Tender is the Flesh(16)
Sergio goes up to the applicants and shakes their hands. “His job is one of the most important, stunning the heads. He strikes them unconscious so their throats can be slit. Go ahead and show them, Sergio,” he says and tells the men to climb up steps that have been built below the window. This way they’ll be able to see what happens inside the box.
Sergio enters the box room and gets up onto the platform. He grabs the club. Then he shouts, “Send in the next one!” A guillotine door opens and a naked female, barely twenty years of age, walks in. She’s wet and her hands are held behind her back with a cable tie. She’s been shaved. Inside the box there’s very little space. It’s almost impossible for her to move. Sergio places the stainless steel shackles, which run along a vertical rail, around the female’s neck and clamps them shut. The female trembles, shakes a little, tries to free herself. She opens her mouth.
Sergio looks her in the eye and pats her a few times on the head, almost like he’s petting her. He says something to her they can’t hear, or sings to her. The female becomes still, she calms down. Sergio raises the club and hits her on the forehead. It’s a sharp strike. So swift and silent it’s crazy. The female is knocked unconscious. Her body goes slack and when Sergio opens the shackles, it falls to the ground. The automatic door opens outwards and the base of the box tilts to expel the body, which slides onto the floor.
An employee enters and binds her feet with straps that are attached to chains. He cuts the cable tie holding her hands together and presses a button. The body is raised and transported face down to another room via a system of rails. The employee looks up into the lounge and waves at him. He doesn’t remember the man’s name, but knows he hired him a few months back.
The employee gets a hose and rinses off the box and floor, which have been splattered with excrement.
The taller applicant climbs down from the steps and takes a seat on a chair, his head hanging. Now is when this man vomits, he thinks, but the man gets up, composes himself. Sergio comes in with a smile, proud of the demonstration. “So what did you think? Who wants to give it a try?” he says.
The shorter man steps forward and says, “I do.”
Sergio laughs loudly and says, “Not so fast, mate, it’ll be a while before you’re doing that.” The man looks disappointed. “Let me explain a few things to you. If you strike them dead, you’ve gone and ruined the meat. And if you don’t knock them unconscious and they’re alive when they go to the slaughter, you’ve also ruined the meat. Got that?” He gives the man a hug and shakes him a little, laughing. “Kids today, Tejo. They want to take on the world and don’t even know how to walk.” All of them laugh, except for the shorter applicant. Sergio explains that beginners use a captive bolt pistol. “There’s a smaller margin of error, but the meat doesn’t turn out quite as tender. That make sense? Ricardo, he’s the stunner who’s taking a rest outside at the moment, uses the pistol and is training to use the club. He’s been here for six months.” Sergio finishes off by saying, “The club is only for those who know what they’re doing.”
The taller man asks Sergio what he said to the meat, why he spoke to it. “Meat,” he thinks with surprise, while they wait for Sergio’s answer, and wonders why the man called the stunned female that, and not a head, or a product. Then Sergio says that every stunner has his secret when it comes to calming down the heads. He says that every new stunner has to find his method.
“Why don’t they scream?” the man asks.
He doesn’t want to answer, he wants to be somewhere else, but he’s there. Sergio is the one who says something: “They don’t have vocal cords.”
The shorter applicant climbs up the steps and looks into the box room again. He puts his hands up against the window. There’s eagerness in his gaze. There’s impatience in it.
He thinks this man is dangerous. Someone who wants to assassinate that badly is someone who’s unstable, who won’t take to the routine of killing, to the automatic and dispassionate act of slaughtering humans.
12
They leave the lounge. He tells them that they’re moving on to the slaughter sector. “Are we going in?” the shorter man asks.
He looks at the man severely. “No,” he says, “we’re not going in, because as I told you, our attire doesn’t meet regulations.”
The man looks at the floor and doesn’t answer, then impatiently puts his hands in his trouser pockets. He suspects this man is a fake applicant. Every so often people pretend to want the job so they can witness the killing. People who enjoy the process, for whom it’s a source of curiosity, an interesting anecdote to add to their lives. He thinks they’re people who don’t have the courage to accept and take on the weight of the work.
They walk through a hallway with a wide window that looks directly into the slitting room. The workers are dressed in white, inside the white room. But the apparent cleanliness is stained with the tonnes of blood that fall into the bleeding trough and splatter the walls, the coveralls, the floor, the hands.
The heads enter via an automatic rail. Three bodies are hanging face down. The first has had its throat slit, the other two wait their turn. One of these is the female Sergio has just stunned. The worker presses a button and the body that’s been bled dry follows its course along the rail while the next body moves into place above the trough. With a swift movement, the worker slits the head’s throat. The body trembles slightly. The blood falls into the trough. It stains the worker’s apron, trousers and boots.