By Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
(Oventic, Mexico, 2005)
The bull fought once or twice.
Scraped its hooves.
Horns pinned to tail.
Neck open to the world.
The crowd pressed closer, moist with the heat of our and the bull’s gasping.
Suddenly, whatever it was – left its body completely.
The exact moment of its death visible
the dissipation of an acrid cloud of smoke – an evaporation.
On this earth, the task of deconstruction began. Knives unfolded for every man. Four sliced circles around the bull’s ankles. Another man began at the throat and bisected the skin on the torso with the tip of his knife, stopping to inspect the furry skin of the penis. A small boy giggled as he held up the freshly severed testicles and rushed down to the kitchen at the bottom of the hill. Other children returned from the kitchen covered in flour with sets of newly sharpened knives. Teenage boys foraged through the trees for fresh branches thick with clean green leaves.
Hundreds of tiny cuts were required to divide the entire skin of the animal from its fat. A dozen hands ripped small knives through the connective tissue. Steam rose off its stringy white flesh into the greyness of the afternoon as four men help open its splayed legs. They rolled the carcass over to the right, laid down a bed of fresh leaves beneath it, and then repeated on the other side.
Droplets of rain forced me and Jan indoors to get our hoodies, but like all the other children and adults in the Caracol, we found ourselves quickly back at the diminishing body of the bull. All the men working on the carcass cheered as a man in a cowboy hat with a mouth full of silver fronts threw his rucksack on the ground and stepped towards the bull. He was the professional they were waiting for. The crowd roared. The butcher had finally shown up.
A few cleared out of the way so the butcher could get to the bull. He stood above its remains and cracked its chest cavity in two with an overhead swing of his axe. The bull’s stomach ballooned forward in a white mass. Three men grabbed what was left of its windpipe attached to an expanding bag of organs and rolled them onto the ground. With the ribcage cracked open, the man with the silver smile set to work on carving the fatty tissue off the liver. He sliced a handle into the red mass and passed it like a suitcase to a young boy, who ran with it to the kitchen with his elbows up.
Next were the large intestines which the man with the silver teeth carried to the ravine, split open and shook out the partially digested grass and dry roots inside. He handed the empty skin to another boy to take to the kitchen as the dogs circled round. A woman and her child set to work on the small intestines, sitting over a bucket, squeezing each tube and cutting it open inch by inch. On the bed of leaves, the man with the silver smile raised the axe over his head again. The crowd had begun to thin out as the sun began to set, and the remaining few of us jumped back as he hacked again and cracked the back bone in half, exposing juicy bits of red and yellow marrow.
He sawed the base of the ribcage from the backbone on both sides. He deepened the circles around each hoof and broke them off one at a time with his hands. At last, he traced the line of the tail, skimmed the hairs off of it, cut clear through the skin and pulled the pointy white snake of bone from the skin in one piece, as two children ran with the last remaining sections of the bull to the kitchen.
That night, we sat at long wooden tables in the school house decorated with red and green paper flowers. We stood in line as the women served the food from tall metal drums. A styrofoam bowl of clear broth, a hunk of meat, vegetables, and jalapeno, and warm corn tortillas. The body of that one bull fed hundreds of us, with more than half of the metal drum to spare filled with bits of beef: the children, their parents and siblings, the committee members, the artisan collectives, the facilitators, me, and Jan. I watched the man with the silver smile at the end of another table with a bowl piled high with scrambled eggs, rice, and beans. Natalio told me later that the man with the silver smile is the regional butcher. Every week he travels from town to town to kill bulls, and every week he never eats them.
When I put the bull back together in my mind – Was I close enough to feel his breath? Could I smell the sun, dirt, twigs, and shit on his skin? Did I feel his bristles around his lips searching, fluttering around the surface of his streaked teeth? Go closer. Look. What was the look? The look in the bull’s eye?
Faith. A simple, incredulous trust. Unbroken.
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