What one map affirms, another denies. Directions guide and at the same time disturb. For
fear of getting lost, some people never go more than ten or twelve blocks away from home in their whole lives. Enriqueta, the manager of the boarding house, for example, had never been west of 9 de
Julio Avenue. ‘What for?’ she’d said. ‘Who knows what might happen to me.’
When I finished eating at La Brigada I went to the Café Británico without stopping off at my room, like I usually did. I urgently needed to revise my notes on the film
Faena
to see whether I might find something in the rituals of the slaughterhouse that could explain Martel’s presence in the arcades at noon the next day. According to the short, every morning
seven thousand cows and calves ascended a ramp toward death. First, they’d waded through a pool and then been hosed down to complete the washing. At the top of the ramp, a hatch shut behind
them and separated them into groups of three or four. Then they were each struck a brutal hammer blow on the back of the neck by a man naked to the waist. The blow rarely missed. The animals
collapsed and were almost instantly thrown two meters down onto a cement floor. That none of them felt the imminence of death was essential to the meat’s tenderness. When a cow sensed danger,
it would stiffen with terror and the muscles would be permeated with a bitter flavor.
As the cattle fell from the ramp, six or seven men went along wrapping their legs with a steel wire and fitting them onto a hook while a counterweight hoisted them up off the ground, head
hanging down. The movements had to be swift and precise: the animals were still alive and, if they awoke from the blackout, they put up a hell of a fight. Once hung, they advanced along an endless
conveyor belt, at the rate of two hundred an hour. The slaughtermen awaited them by the waterwheel, with their knives raised: the sure point in the jugular and that was it. The blood gushed out
into a canal where it would coagulate for later use. What happened next was atrocious and it seemed unthinkable to me that Martel would want to sing to that past. The cows were skinned, slit open,
disembowelled and handed over, now headless and legless, to the quartermen, who chopped them in half or in pieces.
That’s how it was in 1848 as well, when Esteban Echeverría wrote
El Matadero (The Slaughterhouse)
, the first Argentine work of literature, in which the cruelty to the cattle
is a metaphor for the barbarous cruelty inflicted on men in the country. Although the slaughterhouse is no longer behind the arcades and has been scattered among dozens of meat processing plants
outside the city limits, the rites of the sacrifice haven’t changed. They’ve only added another step to the dance, the prod, consisting of two copper poles through which an electrical
charge is generated. When it is applied to the animal’s flank, the prod herds them towards the sacrificial ramps. In 1932, a police commissioner named Leopoldo Lugones, son of the great
national poet – his namesake – realized the instrument could be useful in torturing human beings, and ordered tests of electrical charges on political prisoners, choosing soft areas
where the pain would be most intolerable: the genitals, the gums, the anus, the nipples, the ears, the nasal cavities, with the intention of annihilating all thought or desire and converting the
victims into non-persons.
I made a list of those details in the hope of finding a clue as to what had led Martel to sing in front of the old slaughterhouse, but although I went over it time and time again, I
couldn’t see it. Alcira Villar would have given me the key, but I didn’t know her then. She later told me that Martel tried to recapture the past just as it had been, without the
disfigurations of memory. He knew the past remained intact somewhere, not in the shape of the present but of eternity: what was and still continues to be will be the
fear of getting lost, some people never go more than ten or twelve blocks away from home in their whole lives. Enriqueta, the manager of the boarding house, for example, had never been west of 9 de
Julio Avenue. ‘What for?’ she’d said. ‘Who knows what might happen to me.’
When I finished eating at La Brigada I went to the Café Británico without stopping off at my room, like I usually did. I urgently needed to revise my notes on the film
Faena
to see whether I might find something in the rituals of the slaughterhouse that could explain Martel’s presence in the arcades at noon the next day. According to the short, every morning
seven thousand cows and calves ascended a ramp toward death. First, they’d waded through a pool and then been hosed down to complete the washing. At the top of the ramp, a hatch shut behind
them and separated them into groups of three or four. Then they were each struck a brutal hammer blow on the back of the neck by a man naked to the waist. The blow rarely missed. The animals
collapsed and were almost instantly thrown two meters down onto a cement floor. That none of them felt the imminence of death was essential to the meat’s tenderness. When a cow sensed danger,
it would stiffen with terror and the muscles would be permeated with a bitter flavor.
As the cattle fell from the ramp, six or seven men went along wrapping their legs with a steel wire and fitting them onto a hook while a counterweight hoisted them up off the ground, head
hanging down. The movements had to be swift and precise: the animals were still alive and, if they awoke from the blackout, they put up a hell of a fight. Once hung, they advanced along an endless
conveyor belt, at the rate of two hundred an hour. The slaughtermen awaited them by the waterwheel, with their knives raised: the sure point in the jugular and that was it. The blood gushed out
into a canal where it would coagulate for later use. What happened next was atrocious and it seemed unthinkable to me that Martel would want to sing to that past. The cows were skinned, slit open,
disembowelled and handed over, now headless and legless, to the quartermen, who chopped them in half or in pieces.
That’s how it was in 1848 as well, when Esteban Echeverría wrote
El Matadero (The Slaughterhouse)
, the first Argentine work of literature, in which the cruelty to the cattle
is a metaphor for the barbarous cruelty inflicted on men in the country. Although the slaughterhouse is no longer behind the arcades and has been scattered among dozens of meat processing plants
outside the city limits, the rites of the sacrifice haven’t changed. They’ve only added another step to the dance, the prod, consisting of two copper poles through which an electrical
charge is generated. When it is applied to the animal’s flank, the prod herds them towards the sacrificial ramps. In 1932, a police commissioner named Leopoldo Lugones, son of the great
national poet – his namesake – realized the instrument could be useful in torturing human beings, and ordered tests of electrical charges on political prisoners, choosing soft areas
where the pain would be most intolerable: the genitals, the gums, the anus, the nipples, the ears, the nasal cavities, with the intention of annihilating all thought or desire and converting the
victims into non-persons.
I made a list of those details in the hope of finding a clue as to what had led Martel to sing in front of the old slaughterhouse, but although I went over it time and time again, I
couldn’t see it. Alcira Villar would have given me the key, but I didn’t know her then. She later told me that Martel tried to recapture the past just as it had been, without the
disfigurations of memory. He knew the past remained intact somewhere, not in the shape of the present but of eternity: what was and still continues to be will be the
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