For this post, I read Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. A widespread virus has made all animals unfit for human consumption. Needing to feed a starving population, the government subsidizes the breeding and slaughtering of the one animal that hasn’t been corrupted by the disease: humans themselves. The main character, Marcos, works at a facility that breeds humans. Throughout the novel, he seems to struggle with the whole ordeal. For example, he follows a vegetarian diet and refuses to eat human meat, even when the delicacy is offered to him. Marcos is given a female head to take home as a present from a business partner.
It is expected that he will either kill her himself or sell her to someone else. However, he can’t bring himself to do either. Instead, he impregnates her (which is illegal) and treats her with kindness and respect. At the end of the novel, as the child is being born, Marcos calls his wife to help him with the birth. They reunite after a year-long separation. They always struggled with having a child, but now they finally succeeded (with a little help from the female). Right after she gives birth to his child, Marcos kills the female.
This ending to the novel was so surprising and abrupt, and I will never forget it. It never seemed like something Marcos’s character would do. He always seemed like the only person who wasn’t evil, but in the end, he was just like the rest of them. After a lot of thought (and after reading what other people have to say about it), my current interpretation of the ending is this: Marcos didn’t intend to kill the female from the very start, he decided to do it in the moment once he realized that after birthing his child, she had nothing more to offer him. He had his wife back, and they were going to be able to raise a child together. That’s all he had ever wanted. The female functioned as a substitute for both his wife and the child (growing up in captivity, she was never educated or trained to use the bathroom, so she acted like a child that needed to be taken care of), but once he actually got what he wanted, he had no use for a substitute. I also think that Marcos killed the female because he didn’t want to have to look at her anymore. After she birthed his child, he was truly able to see her as another human instead of a domesticated animal, and he didn’t want to constantly be reminded of the atrocities being committed against other humans in his world every time he looked at her.
If anything the ending is a testament to just how difficult it is for one to be the lone dissenting voice in a society full of ideas that they disagree with. It is much easier to go along with the ideas than to fight them. What does it matter if Marcos kills one female when thousands of humans are slaughtered each day? Would saving one human really make a difference? In society, no. In Marcos’s life, yes. He would have to look at her every day.
What a haunting premise for a book! I wonder what would actually happen if, hypothetically, animals no longer became a viable source of food. Would we have enough meat alternatives and vegetables to sustain the population? Would health decline globally? It’s also interesting to see how this novel presented the treatment of the humans bred for meat–they are branded and described as “heads,” just as cattle are. This seems to be a horrifying concept when applied to humans, yet most do not consider this treatment of food production animals as terrible (one of my future blog posts…); I wonder if this novel is making deeper commentary on this aspect.