To Leave with the Reindeer

by Olivia Rosenthal

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  One evening just before Christmas, you dine with the woman ten years younger than you, and snow starts to fall. Instead of going back to your hotel, you end up in her bed and you make love. Silence envelops you. Silence surrounds you. Silence enfolds you. You fall silent. You hide. Through fear, politeness, impotence, shame, weakness, you go into hiding.

  I’ve no wish to know what happens to my cows after I sell them, they go to Italy, it’s a network, they’ll either keep them or sell them on to people, I don’t know what they do and I don’t care.

  In the morning you go to work, you think about the night before as an experience without consequences, a knot in the straightforward course of your life, a swerve. You don’t consider what you’ll do after Christmas. You’re well brought up, you desire above all to stay that way. You’re lying to yourself.

  True, it’s always a bit strange taking animals to the abattoir that you’ve bred, cared for, groomed and petted, but there’s nothing special about killing them, that’s nature, you just have to not think about it too much.

  The woman ten years younger calls several times in the morning, you try to persuade yourself of the insignificance of the night’s events, you fake indifference to reassure yourself but you can’t help seeing her again that day. You miss the train you’d planned to catch. You realise that things are not going to be as simple as you expected. You consider without articulating it what you’ll do after Christmas. You’re on the verge of setting yourself free.

  It happened in the field behind the house. The livestock dealer got here, we told him, that bull you sold us, we’re not too sure, he’s jumpy, he’s a big scrawny bugger, he’s nervous and we’re a bit worried. The dealer went into the field, I can still see him with his cane, the bull charged him, then stopped a couple of metres short. Then, instead of backing out, he made a professional error. With that club of his he walloped the bull as hard as he could, he gave him great whacks round the head to show him who was boss. The bull got angry, he attacked him head-on and wouldn’t let go. We saw what was happening and got in there like lightning, we managed to get the bull to back off using the tractor but the dealer was smashed to a pulp, he didn’t die on the spot, he had internal haemorrhaging, poor sod. As for the bull, he went straight to the abattoir, I don’t even know if they paid us.

  Although you no longer believe in Father Christmas, you’d like to run away with the reindeer, see Lake Baikal, take a route towards the Urals, all the way to the Chinese border. You are tempted by this flight with the herd but you don’t feel strong enough to do it alone, alone is something you’ve never been. You propose to your husband that he come too. He says yes. You don’t want to be set free quite yet.

  Generally, when they go to the abattoir it all flows smoothly, even if we get the odd tricksy one, we have to corner them in the corridors as best we can, turn them the right way, push them, so they’ll walk up by themselves without needing any shots. It’s a complete system: it’s our job to set them up so they go in by themselves. Also, it’s better to avoid the lasso because, not being used to ropes and such, they fight it when you try to tie them and that’s when they can get dangerous.

  You ask your husband to let you spend a day with the woman who’s ten years younger, you promise him that you need to go so you can break up with her. He lets you go. You go for a spontaneous day-return, you explain to her that you’ll never leave your husband, she cries, you’re upset by her tears, you explain that it’s all too sudden, she’s still crying, you can’t think what to say or do. You stay in bed with her the whole day and when you catch the train back, you realise that you’ve resolved nothing. You would like to spend the Christmas holidays with her.

  This year, I brought a cow to the abattoir and she got out of her pen, she tried to hurdle it, stuck her horns in the bars and tore them away, then she got out of the abattoir’s grounds, and after that there was no catching her. She charged us, then went off towards the town. We had to call the police in and a vet with a hypodermic gun to take out our cow, wait for her to drop off, borrow a tractor that was passing that way, take her back to the abattoir, give her an injection to wake her up before we could kill her, we couldn’t kill her while she was asleep because she first had to get the anaesthetic out of her system. She went completely nuts but that’s very rare, usually it always goes fine.

  You and your husband go sledging and to see reindeer. You visit a farm, you are shown the opencast mines and natural gas terminals around the animals’ pastures. You take a snow bike with the farmer, bringing fodder to deer that, due to industrial encroachment into their former grazing grounds, are no longer surviving on what they can forage. You watch them ruminate and ruminate. Now you know what the reindeer do after Christmas. Disenchantment is just one more route to intellectual emancipation.

  The cow, of course not, she has no idea she’s going to die. She goes dumbly on into the abattoir just as she’d walk into a field, she knows it’s a bad place for her, of course, if she could choose I can tell you she’d do an about-turn just like that, but she can’t. No. She doesn’t know she’s going to die. She knows she’s not in her natural environment, she’s trapped, something’s going to happen, anyway, no matter which animal you back into a corner, they know they’re in danger. And there are very particular sounds there, smells that tell her it’s dangerous, but they don’t think like we do, animals, they don’t know they’re going to die. She couldn’t possibly know.

  You let the cold, the snow and the sledging fill your mind. You’re trying to forget the woman ten years younger than you. You’re trying to hold back the impulses that course through you. You’re practising self-control, self-mastery. You think of the cat woman, you don’t want to end up like her. Death does not seem a good solution. You’re looking for another but finding nothing. You’re delaying your emancipation.

  The animals are always well treated, the professionals look after them well. Of course, if you order over a batch of cows from Poland to be slaughtered in Toulouse, a few will take a tumble inside the lorry and the others will trample over them, that happens, but they’re wrong to do it like that, that’s all, you won’t find a guy like me going about it that way, people talk a lot of crap but all in all, there’s never any real problems, the animals are always well treated.

  All your effort adds up to nothing. The change of scene makes no difference. You don’t want to die. You don’t believe the fairy tales they told you as a child. You’re not like the cat woman. You don’t live in America. You aren’t married to an American. You’ve no intention of refusing to sleep with your husband for fear of what might happen. You don’t wish to change from victim to predator, nor from predator to victim. You are neither dominated, nor dominatrix. You are luckier than the cat woman. You have more freedom to act than the cat woman. You have greater desire than the cat woman. You are stronger than her. You weren’t born before the war. Your parents weren’t Serbian. They haven’t left you alone in a foreign country. You are no panther. You’re not metamorphosing into an animal. You stop identifying with her. You stop holding back. You stop reining yourself in. You accept the impulses moving through you. You’re surprised, you’re determined, and combative, you’re a rebel, you’re untamed, you are joyful, you are light. Your parents’ betrayal is imminent. You are ready.

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  When you get back, the woman ten years younger asks you to leave your husband or to end it with her. You try to avoid doing either one or the other, to make both pleasure and pain go on. You’re disgusted by your own indecision but you dig your heels in.

  I wanted to be a butcher because I wanted to kill things. Maybe it frightened me at first but I also liked the idea, I wanted to be a butcher so I could kill animals.

  Although you’re sure the few nights you spent with the young woman were senseless, you want more. More nights. You are flooded by a wave of naïve love, you’re carried away, emotion is making you stupid. The young woman hits back over your indecision: y
ou may only visit when she decides, you bend to her will, to her desire, she makes you wait, this time yes, another time no, you’re behaving like a teenager, you can’t seem to get away. You’re hungry for her flesh, her smell, you want to drink her, smell her, suck her, bite her, your desire is wild, you’re beside yourself, you tremble, you scream, you’re transforming, you’re exposed. You’re metamorphosing.

  I begged my parents to let me be a butcher but they wanted me to go to school. One day, I was eleven, someone had a pig to slaughter, my dad told me, you want to be a butcher, just kill that pig. There were four or five of them to catch it and the one who’d usually kill it showed me where to aim with the knife, and it went really well, it bled, a perfect job. Then, as I hadn’t chickened out, my parents found someone to take me on and I did what I always wanted, I became a butcher.

  Unlike the cat woman, your metamorphosis does not herald the end of you. Emancipation takes forms you never imagined.

  Calves are just like pigs only easier, because you can cut their throats right across. With calves you’ll end up cutting their heads off anyway without having to try too hard, whereas with pigs you have to be quite precise, the pig has to stay whole. But in general, whichever animal it is, you just have to cut through the artery in the neck, it’s always the same action.

  When at last you decide to leave your husband, it’s too late to think of any kind of relationship with the young woman. For some time now, you’ve wished you’d done things differently, you even hope it might be possible for you to go back, to pick up conjugal life where you left it. You’re afraid your separation could hand the reins back to your parents; you do not wish to go back to the cinema with your mother. At the same time, you’re learning to live by yourself, you’re detaching, extracting yourself, you’re listening to your feelings, you’re no longer sleepwalking, numb, dazed, distracted, dulled, blind, withdrawn. You’re often sad, you weep, you think about the young man you loved who hanged himself in his room, you’re recalling yourself, you’re talking, you’re trying to be your own woman. You are reaching for freedom.

  As a kid I thought it was cool to kill animals, I was impressed by the boys who did it, I thought it took guts and I admired them, though it’s easy really, you just need to be strong, stick a knife into flesh, there’s nothing special in that.

  You fall in love with a woman who doesn’t know exactly what she wants. You don’t, either. You stray together and separately, you wonder what your future holds and even if you’ll have one. After a few months, she leaves you, starts seeing a man, buys an apartment, has two children and creates a family life which looks less attractive to you by the second. You are miserable when she leaves, you realise that you need to abandon the ideas you had as a little girl of how your grown-up life would be. To free yourself, you first have to give things up.

  We had a C-section, the first time I’ve seen that, it was awful. We’d tied the cow by her horns and then we started feeling inside her, we realised the calf was the wrong way round. The vet came, he put his hand inside, he said, she needs a C-section, go get a table, a sheet, soap and hot water. He started injecting her, he shaved her, made an incision, it was horrendous, he took out everything that was inside and put it on the table, you see that living thing there on the table, I can’t explain, it was a horror show, the calf itself was dead, it was too much for it, the vet had to take out the placenta, then put the whole womb back inside, sew it all up double quick, it took all afternoon, cost us a fortune and the cow was screwed, next calving she won’t make it, so we’re forced to get rid of her.

  You give up on toeing the line, pleasing your parents, bearing children, telling fairy tales, going into raptures over motherhood. You know now how to betray them. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re betraying them.

  I started out in abattoirs and I did all the jobs there. I can describe them if you like. In the dirty zone there’s the stunning, the hooking up, there’s the bleeding, there’s what we call the ‘snout and horns’, we peel the snout off the face, there’s the hide removal: first trotter, second trotter, and then we cut off the front trotters, skin the head, back feet, truss up at the back, we put a knot in the digestive tract where it passes close to the larynx so it doesn’t chuck grass all round our animal’s insides, then there’s the evisceration, and the skin comes off. Next we move to the clean zone, open the sternum, cleave the chest in two, take off the head, then out comes the white offal, the small and large intestines, and the dark offal, the liver and lights, they go to the vets, and after that the fat goes for rendering, deboning fore and hind, chopping it up and finishing, then weighing and classing. I don’t have a favourite job, I like them all.

  You watch Silent Light, a film by Carlos Reygadas, without your mother. The main character lives through a great love story with a woman who isn’t his wife. At the end of the film, the wife dies. The main character weeps. The woman he loves comes to see him on the day of the funeral and tells him: we can’t go back to how we were. For the first time, this certainty does not plunge you into depression. You even feel a kind of satisfaction weighing the consequences of this phenomenon. You say the line to yourself over and over. We can’t go back to how we were. It enters and permeates you. Thanks to the art of cinema, you accept this idea, you feel better for it, you even think it’s good news. You’re freeing yourself.

  The production line is an industrial thing. The living and dead circuits never cross and it can’t ever change direction, it goes forward. We get through 400 animals a day, we’re sixty on the line, that makes fifty-eight animals per hour and it’s all without violence, if the first shot doesn’t do the job, we give them a second one, the animals don’t suffer. We could of course kill more per hour but then they pile up down the line, we have to wait for them to get going again, it’s not the killing that takes the time, it’s everything else.

  Your relationship with your ex-husband is a continuation of your relationship with your mother. You decide to divorce him. You know at last how to betray them, and you’re thrilled. When the day comes, you wait to go before the judge, a name is called, no one replies, you realise after a few minutes that this name is your married name and it’s you they’re calling.

  This issue of traceability is pointless. They mark where the cattle come from. That doesn’t get us anywhere. The food the cow eats, whether from the piggery here or in Belgium, makes no difference. They’ve fixed us up to sell it. Telling people that French meat is the best was all about fudging the issue. What we feed them has nothing to do with the animal’s origins, it’s totally dumb. The whole point is it sucks up to the supermarkets. It does nothing for us and if they go on with their bloody rules and regs, we’ll soon go out of business.

  After your divorce, some people persist in calling you by your married name, which, in any case, you never used yourself. The whole thing annoys you.

  At your age, you’ll have to think about having kids now otherwise it will be too late. You don’t want children. You don’t want to be a mother. Everything annoys you.

  Despite your explanations, your gynaecologist doesn’t really understand that your sexuality has changed. Still no sexual relationship? he continues to ask in a troubled voice at every appointment. Everything annoys you.

  You write a script about a love story between two women. The producer suggests you keep the same plot, only change the sex of one of the protagonists, it won’t be so different between a man and a woman and it’ll be more universal. Everything annoys you.

  Some of your friends who’ve become parents aren’t happy to leave their three-year-old daughter with you because you never know, it could give the little one wrong ideas. Everything annoys you.

  Work contacts who call you at home tangle themselves in apologies when they hear another woman’s voice on the line. Everything annoys you.

  You are forty-four years old and still people call you ‘mademoiselle’. Everything annoys you.

  When you walk hand in hand with a woman
in the streets of an average town, pedestrians stare at you and turn to watch you go by. Everything annoys you.

  We understand, we support you, it can’t be easy, homosexuality is a real problem. Everything annoys you.

  You are astonished, you’re disarmed, you control nothing, keep track of nothing, you’re inspired, annoyed, involved, impatient. After decades of holding back, of restraint and self-denial, you no longer have time for self-justification or patience. You release what you’ve had pent up for so many years, you express yourself. You discover rage. It surges in you. It accompanies you. It supports you. It helps. You rely on it. It keeps you alive and aware.

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