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He motions to the applicants to follow him. The next stop is the offal room. They walk there very slowly and he tells them that the product is used almost in its entirety. “Hardly anything goes to waste,” he says. The shorter applicant stops to watch a worker use a blowtorch on the scalded corpses. Once they’re entirely hairless, they can be gutted.
On the way there they walk through the cutting room. The rooms are all connected by a rail that moves the bodies from one stage to the next. Through the wide windows, they see the way the head and extremities of the female stunned by Sergio are cut off with a saw.
They stop to watch.
A worker picks up her head and takes it to another table where he removes her eyes and puts them on a tray with a label that says “Eyes”.
He opens her mouth, cuts out her tongue and places it on a tray with a label that says “Tongues”. He cuts off her ears and sets them down on a tray with a label that says “Ears”. The worker picks up an awl and a hammer and carefully taps the bottom of her head. He continues in this manner until he has cracked a portion of her skull, and then he carefully removes her brain and leaves it on a tray with a label that says “Brains”.
Her head is now empty and he places it on ice in a drawer that says “Heads”.
“What do you do with the heads?” the shorter applicant asks, barely containing his excitement.
He answers automatically: “A number of things. One is sending them to the provinces where they still cook heads like they used to, in pits in the ground.”
The taller applicant says, “I’ve never had heads cooked that way but I hear it’s pretty good. There’s only a little meat, but it’s cheap and tasty if done well.”
Another worker has already gathered and cleaned the female’s hands and feet, and placed them in drawers with their respective labels.
Arms and legs are sold to butchers attached to the carcasses. He explains that all of the products are washed and checked by inspectors before they’re refrigerated. He points to a man who’s dressed like the
rest of the workers but is carrying a folder in which he jots down information, and a certification stamp that every so often he takes out and uses.
The female that Sergio stunned has now been flayed and is unrecognizable. Without skin and extremities, she’s becoming a carcass. They see the way a worker picks up the skin that was removed by a machine and carefully stretches it in the large drawers.
They continue walking. The wide windows now face either the intermediary room or the cutting room. The flayed bodies move along the rails. The workers make a precise cut from the pubis to the solar plexus. The taller applicant asks him why there are two workers per body. He explains that one worker makes the cut and the other stitches the anus shut to prevent expulsions from contaminating the product.
The other applicant laughs and says, “I wouldn’t want that job.”
He thinks that he wouldn’t even hire the man for that job. The taller applicant has had enough as well and looks at him with contempt.
The intestines, stomachs, pancreases fall onto a stainless steel table and are taken to the offal room by employees.
The bodies that have been cut open move along the rails. On another table, a worker slices the upper cavity. He takes out the kidneys and liver, separates the ribs, cuts out the heart, oesophagus and lungs.
They continue walking. When they reach the offal room, they see stainless steel tables. Tubes are connected to the tables and water flows over the surface of them. White entrails have been placed on top of them. The workers slide the entrails around in the water. It looks like a sea that’s slowly boiling, that moves at its own rhythm. The entrails are inspected, cleaned, flushed, pulled apart, graded, cut, measured and stored. The three of them watch the workers pick up the intestines and cover them in layers of salt before storing them in drawers. They watch the workers scrape away the mesenteric fat. They watch them inject compressed air into the intestines to make sure they haven’t been punctured. They watch them wash the stomachs and cut them open to release an amorphous substance, greenish-brown in colour, that’s then discarded. They watch them clean the empty, broken stomachs, which
are then dried, reduced, cut into strips and compressed to make something like an edible sponge.
In another, smaller room, they see red entrails hanging from hooks. The workers inspect them, wash them, certify them, store them.
He always asks himself what it would be like to spend most of the day storing human hearts in a box. What do the workers think about?
Are they aware that what they hold in their hands was beating just moments ago? Do they care? Then he thinks that he actually spends most of his life supervising a group of people who, following his orders, slit the throats, gut and cut up women and men as if doing so were completely natural. One can get used to almost anything, except the death of a child.
How many heads do they have to kill each month so he can pay for his father’s nursing home? How many humans do they have to slaughter for him to forget how he laid Leo down in his cot, tucked him in, sang him a lullaby, and the next day saw he had died in his sleep? How many hearts need to be stored in boxes for the pain to be transformed into something else? But the pain, he intuits, is the only thing that keeps him breathing.
Without the sadness, he has nothing left.