Tender Is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

The office is simple, sleek, but on the wall hangs a cheap reproduction of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. He’s seen the print many times, but it’s only today that he notices the person holding flayed skin. Señor Urami observes him, sees the disconcerted look on his face, and, guessing his thoughts, says that the man is Saint Bartholomew, a martyr who was flayed to death, that it’s a colorful detail, doesn’t he think.

“Everything is reflected in the skin, it’s the largest organ in the body.”

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.

El Gringo explains to Egmont that they’ve been preparing it since eight in the morning, “So it melts in your mouth,” and that the guys are actually about to eat a kid. “It’s the most tender kind of meat, there’s only just a little, because a kid doesn’t weigh as much as a calf. We’re celebrating because one of the farmhands became a father,” he explains. “Want a sandwich?”

“I know that when I die somebody’s going to sell my flesh on the black market, one of my awful distant relatives. That’s why I smoke and drink, so I taste bitter and no one gets any pleasure out of my death.” She takes a quick drag and says, “Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.”

Or do you think we won’t have to pay for this?”

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.”

Ency was shouting, “You’re not animals. They’re going to kill you. Run. You need to escape,” as if the head could understand what he was saying.

She’s his, he can do whatever he wants. He can kill her, slaughter her, make her suffer. He picks up the ax. Looks at her silently. This female is a problem. He raises the ax.

when in some inaccessible corner of his mind he was glad about the Transition, glad to have this new job, to be part of this historic change, to be thinking about the rules that people would have to comply with long after he’d disappeared from the world, because the regulations, he’d thought, are my legacy, the mark I’ll leave behind.

He’d never heard his father sound like this, not since the death of his mother. And when they climbed the bridge, his father pointed to the stained-glass man with wings and the birds alongside him and smiled. “Everyone says that he fell because he flew too close to the sun,” his father said, “but he flew, do you see what I mean, Son? He was able to fly. It doesn’t matter if you fall, if you were a bird for even just a few seconds.”

Cecilia jumps when she hears the thud and looks at him without understanding. “Why?” she yells. “She could have given us more children.” As he drags the body of the female to the barn to slaughter it, he says to Cecilia, his voice radiant, so pure it wounds: “She had the human look of a domesticated animal.”