on their sheaths, wearing the belts on their hips. Hofer spread and clenched his fingers, bit his lip. Huber too was doing finger exercises.
The first bald pig dropped onto the metal frame next to the scraper.
—Here we go, said Huber, and both set to. They gripped the pig’s wet legs. With their longest blades they passed over the skin, shaving off any remaining bristles, then, changing the angle of their knives, Huber cut slits in the leg between bone and tendon by which to hang the pig, while Hofer cut through the cheek meat.
Piccolo was waiting.
—Una testa, subito una testa! he yelled.
Hofer slipped his blade along the occipital bone, felt the weak spot in the neck, and nicked the tendon there, pushed away with his left hand, and suddenly the whole of the head tipped back showing a gaping wound behind the ears. Hofer didn’t turn round. He let the pig’s head fall to the floor.
—La prima testa, porco Dio! Piccolo picked it up by the ears and, holding it high above his head, he jigged from foot to foot. Una testa! he cheered. Water, blood and spittle dribbled onto his shoulders and hair. Una testa!
Then Piccolo took up his knife. He worked on a chopping block. His blades were short and sharp. He set the pig’s head down in front of him, with the trunk-like snout facing him. First he stuck out the left eye, then the right, he removed the brows, then cut away the left and right ears: that was it, the first of three hundred heads.
In the meantime, Huber had pushed the body onto the cradle of the hydraulic hanging equipment, and hooked it onto a hoist. Piccolo hung the skull by the lower jaw on the hoist and sent the whole thing on to Hügli.
Pretty Boy Hügli whetted his knife and made an incision from between the hindlegs down to the sternum. He removed the rod and foreskin; a bluey-white serpent on the granite floor.
Hügli had to be careful not to prick the bladder or the intestines. Meat and bacon were not to become contaminated. He cut apprehensively, delicately, feeling for resistance. He wanted to work. His left arm disappeared up to the shoulder into the pig’s belly, and came out with a load of steaming entrails which he clasped to his belly and then dropped into a waiting trough.
Soon the second pig was dangling upside down from a hoist. Pig after pig rolled up, at a pitiless pace, and while right from the start they had to get stuck in as never before, the butchers still managed a quick look left and right, each reading the gestures of the others. Hügli studied the expressions of Huber and Hofer, and Huber didn’t need to understand the words Luigi’s lips were forming, to know that there was someone else cursing the hectic work rate.
And Hugentobler! Without even giving him a couple of minutes to get changed, Krummen had pulled him straight out of the cooler-room and given him a position on the line. Standing behind Hügli in his three pairs of long johns and all his arctic clothing, he was sweating as though he himself was being scalded alive.
Hugentobler had to take the lungs, liver and heart out of the pigs’ chests.
The butchers barely had time to sharpen dulling blades on a whetstone. Their faces smeared and sweated, but today none of them was fighting his own battle, they were together converting these pigs, which were pressing into the killing bay at the top in fantail packs, but down at the bottom were in an orderly sequence rolling along the overhead track from station to station in Indian file, and it took capitalism decades to train a compliant workforce. Even between the wars there was a factory slogan which ran: ‘Whoever works and doesn’t shirk must be berserk.’ The turning point probably came with the beginning of consensus politics in 1937, which pushed socialism and the trade unions into taking an affirmative view of wage labour. Factory discipline increasingly became subsumed into the workforce’s own perception of itself, and today it exists in the form of completely internalized self-discipline, as ‘the work ethic’, and keeping his eyes on the pelvic bone of the first gutted pig, Überländer spat on his hands, picked up the cleaver and let it whistle through the air once or twice for practice. He felt his shoulder muscles under his butcher’s shirt whose rolled-up sleeves cleared the humps of his biceps. No hold-up would occur on his part of the line! Überländer wound himself up for the first swing of the axe.
The tempo of the slaughter line could not be sustained with this level of undermanning. If one man didn’t finish his task on time, the one behind had to do extra, and then risked falling behind in turn.
It was Hugentobler who fared the worst. Hügli watched as the freezer-room worker fell further and further behind. He was three pigs in arrears. His sweaty face had a sickly gleam, like white-glossed wood. He’s about to croak, thought Pretty Boy Hügli, and hissed:
—For Christ’s sake say something! Get Krummen to help you! Or at least he can slow the fucking scraper down!
Hugentobler didn’t say a word, and Foreman Krummen went on his rounds, kept an eye on the machines, made sure that the carcasses that rolled onto Kilchenmann’s weighing machine at the hall entrance were all in impeccable condition. Here there was a hair left on a ham, there a drop too much blood on the inside of the ribs, and on one pig, not all of the bone marrow had been scraped out of the split backbone.
—And shave them! Eh! Tidy up a bit there! And you Luigi! Niente dormire! Lavare bene, or else there’ll be trouble! E poi niente dimenticare the marrow!
Krummen noticed that Pretty Boy Hügli had already half filled one of the wheeled troughs with entrails. Suddenly very calm, he stood in front of the new intestine-washing machine, rested his hands on his hips, and gazed at the switchboard, the hose connections for water and pressurized air. He looked at every single dial, lever and tap. He stared at the pediment and the chrome-steel veneer, and, as if to wipe away a speck of dust, he brushed his palm over the aluminium table at the front of the machine that served as a work surface. He pulled a lever and pressed a button. The motor hummed, wheels and rollers began to turn, as in a printing-press. Krummen pulled another lever. Water sprayed against the casing from inside and splashed out from underneath. Krummen got down, put his head in the drizzle, and looked up inside the machine. Then he got up, looked around, and, catching sight of Buri over by a water trough, he shouted:
—Buri, come here! You can treat the guts later. I want you to start to get the hang of this machine! I’ll show you how it works. Bring that entrail trough over here!
*
Buri, Hans-Peter, casings specialist, born on 30 October 1909 in a mortar-grey tenement on the edge of the beautiful city. First of seven children. Father, shift-worker in the city gasworks. Occasional hardship. Mother (tubercular) collects firewood, grows cabbages and potatoes on a rented plot.
The bread bin is often empty. Early on, little Hans-Peter suffers from the thought that bread is something that isn’t available in unlimited quantities. (When he ate bread, he ate it quickly, gulping it down, gripping the crust with both hands, and afterwards resting his left hand on his stomach.)
It’s the time of the first automobiles, the time of long dresses.
He is a quiet, chubby, sturdy fellow. Little interest in playing. Throws wooden toys out of the window. He slits open the belly of a teddy with the bread knife and picks out the stuffing. He might make a doctor, says his father, who punishes him for performing the stomach surgery. Or a butcher! What kind of boy would slaughter his teddy? says his mother, stooping to pick up the bread knife.
At school he has trouble with authority figures. Violent teachers: one foams at the mouth when he uses a stick.
Also fear of the janitor, the school doctor, the louse lady. On his way to school, Hans-Peter throws stones at cats. Then his first toy: a catapult.
The resources of the Buri family are stretched by the mother’s illness, they owe for the rent. Master-Butcher Affolter, owner of the tenement, accepts errand-boy and other work from the oldest child (Hans-Peter, ten) in lieu. The boy gets up with his father. Sleep and school suffer.
On Saturdays and holidays, Hans-Peter works for Affolter. The butcher’s journeymen often put a knife in his hand. Hans-Peter picks things up quickly, keeps his eyes and ears open. The journeymen speak coarsely about love, reverently about the greatest meat-packing plants in the world. The corned-beef mills in Chicago, they’re all whorish big places!
Why does little Peterli talk like that? complains mother. Father hits him. Hans-Peter hits back, is unrepentant: that’s just a whorish pile of shit! He is bigger and stronger than everyone else in his class.
When he finishes, all are agreed: Hans-Peter should stay with Affolter and serve his apprenticeship there. It’s a good place for him, says the teacher. He’ll get his board and lodging, say his parents. He can do quite a bit already, thinks the master-butcher.
Buri shows off his muscles, and gets his teeth into the work. He apes the journeymen. Coarse is good, and so is loud and stubborn.
In his apprenticeship, Hans-Peter is mostly called upon to clean and do bicycle deliveries. The more he enjoys it when he gets a chance to hold a knife or a cleaver. He boasts, makes a bet. He says he can split a pig with seven blows. The best butchers need twelve to fifteen. Buri loses and can’t pay up. He agrees to leave the small window over the shop door open. At night, his friends use a walking-stick to hook up several sides of bacon from Affolter’s rack.
The resulting investigation is inconclusive. But an unspoken suspicion rests on Buri. He is called upon to work still harder, and he gets his teeth into that still more rabidly. That apprentice does the work of two men, say many. And Hans-Peter Buri becomes a mighty colossus of a man, given to kicking, spitting on the street and swearing: when he looks up from work, everything’s a pile of whores’ shit. The sausage-kitchen, the attic at Affolter’s, the flat in the tenement, they’re all whorish tight and whorish small. Something is decaying inside him. He could smash half the world in pieces. Already he’s splitting hogs better, faster, in fewer strokes, than the very best. He’s ambitious. What to do with it?
At the end of his apprenticeship, he is advised to specialize. Train to become a sausage-maker! – Bah, what’s that! – It’s difficult. – Use as little as possible of the good stuff, and as much as possible of the cheap rubbish you’ve got in stock, then add a bathful of water. – That might make you a good sausage-maker, but they’re bad sausages. – Then you add spices, and colour and smoke and polish them up afterwards with an oily rag. That’s a pile of whores’ shit! Stuff sausage-making! Buri dreams of Chicago.
At cadet school, he gets wind of a government programme to encourage emigration to Canada. And several of them are agreed: Everything here’s just a pile of whores’ shit!
Buri has his work clothes, wooden-soled boots, knives and tools soldered into an oil barrel, and rolls it from the station at Calais onto the emigration vessel Klondike on 11 May 1929.
When the anchors are raised, Buri is standing up on the promenade deck, with the expression of a man going to the butchers’ Olympics.
In return for the money for the crossing, Buri has to undertake to work for two years on the railways in the west of Canada. There he chops down trees, piles up ballast, lays track, and swings the pointed sledgehammer. What he likes best is working with an axe. It reminds him of a meat-cleaver, and of his own profession. He learns a few tricks from the lumberjacks.
He experiences the brunt of the Canadian winter, and the scourge of insects in the summer. But he likes the raw human climate, the roughness and directness of the people. He likes sitting in bars where women aren’t allowed. Here, when he smashes his fist down on the table, people don’t point at him and whisper: He’s a butcher, a rough meat-hacker who doesn’t know any better.
He spits as frequently and as forthrightly as his workmates.
The men work from sunup to sundown. Mounted foremen shout commands. Drivers keep the work rate high. When Buri lies down on his cot at night, in his tent, he only bothers to pull his boots off. And there’s talk about the ‘old country’. What it was you did before you came. Yes, says Buri, as a butcher, you always had a piece of bread and a sausage in your hand.
But here they don’t eat sausage. Meat is left in its original form, raw and red, with bones and tendons, and great slabs of it lie on Buri’s tin plate on the canteen table. Meat and bread. The men work, eat and drink, they have neither time nor energy for anything else. At twenty-one, Buri is a giant. He likes the way that on the official forms, straight after your surname, they ask for your height and weight. They worked it out for him in the new units at the Consulate. Buri writes: 6 feet 3 inches, 207 pounds.
The two-year spell on the railways comes to an end. Buri works for a German-born butcher in Winnipeg. Contact with Poles, Ukrainians, Irish. All speak of Chicago. The slaughterhouse in Winnipeg, one of the world’s biggest, has nothing to compare with the ‘stockyards’, the abattoirs of Chicago, where half the world’s lard is produced.
Buri joins the subsidiary of an American meat-packing company. He learns to walk tall, he enters beer-joints with inflated lungs. He is as strong as an ox. He spits at people’s feet in the streets.
To entertain the immigrants, unemployed lumberjacks stage tree-felling contests. Buri joins in. He swings his axe, hears the polyglot murmurs of admiration, hears the applause.
And Chicago beckons.
Buri hears that the big firms are hiring strike-breakers. Well, if they don’t want to work! He travels to Chicago on a freight train. SWIFT & CO. give him a job as a ‘knocker and sticker’. All day, he hits oxen on the head, and jabs a knife in their throats. Buri works to save his life, earns little, casts sidelong glances at the ‘splitters’, who work with cleavers and earn the most money.
Some of the strike-breakers are Negroes. Freddie Lewis, the slaughterman, and his brother the trimmer, are the first blacks in the red trade of Chicago. Gangsters are hired. Former distillers and smugglers left high and dry by the end of Prohibition. The men work in felt hats, under ceilings that drip blood, with a barrel of water in the corner and a stoup. Buri puts the inadequate sanitation down to a more generous way of thinking. In the changing rooms, the men find mice in their clothes. Buri is entitled to a holiday. One week every five years.
In 1932, Buri is one of 27,869 employees working for twenty-four companies at the corner of Ashland Avenue and Madison Street, near the Bull’s Head Market, the meat-centre of the world. Buri is proud. That you must see. For Buri the sea of oxen roaring in wooden pens behind the slaughterhouse is a guarantee of a job for life.
In the slaughtering and dressing of an ox, 157 men perform 78 precisely defined operations. The extreme division of labour makes the staggering productivity rate possible. 1050 head of cattle in a ten-hour day.
Sickness and accidents are grounds for dismissal.
Machines are brought in. An acquaintance of Buri’s, an Austrian named Karl Theny, works on one of the first skinning machines, cutting the rinds off hams. One day his own skin winds up under the knife. Hooks on a turning roller catch his thumb as well as pigskin, and skin his arm past the elbow.
Buri slowly moves up through the wage scales. There are thirty-four in all. Right at the top are the ‘splitters’.
An alert observer might visit Chicago and not realize that there were gigantic slaughterhouses there. Only when the wind is in a certain quarter does the smell carry into the residential areas, the business streets. The smell is of rancid fat, carrion, and dung, and when it’s there, it’s everywhere.
Bread is piled high in the shop windows of Chicago. Everything is piled high, in windows, on shelves, in the cooler-rooms at SWIFT & CO. But the people in the street look pale. Queues of unemployed, striking, sacked men and women stand outside locked factory gates.
At first Buri hires a filthy mattress in a dormitory, later he sublets a tiny room. His best shirt disappears off the clothesline, bottles of milk vanish from the doorstep. Buri cooks for himself to save money. He opens tins, and puts them on his small stove. He cooks in the tin, eats
out of the tin. Sometimes Buri goes to the horse-races. There are the funnies in the paper. He can’t understand baseball. Why isn’t there any action? Chasing after a ball!
One Monday morning he ties on a heavy apron of ox-leather, and picks up a cleaver. He’s made it. Buri is a ‘splitter’. When he walks into the changing room, people make way for him. His position commands respect.