Tender is the Flesh(9)
With special meat it was necessary to adapt to new cuts, new measures and weights, new tastes. Spanel was the first and the quickest to do so because she handled meat with chilling detachment. Initially, she only had a few customers: the maids of the rich. But she had an eye for business and opened the first shop in the neighbourhood with the greatest purchasing power. The maids picked up the meat, disgusted and confused, and always clarified that they’d been sent by the man or woman they worked for, as if doing so were necessary. Spanel looked at these women with a grimace, but it was one of understanding, and the maids always came back for more, with increasing confidence, until finally they stopped giving explanations. Over time, the customers became more frequent. The fact that a woman ran the shop put everyone at ease.
But none of them knows what this woman thinks. Except for him. He knows her well because she used to work at his father’s processing plant.
Spanel says strange things to him while she smokes. He wants the visit to be over with as soon as possible because her frozen intensity makes him uneasy. And Spanel keeps him there—she does it every time—just like when he started working at his father’s plant and she brought him to the cutting room after everyone had left.
He thinks she doesn’t have anyone to talk to, anyone to share her thoughts 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. Or not. Now she’d be vulnerable and fragile, opening her eyes so that he could enter, there, beyond the cold.
She has an assistant, a man he’s never known to say a word. The assistant does the drudge work; he loads the carcasses into the cold storage room and cleans the shop. 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.
At first Spanel copied the traditional cuts of beef so the change wouldn’t be as abrupt. A customer would walk in and it was like being in a butcher shop of times past. Over the years, the shop transformed, gradually but persistently. First it was the packaged hands that Spanel placed off to the side where they were hidden among the milanesas à la proven?ale, the cuts of tri-tip and the kidneys. The label read “Special Meat”, but on another part of the package, Spanel clarified that it was “Upper Extremity”, strategically avoiding the word hand. Then she added packaged feet, which were displayed on a bed of lettuce with the label “Lower Extremity”, and later on, a platter with tongues, penises, noses, testicles and a sign that said “Spanel’s Delicacies”.
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.
She leads him to a room at the back of the shop with a wooden table and two chairs. They’re surrounded by fridges that hold the half carcasses she takes out of the cold storage room to slice and then sell. 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.
Spanel asks him to take a seat and serves him a glass of foot-pressed wine. 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.
It’s not that he thinks Spanel is dangerous, or crazy, or that he pictures her naked (because he’s never seen her naked), or that he’s only ever met a few female butchers and that all of them have been inscrutable, impossible to decipher. It’s that he also needs the wine so he can listen to her calmly, because her words drive at his brain. They’re frigid, stabbing words, like when she said “no” and grabbed his arms and held them against the table forcefully, after he’d tried to touch her, take off her apron, run his fingers through her hair. Or when he went up to her the next day and the only thing she said was “goodbye”, with no explanation, no kiss on her way out. Later he learnt that she’d inherited a small fortune, which was how she’d bought the butcher shop.
He hands her forms to sign that certify her interaction with the Krieg Processing Plant and state that she doesn’t adulterate the meat. These are formalities because it’s known that no one does, not now, not with special meat.
Spanel signs the forms and takes a sip of wine. It’s ten in the morning.
She offers him a cigarette and lights it for him. 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.” He downs his wine and tells her he doesn’t understand, she has money and can ensure she’s not eaten when she dies, a lot of people do. She gives him a look that could be pity: “No one can be sure of anything. Let them eat me, I’ll give them horrible indigestion.” She opens her mouth, without showing her teeth, and let’s out a guttural sound that could be a cackle, but isn’t. “I’m surrounded by death, all day long, at all hours of the day,” she says, and points to the carcasses in the fridges. “Everything indicates that my destiny is in there. Or do you think we won’t have to pay for this?”