We are waiting for a call from Santiago's friend, one of the purveyors who works the market. Before too much time has passed,
as the sun is finally just beginning to render the harsh lighting unnecessary, his cell goes off in his pocket, and he answers.
"Okay, let's go." We head back down the stairs, and across the cobbled road that runs through the center of the market, to
one of the prefab buildings where a barrel-chested guy in a parka and hefty boots stands waiting by the door. We all shake
hands and do the cheek kiss thing, as if we were standing outside a restaurant instead of in the middle of a vast corral smelling
of cow manure. Then he lets us into his office.
I get a quick lesson in beef selling, as done in the Mercado de Liniers. The sales forms to be filled out, which corral, number
of animals, and type--
norcilla, vacilla, tornero
--all commanding different prices, depending on the quality, of course, the fat ratio, and conformation. He talks about the
sometimes-checkered history of the market, a Wild West sort of past that involves cheating ranchers and unscrupulous middlemen.
He himself is a middleman, though not unscrupulous. He is in fact proud of the good name he has maintained in the industry.
Santiago claps him on the back with a wide smile. "I only buy beef from him. He is the
best
."
Outside, a bell is clanging. That's the signal for us to pull our coats back on and head out the door again. The sun has fully
risen by now. It's a bright fall morning. We climb back up onto the catwalks that thread around every corral. There's now
a small crowd of people--men, actually, all men, I seem to be the only woman around--trailing in a line behind a guy in a Mercado
de Liniers fleece vest and a beret. He carries hooked under one arm a battery-powered bullhorn, with a CB-like attachment
at the end of a spiraling cord, which he speaks into. In his other hand he holds a small metal hammer, like something the
snooping detective might get hit over the head with in an old noir film. He's followed by a man with a legal pad.
Before each animal pen, crammed with a herd of cattle from a different seller, the man stops, beats the mallet twice against
the railing, and begins rattling off numbers in Spanish:
"Ocho cinco, ocho cinco, nueve? Nueve, nueve cinco? Nueve cinco. Diez? Diez?"
Men are murmuring to him, raising their hands to catch his attention. Then the bidding fizzles out and the auctioneer hammers
the mallet once more against the railing, calls,
"Diez."
The guy with the legal pad makes a note, and everyone moves on to the next corral. The whole process takes about thirty seconds,
which is good because there are untold cattle to sell. Once the highest bid has been accepted, the successful buyer gestures
to one of his
gauchos
, who dips what looks like a branding iron into one of the buckets of white paint that are strapped to the railings of the
stock pens below and commences to mark every animal in the lot that's just been purchased. Then the cattle are herded out
of the corral and off to some other part of the market to be put on trucks. There is a sudden racket of hooves on stone and
shouts from the
gauchos,
which accentuates the relative quiet of the auction's proceedings. Everything moves with brisk efficiency and solemnity.
There's no joking about, no extraneous conversation.
Most of the buyers are up on the catwalks, but a few prefer to move down among the cattle and
gauchos.
Santiago points out a handsome older man on a good-looking chestnut horse; he wears a beret and wool poncho and has glasses
perched on his round nose and a cell phone hanging from his neck. "You see him?" he asks, speaking low so as not to interrupt
the flow of bidding. "He is the buyer for Argentina's oldest and largest grocery chain. He is like the mayor here. He sees
something he likes, he make a call? His guy up here"--he pats the railing of the catwalk--"buys it for him."
Because I don't understand much of what's being said in the course of the auction, my thoughts stray to the animals themselves.
The cattle are... cute. Really cute. They look up at us with liquid eyes, blinking with lovable stupidity. For not the first
time in my life, I vow that I'm going to one day buy myself a rescue cow and until the day it dies feed it carrots or whatever
it is that cows like. But my sentimentality, here, makes me feel foolish.
The auction is over by ten a.m. "Now. The slaughterhouses close at four o'clock in the afternoon. There are maybe thirty?
Maybe thirty slaughterhouses within fifty kilometers of here. All these animals here go there now, and by four thirty they
are entirely all killed and cut."
"Damn." That's ten thousand animals, trucked off, slaughtered, and processed in six hours. I myself could break down maybe
six chuck shoulders in that length of time, and I would need some serious Darvocet afterward.
We leave the market and walk around the Mercado neighborhood. Broad dusty streets, factories, train tracks.
Carnicerias
with grimy linoleum floors and sour smells, selling cheap meat to poor people. Dump trucks drive by, their beds piled high
with cleaned and trimmed bones. The sun is finally warming up the air. Santiago takes me to a
salumeria
where he's made an appointment for us.
The
salumeria
is something else. Josh would lose it if he got to see this place, honestly. His twin loves of meat and of big, terrifying
machinery would achieve a grand apotheosis, like looking into the face of God, that might actually drive him mad. Down long
hallways, doors open onto room after room, dim and redolent of the tang of curing meat, ceilings twenty feet high, full of
rows and rows of tall scaffolds from which hang thousands upon thousands of aging sausages. Prosciutto in another room, thousands
of hog legs hanging. I watch men dressed in whites and hats like Oompa Loompas in Wonka's Television Room filling pig's bladders
with finely ground pork for bologna, out of a stuffer ten feet high. Back in his cramped office overlooking the
salumeria
floor, the owner feeds us eight varieties of sausage, taking slices off links with a pocketknife and laying them out on a
crumpled paper bag.
By now it's lunchtime. Santiago takes me to Parrilla de los Corrales, his favorite spot in the neighborhood. It is bustling
with people. With Santiago guiding, we order two plates of beef ribs, grilled sweetbreads, a white bean salad, a bottle of
wine, and two coffees. It costs about twenty-seven dollars for the both of us and is wonderful. The wine is decent, the food
simple and good, the conversation a bit stilted because of the language thing, but. I find myself bringing out my American
Dame act, but Santiago doesn't seem to be as affected by it as I might like him to be. Oh, it's probably for the best. She's
going to get me in trouble one day. I've only been in Argentina a week or so, and she already almost has. Thank God she's
so good at getting herself out of scrapes.
"Oh darn." The American Dame does a mean Rosalind Russell.
The rotund, grizzled, and well-meaning Brazilian gentleman is drunker than she, by quite a lot. The American Dame can drink
men twice her size under the table. He leans up against the doorframe to her charming Buenos Aires apartment, practically
panting in his eagerness to get inside. He wants into her pants like a six-year-old wants the biggest teddy bear at the fairground.
The American Dame stops fiddling with her keys and turns on her most sparkling smile. "I just remembered. I was going to buy
cigarettes. Do you know where to get them this time of night? Marlboro Lights?"
The American Dame flutters her eyelashes. The gentleman is too charmed to be put out by the implied request. "I will get you
cigarettes. Marlboros." He smiles expansively.
"Oh, I couldn't possibly ask you... well, thank you." The American Dame rummages in her purse, pretending to look for pesos.
"How much do I owe you?"
The gentleman holds up his hands. "Please, don't insult. I am bringing cigarettes for you."
"Thank you so much!" The American Dame twinkles, kissing a furry cheek. "I'll see you in a bit, then!"
As he stumbles down the stairs, the American Dame unlocks her door and walks inside her cozy studio, kicks off her teetering
heels, collapses on her belly onto one of her two single beds, and, most conveniently, passes out. Convenient because, while
she sometimes enjoys making a spectacle of herself, letting a man old enough to be her father buy her a drink or an elegant
dinner, walk her home and maybe cop a feel on the street in front of her apartment, she doesn't always want to make good on
rash promises.
The next morning there is a pack of Marlboro Lights and a matchbook resting on the windowsill outside her apartment door.
The American Dame smiles a little sheepishly, opens the package, and lights up, blowing the smoke out her window as she listens
to children screaming in Spanish, happily, endlessly, in the schoolyard below.
But the American Dame is clearly not going to get any action today, unless she literally pushes Santiago up against a wall
and ravishes the poor man. Instead, he and I finish up our lunch with cups of coffee, and then head out to our last stop of
the day, a processing center for a meat distributor called Fura. Here we stand against the wall of a tall, cold, white-tiled
room where a dozen Argentine butchers break down an endless line of beef sides.
Butchers, it seems, are butchers everywhere. Everywhere the same smells, the same sights, the same logic, the same sorts of
men. Of course these guys are part of a commercial operation, they move fast, they very rarely crack fart jokes--well, that
I can understand, anyway. They're always in motion. But there's something about the way they smile at me--it's not exactly
welcoming but more a cheerful acceptance of the inconvenience of having me around. And there's something about the way they
look at me, or don't look at me, something about the way they move their shoulders as they slice these carcasses into bits.
I'd recognize them anywhere.
I've never seen a side of beef broken down like this, right off the hook. All beef comes to Fleisher's already reduced to
its eight primal parts. What these guys are doing, or some of them anyway, is work that would be done for Josh at the slaughterhouse.
He would love to do it himself, both for the macho thrill factor and because it would save him money, but he just doesn't
have the space. His ceiling isn't high enough and can't bear enough weight. Whole sides of hanging beef are about six feet
long or more. They hang off hooks that slide on a rail bolted to the ceiling, high enough off the ground that the men can
work with them, without screwing up their backs or letting the primal cuts fall to the floor when they come off the carcass.
And it's easy to forget this, since everyone is moving so quickly and casually, and there is just so very much of it, but
these things are
heavy
. As in very. Each side is about four hundred pounds, and there are at least a dozen of them hanging at this moment. That
is two and a half
tons
of beef. You could make my Subaru Outback out of meat and still have some considerable poundage left over. If the ceiling
did cave in, there would be a deadly avalanche of flesh.
The butchers assigned to taking the major pieces off the hook are younger than the men at the table, in their early twenties
perhaps, presumably both stronger and less experienced. But they do their jobs assuredly. I'm pleased to recognize much of
what they're doing, or at least recognize the results of their speedy slicing. But there's one thing I don't get. "Santiago?"
I lean in so he can hear me in the chilly room echoing with sounds of hooks rumbling down their tracks, meat slapping on tables.
"What is that flap of meat he's cutting off there? From the outside, near the rear leg?"
"That's the
matambre.
Very popular in Argentina. Very, very good."
"Really?" The
matambre
is one fatty, ragged, rough-looking piece of meat. I can see where it comes from on the animal, basically the outside of
the loin, maybe including the flank steak, but also a lot of fatty, chewy, well, junk, in American butchery terms. "We throw
that into the grind for hamburgers."
"No! Really?"
"Yup."
"Oh, no, that's terrible. You must have
matambre.
La Brigada, it's the best
parrilla
in Buenos Aires. Have you been to San Telmo yet?"
"Not yet." San Telmo is reputed to be one of the most picturesque neighborhoods in the city, funkier and shabbier than Palermo--where
the hip, young, and rich come to play--but with an arty, Left Bank feel to it, complete with antiques markets and tango bars
and crooked little streets.
"I'll give you the address after we leave here." At his failure to suggest we go together, I feel a small pang of disappointment.
But now I am watching the older butchers at the table, like the old-world butcher of our imaginations, with massive biceps
and hooks and knives that they wield like extensions of their fingers, which of course in a manner of speaking they are. These
men can do something that takes me fifteen minutes at the table--peel the neck bone off the chuck eye, say--in fifteen
seconds
. No lie. It's unbelievable.
Every week I'm not cutting I'm losing more skills. The scrapes and scars on my hands and arms have almost entirely faded;
I look at them in my mirror with just the same sadness that I did watching the last of D's bruises fading from my skin. I'd
had this pipe dream, coming here, that I'd arrive at some
carniceria,
knives in hand, and join my brother craftsmen, united across divides of language and culture and gender by our common skill.
But all I can do is stay out of the way.
Santiago and I stand around with our arms crossed, trying to make ourselves as small as possible, and watch until I get too
cold, even in the windbreaker the plant's manager gave me, with the Fura logo printed on the back, a silk screen of a naked
woman posing sultrily, apparently some actress, known as "the Brigitte Bardot of Argentina." We head back to the office and
drink more Nescafe (Argentines love that crap) while Santiago talks shop in Spanish with the guy, a friendly blond man who
tries to throw some English at me when he can. I in turn attempt to keep up with the flow of foreign language, but a few Michel
Thomas audio lessons do not a competent Spanish speaker--or even listener--make. At least not if that listener is me. I am hopeless
at languages, always have been. So I sit and sip and try to maintain a look of comprehension, and eventually the manager,
whose name I never caught and am now too embarrassed to ask for, offers to drive us back to the city center, an offer we take
him up on.