by Julie Powell
Before each animal pen, crammed with a herd of cattle from a different seller, the man stops, beats the mallet twice against the railing, and begins rattling off numbers in Spanish: “Ocho cinco, ocho cinco, nueve? Nueve, nueve cinco? Nueve cinco. Diez? Diez?” Men are murmuring to him, raising their hands to catch his attention. Then the bidding fizzles out and the auctioneer hammers the mallet once more against the railing, calls, “Diez.” The guy with the legal pad makes a note, and everyone moves on to the next corral. The whole process takes about thirty seconds, which is good because there are untold cattle to sell. Once the highest bid has been accepted, the successful buyer gestures to one of his gauchos, who dips what looks like a branding iron into one of the buckets of white paint that are strapped to the railings of the stock pens below and commences to mark every animal in the lot that’s just been purchased. Then the cattle are herded out of the corral and off to some other part of the market to be put on trucks. There is a sudden racket of hooves on stone and shouts from the gauchos, which accentuates the relative quiet of the auction’s proceedings. Everything moves with brisk efficiency and solemnity. There’s no joking about, no extraneous conversation.
Most of the buyers are up on the catwalks, but a few prefer to move down among the cattle and gauchos. Santiago points out a handsome older man on a good-looking chestnut horse; he wears a beret and wool poncho and has glasses perched on his round nose and a cell phone hanging from his neck. “You see him?” he asks, speaking low so as not to interrupt the flow of bidding. “He is the buyer for Argentina’s oldest and largest grocery chain. He is like the mayor here. He sees something he likes, he make a call? His guy up here”—he pats the railing of the catwalk—“buys it for him.”
Because I don’t understand much of what’s being said in the course of the auction, my thoughts stray to the animals themselves. The cattle are… cute. Really cute. They look up at us with liquid eyes, blinking with lovable stupidity. For not the first time in my life, I vow that I’m going to one day buy myself a rescue cow and until the day it dies feed it carrots or whatever it is that cows like. But my sentimentality, here, makes me feel foolish.
The auction is over by ten a.m. “Now. The slaughterhouses close at four o’clock in the afternoon. There are maybe thirty? Maybe thirty slaughterhouses within fifty kilometers of here. All these animals here go there now, and by four thirty they are entirely all killed and cut.”
“Damn.” That’s ten thousand animals, trucked off, slaughtered, and processed in six hours. I myself could break down maybe six chuck shoulders in that length of time, and I would need some serious Darvocet afterward.
We leave the market and walk around the Mercado neighborhood. Broad dusty streets, factories, train tracks. Carnicerías with grimy linoleum floors and sour smells, selling cheap meat to poor people. Dump trucks drive by, their beds piled high with cleaned and trimmed bones. The sun is finally warming up the air. Santiago takes me to a salumería where he’s made an appointment for us.
The salumería is something else. Josh would lose it if he got to see this place, honestly. His twin loves of meat and of big, terrifying machinery would achieve a grand apotheosis, like looking into the face of God, that might actually drive him mad. Down long hallways, doors open onto room after room, dim and redolent of the tang of curing meat, ceilings twenty feet high, full of rows and rows of tall scaffolds from which hang thousands upon thousands of aging sausages. Prosciutto in another room, thousands of hog legs hanging. I watch men dressed in whites and hats like Oompa Loompas in Wonka’s Television Room filling pig’s bladders with finely ground pork for bologna, out of a stuffer ten feet high. Back in his cramped office overlooking the salumería floor, the owner feeds us eight varieties of sausage, taking slices off links with a pocketknife and laying them out on a crumpled paper bag.
By now it’s lunchtime. Santiago takes me to Parrilla de los Corrales, his favorite spot in the neighborhood. It is bustling with people. With Santiago guiding, we order two plates of beef ribs, grilled sweetbreads, a white bean salad, a bottle of wine, and two coffees. It costs about twenty-seven dollars for the both of us and is wonderful. The wine is decent, the food simple and good, the conversation a bit stilted because of the language thing, but. I find myself bringing out my American Dame act, but Santiago doesn’t seem to be as affected by it as I might like him to be. Oh, it’s probably for the best. She’s going to get me in trouble one day. I’ve only been in Argentina a week or so, and she already almost has. Thank God she’s so good at getting herself out of scrapes.
“Oh darn.” The American Dame does a mean Rosalind Russell.
The rotund, grizzled, and well-meaning Brazilian gentleman is drunker than she, by quite a lot. The American Dame can drink men twice her size under the table. He leans up against the doorframe to her charming Buenos Aires apartment, practically panting in his eagerness to get inside. He wants into her pants like a six-year-old wants the biggest teddy bear at the fairground.
The American Dame stops fiddling with her keys and turns on her most sparkling smile. “I just remembered. I was going to buy cigarettes. Do you know where to get them this time of night? Marlboro Lights?”
The American Dame flutters her eyelashes. The gentleman is too charmed to be put out by the implied request. “I will get you cigarettes. Marlboros.” He smiles expansively.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly ask you… well, thank you.” The American Dame rummages in her purse, pretending to look for pesos. “How much do I owe you?”
The gentleman holds up his hands. “Please, don’t insult. I am bringing cigarettes for you.”
“Thank you so much!” The American Dame twinkles, kissing a furry cheek. “I’ll see you in a bit, then!”
As he stumbles down the stairs, the American Dame unlocks her door and walks inside her cozy studio, kicks off her teetering heels, collapses on her belly onto one of her two single beds, and, most conveniently, passes out. Convenient because, while she sometimes enjoys making a spectacle of herself, letting a man old enough to be her father buy her a drink or an elegant dinner, walk her home and maybe cop a feel on the street in front of her apartment, she doesn’t always want to make good on rash promises.
The next morning there is a pack of Marlboro Lights and a matchbook resting on the windowsill outside her apartment door. The American Dame smiles a little sheepishly, opens the package, and lights up, blowing the smoke out her window as she listens to children screaming in Spanish, happily, endlessly, in the schoolyard below.
But the American Dame is clearly not going to get any action today, unless she literally pushes Santiago up against a wall and ravishes the poor man. Instead, he and I finish up our lunch with cups of coffee, and then head out to our last stop of the day, a processing center for a meat distributor called Fura. Here we stand against the wall of a tall, cold, white-tiled room where a dozen Argentine butchers break down an endless line of beef sides.
Butchers, it seems, are butchers everywhere. Everywhere the same smells, the same sights, the same logic, the same sorts of men. Of course these guys are part of a commercial operation, they move fast, they very rarely crack fart jokes—well, that I can understand, anyway. They’re always in motion. But there’s something about the way they smile at me—it’s not exactly welcoming but more a cheerful acceptance of the inconvenience of having me around. And there’s something about the way they look at me, or don’t look at me, something about the way they move their shoulders as they slice these carcasses into bits. I’d recognize them anywhere.
I’ve never seen a side of beef broken down like this, right off the hook. All beef comes to Fleisher’s already reduced to its eight primal parts. What these guys are doing, or some of them anyway, is work that would be done for Josh at the slaughterhouse. He would love to do it himself, both for the macho thrill factor and because it would save him money, but he just doesn’t have the space. His ceiling isn’t high enough and can’t bear enough weight. Whole sides of hanging beef are
about six feet long or more. They hang off hooks that slide on a rail bolted to the ceiling, high enough off the ground that the men can work with them, without screwing up their backs or letting the primal cuts fall to the floor when they come off the carcass.
And it’s easy to forget this, since everyone is moving so quickly and casually, and there is just so very much of it, but these things are heavy. As in very. Each side is about four hundred pounds, and there are at least a dozen of them hanging at this moment. That is two and a half tons of beef. You could make my Subaru Outback out of meat and still have some considerable poundage left over. If the ceiling did cave in, there would be a deadly avalanche of flesh.
The butchers assigned to taking the major pieces off the hook are younger than the men at the table, in their early twenties perhaps, presumably both stronger and less experienced. But they do their jobs assuredly. I’m pleased to recognize much of what they’re doing, or at least recognize the results of their speedy slicing. But there’s one thing I don’t get. “Santiago?” I lean in so he can hear me in the chilly room echoing with sounds of hooks rumbling down their tracks, meat slapping on tables. “What is that flap of meat he’s cutting off there? From the outside, near the rear leg?”
“That’s the matambre. Very popular in Argentina. Very, very good.”
“Really?” The matambre is one fatty, ragged, rough-looking piece of meat. I can see where it comes from on the animal, basically the outside of the loin, maybe including the flank steak, but also a lot of fatty, chewy, well, junk, in American butchery terms. “We throw that into the grind for hamburgers.”
“No! Really?”
“Yup.”
“Oh, no, that’s terrible. You must have matambre. La Brigada, it’s the best parrilla in Buenos Aires. Have you been to San Telmo yet?”
“Not yet.” San Telmo is reputed to be one of the most picturesque neighborhoods in the city, funkier and shabbier than Palermo—where the hip, young, and rich come to play—but with an arty, Left Bank feel to it, complete with antiques markets and tango bars and crooked little streets.
“I’ll give you the address after we leave here.” At his failure to suggest we go together, I feel a small pang of disappointment.
But now I am watching the older butchers at the table, like the old-world butcher of our imaginations, with massive biceps and hooks and knives that they wield like extensions of their fingers, which of course in a manner of speaking they are. These men can do something that takes me fifteen minutes at the table—peel the neck bone off the chuck eye, say—in fifteen seconds. No lie. It’s unbelievable.
Every week I’m not cutting I’m losing more skills. The scrapes and scars on my hands and arms have almost entirely faded; I look at them in my mirror with just the same sadness that I did watching the last of D’s bruises fading from my skin. I’d had this pipe dream, coming here, that I’d arrive at some carnicería, knives in hand, and join my brother craftsmen, united across divides of language and culture and gender by our common skill. But all I can do is stay out of the way.
Santiago and I stand around with our arms crossed, trying to make ourselves as small as possible, and watch until I get too cold, even in the windbreaker the plant’s manager gave me, with the Fura logo printed on the back, a silk screen of a naked woman posing sultrily, apparently some actress, known as “the Brigitte Bardot of Argentina.” We head back to the office and drink more Nescafé (Argentines love that crap) while Santiago talks shop in Spanish with the guy, a friendly blond man who tries to throw some English at me when he can. I in turn attempt to keep up with the flow of foreign language, but a few Michel Thomas audio lessons do not a competent Spanish speaker—or even listener—make. At least not if that listener is me. I am hopeless at languages, always have been. So I sit and sip and try to maintain a look of comprehension, and eventually the manager, whose name I never caught and am now too embarrassed to ask for, offers to drive us back to the city center, an offer we take him up on.
Santiago gets dropped off first. It’s almost four by now, and he’s got to get changed and head to the restaurant. We make the rest of the drive in near silence, simply because of the language barrier, though the guy does point out some sights along the way—a restaurant he supplies here, a particularly lovely park there, the racetrack, shops, and important buildings. He drops me off in front of my building with a cheerful “Ciao!” and cheek kiss, and once I’ve entered the vestibule, nodded, and murmured “Buenos días” to the doorman and climbed into the creaking elevator, I am, after a day of being with people, solitary again. I smell like meat for the first time in a while, the scent enhanced, as I consider it, by a faint green aroma of dust and cow shit.
Now it’s the long slog toward Argentine dinnertime. Everyone here eats at ten or ten thirty. To go to a restaurant at nine, especially alone, especially as a woman, is to court undue, concerned attention from waiters and the one other person eating at that early hour.
Since arriving in Buenos Aires, moving into this small, comfortable apartment, I have developed a routine. I take my customary shower, in my customary but not much enjoyed lukewarm water, and then I take my customary nap. When I awake, I open my customary wine bottle, drink my two customary first glasses, and then, atop my single bed’s comforter, attempt to distract myself from my thoughts in my customary fashion. Try to bring back the physical sensation of waking up with D’s arms around me, his cheek resting on my shoulder, his reliable morning erection pressing against my thigh…
One character in Buffy, Willow, happens to be a witch, and when she is heartbroken over losing her girlfriend she can perform a spell to fill out some clothes left behind, as if they were being worn by an invisible, beloved body, and have them, simply, hold her. What I do is a bit like that, except I have no magical powers, and afterward there follows the inevitable result. A stupid bind, this general need tethered so closely to this particular desire, this one person. I wind up unable to get where I want to be at all, or if I do get there, it’s only to find that no relief at all comes with the spasm and shudder—just tears and a bitter sense of senselessness.
I can’t imagine D ever having such a problem, ever having any sort of problem with sex at all. Though maybe the way he paraglided right off my planet, as soundlessly and utterly as the ivory-billed woodpecker that birders will spend the rest of their lonesome lives searching for, is a symptom of his own disease. I’d like to believe that.
I splash water on my face and watch some TV, listlessly, downing the rest of my bottle of wine with the steady efficiency of a good butcher. At last it’s nine thirty. I dress in something pretty, go downstairs, catch a cab, manage to convey that I want to go to the address Santiago has written out for me.
The restaurant is loud, bustling. Soccer pennants and pictures and team shirts cover the walls. I am the only person eating alone, and both the waiters and the other diners are very careful not to stare at me, as if I’m an exotic, doomed creature, a dodo or some such. I order the matambre as an appetizer, of course. It arrives at my table prepared something like this. I have made up this recipe, but I think it comes pretty close:
MATAMBRE À LA PIZZA
1 matambre, about 5 pounds (This is going to be nearly impossible for you to find. Call Josh, as I did, or use flank steak. Which won’t really be the same thing, at all.)
½ gallon milk
½ gallon water
Salt and pepper
1½ cups tomato sauce
2 cups mozzarella cheese
Your choice of pizza toppings
Lay the matambre on a cutting board, fat side up. Trim off some but not all of the extra fat.
On the stove, bring the milk and water to a boil in a pot large enough to hold the meat. Once it’s boiling, slip in the meat and turn down the heat. Let it simmer for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile prepare a charcoal grill. You’ll want it nice and hot.
After 30 minutes, lift the matambre from the pot and pat it dry. Season with salt and pe
pper. Place it on the grill, fat side down, and cook it until the fat is golden brown, about 10 minutes. Turn the matambre and cook for about 10 minutes more.
While the second side is cooking, top the fat side with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and any other pizza toppings you like—pepper, onions, hell, pepperoni if you want. If you do it right you’ll wind up thinking there is a God, and he’s an Italian stoner. It will feed the same number as a large pizza, whatever that means to you.
And there’s more insane food to come. Specifically, steak. There are six or eight different cuts to choose from on the menu, as at most traditional parrillas. I’ve been reading up on this, so I know what to go for—bife de chorizo, the classic Argentine strip steak. Tourists, I’ve already figured out, generally go for the more expensive lomo, or tenderloin, but I still hold on to my high-handed butcher’s contempt for such insipid flesh.
My waiter is a young man with a thin mustache who asks me in his broken English where I’m from and if I’m loving Buenos Aires as much as it deserves to be loved. He maintains the proprietary consideration that I have by now realized is an intrinsic part of the female solo-dining experience in this country. It’s a strange reversal: the way he treats me reminds me of the way I used to watch D treat attractive waitresses in expensive restaurants, with a casual assured flirtatiousness that made me feel both a twinge of jealousy and a strange welling of pride. (It’s one thing when I lie in bed, willing the memories—I deserve that anguish, bring it upon myself. But, dammit, why does my brain foist those remembrances on me when I’m in the middle of a perfectly pleasant meal, being talked up by a perfectly nice-looking waiter?) When I ask for my steak jugosa, he looks skeptical, or as if he hasn’t understood me correctly, much as he looked when I ordered an entire bottle of wine for myself. I’ve gotten used to this. When I first got here, I would order my steaks a punto (“to the point,” or medium rare). But for some reason, because I’m a tourist or a woman, waiters seem unwilling to believe I want a steak that hasn’t been cooked halfway to oblivion. Odd, since they don’t blink an eye when I order criadillas—that would be lamb testicles, to you and me.