1
Carcass. Cut in half. Stunner. Slaughter line. Spray wash. These words appear in his head and strike him. Destroy him. But they’re not just words. They’re the blood, the dense smell, the automation, the absence of thought. They burst in on the night, catch him off guard.
When he wakes, his body is covered in a film of sweat because he knows that what awaits is another day of slaughtering humans.
No one calls them that, he thinks, as he lights a cigarette. He doesn’t call them that when he has to explain the meat cycle to a new employee. They could arrest him for it, even send him to the Municipal Slaughterhouse and process him. Assassinate him, would be the correct term, but it can’t be used. While he removes his soaked shirt, he tries to clear the persistent idea that this is what they are: humans bred as animals for consumption. He goes to the refrigerator and pours himself cold water. He drinks it slowly. His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world.
There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.
He opens the window; the heat is suffocating. He stands there smoking and breathes the still night air. With cows and pigs it was easy. It was a trade he’d learnt at the Cypress, the meat processing plant he’d inherited from his father. True, the screams of a pig being skinned could petrify you, but hearing protectors were used and eventually it became just one more sound. Now that he’s the boss’s right-hand man, he has to monitor and train the new employees.
Teaching to kill is worse than killing. He sticks his head out the window. Breathes the thick air, it burns.
He wishes he could anaesthetize himself and live without feeling anything. Act automatically, observe, breathe and nothing more. See everything, understand and not talk. But the memories are there, they remain with him.
Many people have naturalized what the media insist on calling the “Transition”. But he hasn’t because he knows that transition is a word that doesn’t convey how quick and ruthless the process was. One word to sum up and classify the unfathomable. An empty word. Change, transformation, shift: synonyms that appear to mean the same thing, though the choice of one over the other speaks to a distinct view of the
world. They’ve all naturalized cannibalism, he thinks. Cannibalism, another word that could cause him major problems.
He remembers when they announced the existence of GGB. The mass hysteria, the suicides, the fear. After GGB, animals could no longer be eaten because they’d been infected by a virus that was fatal to humans. That was the official line. The words carry the weight necessary to mould us, to suppress all questioning, he thinks.
Barefoot, he walks through the house. After GGB, the world changed definitively. They tried vaccines, antidotes, but the virus resisted and mutated. He remembers articles that spoke of the revenge of the vegans, others about acts of violence against animals, doctors on television explaining what to do about the lack of protein, journalists confirming that there wasn’t yet a cure for the animal virus. He sighs and lights another cigarette.
He’s alone. His wife has gone to live with her mother. It’s not that he still misses her, but there’s an emptiness in the house that keeps him awake, that troubles him. He takes a book off the shelf. No longer tired, he turns on the light to read, then turns it off. He touches the scar on his hand. The incident happened a long time ago and it doesn’t hurt any more. It was a pig. He was very young, just starting out, and hadn’t known that the meat needed to be respected, until the meat bit him and almost took his hand off. The foreman and the others couldn’t stop laughing. You’ve been baptized, they said. His father didn’t say anything. After that bite, they stopped seeing him as the boss’s son and he became one of the team. But neither the team nor the Cypress Processing Plant exist, he thinks.
He picks up his phone. There are three missed calls from his mother-in-law. None from his wife.
Unable to bear the heat, he decides to shower. He turns on the tap and sticks his head under the cold water. He wants to erase the distant images, the memories that persist. The piles of cats and dogs burned alive. A scratch meant death. The smell of burned meat lingered for weeks. He remembers the groups in yellow protective suits that scoured the neighbourhoods at night, killing and burning every animal that crossed their paths.
The cold water falls onto his back. He sits down on the floor of the shower and slowly shakes his head. But he can’t stop
remembering. Groups of people had started killing others and eating them in secret. The press documented a case of two unemployed Bolivians who had been attacked, dismembered and barbecued by a group of neighbours. When he read the news, he shuddered. It was the first public scandal of its kind and instilled the idea in society that in the end, meat is meat, it doesn’t matter where it’s from.
He tilts his head up so the water falls onto his face. What he wants is for the drops to wipe his mind blank. But he knows the memories are there, they always will be. In some countries, immigrants began to disappear en masse. Immigrants, the marginalized, the poor. They were persecuted and eventually slaughtered. Legalization occurred when the governments gave in to pressure from a big-money industry that had come to a halt. They adapted the processing plants and regulations. Not long after, they began to breed people as animals to supply the massive demand for meat.
He gets out of the shower and barely dries himself off. In the mirror, he sees there are bags under his eyes. He believes in a theory that some people have tried to talk about. But those who have done so publicly have been silenced. The most eminent zoologist, whose articles claimed the virus was a lie, had an opportune accident. He thinks it was all staged to reduce overpopulation. For as long as he can recall, there’s been talk of the scarcity of resources. He remembers the riots in countries like China, where people killed each other as a result of overcrowding, though none of the media outlets reported the news from this angle. The person who said that the world was going to explode was his father: “The planet is going to burst at any minute.
You’ll see, Son, it’s either going to be blown to bits or all of us are going to die from some plague. Look at what’s happening in China, they’ve already started killing themselves because there’s so many people, there’s no room for them all. And here, there’s still room here, but we’re running out of water, food, air. Everything’s going to hell.”
He’d looked at his father almost with pity because he’d thought he was just an old man rambling on. But now he knows his father had been right.
The purge had resulted in other benefits: the population and poverty had been reduced, and there was meat. Prices were high, but
the market was growing at an accelerated rate. There were massive protests, hunger strikes, complaints filed by human rights organizations, and at the same time, articles, research and news stories that had an impact on public opinion. Prestigious universities claimed that animal protein was necessary to live, doctors confirmed that plant protein didn’t contain all the essential amino acids, experts assured that gas emissions had been reduced, but malnutrition was on the rise, magazines published articles on the dark side of vegetables. The protest centres began to disperse and the media went on reporting cases of people they said had died of the animal virus.
The heat continues to suffocate him. He walks to the porch naked.
The air is still. He lies down in the hammock and tries to sleep. A commercial plays again and again in his mind. A woman who’s beautiful but dressed conservatively is putting dinner on the table for her three children and husband. She looks at the camera and says: “I serve my family special food, it’s the same meat as always, but tastier.”
The whole family smiles and eats their dinner. The government, his government, decided to resignify the product. They gave human meat the name “special meat”. Instead of just “meat”, now there’s “special tenderloin”, “special cutlets”, “special kidneys”.
He doesn’t call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product. To the number of heads to be processed, to the lot waiting in the unloading yard, to the slaughter line that must run in a constant and orderly manner, to the excrement that needs to be sold for manure, to the offal sector. No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him, he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.