Before leaving the city, he buys balanced feed specially formulated for domestic head.
When he gets home, it’s night. He leaves the car and goes straight to the barn, cursing El Gringo. It had to be right now, right in the middle of the week he’s on the meat run, that El Gringo unloads this problem on him. Right when Cecilia isn’t around.
He opens the barn. The female is curled up on the floor in the fetal position. She’s asleep and looks cold despite the heat. The rice and water are gone. He prods her a little with his foot and she jumps. She protects her head and curls up further.
He goes into the house and gets some old blankets, which he brings back to the barn and places next to the female. Then he picks up the bowls, fills them, and returns with them to the barn. He sits down on a bale of hay and looks at her. She crouches over one of the bowls and slowly drinks some water.
She never looks at him. Her life is fear, he thinks.
He knows he can raise her, that it’s permitted. He’s aware there are people who do so, and who eat their domestic head alive, part by part. They say the meat tastes better, claim it’s really fresh. Tutorials are available that explain how, when, and where to make the cuts so the product doesn’t die early.
Owning slaves is prohibited. He remembers the allegations against a family that was later prosecuted for keeping ten female slaves in a clandestine workshop. They were branded. The family had bought them from a breeding center and trained them. They’d all been taken to the Municipal Slaughterhouse. The females and the family became special meat. The press reported on the case for weeks. He remembers there was a sentence that everyone repeated, horrified: “Slavery is barbaric.”
She’s no one and she’s in my barn, he thinks.
He doesn’t know what to do with the female. She’s dirty. He’ll have to wash her at some point.
He closes the door to the barn and goes over to the house. Inside, he takes off his clothes and steps into the shower. He could sell her and get rid of the problem. He could raise her, inseminate her, start with a small lot of head, branch off from the processing plant. He could escape, leave everything, abandon his father, his wife, his dead child, the cot waiting to be destroyed.
8
Nélida’s call wakes him up. “Don Armando had a breakdown, dear. Nothing serious, but I thought you should know. I don’t need you to come in, though it would be nice. You know your father’s happy to see you, even if he doesn’t always recognize you. Whenever you visit, there are no episodes for a few days afterward.”
He thanks her for letting him know and says he’ll stop by at some point. He hangs up and lies in bed thinking he doesn’t want the day to begin.
Once he’s put the kettle on the stove, he gets dressed. While he takes the first sip of mate, he calls the game reserve. He explains that he has a family emergency, says he’ll call back to reschedule the visit. Then he calls Krieg and tells him that he’ll need more time for the meat run. Krieg says that he can take as long as he needs, but that he’s waiting for him to interview two job applicants.
After thinking it over for a few seconds, he calls his sister. He tells her that their father is doing fine and that she should visit him. She says she’s busy, raising two kids and running the house takes up all her free time, but she’ll go soon. It’s harder for her to get to the nursing home from the city, she says, it’s so far away and she’s afraid about getting back after curfew. She says this with contempt, as though the world were to blame for her choices. Then she changes her tone of voice and tells him that they haven’t seen each other in forever, says she wants to have him and Cecilia over for dinner, and asks how she’s doing, whether she’s still staying with her mother. He says he’ll call back at some point and hangs up.
He opens the door to the barn. The female is lying on the blankets. She wakes with a start. He picks up the bowls and returns with water and balanced feed. Then he sees she’s found a spot to relieve herself. When he gets back, he’ll have to clean it up, he thinks tiredly. He hardly looks at her, because she’s a nuisance, this naked woman in his barn.
Once he’s in his car he drives straight to the nursing home. He never lets Nélida know ahead of time when he’s coming. It’s the best and most expensive facility in the area that he’s paying for, and he feels it’s his right to show up unannounced.
The nursing home is located between his house and the city. It’s in a residential area of gated communities. Whenever he goes to visit his father, he makes a stop a few kilometers before the home.
He parks and walks toward the entrance to the abandoned zoo. The chains that locked the gate are broken. The grass overgrown, the cages empty.
Going to the zoo is risky because there are still animals loose. He knows this, and he doesn’t care. The mass killings took place in the cities, but for a long time there were people who clung to their pets, unwilling to kill them. It’s said that some of these people were killed by the virus. Others abandoned their dogs, cats, horses out in the country, in the middle of nowhere. Nothing’s ever happened to him, but people say it’s dangerous to walk around alone, without a weapon. There are packs of animals, and they’re hungry.
He walks to the lion’s den. When he gets there, he sits down on the stone railing. He lights a cigarette and looks out into the empty space.
He thinks of the time his father brought him here. His father didn’t know what to do with the boy who didn’t cry, who hadn’t said a thing since his mother died. His sister was a baby, she was looked after by nannies, oblivious to it all.
His father took him to the movies, to the plaza, to the circus, anywhere that was far from home, far from the photos of his smiling mother holding up her architecture diploma, the clothes still on their hangers, the Chagall print she’d picked out to place above the bed. Paris Through the Window: there’s a cat with a human face, a man flying with a triangular parachute, a colorful window, a dark couple, and a man with two faces and a heart in his hand. There’s something that speaks to the craziness of the world, a craziness at times cheerful, and cruel, even though all of the figures are serious. Today, the print hangs in his bedroom.
The zoo was full of families, caramel apples, cotton candy in shades of pink, yellow, blue; laughter, balloons, stuffed kangaroos, whales, bears. His father would say, “Look, Marcos, a squirrel monkey. Look, Marcos, a coral snake. Look, Marcos, a tiger.” He would look without speaking because he felt his father didn’t have any more words, that even the ones he said weren’t really there. He intuited without being certain that his father’s words were about to break, that they were held together by the thinnest of transparent threads.
When they reached the lion’s den, his father stood there watching and didn’t say anything. The lionesses were resting in the sun. The lion wasn’t there. Someone had a biscuit to feed the animals and tossed it into the den. The lionesses looked on with indifference. They’re so far away, he thought, and at that moment all he wanted was to leap into the den, lie down with the lionesses, and go to sleep. He would have liked to pet them. The children shouted, growled, tried to roar, the people piled close together, said, “Excuse me.” But then suddenly everyone went silent. The male lion came out of the shadows, out of a cave, and slowly ambled along. He looked at his father and said, “Dad, the lion, the lion’s over there, do you see it?” But his father’s head was down, he was fading among all those people. And though he wasn’t crying, the tears were there, behind the words he couldn’t say.
He finishes his cigarette and tosses it into the den. Then he gets up to leave.
Slowly he walks back to his car, his hands in his trouser pockets. He hears a howl. It’s in the distance. He stops and looks around to see if he can make anything out.
He arrives at the New Dawn Nursing Home. It’s a large house surrounded by well-kept grounds with benches, trees, and fountains. He was told that there were once ducks in a small artificial pond. Today the pond is gone. The ducks are too.
When he ring
s the bell, a nurse answers. He can never remember their names, though they all remember his. “Señor Marcos, how are you doing? Come on in, we’ll bring Don Armando over in just a moment.”
He made sure that all the employees at the home were nurses. Not caregivers or night attendants with no education or training. That’s where he met Cecilia.
The first thing he notices every time he walks in is the faint smell of urine and medication. The artificial odor of the chemicals that keep these bodies breathing. The home is impeccably clean, but he knows the smell of urine is almost impossible to get rid of with the seniors in diapers. He never calls them grandpas.
Not all of them are grandparents, or will be. They’re just seniors, people who have been alive for many years, and perhaps that’s their only achievement.
The nurse leads him to the waiting room and offers him something to drink. He sits down in an armchair facing a huge window that opens onto a garden. No one goes for a walk in the garden without protection. Some people use umbrellas. The birds aren’t violent, but people panic around them. A black bird perches on the branch of a small bush. He hears a gasp. A woman, a senior, a patient at the nursing home, is looking fearfully at the bird. It flies off and the senior mumbles something, as though she could protect herself with words. Then she falls asleep in her seat. She appears to have been recently bathed.
He remembers Hitchcock’s The Birds, and how much of an impact the film had had on him when he saw it, and how he wished it hadn’t been prohibited.
He thinks back to when he met Cecilia. He’d been sitting in the same armchair, waiting. Nélida wasn’t there and Cecilia was the one who had taken him to his father. In those days his father walked, talked, was somewhat lucid on his visits. When he stood up and saw her, he didn’t feel anything in particular. Just another nurse. But then she began to talk and he paid attention. That voice. She talked about the special diet Don Armando was on, about how they were monitoring his blood pressure and giving him regular checkups, about how he was calmer now. He saw infinite lights surrounding them and felt that her voice could lift him up. That her voice was a way out of the world.
After what happened with the baby, Cecilia’s words became black holes, they began to disappear into themselves.
There’s a TV on with no volume. It’s a rerun of an old show where the participants have to kill cats with a stick. They risk their lives to win a car. The audience applauds.
He picks up a brochure for the nursing home. It’s on a side table, next to the magazines. On the cover, a man and woman are smiling. They’re seniors, but not quite elderly. The brochures used to have pictures of seniors frolicking in a meadow, or sitting in a park surrounded by greenery. Today the backdrop is neutral. But the seniors are smiling just like they always did. Inside a circle, in red letters, are the words “Security guaranteed 24/7.” It’s known that in public nursing homes, when the majority of seniors die, or are left to die, they’re sold on the black market. It’s the cheapest meat money can buy because it’s dry and diseased, full of pharmaceuticals. It’s meat with a first and last name. In some cases, seniors’ own family members authorize a private or state-owned nursing home to sell their bodies and use the proceeds to pay off any debt. There are no longer funerals. It’s very difficult to ensure that a body isn’t disinterred and eaten. That’s why many of the cemeteries were sold and others abandoned. Some still remain as relics of a time when the dead could rest in peace.
He will not allow his father to be cut up.
From the waiting room, he can see the lounge area where the seniors relax. They’re sitting and watching television. It’s how they spend most of their time. They watch television and wait to die.
There aren’t many of them. This was something else he’d made sure of. He didn’t want his father in a nursing home full of neglected seniors. But there also aren’t many of them because it’s the most expensive facility in the city.
Time stifles in this place. The hours and seconds stick to the skin, pierce it. Better to ignore its passing, though that’s not possible.
“Hi, there, Marcos. How are you doing? It’s so nice to see you, dear.” Nélida has brought his father over in a wheelchair. She hugs him because she’s fond of him, because all the nurses know the story of the man who’s not only a dedicated son but who rescued one of the nurses and married her.
After the baby’s death, Nélida started hugging him.
He crouches down and looks his father in the eye and takes his hands. “Hi, Dad,” he says. His father’s gaze is lost, desolate.
“How’s Dad, any better?” he says, getting up. “What happened exactly?”
Nélida tells him to take a seat. She leaves his father next to the armchair, looking out the window. They sit close by, at a table with two chairs.
“Don Armando had another episode, dear. Yesterday he took off all his clothes, and when Marta—she’s the nurse who works nights—went to look after one of the other residents, your father went to the kitchen and ate the entire birthday cake we’d set aside for a grandpa who’s turning ninety.”
He covers up his smile. The black bird takes flight and lands on another bush. His father points happily to the bird. He gets up and pushes the wheelchair close to the window. When he sits back down, Nélida looks at him with affection and pity. “Marcos, we’re going to have to go back to tying him up at night,” she says. He nods. “I need you to sign the authorization form. It’s for Don Armando’s own good. You know I don’t like to do it. But your father is sensitive. He can’t go eating whatever he wants, it’s not good for him. Besides, today it’s a cake, tomorrow it’s a knife.”
Nélida goes to get the forms.
His father barely speaks now. He emits sounds. Complaints.
The words are there, encapsulated. They’re rotting behind the madness.
He sits down in the armchair and looks out the window. Then he takes his father’s hand. His father looks at him as though he doesn’t know him, but neither does he pull his hand away.
9
He arrives at the processing plant. It’s isolated and surrounded by electric fencing. They had it put up because Scavengers kept trying to get in. Before the fence was electrified, the Scavengers would break it, climb over it, and cut themselves, just to get fresh meat. Now they make do with the leftovers, the pieces that don’t have commercial use, with the diseased meat, with what no one would eat except them.
Before going into the plant, he sits in the car for a few seconds and looks at the complex of buildings. They’re white, compact, efficient. There’s nothing to indicate that inside them humans are killed. He remembers the photos of the Salamone Slaughterhouse his mother showed him. The building was destroyed, but the façade remains intact, the word “SLAUGHTERHOUSE” striking out in silence. Huge and alone, the word resisted, didn’t disappear. It held out, refusing to be broken down by the weather, by the wind that perforated the stone, by the climate that ate away at the façade that his mother told him had an art deco influence. The gray letters stand out against the backdrop of the sky. It doesn’t matter what the sky looks like, if it’s an oppressive blue, or full of clouds, or a rabid black; the word remains, the word that speaks to the implacable truth behind a beautiful building. “SLAUGHTERHOUSE,” because there, slaughter took place. His mother had wanted to renovate the façade of the Cypress Processing Plant, but his father wouldn’t agree to it. He felt that a slaughterhouse should go unnoticed and blend in with the landscape, that it should never be called what it really is.
The security guard who works mornings, a man named Oscar, is reading the paper. When Oscar sees him sitting in the car, he closes the paper right away and waves nervously. Oscar opens the door for him and says, in a voice that’s a bit forced, “Good morning, Señor Tejo, how are you doing?” He acknowledges the security guard with a movement of the head.
He gets out of the car. Before going in, he has a smoke, his arms propped up on the car roof, still, watching. He wipes the sw
eat off his forehead.
There’s nothing in the vicinity of the processing plant. Nothing as far as the eye can see. There’s a space that’s been cleared except for a few solitary trees and a rank creek. He’s hot, but he smokes slowly, stretching out the minutes before he enters the plant.
He goes straight up to Krieg’s office. A few employees greet him on the way. He responds almost without looking at them. He kisses the secretary, Mari, on the cheek. She offers him some coffee and says, “I’ll get that for you in just a second, Marcos, I’m really glad to see you. Señor Krieg was starting to get nervous. It happens every time you’re on the meat run.” He enters the office without knocking and sits down without asking permission. Krieg is on the phone. He smiles and motions that he’ll be right with him.
Krieg’s words are hard-hitting but scarce. He says little and speaks slowly.
He’s one of those people who’s not made for life. His face looks like a portrait that turned out all wrong, one the artist crumpled up and tossed into the garbage. He’s someone who doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. He’s not interested in human contact, which is why he had his office remodeled. First he isolated it, so that only his secretary could hear him and see him. Then he added another door. The door opens to a staircase that takes him straight to the private parking lot behind the plant. The employees see him infrequently or not at all.
Working for Krieg, he’s seen how the man runs the business to perfection: When it comes to numbers and transactions, he’s the best. If it’s a question of abstract concepts, market trends, statistics, Krieg excels. He’s only interested in edible humans, head, the product. What he’s not interested in is people. He hates saying hello to them, making small talk about the cold or the heat, having to listen to their problems, learn their names, keep track of who’s on leave or who’s had a child. That’s why Krieg needs him. He’s the one they all respect and like because none of them knows him, not really. Few of them know he lost a child, that his wife has left, that his father is collapsing into a dark and demented silence.
Tender Is the Flesh Page 4