Tender Is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

People always confessed things to him. He thinks it’s because he’s a good listener and isn’t interested in talking about himself.

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 afterward 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...

He knows she’s indifferent to the world.

Hers is a passion that’s contained, calculated.

Spanel says strange things to him while she smokes. He wants the visit to be over with as soon as possible because her intensity makes him uneasy.

with. He also believes that Spanel would be willing to lie down on the cutting table again and that she’d be just as efficient and distant as she’d been when he wasn’t yet a man.

His gaze is like a dog’s, full of unconditional loyalty and contained ferocity. He doesn’t know the assistant’s name, since Spanel never addresses the man, and when he’s at the shop, “El Perro,” the dog, generally makes himself scarce.

Before long, people began to ask for front or hind trotters, using the cuts of pork to refer to upper and lower extremities. The industry took this as permission and started to label products with these euphemisms that nullified all horror.

Today Spanel sells brochettes made of ears and fingers, which she calls “mixed brochettes.” She sells eyeball liquor. And tongue à la vinaigrette.

The human torso is referred to as a “carcass.” The possibility of calling it a “half torso” isn’t contemplated. In the fridges, there are also arms and legs.

He drinks the wine because he needs it, so he can look her in

the eye, so he doesn’t remember the way she pushed him onto the table that was usually covered in cow entrails, but then was as clean as an operating table, and lowered his trousers without saying a word. The way she lifted her apron, which was still stained with blood, climbed onto the table where he lay naked, and carefully lowered herself, grabbing hold of the hooks used to move the cows.

While they smoke, she says, “I don’t get why a person’s smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, they’re showing their skeleton.” He realizes he’s never seen her smile, not even when she took hold of the hooks, raised her face, and cried out in pleasure. It was a single cry, a cry both brutal and dark.

“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.”

“No one can be sure of anything. Let them eat me, I’ll give them

horrible indigestion.”

“I’m surrounded by death, all day long, at all hours of the day,” she says, and points to the carcasses in the fridge. “Everything indicates that my destiny is in there. Or do you think we won’t have to pay for this?”

“Who knows, maybe one day I’ll sell your ribs at a good price. But not before I try one.”

He doesn’t clarify that she can order online. He likes to watch Spanel write: she’s silent, concentrating, serious.

There’s something admirable in her artificial indifference. There’s something about her he’d like to break.

He knows he can raise her, that it’s permitted. He’s aware there are people who do so, and who eat their domestic head 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 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: “Sl...

He saw infinite lights surrounding them and felt that her voice could lift him up. That her voice was a way out of the world.

He will not allow his father to be cut up.

Time stifles in this place. The hours and seconds stick to the skin, pierce it. Better to ignore its passing, though that’s not possible.

After the baby’s death, Nélida started hugging him.

The black bird takes flight and lands on another bush. His father points happily to the bird.

“Marcos, we’re going to have to go back to tying him up at night,” she says. He nods.

His father barely speaks now. He emits sounds. Complaints. The words are there, encapsulated. They’re rotting behind the madness.

His mother had wanted to renovate the façade of the Cypress Processing Plant, but his father wouldn’t agree to it. He felt that a slaughterhouse should go unnoticed and blend in with the landscape, that it should never be called what it really is.

He’s hot, but he smokes slowly, stretching out the minutes before he enters the plant.

But he also lets it go as a means of appeasing the Scavengers and their hunger. The craving for meat is dangerous.

“Those head have been selected for the game reserve. The specialists examine them and pick the ones in the best physical condition. The hunters need prey that challenges

them, they want to chase after the head, they’re not interested in sitting targets.” “So that’s why most of them are males,” the taller man says. “That’s right, females are generally submissive. They’ve tried with impregnated females and the result is very different because they become vicious. Every so often we get requests for them.”

One can get used to almost anything, except the death of a child.

He wishes he could hate someone for the death of his son. But who can he blame for a sudden death? He tried to hate God, but he doesn’t believe in God. He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral, but he couldn’t keep it up because hating

everyone is the same as hating no one. He also wishes he could break like Ency, but his collapse never comes.

There’s a certain purity to this being who’s unable to speak, he thinks, as his finger traces the outline of her shoulder, arm, hips, legs, until it reaches her feet.

Yikes

It’s not for health reasons. Since his son died he hasn’t gone back to eating meat.

drawings. Close to the frame he sees a cockroach on the wall. The cockroach crawls down to the countertop and disappears behind a plate of bread.

“I’ve had it with this game. We don’t eat people. Or are the two of you savages?”

His sister’s words are like dry leaves piled up in a corner, rotting.

It’s a hot day. He takes off his shirt and ties it around his waist.

“The mask of apparent calm, of mundane tranquility, of the joy, at once small and bright, of not knowing when this thing I call skin will be ripped off, when this thing I call mouth will lose the flesh that surrounds it, when these things I call eyes will come upon the black silence of a knife.”

slaughtered. He strokes her neck. Now he’s the one who trembles. He removes his jeans and stands there, naked. His breath quickens. He continues to hug her as it rains down. What he wants to do is prohibited. But he does it anyway.

Welllllll….that’s a bummer. Extremely disappointed. I guess I thought from the synopsis/blurb that he would communicate with a woman/head and through that bond he would begin to gain the courage to rebel. But of course it just ends up being that he fucks/rapes a woman that is essentially his prisoner and can’t speak or advocate for herself at all, not to mention a good deal younger than him.

He runs his hand over her belly. She’s eight months pregnant.

What the fuck

She’ll be fine watching the TV he mounted on the wall, sleeping, drawing with the crayons he left her, eating the food he made for her, flipping through the pages of books she doesn’t understand.

Disgusting. Disappointed but not surprised