Tender is the Flesh(8)
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 heads 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 towards 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 afterwards 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 slice 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.