Tender is the Flesh(10)
“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 off 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 a detained 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.
Before leaving the city, he buys balanced feed specially formulated for domestic heads.
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 heads 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 centre 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 heads, 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 afterwards.”