Tender Is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

“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.”

He had to fire Ency because someone who’s been broken can’t be fixed. He did speak to Krieg and make sure he arranged and paid for psychological care. But within a month, Ency had shot himself. His wife and kids had to leave the neighborhood, and since then Manzanillo has looked at him with genuine hatred. He respects Manzanillo for it. He thinks it’ll be cause for concern when the man stops looking at him this way, when the hatred doesn’t keep him going any longer. Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything. 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.

As he pulls up to his house, he misses the way Koko and Pugliese used to bark and chase after the car along the dirt road bordered with eucalyptus trees. It was Koko who had found Pugliese. He was crying under the tree where the two of them are now buried. He was a puppy only a few months old, full of fleas and ticks, and malnourished. Koko adopted him as if he were her own. And though he’d been the one who removed the fleas and ticks from the pup, and fed him so he’d regain strength, Pugliese always saw Koko as his savior.

“After all, since the world began, we’ve been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we’ve been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical.”

“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.”

Gershwin’s “Summertime.” His father would always put on Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s version. He’d say, “This is the best recording, it’s the one that moves me to tears.”

She gives him the same speech every time, tells him how difficult it is even in this day and age to be a woman and have a career, says that people continue to hold prejudices against her, that only recently have they started greeting her and not her assistant who’s a man, because they think he’s the one who’s head of the laboratory, it was her choice not to have a family, and socially she has to pay for it, because people continue to think that women have to fulfill some biological plan, when her great accomplishment in life has been to press ahead, to never give in; being a man is so much easier, she says, this is her family—the laboratory—but no one understands, not really, she’s revolutionizing medicine, she tells him, and people continue to care whether her shoes are feminine, or that her roots are showing because she didn’t have time to go to the hairdresser, or that she’s gained weight. He agrees with everything she says, but he can’t bear her words, which are like tiny tadpoles dragging themselves along, leaving behind a sticky trail, slithering until they pile up, one on top of the other, and rot, vitiating the air with their rancid smell. He doesn’t answer because he also knows that she has few female employees working for her. And if one of them were to get pregnant, she’d look down on her, disregard her.