The Cathedral Mall

by Mois Benarroch

  Sandra and Sandoval found themselves in a room with, ceiling and floor made of wood.

  Seven minutes went by when a fiftyish woman in a white apron arrived and

  Both immediately exclaimed:

  “This must be a mistake.”

  “Yes it is, but not what you think.”

  At that moment a man in a suit and tie approached the owner of the cafe and gave him a bill of a hundred.

  “But wasn’t it one hundred per person?”

  “Yes but I don’t know if you are an idiot or whether you haven’t noticed that today we don’t need drops through this door. There’s no work for them. We need them dropped through the other door to the sub-basement.

  The other drop, the one to the basement was the drop through which the old man had saved the two young folks. The sub-basement marked sudden and sure death. Neither the owner of the café nor the old man knew that.

  Now the old man and the old lady walked together toward exit B8 when he remembered the books he needed to buy to be able to leave. He went to the bookstore and in the wink of an eye he bought the books according to the rules of the promotion and went to pay.

  “Yes, it was a mistake because we don’t have much work here,” said the fiftyish woman.

  “But we found something for you. You will clean the floor and the slaughterhouses. Well, it looks like this is your first time here. Today you will work for those up above. Those up there don’t know anything about those down below. Those who do know call us those of the underground. Today you will work until one thirty in the morning and that’s it. That is your punishment for stealing.”

  “But we haven’t stolen anything from anybody,” said Sandoval.

  “Well, you must have done something. Of course you can appeal to the court but then you will have to stay here until the trial, and that can take a couple of years so you’d best keep quiet like everybody else and it’s over. The work here isn’t that difficult. But right at one thirty they come out whistling because at two they let out the wolves so nobody is left around La Catedral so it is important to be home or at the third passageway in less than half an hour so you’ll have to run. In the meantime you’ll work with me. This is basement three and it’s called the synagogue. Here we prepare lamb, beef, chicken and giraffe to send to the restaurants up above. Today there is not much meat. There is a shortage, so we’ll clean everything for tomorrow. And I think you have been saved from a jackpot.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Well I’m not saying, but sometimes you hear voices, screams from down below. They say there is another basement down below and that they use both when there is a shortage. They say if you add essential oil of saffron human flesh tastes the same as beef. But it’s only rumors. So you’d better just do what little there is to do today and leave tonight and forget about everything and tomorrow keep buying.”

  “And why should we believe what you are saying?” said Sandoval

  “You’d better shut up,” said Sandra

  “And everything you have in your bags is confiscated and we send it up above right away.”

  “That’s harsh!”

  “Fine,” said Sandra, “Take it.”

  The two young folks were taken to a white room with blood stains and they were told to clean the blood off. “It’s not hard,” said the woman.

  At that moment the two old folks entered the apartment on the seventeenth floor.

  “Would you like something to drink?” asked the old man.

  “What are we going to do about this?” asked the young man.

  At that exact same moment the old lady approached the old man and Sandra, the young man, and at the same time both said:

  “Why don’t we make love?” We’re here alone.

  Both approached, and using the same hand, began rubbing the member of the man beside her. They were surprised when the men did not react at all.

  ”What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think this is the time. I can’t. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Stop.”

  Sandra began to cry.

  “You don’t love me anymore.”

  He did not respond.

  “You haven’t loved me for years. Two years. You have moved on.”

  “You can come with me.”

  “No I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. I just couldn’t keep staying in the same place.”

  “Yes you can, what I want is for you not to change. I want you to be like you were when we met.”

  “But Sandra, it’s not change; it’s evolution, It’s normal. People keep changing even though they are the same.”

  “But what do you want to change?”

  “Nonstop shopping.”

  “Oh not that!”

  The woman came in at that moment with a jacket, “Here are two knives. It’s very simple. You cut the meat into thin steaks and place them in packages of ten. Mark them lamb. That’s it. There isn’t much. You’ll finish in half an hour and we’ll send it up. Then you’ll clean the walls and wait until night. It will be over quickly. Buck up a little, you’re young.” They had no time to ask any questions as she disappeared.

  Sandra was shocked and disgusted seeing the enormous piece of meat Sandoval placed on the marble slab.

  “I’m not touching that.”

  “It disgusts me too. This is the shit we eat. But it’s ok. You clean the walls and I’ll cut this up as fast as I can.”

  And that was done.

  The woman returned after half an hour and the packages of cutlets were all prepared. She grabbed them without looking at them. She had something to hide and didn’t want to look them in the eye. She knew the meat had come from down below where it was better not to know about it.

  “In an hour, if you’re hungry we can have lunch. But meanwhile keep cleaning the walls.”

  The woman left and Sandra hugged Sandoval again.

  “Please don’t change. Not so much all at once.”

  He felt dirty. Like when he had masturbated in his room at the age of fifteen.

  Sandra recalled stories her father had told her when she was a child. She remembered as she cleaned blood off the walls. He always told stories of two sheep, one white and one black who spent their lives arguing about who was better looking and whether white was a prettier color than black or whether the reverse was true. They were two carnivorous sheep who spent their time killing wolves and making them into salami and had a thriving business selling salami until there were no more wolves. This made her smile even though in her childhood the two sheep frightened her and even caused nightmares. Her father had died in the war, one of the wars. A long time ago they stopped giving names to wars. There was always one, two or a hundred, to which her country would send soldiers. They were fighting for Sandra’s right to continue shopping.

  “This is what we live for, shopping, it is our freedom.”

  “But if we aren’t free to stop shopping it’s not freedom.”

  “We can choose what we want to buy. That is freedom.”

  “But I want to choose not to buy, or at least to buy only what I need.”

  “But if you buy only what you need that isn’t living, it’s surviving.”

  “There are other things to living: watch the sun rise, smell a plant, swim in the sea.”

  “Yes, but animals can do that. And they do it better than we do. But an animal can’t buy essential oil of Ravensara Aromática, or Ravensara Anisata, to smell a plant they never saw. That’s what we humans do, buy.”

  “Not only that. There are other things.”

  “Like being aware of our own mortality.”

  “Being aware is not doing anything. It’s being. It’s passive. Being aware is not buying.”

  “Loving, grieving when someone dies, animals don’t do that.”

  “You are so behind the times! Of course animals suffer, just like us, it has been many years since anyone thought animals don’t suffer, or that they aren’t
aware of their own suffering. But they don’t buy.”

  “OK say you’re right. But we could buy less.”

  “But why? A person who earns as much as you do, how can you want to buy less? Wake up! You are rich and you live in the third passageway! We could even move up to the first passageway.”

  “The passageways suffocate me. I want to live in the country.”

  “You can’t. There is no space.”

  “Yes there is. They lie to us.”

  “Why would they lie to us?”

  “To get us to buy more.”

  “You are crazy. You are always looking for hidden conspiracies. What they want is for us to buy more.”

  “What else could they want?”

  “They don’t want. Nobody wants. People live. They don’t think all day long like you do. And they aren’t looking for the man behind the curtain. They just live,”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  Sandra didn’t understand that statement but before she could ask, the woman came in with some snacks.

  “There is tuna, horsemeat, dog meat, avocado, tofu and carrot. Whatever you want. There is more in the room across there.”

  The woman left quickly as though she didn’t want to see them so she wouldn’t feel bad. Sandoval thought that all this was happening because he had sinned. He had sinned against his own conscience and bought more than he needed and more than he felt he should buy. He couldn’t share these thoughts with Sandra but he felt he had to tell her. “This is happening to us because we bought so much.” Sandra looked at him and half closed her right eye like she had done since age eight with her friends when she thought they were crazy. “Nothing is happening to us, nothing. We spend a few hours here and then we go on with our lives. Love, it’s nothing.” Sandoval felt relieved. It had been many months since Sandra had called him her love.

  If I’m still your love everything is possible...

  Abruptly the two police entered. They were easy to recognize in the room. The officer with beard and boobs and short skirt, something between male and female, and the other who appeared to be righteously male. “You need to come with us. You shouldn’t have come to this basement. You should have gone to the other.”

  Sandoval reacted swiftly and surely.

  “You don’t have any say here and we don’t have to do what you say. Those above don’t have any jurisdiction over those below. Now we are from the underground and you can’t even talk to us.”

  “Yes, that’s what I say,” said the woman, who it appeared had been startled by the noise when they opened the door.

  The officer in the skirt pulled his firearm and fired into the air. “Come with us.”

  The Escape

  Sandoval murmured into Sandra’s ear that they should run. They both went out the door and ran down a long dark corridor with Green walls.

  “After them!” shouted the officer. But the officer in the skirt couldn’t run because he wore black, very uncomfortable espadrilles.

  “Let them go.” He said. “It’s better to wait here because they will go full circle and end up back here. It’s a circular corridor with no exits.”

  They did not return. Sandoval figured out they were going in a circle and on seeing a grate in the ceiling decided it would be better to go up. “Below they’ll eat us and you know that won’t be at all pleasant. And it won't be minor either as it’ll be over in a few hours. I think that’s why they came, for OUR meat.”

  Going up, they came to another corridor very similar to the corridor they had just left but painted white. It was empty.

  “Now what‘ll we do? I wonder if they’ll let us out at all.”

  “Don’t you get it you silly fool? You haven’t figured out they want our meat to send it to the restaurants above. We were just lucky to fall into the third basement and not the forth. Well, thanks to the old man, or the waiter.”

  “You get crazier every day.”

  “You can’t see it because you don’t want to see it. We’ve been saying for years that the meat tastes funny. This is what is strange. Not hormones or chemical agents.”

  “We’ve been eating human flesh for years without realizing it. But how could we know? “

  “How?”

  “If we don’t see the animal we kill, if we don’t know the butcher, if we don’t know where it comes from, they can change the flavor of any product and when we think we are eating lamb it could be any other meat. Haven’t you noticed that they are always talking about stoppages and then suddenly there is no stoppage, there are no handicapped people around, all the orphans disappear and the poor beggars are gone from the street and they all end up here, the circular corridors, and that is what we eat! That is what we buy.”

  “I can’t believe how you got out of your mind that way.”

  “And of course we swallow their lies too until one day it is your turn to be eaten. Now we realize those crazy persons disappeared from one day to the next because they were saying that people were being killed to produce, mark that word, produce meat. Well we THOUGHT they were crazy and we didn’t care when they disappeared because that is what happens here. We are being eaten, we are eating those who are of no use, well, they are of SOME use - for meat, to be eaten. Come on, let’s go over here even this is nothing more than another circle like the other one and comes back around, what we need to do is to keep going up, finding ways to go up. If not, we’re fried. Fried.”

  Sandoval remembered a philosopher who said where animal flesh becomes an industry, human flesh will also be consumed. Or something like that. The philosopher was Jacques Émar or something like that.”

  Sandra started thinking about the sheep again: the white one and the black one. She remembered the time when the sheep had decided to go on vacation and went to the airport to get on a plane. They had paid for the flight with the money they had made making salami from wolf meat.

  “Look, look Sandoval”

  Soon a man ran past with a sheep and entered a room.

  “Let’s go to the other side. This is the slaughter house for lamb. We’d better get away from here.”

  “But I want to see the sheep.”

  Sandoval grabbed her arm and dragged her through the corridor. They found an open door and entered. It was the stairs. They quickly ran up three floors and tried to open but couldn’t.

  They went up to the next floor which also had the door locked and another, until they got to the twenty third floor. There they found the door unlocked. They entered. It was the restaurant level.

  They were a bit tired.

  They sat at the first empty table they saw and ordered mineral water and a menu. They were sweating.

  “I’m not eating meat again,” said Sandoval.

  “Why’s that?”

  “You don’t fucking get it. You don’t want to know what is happening here.”

  “No, I don’t. I want to eat meat.”

  “That’s disgusting. You can eat meat alone. I’ll eat at another table.” He looked around and all the other tables were full. The tables were of wood and all the chairs were covered with black leather. One of the walls had an enormous wine rack.

  The waiter came over.

  “What I want is spaghetti with olive oil.”

  “What kind of meat?”

  “No meat.”

  “Sir, in this restaurant we only serve meat plates. We have lamb, beef, horse, giraffe, chicken, crocodile, dog, and stork.”

  “But how can you serve lamb or beef if there is a scarcity. We were just down below in the basements and we know full well there is no lamb. Sandra, let’s go.”

  “Ï want chicken. Chicken meatballs. I’m hungry Sandoval. It’s been a hard day.”

  “Girl, let’s go. Something stinks here.”

  And he went toward the door, but quickly turned toward the diners.

  “Folks, there is a scarcity of lamb and beef and probably other kinds of meat. What you folks are eating is human flesh, maybe one of your fri
ends that you haven’t seen for a couple hours or a couple days.”

  “Please sir,” said the waiter, “Leave the restaurant.”

  The diners began to laugh and continued talking. Most of them hadn’t even heard.

  The waiter pushed him toward the door and told him he would forgive this time but the next time he would call the police. With disgust, he said “Across there is a vegetarian restaurant.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know what you’re serving.”

  “Sir, this is an established quality restaurant and we only serve the best meats.”

  “And you know it...Shit. How many years have I been here like an idiot eating your shit? I want to puke.”

  “He exited and after a few steps he bent over and vomited.”

  “Sandoval, what’s wrong?”

  “Ask me again”. And he stood back up to think as some passers-by looked at him, perplexed.

  “I hate it when people take advantage of me.”

  “But what’s wrong? Who is taking advantage of you?”

  “I don’t know, the basement people, the underground people, those that are there eating in the restaurant, you, your mother, my grandmother, my friends, everybody. I can’t stand it.”

  “You need to calm down a little.”

  “How can I calm down when half an hour ago I was going to be made into barbeque?”

  “It’s over. Calm down guy, it’s over. Let’s go home.”

  “They’ll never let us out the door.”

  “Yes they will, you’ll see how they let us leave.”

  “You don’t get it at all do you?”

  “Take my hand. Come with me. Let’s go.”

  Sandoval, quite surprised at what he was doing, gave her his hand. He felt like when he took his father’s hand to cross the Street. But why would I be doing this when what I should be doing is running and jumping through the window or something?

  But nothing happened. They left through one door and nobody asked them anything. The incident seemed so remote that Sandoval began to question whether he had dreamed about the old people, wars, basements, and lower level people, slaughterhouses, and butchers, police with beard and boobs and vegetarian nuns.