Cow Read online

  *

  The surface simplicity of the story is daringly juxtaposed with a stylistic sophistication sustained by tonal shifts suggesting interior voices, various asides, the individual histories of some of the slaughterhouse workers and, most tellingly, with an angry first-person, near-confessional lament which appears to be that of one of the workers, or possibly any outraged onlooker, either man or beast. The mood is at times dream-like. Instead of a righteous polemic the narrative is a meditation, undercut by awed revulsion:

  I had to get out in the lunch breaks.

  From the loading-apron by the railroad tracks to the sliding doors of the killing bays, to the animals’ entrance to the slaughter-hall, I wandered all over the slaughterhouse terrain. I passed from one grille to another, along the bars, through the maze of squeeze gates, driving passages and waiting pens. Absent-mindedly I opened the bolts on the doors, drove away a calf that was following me, climbed over pigs that had been hurt in transit, pulled muscles or a broken leg, and lay grunting at me from the furthest recesses of cages. I hardly saw them. The pain of those pigs, laying around in passages, separated from their herds, was not my own pain. And the thin-shanked sheep, thrusting their woolly heads between the bars of their folds, and bleating at me, didn’t interest me either.

  I drifted.

  Apparently aimlessly, only to find myself sooner or later standing by a snorting cow in the cattle stall. There was no getting away from it. Every day I wound up among these animals.

  And in my thoughts, I untied them.

  Whole herds of them.

  Early in the narrative Ambrosio gazes at Knuchel’s over-bred prize cows as they doze in the clean barn:

  Sometimes their uninterrupted productivity seemed positively godlike to him, and he learned to respect it. It all made it still more unfathomable to him that, as yet invisible but menacing enough, the butcher’s knife should be hanging over them, Blösch and Baby, Flora and Check and Spot. Every cow in Knuchel’s shed had a vertebra that one day would be split. All of them would one day climb unwept and unsung the shit-smeared ramp of a cattle-truck and disappear in the direction of the slaughterhouse.

  Ambrosio struggles with the empathy he has acquired. ‘Blösch was just a cow’ he thinks, but he knows she is far more than that; he can’t help feeling that special kinship:

  But caramba! The emaciated body that had been dragged out of the cattle-truck onto the ramp, that had mooed so pathetically into the morning mist, that body was also Ambrosio’s body. Blösch’s wounds were his own wounds, the lost lustre of her hide was his loss, the deep furrows between her ribs, the hat-sized hollows round her hips, they were dug into his flesh, what had been taken from the cow had been taken from himself. Blösch’s limping and dragging and hesitating, that was him, Ambrosio himself on a halter. Yes, he had laughed at Knuchel’s cows for their passivity and meekness, but the display of unconditional obedience, of obsequiousness and motiveless mooing that he had witnessed on the ramp, he had also witnessed in himself, to his own disgust. In Blösch on that Tuesday morning, Ambrosio had recognised himself.

  Although this is a novel that moves and humbles, there is no trace of sentimentality in its pages. The descriptions of the various stages of the slaughtering process – the stun gun, the blows, the bullet, the bleeding, and blood seeps, spills, dribbles, splashes throughout – are brutally exact as is the contempt expressed for the animals by some of the men. Stoic or terrified, cattle and pigs, are stunned, suspended by a hind leg, bled before death, dismembered, beheaded, stripped of their hides and reduced to parcels of skin. Even the intestines are harvested.

  In the first of the many scene shifts between the happy, ordered farm and the contrasting horrors of the slaughterhouse, Ambrosio watches Blösch walk to her death. The once beautiful animal, now emaciated and ravaged, has already become a ghost: ‘skin sagging and udder disfigured by machine milking’ she is grabbed by impatient slaughterhouse men.

  Even during the humiliating ritual of weighing, she kept her aura of ancient creaturely warmth... and immune to scorn, Blösch declined to lower her head to butt, but made no use of the strength that still dwelt in her great body. Even given the justification of self-defence, she declined to use any kind of force. She was civilized inside and out, horn to udder, and even on the abattoir platform she remained submissive and meek.

  Presented as if it is a glimpse of a terrifying future, the scene is not only about the grim final moments of poor Blösch, it is about the end of a way of life, the end of farming. As for the cow herself, there is nothing simplistic about her; she is a hero, a doomed goddess, a mother. Her time is past, yet she remains a symbol of purity. Her courage and dignity prevail throughout. The narrative returns to the story of everyday life in a community in which the villagers argue, banter, tease and offer scant mercy for outsiders. In between many of the set pieces, Sterchi makes inspired use of a massive, very physical woman who spends her days pedalling furiously between the farms as if on an endless mission. In a sense this is true; as the local midwife she is always busy and in common with Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit she is always in a hurry. It is one of several deft touches; her racing to oversee births appears to counter the continual death being perpetrated at the abattoir.

  Further bleak irony is introduced when it is revealed that one of the butchers actually dreads going to the barbers for fear he will accidently be cut by a shakily-held razor. No less ironic is the characteristically blunt and hearty declaration made by Hans Knuchel in an exchange with the mayor when the farmer announces:

  Well, there’s artificial insemination and all that, but it’s not my idea of how to go about it. Do you really believe you get healthy calves that way? I’m not so sure. And you wouldn’t catch me drinking the milk of an artificially inseminated cow, not me, not thank you!

  He is equally vocal about milking machines, but that too, changes. When another famer tells him that while visiting a veterinary hospital he had seen a young cow ‘with a regular window fitted into the side of her belly, so you could look through it and see the ruminant’s stomachs, and even the grass, ever so clearly’ Knuchel explodes into incredulous laughter, exclaiming ‘were our learned professors unaware that what a cow eats goes into her belly?’

  More than thirty years have passed since its first publication and during that time the implicit political message of Cow has only intensified. In the age of video and smart phones, meat producers have taken to making jaunty little films about slaughter and preparing meat; charting how a living animal becomes a piece of meat on a plate to serve a delighted diner. Bizarrely, the tone of these short films tends to be celebratory. But nowadays vegetarians are no longer viewed as members of a minority obsessive cult.

  Sterchi wrote from within his own experience. Cow is a bold, eerie book; a brave one, and deeply sad. When the men decide to groom and decorate a pretty little cow, parading her with affection before they kill her, it is as if a young virgin has been violated by men who have simply become immune to emotion and are functioning only as mindless agents of slaughter.

  It ends in an anarchic flourish as the abattoir hands rebel, appearing to have become collectively unhinged by all the blood and all the death. This dazzling, demanding allegory is about understanding and even more obviously, about cruelty. Above all it is about power; the power of language as well as of physical force and about deciding who are the victors. And exactly who are the victims? Blösch, her long-desired heifer calf ripped dead from her mangled, pillaged womb, comes to represent far more than a once-prized dairy cow. She stands for goodness in a world gone mad through venal greed and acquisitiveness, a Hades in which the old values and core decencies have been lost. Be prepared to relinquish your complacency and have your humanity restored as a beaten old dairy cow stares mildly into your very soul, persuading you to mourn her passing and acknowledge her dignity.

  EILEEN BATTERSBY,

  Katesfield, Co Meath, 2017

  1

  MANY YEARS LAT
ER, when he had just got up on tiptoe for the last time to drop his card once and for all into slot No. 164 of the clocking-in machine at the entrance of the municipal abattoir, Ambrosio remembered the faraway Sunday of his arrival in the prosperous land.

  After a gruelling journey from his native South across desert plains, over mountain passes and through tunnels, towards a North whose only existence had been a couple of unpronounceable names on an official form, he found himself standing like a piece of abandoned luggage, dumped in the middle of Innerwald, the village that for months he’d been trying tenaciously and vainly to imagine. At last he’d arrived! What he and his family had longed for had come to pass. Soon he would be working and earning; the first cheque home was just a matter of time; he, Ambrosio, would have succeeded where so many others had failed. But even so, scarcely arrived, he was still seized by the urge to rush after the bus while it was still in sight, to shout to the driver to stop, and to be ferried back again, through the tunnels and over the mountains, back to the light of his own village in Coruña.

  But the post bus hadn’t waited, it was gone, drawn aside like a yellow curtain in a theatre, leaving Ambrosio alone to face a curious audience.

  A dozen or so Innerwalders, who had just been busy with cans and basins in front of the communal cheese dairy, shouting instructions to horses and dog teams, laughing and bragging, suddenly fell silent, dropped their work and stared at the newcomer standing in the middle of their village square on show like a fish on a hook, apprehensive like a prisoner outside the gates.

  Nothing moved: the film had got stuck; the sound had failed, only the water in the village fountain went on splashing.

  Ambrosio stood there, rooted to the spot, incapable even of rolling himself a cigarette: he could only watch himself, strickenly. Everything about him had suddenly turned menacing and out of the ordinary. He felt his cropped hair round his bald spot, felt its blackness. He smelled his own sweat, his shirt was dirty and soaked, he would have liked to cover up his knobbly legs but he was wearing thin, knee-length shorts. He looked down at his little battered suitcase, looked up at the people around, looked down again: in that one second, he had become acquainted with loneliness. For the first time in his life he understood that he was small and foreign and an alien.

  It wasn’t until a Freiberg mare tried to jump out of her harness with a loud whinny that life returned to that Sunday night. A tractor motor started up; the Innerwalders went back to their laughing and prating; the cheeser’s arms carried on grabbing pails of milk and pouring the white flow by the hundredweight into weighing pans and cooling basins; the Alpine dogs, harnessed to their carts, barked their rivalries at each other from a safe distance, and a mare struck sparks from the cobblestones with her hooves.

  Ambrosio was thankful for the renewed activity in the village square, and he would have been happy just to go on standing there for quite some time, if the approach of a herd of cows hadn’t forced him into a decision. They were being driven along by two boys to the fountain, which was opposite the cheese dairy and in front of the Ox Inn. At their head was a massive cow with all the self-importance of a lady mayoress, a peaceable enough creature no doubt, but not one who looked as though she would take two cowsteps out of her way for the sake of the little Spaniard.

  Ambrosio picked up his suitcase and, groping with his free hand for his papers in shirt and trouser pockets, headed for the inn, where he held up to one boy’s face his residence permit and a document from the immigration police. But he found himself surrounded by frowning mouths in silent faces. Eyes scrutinized him, brows were furrowed, heads were shaken then turned to the cheeser. He in turn, without interrupting his weighing, asked what the little fellow in short trousers was after.

  ‘I reckon that must be Knuchel’s Spaniard. These are his papers, see,’ said one of the farmers, and passed the tatty bunch over to the cheeser.

  ‘Well, well. It had to happen, didn’t it. He doesn’t look the type for spreading muck. Not very much of him is there?’ The cheeser, who stood on his platform on high, puffed out his chest to bursting. ‘Knuchel’s nursery would be more his line than his cowshed.’ He went on. ‘Now listen! Knuchel’s boy is always the first with the milk. Understand? He’s been and gone.’

  Ambrosio shook his head.

  ‘Don’t you speak German then?’ he was asked, and some of the Innerwalders began laughing heartily. The cheeser cracked a few more jokes himself, but stopped when he saw that Ambrosio, realizing who was being laughed at but not seeing any malice in it, was laughing himself, and even had the nerve to start rolling the longed-for cigarette right there, in their midst.

  ‘Mosimann! Your way takes you past Knuchel’s farm. Show the little fellow where to go!’

  It was night already when Ambrosio walked down the village street. He was following a hand-cart, which a stroppy boy was braking, while a red-black-and-white Alpine dog was pulling at it with all his strength, hungry for his dinner. Ambrosio was hungry too. He wouldn’t have minded a couple of mouthfuls of that broth, the sweet smell of which was wafting out of a can on the cart. He had no idea that it was whey left over from cheese-making, and used for pigswill.

  Ambrosio couldn’t see much of Innerwald. The village street was poorly lit, and there were few lights on in the farms. But he could hear the sound of clogs, of shouting and calling to animals; he heard the clatter of milking gear being washed in the fountains, it sounded like bells; he could hear the swish of brooms, the rattle of carts, the clucking of hens and squeal of pigs, for the Innerwalders were still busy with the last of the day’s tasks and the first preparations for the next morning’s feed.

  What he could still make out were the outlines of the farmhouses: every roof high and wide, as if it alone had to protect half the world from a savage sky; every roof a church roof. At the same time, Ambrosio wondered about the manure that was piled up everywhere by the side of the road. Veritable towers of dungheaps stood in front of the houses, perfuming the air.

  Once out of the village, the boy smiled at Ambrosio and motioned to him to put his suitcase on the milk-cart.

  ‘Another five minutes,’ he said and spread his fingers at him.

  As Ambrosio was only wearing sandals, he walked along the grass strip down the middle of the gravel path, which led in three loops past fenced-in pastures, past orchards running down a slope, and in a wide curve round a clump of trees into a pine wood.

  The other side of the little wood, the boy pointed at a group of shadowy buildings.

  ‘You’ll find them down there, the Knuchels,’ he said, waved and disappeared into the night with his dog and cart.

  Before turning down a narrow track to the farmyard, which lay like another village, tucked in between two hillsides, Ambrosio rolled himself another cigarette. As he took a couple of quick drags at it, he noticed the stars had come out.

  *

  Farmer Knuchel had the habit, not uncommon in the prosperous land, of not leaving his cows waiting in milk any longer on Sundays than on weekdays. He had come home early from his walk and coffee with brandy at the Ox, and reported that while there was no actual news of the long-awaited Spaniard in the post office or anywhere else, talk in the village was mightily concerned with the truant. Not everyone spoke in his favour; least of all the cheeser. Proper cheesing had become much harder on account of the Boden farmer’s insanitary Italian. The Innerwald milk wasn’t what it used to be. And now some Spaniard had to turn up! They should mark his words, Farmer Knuchel’s milk money would suffer and so would the standing of the whole community.

  Knuchel’s wife shook her head at this, muttered something inaudible and went back to the geranium plants on her veranda.

  He had remained standing next to her for a moment. With his hands buried in the pockets of his Sunday trousers, he had looked out across the fields, then at the vegetable garden, and had praised his wife for the good order there, and Grandma for her hens, only then, again unable quite to conceal his impatience, to go b
ack into the house to change, with a ‘well. I’ll be blowed’ on his lips. Once inside, he had carefully folded his smarter trousers, and hung them on a wooden hanger inside the door, slipped into fresh clothes and dry boots, and went off with his son Ruedi to clean out the shed and milk the cows.

  For their part, the cows had got out of their habitual doziness, they had mooed one another awake more joyfully than usual, and soon got over the stupor of being kept shut in all winter.

  Not that Knuchel’s cows had a harder time of it than other Innerwald cattle. Far from it. Seeing as their farmer wouldn’t allow any smooth-talking salesman of milking machines or automatic watering gear within a good three potato-shies of his farm, his cows had the twice-daily pleasure of an udder-easing milk by hand, and after each milking, a walk to the watering trough. Whereas on progressively minded farms, a cow’s movements were restricted to the one step forward to the feed crib and the one step back into their dungy straw, those fortunate cowsouls of Knuchel’s could regularly enjoy a modicum of unhindered physical activity when they were watered. Thanks to these visits to the trough, all the inevitable conflicts and mutual reprimands essential to maintaining the hierarchy within the herd didn’t have to be either postponed until the springtime when they were put out to grass, or simply crowded into their racial subconscious. Twice a day, Blösch, the first lady of the byre, was able to give expression to her hegemony, and to discipline some insubordinate young cow with a few well-aimed butts or kicks. Motherhood in particular was conducive to overweening pride, and led to exaggerated demands, but then they were all mothers, and simply because there was one of them who had just given birth to a calf that lay bleating in the straw, it didn’t mean that Blösch was about to renounce her right to be the first out of the shed, the first to dip her floppy mouth into the water trough, and draw one or two dozen litres of spittle-free water, and then be the first to lie down again in the straw. Status had to be. But the more ruthlessly Blösch ladied it daily over the procession to the trough, condescendingly, with rough country methods, and the more eager the animals lower down the cow hierarchy in Knuchel’s shed were to show their respect, by smarming and sneaking their way like prima donnas from one position to the next, one privilege to another, the more productive the long hours in the byre were for all of them. While they belched up one knot after another of pre-masticated hay from their rumina, and chewed around on it apathetically, in their thick skulls they could brood on revenge and make impracticable but none the less diverting plans for palace revolutions.