Tender is the Flesh(4)
Then they walk to the tanning drum. Se?or Urami stops and tells him he wants black skins. Out of nowhere, with no explanation. He lies and says that a lot will be arriving shortly. Se?or Urami nods and says goodbye.
Whenever he leaves the building, he needs a cigarette. Inevitably an employee comes over to tell him horrific things about Se?or Urami. Rumour has it he assassinated and flayed people before the Transition, that the walls of his house are covered in human skin, that he keeps people in his basement and that it gives him great pleasure to flay them alive. He doesn’t understand why the employees tell him these things. All of it’s possible, he thinks, but the only thing he knows for certain is that Se?or Urami runs his business with a reign of terror and that it works.
He leaves the tannery and feels relief. But then he questions, yet again, why he exposes himself to this. The answer is always the same. He knows why he does this work. Because he’s the best and they pay him accordingly, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else and because his father’s health depends on it.
There are times when one has to bear the weight of the world.
3
The processing plant does business with several breeding centres, but he only includes those that provide the greatest quantity of heads on the meat circuit. Guerrero Iraola used to be one of them, but the quality of their product declined. They started sending lots with violent heads, and the more violent a head is the more difficult it is to stun. He was at Tod Voldelig to finalize the initial operation, but this is the first time he’s included the breeding centre on the meat run.
Before going in, he calls his father’s nursing home. A woman named Nélida answers. Nélida truly doesn’t care about the things she’s in charge of, and she exaggerates this with a passion. Her voice is nervy, but beneath it he senses a tiredness that erodes her, consumes her. She tells him that his father, whom she calls Don Armando, is doing fine. He tells Nélida he’ll stop by for a visit soon, that he’s already transferred the money for this month. Nélida calls him “dear”, says, “Don’t worry, dear, Don Armando is stable, he has his moments, but he’s stable.”
He asks her if by “moments” she means episodes. She tells him not to worry, it’s nothing they can’t handle.
The call ends and he sits in the car for a few minutes. He looks for his sister’s number, is about to call her, but then he changes his mind.
He enters the breeding centre. El Gringo, the owner of Tod Voldelig, apologizes, says he’s with a man from Germany who wants to buy a large lot, tells him he has to show this man around, explain the business to him, because the German is new and doesn’t understand a thing, he just stopped by out of nowhere. El Gringo wasn’t able to let him know. Not a problem, he says, he’ll join them.
El Gringo is clumsy. He moves as though the air were too thick for him. Unable to gauge the magnitude of his body, he bumps into people, into things. He sweats. A lot.
When he met El Gringo, he thought it was a mistake to work with his breeding centre, but he’s efficient and one of the few who were able to resolve a number of problems with the lots. His is the sort of intelligence that doesn’t need refinement.
El Gringo introduces him to the man from Germany. Egmont Schrei. They shake hands. Egmont doesn’t look him in the eye. He’s wearing jeans that appear brand new, a shirt that’s too clean. White sneakers. He looks out of place with his ironed shirt, his blond hair plastered to his skull. But he knows this. Egmont doesn’t say a word, because he knows it, and his clothes, which only a foreigner who’s never set foot in the fields would wear, serve to place him at the exact distance he needs to negotiate the deal.
He sees El Gringo take out an automatic translator, a device he’s familiar with, though he’s never had reason to use one. He’s never been abroad. It’s an old model, he can tell because there are only three or four languages. El Gringo talks into the machine and it automatically translates everything into German. The machine tells Egmont that he’ll be taken around the breeding centre, that they’ll start with the teasing stud. Egmont nods and doesn’t show his hands, which are behind his back.
They walk through rows of covered cages. El Gringo tells Egmont that a breeding centre is a great living warehouse of meat, and he raises his arms as though he were handing him the key to the business. Egmont doesn’t appear to understand. El Gringo abandons the grandiloquent definitions and moves on to the basics, explaining how he keeps the heads separate, each in its own cage, to avoid violent outbursts, and so they don’t injure or eat one another. The device translates into the mechanical voice of a woman.
He sees Egmont nod and can’t help but think of the irony. The meat that eats meat.
El Gringo opens the stud’s cage. The straw on the floor looks fresh and there are two metal bins secured to the bars. One contains water. The other, which is empty, is for feed. El Gringo speaks into the device and explains that he raised the teasing stud from when he was just a little thing, that he’s First Generation Pure. The German looks at the stud with curiosity. He takes out his automatic translator, a new model. He asks what “generation pure” is. El Gringo explains that FGPs are heads born and bred in captivity. They haven’t been genetically modified or given injections to accelerate their growth. Egmont appears to understand and doesn’t comment. El Gringo picks up where he left off, with a topic he seems to find more interesting, and explains that studs are purchased for their genetic quality. This one’s a teaser stud, he says, because even though he’s not castrated, and he tries to inseminate the females and mounts them, he’s not used for breeding. El Gringo tells the German that he calls the stud a teaser because he detects the females that are ready for fertilization. The other studs are the ones destined to fill tin cans with semen that will then be collected for artificial insemination. The device translates.