tender is the flesh | agustina bazterrica
notes:
As he drives along the deserted road, he slowly shakes his head because he doesn’t want to remember. But he does remember.
The owner of the tannery is always smiling and he feels that when this man observes him, what he’s really doing is calculating how many meters of skin he can remove in one piece if he slaughters him, flays him, and removes his flesh on the spot.
He sees the way the space fills with El Gringo’s words. They’re light words, they weigh nothing. They’re words he feels mix with others that are incomprehensible, the mechanical words spoken by an artificial voice, a voice that doesn’t know that all these words can conceal him, even suffocate him.
It’s time for him to leave. He can’t handle El Gringo’s voice any longer. He can’t bear the way the man’s words accumulate in the air.
His father is a person of integrity, that’s why he went crazy.
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.
don’t get why a person’s smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, they’re showing their skeleton.”
“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.”
For a while she doesn’t say anything, as though the answer were obvious and didn’t need words.
He knows she’s serious. And that this conversation is prohibited, that these words could cause major problems for them. But he needs someone to say what no one does.
There’s something about her he’d like to break.
He closes the door to the barn and goes over to the house. Inside, he takes off his clothes and steps into the shower. He could sell her and get rid of the problem. He could raise her, inseminate her, start with a small lot of head, branch off from the processing plant. He could escape, leave everything, abandon his father, his wife, his dead child, the cot waiting to be destroyed.
He would look without speaking because he felt his father didn’t have any more words, that even the ones he said weren’t really there.
He said that even though the original meat, from before the product was bred, didn’t eliminate overpopulation, poverty, and hunger, it did help fight them. He said that everything has a purpose in this life and the purpose of meat is to be slaughtered and then eaten. He said that thanks to his work, people were fed, and that was something he was proud of.
He had to fire Ency because someone who’s been broken can’t be fixed.
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.
she screams as if beneath this hell there was another hell, one from which she didn’t want to escape.
His sister’s words are like boxes filled with blank paper.
He looks at his niece and nephew as though he were savoring the taste of them. It startles them and they lower their eyes.
He looked at everyone as though the world had distanced itself a few meters; it was as though the people embracing him were behind frosted glass.
The man is one of those people who seem to have been part of the world since the beginning, but who have a certain vitality, and as a result appear young.
nor can he stop the feeling that inside this man there’s a presence, something clawing at his body, trying to get out.
unwilling to look Urlet in the eye, because he’s afraid that the presence, the entity that lives under the man’s skin, will cease clawing at him and be set free. Is it the soul of a being Urlet ate alive, one that got trapped inside him? he wonders.
Now his father is free from the madness, he thinks, from this horrific world, and he feels something like relief, but in fact the stone in his chest is getting bigger.
Dr. Valka never asks him how he’s doing or if everything is okay, because she only sees him as a reflection of herself, a mirror into which she can keep talking about her achievements.
Except for him, there isn’t a single person in the place who knows his father was captivated by birds, that he was passionately in love with his wife, and when she died something in him went out for good.
janet change 