Tender is the Flesh(32)

Gastón Schafe stumbles a little. The tranquillizer has taken effect. They pass the offal and slitting rooms, but the windows are covered. Then they’re at the boxes. Sergio is waiting for them at the door. Gastón Schafe is a little pale, but he’s keeping it together. Sergio takes off his tunic and shoes. Gastón Schafe is now naked. He trembles a little and looks around, confused. He’s about to speak, but Sergio grabs his arm carefully, and blindfolds him. Sergio guides Gastón Schafe into the box. The man moves desperately, says something that’s not clear. As he watches Sergio handle Gastón Schafe, he thinks they’ll have to increase the dose of the tranquillizer. Sergio adjusts the stainless steel shackles around the man’s neck and talks to him. He seems to calm down, or at least stop moving and talking. Sergio raises the club and hits him on the forehead. Gastón Schafe falls. Two workers pick him up and take him to the Scavenger sector.

The electric fence can’t silence the cries and the sound of the machetes slicing open his body, the Scavengers fighting for the best piece of Gastón Schafe.





3




He gets home tired. Before opening Jasmine’s room, he takes a shower, otherwise she won’t let him do so in peace. She’ll try to get under the water with him, kiss him, hug him. He understands she’s alone all day, that when he gets home she wants to follow him around the house.

He opens the door and Jasmine greets him with a hug. He forgets about Gastón Schafe, Mari and the boxes.

There are mattresses on the floor. The room contains no furniture within reach; nothing that could hurt her. He set it up this way when he found out she was pregnant. He didn’t want to risk something happening to his child and took all the necessary precautions. Jasmine learnt to relieve herself in a bucket that he cleans every day and also to wait for him. She’s able to move freely within the four walls adapted so that nothing happens to her.

It’s been a long time since he felt that this house was his home. It was a space in which to sleep and eat. A place of broken words and silences encapsulated between walls, of accumulated sadnesses that splintered the air, scraped away at it, split open the particles of oxygen. A house where madness was brewing, where it lurked, imminent.

But ever since Jasmine arrived, the house has been full of her wild smell and her bright and silent laughter.

He goes into the room that was once Leo’s. He’s taken down the wallpaper with boats on it and painted the room white. There’s also a new cot and furniture. Buying these things wasn’t an option so he built them by hand. He didn’t want to arouse suspicion. After his day at the plant, he likes to get down on the floor and imagine what colour he’s going to paint the cot. He wants to decide the moment the baby is born. When he looks his child in the eye, he imagines he’ll know what colour to choose. For the first few months, the baby will sleep by his side, next to his bed, in a temporary cot.

That way he can make sure this child doesn’t stop breathing.

Jasmine always sits with him in the baby’s room. He prefers it this way, for her to follow him around. All of the drawers in the house have locks on them. One day when he got home from the plant, Jasmine had taken out all the knives. She’d cut one of her hands. She was sitting on the floor, covered in the blood that was slowly dripping from her. He panicked. But it was only a superficial wound. He treated it, cleaned her up and locked away the knives. And the forks and spoons. When he cleaned the floor, he discovered that she’d been trying to draw on the wood. That’s when he bought her the crayons and paper.

He also bought cameras that connect to his phone so that while he’s at the plant, he can see what Jasmine is doing in the room. She spends hours watching television, sleeping, drawing, staring at a fixed point. At times, it seems she’s thinking, like she really can.





4




“Have you ever eaten something that’s alive?”

“I haven’t.”

“There’s a vibration, a subtle and fragile heat, that makes a living being particularly delicious. You’re extracting life by the mouthful. It’s the pleasure of knowing that because of your intent, your actions, this being has ceased to exist. It’s the feeling of a complex and precious organism expiring little by little, and also becoming part of you. For always. I find this miracle fascinating. This possibility of an indissoluble union.”

Urlet is drinking wine from a glass that looks like an antique chalice. It’s a transparent red, made of etched crystal, and has strange figures on it. The figures could be naked women dancing around a bonfire. Or not. They’re abstract. Perhaps men howling. Urlet picks the glass up by the stem and raises it very slowly, as though it were an object of extraordinary value. The cup is the same colour as the band he wears around his ring finger.

He looks at Urlet’s nails, he always does, and can’t help but feel disgust. The man’s nails are neat but long. There’s something hypnotic and primitive about them. There’s something of a wail, of an ancient presence to them. Something about Urlet’s nails creates a need to feel the touch of his fingers.

It occurs to him that he only has to see the man a few times a year and he’s glad.

Urlet is sitting against the tall back of an armchair made of dark wood. Behind him hang half a dozen human heads. His hunting trophies. He always clarifies, to whoever will listen, that over the years these were the toughest heads to hunt, those that posed “monstrous and invigorating challenges”. Next to the heads hang framed antique photographs. They’re classic photographs of black people being hunted in Africa before the Transition. The largest and sharpest image shows a white hunter down on his knees holding a rifle, and behind him, on stakes, the heads of four black men. The hunter is smiling.