Tender Is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

  He sees this clearly. The questions and the veiled threat. But he doesn’t care. He knows he can fake a certificate for domestic slaughter, the plant has everything he needs. That, and he can no longer depend on El Gordo Pineda, not after this visit. He wants the inspector to leave, he wants to go back to sleep, even though he knows it won’t be possible. He hands back the form and says, “Did you want more mate?”

  The inspector gets up slowly. He puts the form in his briefcase and says, “No, thank you. I’ll be on my way.”

  He sees the inspector to the door and holds out his hand. The man’s hand doesn’t grasp his; it’s limp, lifeless, so that he has to make an effort to shake it, to support the hand that’s like an amorphous mass, a dead fish. Before turning away, the inspector looks him in the eye and says, “This job would be pretty easy if everyone could just sign and not do anything else, don’t you think?”

  He doesn’t say anything. What he thinks is that it’s an impertinence, even if he does understand. He understands the powerlessness felt by this young inspector who needs something out of the ordinary to happen so his day will be worthwhile, this inspector who’s suspicious about the whole scene and has to resign himself to not doing his job, this inspector who’s clearly not corrupt, who never would have accepted a bribe, who’s an honest man because there are a few things he doesn’t understand yet, this inspector who reminds him so much of himself when he was young (before the processing plant, the doubts, his baby, the series of daily deaths) and thought that complying with regulations was what mattered most, when in some inaccessible corner of his mind he was glad about the Transition, glad to have this new job, to be part of this historic change, to be thinking about the rules that people would have to comply with long after he’d disappeared from the world, because the regulations, he’d thought, are my legacy, the mark I’ll leave behind.

  He never would have imagined he’d break the very law he established.

  8

  When he’s sure the inspector has left and that the man’s car is past the gate, he goes back to his room, unties Jasmine, and hugs her. He hugs her tight and puts his hand on her belly.

  He cries a little and Jasmine looks at him. Though she doesn’t understand, she touches his face gently, and it’s almost like a caress.

  9

  He has the day off.

  He makes some sandwiches, grabs a beer, and some water for Jasmine. Then he gets the old radio, the one he listened to when Koko and Pugliese were still alive, and he takes Jasmine to the tree where the dogs are buried. The two of them sit in the shade, listening to instrumental jazz.

  The station plays Miles Davis, Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie. There are no words, only the music and the sky, its blue so immense it shimmers, and the leaves of the tree barely moving, and Jasmine leaning silently against his chest.

  When Thelonious Monk comes on, he stands up and slowly brings Jasmine to her feet. He holds her carefully and begins to move, to sway. At first Jasmine doesn’t understand and seems uncomfortable, but then she lets go and smiles. He kisses her on the forehead, on the mark where she’s been branded. They dance slowly, though it’s a fast song.

  They spend the rest of the afternoon beneath the tree and he thinks he can feel Koko and Pugliese dancing with them.

  10

  He wakes to Nélida’s call.

  “Hi, Marcos, how are you, dear? Your father’s a tad out of sorts, nothing serious, but we need you to stop by, today if possible.”

  “I don’t think I can make it today, tomorrow’s better.”

  “You’re not understanding me. We need you to come in today.”

  He doesn’t answer. He knows what Nélida’s call means, but doesn’t want to say it, he can’t put it into words.

  “I’ll leave now, Nélida.”

  First he takes Jasmine to her room. He knows it’ll be a while before he’s back, so he leaves enough food and water for the whole day. Then he calls Mari and tells her he won’t be coming in to the plant.

  He speeds to the nursing home. Not because he thinks it’s going to change things or because he believes he’ll see his father alive, but because the speed helps stop him from thinking. He lights a cigarette and drives. But he starts to cough hard, and tosses it out the window. The cough doesn’t subside. He feels something in his chest, like there’s a stone in there. He thumps on it and coughs.

  Then he pulls over to the side of the highway and rests his head on the steering wheel. He sits there in silence, trying to breathe. The entrance to the zoo is right next to him. He looks at the sign. It’s broken and stripped of paint, and the animals drawn around the word “Zoo” are almost impossible to make out. He leaves the car and walks to the entrance. The sign sits on a lintel arch made of uneven stones. The arch isn’t very high up and he climbs onto the stones and stands behind the sign. He starts to kick the sign, to hit it, to move it until he’s able to push it over onto the ground. The sign hits the grass with a dull sound, a thud.

  Now this place has no name.

  When he arrives at the nursing home, Nélida is waiting for him at the door. She gives him a hug. “Hi, dear, I don’t have to say it, do I? I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, but we needed you to come in today, to take care of the paperwork. I’m so sorry, Marcos, I’m so very sorry.”

  All he says is: “I want to see him now.”

  “Of course, dear, I’ll take you to his room.”

  Nélida leads him to his father’s room. There’s a lot of natural light in the room and everything is in its place. On the night table sits a photo of his mother holding him in her arms when he was a baby. There are pill bottles and a lamp.

  He sits down on a chair next to the bed in which his father lies. The man’s hands are crossed over his chest. His hair has been combed and his body perfumed. He’s dead.

  “When did it happen?”

  “Today, in the early hours. He died in his sleep.”

  Nélida closes the door and leaves him alone.

  When he touches his father’s hands, he finds that they’re freezing and can’t help but move his away. He doesn’t feel anything. What he wants to do is cry and hug his father, but he looks at the body as though it were a stranger’s. Now his father is free from the madness, he thinks, from this horrific world, and he feels something like relief, but in fact the stone in his chest is getting bigger.

  He goes over to the window that opens onto the garden. A hummingbird hovers right at the level of his eyes. For a few seconds, the bird seems to be watching him. He wishes he could touch it, but it moves quickly and disappears. He thinks there’s no way that something so beautiful and small could cause harm. He thinks that just maybe the hummingbird is his father’s spirit saying goodbye.

  It’s then that he feels the stone shift in his chest and the tears begin to fall.

  11

  He leaves the room. Nélida asks him to follow her so he can sign the papers. They step into her office and she offers him a cup of coffee, which he turns down. Nélida is nervous; she shuffles the papers, takes a sip of water. He thinks that this should be routine for her, that there’s no reason to be holding up the paperwork as she is.

  “What’s your problem, Nélida?”

  Nélida looks at him, disconcerted. He’s never been this direct, or this aggressive.

  “It’s nothing, dear, just that I had to call your sister.”

  She looks at him with a bit of guilt, but also resolve.

  “These are the nursing home’s rules and there are no exceptions. You know I adore you, dear, but I’d be putting my job at risk. Who knows what we’d be dealing with if your sister showed up and made a scene? It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened.”

  “That’s fine.”

  On other occasions, he would have consoled her and said something like, Don’t worry about it, or No problem. But not today.

  “You’ll have to sign the consent form to cremate him. Your sister has already sent it back with
a virtual signature, but she clarified that she won’t be able to attend the cremation. We can make the call to the funeral parlor if you like.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Of course, you’ll have to attend the cremation, to confirm it’s taken place. They’ll give you the urn there.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Will you be wanting a simulacrum of a funeral?”

  “No.”

  “Of course, almost no one has them now. But what about the farewell service?”

  “No.”

  Nélida looks at him with surprise. She drinks some more water and crosses her arms. “Your sister would like to have the service, and legally she has the right. I understand you’re in denial, but she’s determined to say goodbye.”

  He breathes deeply, feels a crushing exhaustion. The stone is now the size of his whole chest. He’s not going to argue with anyone. Not with Nélida, not with his sister, not with all the people who will attend the simulacrum of a wake, what they call a “farewell service,” just to be on good terms with his sister, even though these people never knew his father, and didn’t once take it upon themselves to ask how he was. Then he laughs and says, “Fine, let her have the service. Let her take care of something for once. Just one thing.”

  Nélida looks at him with surprise and a bit of pity. “I understand your anger and you have reason to feel the way you do, but she’s your sister. You only have one family.”

  He tries to recall when it was, exactly, that Nélida went from being a nursing home employee to someone who believes she has the right to give advice and her opinion, and to fall again and again into platitudes and irritating clichés.

  “Give me the papers, Nélida. Please.”

  Nélida recoils. She looks at him, taken aback. He’s always been kind to her, affectionate even. She gives him the papers in silence. He signs them and says, “I want him to be cremated today, now.”

  “Okay, dear. After the Transition, everything was sped up. Take a seat in the waiting room and I’ll look after it. They’ll come get him in a regular car, just so you know. Hearses are no longer used.”

  “Yeah, everyone knows that.”

  “Right, well, I just wanted to clarify it because there are a lot of clueless people who think that things haven’t changed when it comes to these matters.”

  “How could things not have changed after the attacks? It was in all the papers. No one wants their dead family member to be eaten en route to the cemetery, Nélida.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m nervous, and I’m not thinking clearly. I cared a lot about your father and all of this is very difficult for me.”

  There’s a long silence. He’s unwilling to concede an apology in return. Instead, he looks at her impatiently and she gets upset.

  “I know it’s not for me to ask, Marcos, but are you okay? This is very sad news, I know that, but for some time now you’ve been a bit off, you have bags under your eyes, you seem tired.”

  He looks at her without saying anything and she continues, “All right, well, what’s going to happen is that you’ll go there in the car and you’ll be next to your father at all times, including during the cremation.”

  “I know, Nélida. I’ve been through this before.”

  She goes white. Of course, it hadn’t occurred to her, not until now. Nélida gets up quickly and says, “I’m sorry, I’m an old fool. I’m sorry.” She keeps apologizing until they reach the waiting room, where he sits down and she offers him something to drink before leaving in silence.

  12

  He drives home with his father’s ashes in the car. They’re on the passenger seat because he didn’t know where to put the urn. The cremation was over with quickly. He saw his father’s body slowly enter the oven in the transparent coffin. He didn’t feel anything, or perhaps what he felt was relief.

  His sister has already called four times, though he hasn’t answered. He knows she’s capable of driving to his house to get the ashes, he knows she’s capable of anything to stick to the social convention of a farewell service for their father. Eventually he’ll have to answer.

  It’s late when he drives past what was once the zoo, what no longer has a name. But he pulls over. There’s still a bit of light.

  He leaves the car with the urn in his hands. The sign is on the ground and he walks past it.

  He goes straight to the aviary without even thinking about the lion’s den. In the distance, he hears shouts. It must be the teenagers, he thinks, the ones who killed the puppies.

  When he reaches the aviary, he climbs the stairs to the hanging bridge. He lies down and looks up at the glass roof, the orange and pink sky, the night that’s approaching.

  He remembers when his father brought him to the aviary. They sat right next to each other on one of the benches that used to be below the bridge, and for hours his father told him about the different species of birds, their habits, the colors of the females and males, about birds that sang during the day or at night, about those that migrated. His father’s voice was like brightly colored cotton candy, soft, immense, beautiful. He’d never heard his father sound like this, not since the death of his mother. And when they climbed the bridge, his father pointed to the stained-glass man with wings and the birds alongside him and smiled. “Everyone says that he fell because he flew too close to the sun,” his father said, “but he flew, do you see what I mean, Son? He was able to fly. It doesn’t matter if you fall, if you were a bird for even just a few seconds.”

  For a while, he lies there, whistling a song his father used to sing: Gershwin’s “Summertime.” His father would always put on Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s version. He’d say, “This is the best recording, it’s the one that moves me to tears.” One day he saw his parents dancing to the rhythm of Armstrong’s trumpet. They moved in the half-light and he stood there for a long time, watching them in silence. His father stroked his mother’s cheek and, still a young child, he felt that this was love. He couldn’t put it into words, not at the time, but he knew it in his body, in the way one feels that something is true.

  It was his mother who tried to teach him to whistle, though at first he couldn’t get it. Then one day his father took him for a walk and showed him how it was done. “The next time your mother wants to teach you,” his father said, “pretend to struggle a bit first.” When he eventually did whistle in front of her, she jumped for joy and applauded. He remembers that from that day on, the three of them would whistle together, like a sloppy trio who enjoyed themselves nonetheless. His sister, who was a baby, looked at them with bright eyes and smiled.

  He stands up, takes the lid off the urn, and throws the ashes down from the bridge. They fall slowly to the ground and he says, “ ’Bye, Dad, I’m gonna miss you.”

  Then he takes the stairs back down and leaves the aviary. When he reaches the playground, he crouches to gather some sand, enough to fill the urn. It’s sand mixed with rubbish, but he doesn’t bother to pick it out.

  He sits on one of the swings and lights a cigarette. When he’s done smoking, he stubs it out inside the urn and puts the lid back on.

  This is what his sister’s going to get: an urn full of dirty sand from an abandoned zoo with no name.

  13

  He drives home with the urn in the trunk. His sister has now called numerous times. She calls again. He looks at his phone with impatience and puts the speaker on.

  “Hi, Marquitos. Why can’t I see you?”

  “I’m driving.”

  “Oh, right. How are you doing about Dad?”

  “Fine.”

  “I was calling to tell you that I’m planning to have the farewell service at home. It seems like the most practical option.”

  He doesn’t say anything. The stone in his chest moves, grows.

  “I wanted to ask you to bring me the urn today or tomorrow. I can also stop by your house to pick it up, though that’s not ideal because of the distance, as you can imagine.”

/>   “No.”

  “What do you mean no?”

  “No. Not today, not tomorrow. When I say so.”

  “But, Marqui—”

  “But nothing. I’ll bring you the urn when I want to and you’ll have the farewell service when it’s good for me. Is that clear?”

  “Look, I understand that you’re having a hard time, but you could talk to me in another to—”

  He hangs up.

  14

  It’s late when he gets home, and he’s tired. Jasmine is asleep. He knows because he’s been monitoring her all day on his phone.

  He doesn’t open the door to her room.

  Instead, he goes to the kitchen and gets a bottle of whiskey. He lies down in the hammock and takes a swig. There are no stars in the sky. The night is pitch-black. He doesn’t see any fireflies either. It’s as if the whole world has been turned off and gone silent.

  He wakes with the sun, its light hitting him in the face. Off to the side, he sees the empty bottle lying on the ground. It’s only when he moves and the hammock swings a little that he understands where he is.

  He stumbles out of the hammock and sits down in the grass, the morning sun on his body. His head throbs between his hands. He lies on his back and looks up at the sky. It’s an incandescent blue. There are no clouds and he feels that if he stretches out his arms he’ll be able to touch the blue, it seems so close.

  His dream is still with him, he remembers it perfectly, but he doesn’t want to think, only to lose himself in the radiant blue.

  Then he lowers his arms, closes his eyes, and lets the images and feelings of the dream project in his mind like a movie.