Carnality, p.13
Carnality, page 13
* * *
—
What I remember most are the air, the light, and the countryside. The grass that was perfumed with all the smells of the soil, and the wind that used to caress its leaves when it blew across the interior of Extremadura in the spring. I also remember the forests to the north and the tall eucalyptus trees that were silent during the summers just as in Neruda’s poem. When autumn came, the same trees would be completely still as though standing at attention in the face of their own decline. But if the countryside was paradisiacal, my body was a Pandora’s box. All bodies are, in fact, Pandora’s boxes. What you glimpse inside when the lid is opened are disease, desire, and sordidness of every kind. Looking in the mirror one day, I suddenly saw that I had changed and that though the change was a blessing, it was also in some way the beginning of a decline…
* * *
—
My father died when I was very young and my mother was a butcher, like her father and grandfather before her, so if it did not sound as odd as it does, you could say I have meat and flesh in my blood. Though the war was being waged during my teenage years, it was as if it never quite reached our village and we were able to live in peace, as though in a small oasis or a hidden valley. When I was a child, I was allowed to play with all the animals apart from the pigs, because pigs had bitten off the ears and noses of little children. Pigs’ tails were fine, though, and I would be cutting them up while other children played in playpens or with kitchen utensils on the floor. It was the only part of the pig my mother could spare for my games, apart from the snout, but she wasn’t prepared to give that to a small child.
My mother loved tools. She would oil, sharpen, and polish them. She had a blacksmith’s, or maybe even an alchemist’s, eye for metals. One day I saw her chop the head off a hen.
“Did you see that, Lucia?” she asked while inspecting the bloody edge. “The ax is the true queen of all tools. So simple in design and yet so explosive when used.”
She taught me to use Skinner, the skinning knife, and the short and broad castrating knife called the Cow’s Tongue. The bollock dagger had sandpapered wooden balls above the blade, and then there was the Argentine Brother-in-Law, which was meant for hand-to-hand combat. My mother called the crown jewel of her knife collection the Loving Butcher’s Daughter—and, yes, that was me.
Macaria, my mother.
* * *
—
I suppose it is easy to imagine all butchers as grim-looking, hard-hearted bruisers with an ax in one hand, the slaughterer’s knife in the other, and dried blood spattered across their broad faces. But my mother was both small in stature and slim and wore trousers she had to cinch at the waist with a belt, while her arms looked like matchsticks you were afraid would snap when she lugged around the heavy carcasses in the slaughter room. She also had hands that were beautifully cared for. The loveliest hands in the village; hands that any pianist might envy. Long fingers, soft palms, and trimmed nails without any black rims. She caught the eye of all the men, and in an attempt to avoid this, wore baggy clothes and would often leave a bloodstain or two untouched on her burlap shirt—anything, as she put it, to discourage them. Her attempts to divert their attention had the opposite effect, however, and some would even come to an abrupt halt, their eyes locked on her, as though they had caught a certain scent, or had suddenly spied an old wreck of a motor from which they could nevertheless hear the self-confident thrum of a sports car’s spinning engine. Then she would move away or say something offensive.
“You should be grateful for my attention,” a man once said to her. “You’ll get old one fine day and no one will so much as glance in your direction.”
My mother said to me afterward that that was what it was all about.
“Never let the flesh dictate your terms, Lucia,” she said. “In many people the power of the flesh is greater than that of the soul and for many people life is about the carnal rather than the spirit. You need to be on your guard, Lucia, against carnality.”
If only she had realized how I would heed her words.
* * *
—
On a lovely day at the beginning of April when the cherry trees were in blossom in Extremadura, and perhaps in all of Spain, an officer strolled into our butcher’s shop. He asked for the best Iberico sausages my mother produced, to be grilled by his platoon in their trenches twenty or thirty kilometers north of our village while they were defending their positions against Republicans and anarchists. Although his smile was a bit too broad, his eyes too beady, and his boots too shiny, my mother appeared not to notice. While she was wrapping the sausages in paper, she chatted to him about the war and she did so as if the war were an afternoon tea, at which you might have opinions about the sandwiches or the other guests, but which also allowed you to bring together people who might otherwise never have met. Alfonso Hidalgo quickly adopted the same tone and said that while the war had its disadvantages in his view—that went without saying as war is ultimately war after all—it also offered modest but unquestionable advantages. A war meant devastation, but what was devastation if not also an opportunity to start again? Silence descended on the butcher’s shop, and my mother stood there holding the wrapped sausages while looking at Alfonso Hidalgo with a faint gleam in her eyes. When he had left I asked my mother whether she remembered what she had said about never allowing pleasure and vanity to dictate the terms of your life. About the carnal and the spiritual. She looked at me as though she had never heard those words before. They got married as soon as the war was over. At the wedding Alfonso’s chest was adorned with several rows of medals awarded for his valor. He moved into our house, took my father’s place at the table and in their bed, and so became part of our lives.
* * *
—
Everyone will use certain words more than others, and if you listen to someone long enough you can work out what those words are and gain a more profound understanding of the person in question in the process. I am familiar with this by now because of the endless hours I have spent listening to people who come to the convent for a chance to speak with someone. The word Alfonso used most was “modernize.” Wherever he turned those chilly, close-set eyes he would find things he could modernize. The handling of the animals could be modernized, the slaughter could be modernized, and the sale of meat could be modernized as well. In all likelihood my mother could also be modernized, and I am convinced Alfonso Hidalgo would have done anything to see her dressed up and wearing makeup, adorned with earrings and a pearl necklace, at one of the events that took place in Madrid and to which former generals were invited to mingle with the powers that be. My mother refused, however. She did not want to travel to the city and absolutely refused to attend any events with generals who had been put out to grass, and Alfonso Hidalgo possessed enough of a survival instinct not to press the matter. But when it came to making the slaughter more efficient, there was no one to restrain him. More animals could be kept on a smaller acreage, while allowing them to graze freely was costly and impractical and led to slower growth than if the animals were housed indoors and ate a special kind of fodder. With a big, beaming smile on his face, he remodeled our abattoir and rearranged the routines that guided the slaughter. We no longer slaughtered only our own cows and pigs; animals would be driven to us from the whole of the surrounding area as well. The trucks that arrived once a week stopped behind the abattoir, and the animals were led en masse down the ramp. The engines of those vehicles and the desperate cries of the beasts could be heard right across the square, and all the windows along the street would be closed. Alfonso Hidalgo did not believe you should stop the entire process just because some bone or other got broken or a tail was crushed. The whole point was to funnel the animals forward as efficiently as possible so the soundproof doors could be slammed swiftly shut behind them. Once this was done, the vehicles drove out of the village and quiet descended once more. Alfonso would then start to clean the street and the ramp with a hosepipe while whistling, which served to drown the echoes of the animals’ cries. The shop doors onto the street were reopened after that, and the village could start to breathe again as usual.
* * *
—
During the postwar years, Franco’s men carried out a number of purges in our village with Alfonso’s help. According to him the people involved were refusing to show their true colors and could be intent on harming Spain. Alfonso and his friends would sometimes drive around in a platform truck, picking up people and then taking them out of the village; the people who had been picked up never came home. No one dared call Alfonso to account because he was well known for having fought bravely during the war and for being on good terms with the authorities in Madrid. No one wanted to get into trouble with people like that, and the dead were dead in any case; there was no bringing them back. Occasionally Alfonso would also “take care of” people Franco’s men were looking for, and in that case they would be imprisoned in the slaughter room in the basement of the butcher’s shop together with the animals while waiting to be collected. I used to try to avoid looking at them. Although Alfonso did not normally involve me or my mother in the handling of these individuals, there was one occasion on which he departed from the routine, and this would have consequences none of us could have envisaged at the time.
That day he had entrusted me with keeping watch. One of them, a woman, had bitten Alfonso Hidalgo on the hand. He had taken them in some food, and the woman had come flying out of the darkness of the pen, according to him, and grabbed hold of his hand and sank her teeth into it. War can make people lose their heads, and apparently the woman in question had children she had been separated from and was no longer able to keep her despair in check. I could hear Alfonso’s scream from where I stood in the cold store and was immediately transfixed by the sense that nothing good could come of that scream.
“Lucia,” he yelled, “Lucia!”
I ran out into the basement to see him holding his bleeding hand.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The whore bit me,” he yelled.
He really was bleeding from a bite on the side of his hand. That didn’t stop him from going inside the pen and grabbing the woman by the hair and dragging her across the filthy floor. I could see she had ugly infected wounds on her legs and bruises and dirt all over her face. She screamed from the pain and was spitting so much that saliva was dripping down her chin.
“Alfonso,” I called and hurried after him. “Alfonso, wait.”
But Alfonso refused to listen and shut the woman inside the cutting room. Then he came back out to find me, virtually paralyzed, next to the pen containing the other prisoners.
“You’ll have to watch the scum while I deal with her,” he said.
“But they’re already locked up,” I said.
“You just keep an eye on the scum,” he said again and shoved over a bale of straw for me to sit on in front of the pen.
I sat on it. Alfonso fetched a pitchfork and handed it to me.
“You have to show them you’ve got some backbone.”
I took the pitchfork from him, but it was so heavy it fell out of my hands and onto the floor. I sat there trying not to look inside the pen, but it felt like my eyes were being drawn there by an invisible force. Finally I looked into the darkness. There were seven prisoners sitting inside. They did not say anything, but what I noticed straightaway were their eyes. They were all fixed intently on me and they were glowing with a luminous flame. It was then I felt the hatred. It came at me through the air like a freezing draft, as if there were only a single person inside, one gigantic soul, throbbing with a great and icy loathing. And as I was being enveloped in that hate-filled and sepulchral silence, the scream sounded. It was a long one, drawn out and panicked. A woman’s scream at its most awful, a woman’s scream to make the very earth contract in spasms. I jerked to my feet by reflex but then quickly sat back down again and tried to feign calm even though a cold sweat was running down my spine. The scream went on, and the prisoners in the pen began to move anxiously around in the straw, talking to one another in their fear. One of them looked like he was about to have a panic attack and was groaning and gasping for breath. I ran over to the door to the cutting room and leaned my ear against it, but it had gone quiet. When I turned around I could see that all the prisoners in the pen had got to their feet and were leaning against the bars in a tight group, their eyes on me. I turned back to the door and pounded on it hard.
“Alfonso,” I yelled. “Alfonso, what’s going on? Open up.”
The door opened then, and Alfonso and the woman came out. Her face was now black and blue all over and streaked with tears. A bloodstained piece of cloth was knotted around her hand. Alfonso opened the pen and flung her inside.
“Come, Lucia,” he said, and he walked over to the door.
But I was unable to move from the spot and kept looking at the woman and the other captives. She said, “He took a finger.”
It looked like she was opening the cloth to let them see because they all screamed and one of them seemed to turn around and vomit into the darkness. I had to run to catch up with Alfonso.
“What did you do,” I yelled, “what did you do, you can’t just chop someone’s finger off!”
He did not reply.
“What did you do, you bastard?” I said and aimed a blow at one of his kidneys.
He turned toward me then and I was looking up at his broad blood-spattered face. He grabbed me tightly around the throat with one hand and squeezed.
“My duty,” he said. “I did my duty, as a man, a soldier, and a citizen of this country.”
“Your hand smells of blood,” I managed to get out.
He let me go and then aimed a blow at my head that landed with such force I was hurled into the cement wall. Once I was on the floor he put his foot between my shoulder blades and pressed me down against the asphalt.
“Talk back to me again, and it’ll be your finger next time.”
He took his foot away and started to walk down the street. But then he turned and raised his index finger toward me: “Not a word to Macaria about this!”
* * *
—
A few days later Franco’s men arrived to pick up the prisoners. Alfonso Hidalgo was lauded once again for his efforts. In the end the police felt so confident of him, they said that under his leadership the villagers could take matters into their own hands and handle any troublemakers as they saw fit, because it was both a long and a costly trip to drive all the way from Madrid and with Alfonso in charge matters would be handled just as if they were actually on the scene. Some weeks later he got a financial reward for his zeal and courage. He was also invited to send a box of charcuterie to Doña Carmen, Franco’s wife, who thanked him personally in a letter written on pink paper that, when opened, gave off the scent of an exclusive lady’s perfume.
* * *
—
Over time Alfonso’s hatred me of me would become more intense. He said he could not understand what my mother could possibly mean when she said I had the makings of a good butcher, because I lacked all the qualities a good butcher ought to have, as he saw it. I lacked courage. I was squeamish and compassionate, to a ridiculous degree.
“That’s because she’s a girl,” my mother said.
“That’s no excuse,” Alfonso replied. “I have come across women as tough as granite who had hearts of steel. There’s you for instance, Macaria. No one ever coddled you, and you grew up to be a thick-skinned and formidable female. Come over here and sit in my lap so I can have a squeeze.”
According to Alfonso, the human race could be divided into shellfish and finfish. Good people were shellfish who protected their innards with a hard surface. In keeping with the shellfish principle, a person with any value to them had to become thick-skinned. This was all about the pearl inside, or a sense of self-worth, if you prefer. It followed that only people who were completely worthless could be kind to their very core.
“Lucia,” he said, “is the perfect finfish. As soft on the outside as on the inside and just as unprotected from the natural challenges and constructive reverses that life entails.”
But his lectures failed to help. It might have been the memory of the woman and her chopped-off finger as well as all the other things that went on in the abattoir that made me start to cry inconsolably every time a slaughter was due. My mother and Alfonso did their utmost to get me to control my feelings, mainly by forcing me to help with all the practical arrangements during the hours I was not in school. I obeyed them, but the tears flowed while I did what I could to be useful. Alfonso gave me a hiding on more than one occasion out of pure rage. My mother could also get really upset over what she called my “squeamishness” and smack me with her plastic glove-covered hands, which sometimes left a bright red bloodstain or a scrap of meat on my cheek. From time to time they also tried to harden me, in line with the motto What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, by forcing me to carry out the cruelest of tasks. These included the castration of young boars and the slaughter of the piglets. My mother and Alfonso must have thought that turning my hands into granite was simply a matter of how many metal implements I proved able to stick into the soft parts of pigs, or how many animal body parts I could cut off and, at Alfonso’s orders, throw to the sows, which devoured them greedily. Several years later, when I arrived at the convent and talked about these experiences, the madre superiora said to me: “That explains why you are so short, Lucia. Some people cannot deal with all the challenges that confront them and may then stop growing, out of sheer terror.”
