Tender Is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

  From the corner of his mouth, the orange sauce slowly falls and begins to drip onto his white sneakers.

  4

  He gets up early because he has to stop by the butcher shops. His wife is still at her mother’s place.

  He goes into a room that’s empty except for a cot in its center. He touches the cot’s white wood. On the headboard, there’s a drawing of a bear and a duck hugging. They’re surrounded by squirrels and butterflies and trees and a smiling sun. There are no clouds or humans. It had been his cot and then it was his son’s. Products with sweet, innocent animals on them are no longer sold. They’ve been replaced by little boats, dainty flowers, fairies, gnomes. He knows he has to get rid of it, to destroy and burn it before his wife comes back. But he can’t.

  He’s drinking mate when he hears the horn of a truck at the entrance to his house. It startles him and he drops the mate and burns himself. He goes up to the window and sees the red Tod Voldelig letters.

  His house is fairly isolated. The closest neighbors are two kilometers away. To get to it, you have to open the gate, which he thought he’d locked, and follow the road lined on both sides with eucalyptus trees. He’s surprised he didn’t hear the truck’s motor or see the cloud of dust. He used to have dogs that would chase after cars and bark at them. Their absence has left a silence that’s oppressive, complete.

  Someone is clapping and calling his name. “Hello, Señor Tejo?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “I’ve got a gift from El Gringo. Can you sign here?”

  He signs without thinking. The man hands him an envelope and then walks over to the truck. He opens the back door, goes in, and takes out a female.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a female FGP.”

  “Take her back, okay? Now.”

  The man stands there not knowing what to do, and looks at him, confused. No one would turn down a gift like this. The sale of the female would amount to a small fortune. The man tugs on the rope around her neck because he doesn’t know what to do. The female moves submissively.

  “I can’t. If I take her back, El Gringo will get rid of me.”

  The man tightens the rope and holds out the other end. But he doesn’t reach for it, and the man throws the rope to the ground, takes a few quick steps, gets into the truck, and drives off.

  5

  “Gringo, what did you send me?”

  “A gift.”

  “I kill head, I don’t breed them, okay?”

  “Just keep her for a few days and then we’ll have ourselves a barbecue.”

  “I don’t have the time or means to keep her for a few days. I don’t want her.”

  “I’ll send the men over tomorrow to slaughter her for you.”

  “If I want to slaughter her, I’ll do it myself.”

  “Then it’s settled. I sent you all the papers in case you want to sell her. She’s healthy, all her vaccines are up-to-date. You can also crossbreed her. She’s at just the right age for reproducing. But most important is that she’s an FGP.”

  He doesn’t answer. El Gringo tells him that this female is a luxury, repeats that she’s got pure genes, as if he didn’t know it, and says that she’s from a consignment that’s been given almond-based feed for over a year now. “It’s for a demanding client who orders custom-raised meat,” he explains, and says that he breeds a few extra head in case any die. El Gringo says goodbye, but first he clarifies that the gift is intended as recognition of how much he values doing business with the Krieg Processing Plant.

  “Right, thank you,” he says, and hangs up in a rage. In his mind, he curses El Gringo and his gift. He sits down and looks at the time. It’s getting late. He goes out to untie the female from the tree where he left her. She hasn’t taken the rope off her neck. Of course, he thinks, she doesn’t know she can. He moves toward her and she begins to tremble. She looks at the ground. Urinates. He takes her to the barn and ties her to the door of a broken and rusted truck.

  He goes into the house and thinks about what he can leave her to eat. El Gringo didn’t send any balanced feed; all he sent was a problem. He opens the fridge. One lemon. Three beers. Two tomatoes. Half a cucumber. And a pot of leftovers from some meal, which he smells and decides is still good. It’s white rice.

  He takes a bowl of water and another full of cold rice out to the barn. Then he locks the door and leaves.

  6

  The toughest part of the meat run is the butcher shops because he has to go into the city, because he has to see Spanel, because the heat of the concrete makes it hard to breathe, because he has to respect the curfew, because the buildings and the plazas and the streets remind him that there were once more people, a lot more.

  Before the Transition, the butcher shops were staffed by poorly paid employees. They were often forced by the owners to adulterate the meat so it could be sold after it had begun to rot. When he worked at his father’s processing plant, one employee told him: “What we sell is dead, it’s rotting, and apparently people don’t want to accept that.” Between sips of mate, the man told him the secrets to adulterating meat so it looks fresh and doesn’t smell: “For packaged meat, we use carbon monoxide, the meat on display needs a lot of cold, bleach, sodium bicarbonate, vinegar, and seasoning, a lot of pepper.” People always confessed things to him. He thinks it’s because he’s a good listener and isn’t interested in talking about himself. The employee explained that his boss would make up for losses by buying meat that had been confiscated by the FSA, carcasses full of worms, and that he’d have to work the meat and then put it on sale. He explained that “working the meat” meant leaving it in the fridge for a long time so the cold would get rid of the smell. He said that his boss forced him to sell diseased meat covered in yellow spots, which he’d had to remove. The employee wanted to leave, to get a job at the Cypress Processing Plant, since it had such a good reputation. He just wanted to do honest work so he could support his family. He couldn’t take the smell of bleach, the stench of rotting chicken made him vomit, he’d never felt so sick and miserable. And he couldn’t look the customers in the eye, the women who were trying to make ends meet and asked for whatever was cheapest to make breaded milanesas for their children. If his boss wasn’t there, he gave them whatever was freshest; otherwise he had to sell them the rotten meat, and afterward he couldn’t sleep because of the guilt. This job was consuming him little by little. The employee told him all this and he talked to his father, who decided to stop selling meat to the butcher shop and hire the man to come and work for him.

  His father is a person of integrity, that’s why he went crazy. He gets into his car and sighs. But right away he remembers he’s going to see Spanel and smiles, though seeing her is always complicated.

  While he’s driving, an image bursts into his mind. It’s the female in his barn. What is she doing? Does she have enough food? Is she cold? He has these thoughts and silently curses El Gringo.

  He arrives at Spanel Butchers and gets out of the car. The city’s pavements are cleaner now that there are no dogs. And emptier.

  In the city, everything is extreme. Raging.

  After the Transition, the butcher shops closed down, and it was only later, once cannibalism had been legitimized, that some of them reopened. The new shops are exclusive and run by their owners, who demand extremely high quality products. Few are able to open a second location, and those who do have a relative or someone they can absolutely trust run it.

  The special meat sold at butcher shops isn’t affordable, which is why there’s a black market, to sell a cheaper product that doesn’t need to be inspected or vaccinated, that’s easy meat, with a first and last name. That’s what illegal meat is called, meat obtained and produced after the curfew. But it’ll also never be genetically modified and monitored to make it more tender, tasty, and addictive.

  Spanel was one of the first to reopen her butcher shop. He knows she’s indifferent to the world. The only thing she can do is slic
e meat and she does this with the coolness of a surgeon. The viscous energy, the cold air in which smells are suspended, the white tiles intended to affirm hygiene, the apron stained with blood, it’s all the same to her. For Spanel, touching, chopping, grinding, processing, deboning, cutting up what was once breathing is an automatic task, but it’s one done with precision. Hers is a passion that’s contained, calculated.

  With special meat it was necessary to adapt to new cuts, new measures and weights, new tastes. Spanel was the first and the quickest to do so, because she handled meat with chilling detachment. Initially, she only had a few customers: the maids of the rich. But she had an eye for business and opened the first shop in the neighborhood with the greatest purchasing power. The maids picked up the meat, disgusted and confused, and always clarified that they’d been sent by the man or woman they worked for, as if doing so were necessary. Spanel looked at these women with a grimace, but it was one of understanding, and the maids always came back for more, with increasing confidence, until finally they stopped giving explanations. Over time, the customers became more frequent. The fact that a woman ran the shop put everyone at ease.

  But none of them knows what this woman thinks. Except for him. He knows her well because she used to work at his father’s processing plant.

  Spanel says strange things to him while she smokes. He wants the visit to be over with as soon as possible because her intensity makes him uneasy. And Spanel keeps him there—she does it every time—just like when he started working at his father’s plant and she brought him to the cutting room after everyone had left.

  He thinks she doesn’t have anyone to talk to, anyone to share her thoughts with. He also believes that Spanel would be willing to lie down on the cutting table again and that she’d be just as efficient and distant as she’d been when he wasn’t yet a man. Or not. Now she’d be vulnerable and fragile, opening her eyes so that he could enter, there, beyond the cold.

  She has an assistant, a man he’s never known to say a word. The assistant does the drudge work; he loads the carcasses into the cold storage room and cleans the shop. His gaze is like a dog’s, full of unconditional loyalty and contained ferocity. He doesn’t know the assistant’s name, since Spanel never addresses the man, and when he’s at the shop, “El Perro,” the dog, generally makes himself scarce.

  At first Spanel copied the traditional cuts of beef so the change wouldn’t be as abrupt. A customer would walk in and it was like being in a butcher shop of times past. Over the years, the shop transformed, gradually but persistently. First it was the packaged hands that Spanel placed off to the side where they were hidden among the milanesas à la provençale, the cuts of tri-tip, and the kidneys. The label read “Special Meat,” but on another part of the package, Spanel clarified that it was “Upper Extremity,” strategically avoiding the word hand. Then she added packaged feet, which were displayed on a bed of lettuce with the label “Lower Extremity,” and later on, a platter with tongues, penises, noses, testicles, and a sign that said “Spanel’s Delicacies.”

  Before long, people began to ask for front or hind trotters, using the cuts of pork to refer to upper and lower extremities. The industry took this as permission and started to label products with these euphemisms that nullified all horror.

  Today Spanel sells brochettes made of ears and fingers, which she calls “mixed brochettes.” She sells eyeball liquor. And tongue à la vinaigrette.

  She leads him to a room at the back of the shop with a wooden table and two chairs. They’re surrounded by fridges that hold the half carcasses she takes out of the cold storage room to slice and then sell. The human torso is referred to as a “carcass.” The possibility of calling it a “half torso” isn’t contemplated. In the fridges, there are also arms and legs.

  Spanel asks him to take a seat and serves him a glass of foot-pressed wine. He drinks the wine because he needs it, so he can look her in the eye, so he doesn’t remember the way she pushed him onto the table that was usually covered in cow entrails, but then was as clean as an operating table, and lowered his trousers without saying a word. The way she lifted her apron, which was still stained with blood, climbed onto the table where he lay naked, and carefully lowered herself, grabbing hold of the hooks used to move the cows.

  It’s not that he thinks Spanel is dangerous, or crazy, or that he pictures her naked (because he’s never seen her naked), or that he’s only ever met a few female butchers and that all of them have been inscrutable, impossible to decipher. It’s that he also needs the wine so he can listen to her calmly, because her words drive at his brain. They’re frigid, stabbing words, like when she said, “No,” and grabbed his arms and held them against the table forcefully, after he’d tried to touch her, take off her apron, run his fingers through her hair. Or when he went up to her the next day and the only thing she said was, “Goodbye,” with no explanation, no kiss on her way out. Later he learned that she’d inherited a small fortune, which was how she’d bought the butcher shop.

  He hands her forms to sign that certify her interaction with the Krieg Processing Plant and state that she doesn’t adulterate the meat. These are formalities, because it’s known that no one does, not now, not with special meat.

  Spanel signs the forms and takes a sip of wine. It’s ten in the morning.

  She offers him a cigarette and lights it for him. While they smoke, she says, “I don’t get why a person’s smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, they’re showing their skeleton.” He realizes he’s never seen her smile, not even when she took hold of the hooks, raised her face, and cried out in pleasure. It was a single cry, a cry both brutal and dark.

  “I know that when I die somebody’s going to sell my flesh on the black market, one of my awful distant relatives. That’s why I smoke and drink, so I taste bitter and no one gets any pleasure out of my death.” She takes a quick drag and says, “Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.” He downs his wine and tells her he doesn’t understand, she has money and can ensure she’s not eaten when she dies, a lot of people do. She gives him a look that could be pity: “No one can be sure of anything. Let them eat me, I’ll give them horrible indigestion.” She opens her mouth, without showing her teeth, and lets out a guttural sound that could be a cackle, but isn’t. “I’m surrounded by death, all day long, at all hours of the day,” she says, and points to the carcasses in the fridge. “Everything indicates that my destiny is in there. Or do you think we won’t have to pay for this?”

  “Then why don’t you give it up? Why not sell the shop and do something else?”

  She looks at him and takes a long drag. For a while she doesn’t say anything, as though the answer were obvious and didn’t need words. Then she exhales the smoke slowly and says, “Who knows, maybe one day I’ll sell your ribs at a good price. But not before I try one.”

  He drinks some more wine and says, “You’d better, no doubt I’m delicious,” and gives her a big smile, showing off his skeleton. She looks at him with icy eyes. He knows she’s serious. And that this conversation is prohibited, that these words could cause major problems for them. But he needs someone to say what no one does.

  The shop’s doorbell rings. A customer. Spanel leaves him to take care of business.

  El Perro appears and, without looking at him, gets a half carcass out of the fridge and takes it to a cold room with a glass door. He can see everything El Perro does. The man hangs the half carcass so it doesn’t get contaminated. He removes the NMSA approval labels and begins to butcher the meat. He makes a fine cut over the ribs to remove a good piece of skirt steak.

  While he’s watching El Perro, he thinks that he no longer knows the cuts of meat by heart. During the adaptation process, many of the names of bovine cuts were carried over and mixed with those for pork. New directories were written up and posters were redesigned to show the cuts of special meat. The posters are never shown to the public. El Perro takes a saw and cuts the nape of the neck.


  Spanel comes in and serves more wine. She sits down and says that people are starting to order brains again. A doctor had confirmed that eating brains caused who-knows-what disease, one with some compound name, but now apparently other doctors and several universities have confirmed that’s not the case. She knows that viscous mass can’t be good for you if it’s not inside your head. But she’ll buy them and cut them into slices. It’s tough to do, she says, because they’re quite slippery. She asks him if he can put in this week’s order for her, but doesn’t wait for his answer. She picks up a pen and begins to write. He doesn’t clarify that she can order online. He likes to watch Spanel write: she’s silent, concentrating, serious.

  He looks at her closely while she finishes the order, the letters she writes squeezed tight together. Spanel has an arrested beauty about her. It disturbs him that there’s something feminine beneath the brutal aura she takes great care to give off. There’s something admirable in her artificial indifference.

  There’s something about her he’d like to break.

  7

  After the Transition, he’d always spend the night in the city, in a hotel, whenever he was on the meat run, and then the following day he’d go to the game reserve. That way he saved a few hours on the road. But with the female in his barn, he has to go back home.