Many winters ago, during a family’s matanza, I helped kill a guarro. I had reasoned that if I was eating the family’s jamón and chorizo from their plate, I should help slaughter the pig. Despite my good intentions, as Fatima’s brothers drove me to the piggery, I had conflicting feelings about the slaughter.
The piggery belonged to their uncle Tito, who owned a modest sounder of swine, stied on an undistinguished smallholding in the foothills of the Sierra Morena, a rural backwater of Spain. ‘Got some packing on him, that one,’ Tito had said on the morning of the matanza, after choosing the fattest guarro the day before. For the guarro, comfortable with its obesity, foraging for satisfaction beyond satiety and unaware of its impending death, the day had started like any other.
*
Every first week in December the matanza was an imposition. Although the loss of time-honoured traditions, impeccable provenance and artisanal produce should never be a cause for indifference, the matanza’s combination of death, voracious carnivorousness, and hard work had always been a source of disagreement. All the same, though it could strain familial relationships, it could also foster comradeship. It was either one or the other. It had never been a family gathering of little importance.
Fatima and I had been together for several matanzas. I suspected she avoided much of the day not through idleness or even a sensibility for the animal’s welfare—although this was partly true—but a reaction to her disenfranchisement from the patriarchy of which the matanza was a part. On the contrary, her brothers showed no reluctance in orchestrating the slaughter, with an alacrity that belied their usual sober demeanour. Noe, the eldest, persisted with the inviolability of Papa’s matanza; like his father, he was hard-headed, judicious and did what was required. The younger Beto was industrious, affable and enjoyed whatever fell his way. Tito and his two sons Teo and Manu, completed the brotherhood that undertook the matanza that year.
… sheets of cardboard—that would soak up splatters of blood—had been laid out from the toe-caps of his boots.
Sitting by the basement chimney throughout the day, octogenarian, wearing a flat cap, Papa would scrape the concrete floor with his hobnailed boots. From the early hours, he would restlessly drag them under his chair or disagreeably push them away; sheets of cardboard—that would soak up splatters of blood—had been laid out from the toe-caps of his boots. No longer present at the slaughter, he impatiently awaited the carcass for butchering at the family dwelling; situated on the outskirts of the Sierra’s hilltop village, the dwelling serendipitously overlooked Tito’s smallholding.
Directing the butchery with his ironwood stick Papa would equal any conductor of a village orquesta de música. It also allowed him to place his burdensome crutches by the mantelpiece and forget about them for the rest of the day. If he was not gesticulating to those butchering the carcass, the stick would anxiously tap the concrete or otherwise be held perpendicular between his incapacitated legs. His knurled hands and knotted fingers were an acetabulum around a femoral head as they encapsulated the stick’s large spherical burred end. Removing his cap at infrequent, though regular intervals, he would run a hand over his balding pate: over time, the modest quantity of sebum from the follicles of his grey hair had rubbed the burr smoother and more lustrous. Now and again, with the stick’s iron tip, he would give the chimney’s smouldering log a half-hearted poke: after jumping into flame, it would quickly die down.
Producing around half a billion kilos a year made it difficult to avoid pork consumption in Spain, except for those following kashrut or halal. Offal and the fifth quarter had never been out of fashion: as a family staple, nourishment for the needy or an epicurean relish for the affluent. The nose and tail, and all the parts between, were frequently found on the Spaniard’s plate: braised pettitoes and ears in glutinous sauces were delicacies for gourmands and everyone else besides. Served in the village bars, I waited for a beer and its complimentary tapas with equal anticipation. Fatima’s mother was particularly fond of rabos in a stew of garbanzos, which Fatima habitually served on the day of the matanza. Surrounded by her extended family, she would exclaim, ‘¡Rabinos que ricos!’ as the pot arrived on the table. Without hesitating to defer the pleasure, she would remove the thumb-like pork tails from the chickpeas and nibble them to the bone between her fingers, turning them as if they were revolving on rotisserie skewers. Later, a handful of cartilaginous bones—like craps dice thrown across a green baize—would be found spread across the plastic tablecloth.
… conceited with its muscularity, marble veined, veined, blood-red, raw, flaunting adiposity, awash on bloody marbled counters of carnicerías
I had never eaten a lot of meat.
Meat: conceited with its muscularity, marble veined, veined, blood-red, raw, flaunting adiposity, awash on bloody marbled counters of carnicerías, rarely disposed me to buy from the butcher’s cornucopia. Anyway, Cockaigne was a distant shore, one I did not travel to much. Overconsumption was a gratification far beyond necessity’s thriftiness. I was also uneasy about culling animals for gastronomic indulgence. On the other hand, I was no proponent of herbivory. I was too partial to jamón and embutidos, the dry-cured sausages of salchichón, chorizo and morcilla, the ichorous child of the matanza. My reservations about the matanza had not come from oversensitivity to the slaughter, on the contrary, my participation the previous year had elicited a morbid fascination with its butchery.
The convoy from the piggery to the village had been a bustling cortège of pickup trucks, betraying an eagerness to start the butchery promptly after the slaughter. While waiting, Chente, the matadero or slaughterman, had run his butchers knife up and down a sharpening steel, honing it so the carcass opened before the knife arrived. A light mist had risen from the abdominal cavity as the remaining body heat was allowed to leave. Within the hour, the carcass had been divided up.
Wives and daughters, including Fatima and the children, had been charged with the arduous task of processing the meat. Papa’s eyes had begun to close. He drifted into a lethargy that had been conspicuous in comparison to the industriousness that clattered on around him. His stick would no longer tap the floor and had fallen from the perpendicular.
The casings of the embutidos were teased from the mucous-laden visceral intestines. They had spilt out from the opened carcass into a panoply of moist polyps, vesicles, and intertwined networks of distended alimentary tubing, fed with matrices of fine blood-red lines that had fanned out along their surfaces. Pulled and stretched by connective tissue, the entrails had displayed themselves like peacocks in beguiling pastel shades of blusher or verdancy, greened by the contents of their translucent digestive chambers. And though the guarro had wallowed in muddy, soiled pens for all but the last months of its short life, the unblemished innards of the carcass had been clean, fresh, and odourless.
Mince was ground from the belly and shoulder. Fed into a hopper they had passed into a vast, antiquated, tin-plated, cast iron meat grinder, where from blades and grinding plates, the meat had been extruded as strands of mince and fallen into a red plastic bucket. Blended with salt and a few additional ingredients—determined by an unwritten recipe that nobody in the family had ever agreed on—the fillings had been stuffed into the casings and hung for curing. It was a curiosity of porcine anatomy that had allowed the fillings of the embutidos to be cannibalistically forced back into its digestive tract, without wastage of either the filling or casing.
… a trace of death, even decay: fusty, pungent, peppery, earthy, the robustness imbued with bloody succulence or fatty unctuousness.
Though embutidos were an uncomplicated combination of basic ingredients, curing increased the complexity of their flavours. Neither was it a process that would impose itself on those who suffered from impatience. Less than a handful of months after the matanza they were taken down, ready for an epicurean’s indulgence: time-worn by air, desiccated, their elaborated flavours distilled into a heady concentrate of the guarro’s demise, a trace of death, even decay: fusty, pungent, peppery, earthy, the robustness imbued with bloody succulence or fatty unctuousness.
*
‘Nowadays only kill one a year,’ Noe said, sensing my ambivalence, as if to mitigate the impending slaughter, and I raised my eyebrows in acknowledgement as we arrived at the smallholding. The pickup truck’s headlamps cut through what remained of the early morning darkness. The beam lit a verdurous bed of kale that Tito had sown only two months earlier, each dusky-viridian rosette the size of an aspidistra with cockled, veinous leaves like leather.
Chente was already with his toolbox, sorting knives, cleavers and sharpening steels, under the light of an outhouse. He greeted us with a prolonged, ‘¡Hombreeee!’ with intonation rising in pitch, as was the manner in the locale.
‘What’s up with you?’ said Noe flatly.
‘Same as yesterday,’ he replied, and from where he was crouching, looked up at me, ‘There’s a new helper today, he knows what end of knife the blade’s at?’
Noe shrugged but accepted the banter with a conspiratorial wink adding, ‘¡Vete pa’llá tío!’ inviting him to follow us.
Chente closed the toolbox, got to his feet, and followed us across the yard carrying his tools. Easygoing and soft-spoken, he had a ready wit, the prerogative of any butcher or mortician: those who looked at death every day, armed only with humour to divert either the reality of butchery or the inevitability of mortality. A solitary witticism was less than expected during that terse early morning. With a preference for loquacity, since the laconic were already burdened with reticence, a raw-boned duende, gloomed, shrouded in obscurity, stole our words, extracting them from our mouths with long, pencil-thin digits and hiding them within the darkness where they could never be spoken.
As dawn lightened the sky, words recovered from the gloaming began to form sentences, while a barrel-chested jackass held our quietude to account with a thunderous bray.
‘¡A tomar por culo!’ was Chente’s immediate riposte, and Teo’s ribald laughter rivalled the hee-hawing.
The donkey’s bellow provoked local mastiffs to bark and howl, backwards and forwards across the hill, with a cacophony that would wake unfortunates in the village above. For those already conscious of the day, hearths were burning olive and almond boles and boughs, charring already blackened stones of chimneys, the smoke drawn up into the chill lazurite sky by the flames below. From the piggery, the threads of smoke hung from the empyrean until a fickle wind whipped them around, dispersing peppery, aromatic, woody fragrances that tumbled down the hill; scant compensation for the swine’s sweet, sulphuric, miasmatic malodour, heightened by the mizzle that had begun to fall.
The piglets furrowed last September had recently been weaned. Teo threw the shoats scoops of their morning grain. Transformed into a writhing mass of flesh, they dived beneath each other or rose from the abyss to take in air: twisting and turning, they were frenetic, pinky-grey and glabrous. A single floundering anguilliform body; an eel of colossal length that coiled and convulsed itself into the labyrinthine contortions of a sea monster flailing in waves of its flesh and bones. Salivating unquenchably, it hunted for even a solitary kernel that had tumbled down lower and lower towards the barn floor and lost itself between the straw. Cockcrow’s grotesque chimaera was unpleasant, disconcerting and obtrusive.
A year of growth and the pen’s enclosure separated the ravenous shoats from the matanza’s condemned guarro. Though there had been ample grain for the shoats, there was nothing for the guarro but an empty trough.
‘Cut open, it’s better if he be empty,’ confided Teo, with a mischievous grin.
They were all black Iberian swine. The older pigs were grey-skinned, with a patchy, insignificant covering of coal-black wiry hair. A full coat had not returned after summer, so Tito’s pigs were grey. Even so, they were brawny, thickset and fractious, snorting and squealing around the pen. One would mount another, impose its superiority—a boar or sow made no difference, then spurn it with an elongated, puckered snout, baring its inadequate denticulation. Its barbed tusks had been rasped down, and its suckling teeth had some time ago been trimmed for the sake of the sow’s teats. Taking flight with a raucous oinking, the half dozen pigs hurried to one side of the pen: they moved as a herd of wildebeests on the African savannah until an ill-tempered one broke from the pack, and they settled.
They were soulful and solicitous; ink-black pupils and iridescent irises were lustrous holms in a milky sclera.
The brothers entered the pen. Taking advantage of the lull, they tied a black nylon cord around the chosen guarro’s muzzle. Harried across the yard onto weighing scales, it carried its abdominous, lard-rich body on slender legs and dainty cloven hooves, flannel-like ears flapped around its head, and its underbelly burdened with an abundance of tocino—the pork belly used to flavour stews—swayed from side to side with every step. Standing on the weighing platform, it was unsettled. I looked into its eyes beneath long-lashed lids that flickered coyly. They were soulful and solicitous; ink-black pupils and iridescent irises were lustrous holms in a milky sclera. Each was by nature moistened with a tear or two that implied a look of despondency and reproachfulness that might have conferred on the guarro a capacity to understand betrayal and apportion condemnation.
‘¡Ciento cuarenta y siete!’ shouted Manu.
‘Coño,’ muttered Noe.
‘Told you he’d got some packing on him,’ said Tito, and everyone nodded in appreciation of it having exceeded their expectations. The guarro weighed one hundred and forty-seven kilograms.
‘Its legs, the legs!’ Beto cried …
As the weight was called, Beto was dragging the guarro across the yard. His fingertips were cold and white, their circulation restricted by the cord around the guarro’s muzzle, but Beto would not allow his grip to slip from under it. The ruddiness of his hand increased as his fingertips paled. He felt its hot, vaporous breath, snorted from the snub of its moist earth-soiled snout. Every few steps he took backwards, Beto dug in the heels of his oversized boots, the tongues flapping over their laces, wriggling them into the slurry of earth to gain a purchase. Noe, Teo and Manu pushed from behind. At first, the guarro had been compliant and condescended to follow but aware of its peril soon pushed back, in supplication more than defiance. Everything about the morning was now unfamiliar. Its resistance rose. Its powerful neck wrestled Beto from one side to the other, but still, he would not let go, pushing his fingers further beyond the cord. The guarro looked to turn back but was goaded forward from behind. Squealing from the depths of its bound, tongue-tied muzzle, its plaintive cries split the early morning and silenced the mastiff’s refrain. Alarmed, it dug its dainty arrow-headed hooves into the yard’s soft-wet earth.
‘Its legs, the legs!’ Beto cried, and Noe calmly tapped each trotter with his boot and surprised, wrong-footed, the guarro raised its legs instinctively.
Noe called to me for help, ‘¡Coño ayúdame!’ and in a slow, macabre, staccato waltz, we moved with the guarro across the yard towards its death.
Outside the barn, the guarro was turned onto the ground and pressed to the earth with our knees. My hands felt its moist bristles. Rivulets of limpid mizzle streaked patches caked in claggy soil. As it tried to wrestle its rump free, I felt its force, the strength of its musculature, the coursing of blood, its vitality. At times but for its heavy breathing, it was still, waiting, girding itself, before throwing its head up and twisting its body. Its struggle drove us closer to the slaughter, the meat tightening with every flush of adrenaline. Adjusting his posture and securing the grip on the butchers knife, a steely coldness appeared across Chente’s genial countenance. It no longer possessed the mien of a jester. An honourable death did not merit jocularity. Though the guarro’s conformation was not well defined—with little distinction between head, neck and body—the matadero knew where to extinguish the life force. In a moment of deliberation, his blade hovered over the thick, flaccid, flabby scrag. It happened quickly. His knife severed the carotids and jugular.
The guarro died. Convulsed once, twice, but without a doubt, it was dead.
… he was a pre-Colombian Ah Kin intoning over a ritual sacrifice
Tito was on his knees steadying a large red plastic bowl under the guarro’s lacerated neck. His hands stirred the blood as it filled to prevent it from coagulating. Vapour rose as the warm blood met the cold December morning. When only drops fell from the wound, he lifted his blood-stained forearms over the bowl, palms upward, dripping: he was a pre-Colombian Ah Kin intoning over a ritual sacrifice, lacking only a bloodied heart between his hands. Manu removed the bowl, and the remaining drips from the guarro were drunk by the already sodden earth, imbibing the last traces of the slaughter.
I had never seen anything die. The moment of death was infinitesimally short, much less than a snap of the fingers, even a blink of an eye or the turning off of a switch. As a coda to the slaughter, a low winter sun elbowed itself between steel-grey clouds. And though a breeze had since driven the mizzle over the hill, it had left the petrichor with a trace of ozonic purity such that death had an unfamiliarity, remoteness, was an anomaly or had even been an illusion. Something intangible had left the guarro. What lay before me was not a pig but an inanimate carcass that neither elicited compassion nor was worthy of condolences.
With our hands wrapped around a hemp rope and cries of, ‘¡Venga!’ and ‘¡Vamos!’ we raised the snout of the carcass to our shins. Hung from its back trotters, on a block and tackle strung from a derrick of scaffolding poles, a faint trickle of blood ran from the wound. It fell to the shed floor without much haste, regularity or necessity to leave the carcass, forming a small naevus on the concrete. With patience, one may have counted the drops that fell on both hands. If I had sat there for the rest of the day, a small stain might have formed, and if anyone had been inclined to do so, they might have scrubbed it clean with little effort.
Without reveries or respite, the carcass was laid on the ground for scraping. The blowtorches were barbarous flamethrowers; a burner connected to a gas cylinder through a long tube and rubber hose. Ignited, they spat a firestorm that roared ferociously with a blazing blue flame. As the gas was throttled, the roar quietened and the flames became incandescent: an amorphous, billowing, rolling cloud of amber. It licked over the carcass, missing neither a crevice, wrinkle or fold of its skin. Through the flames, its wiry hairs curled, darkened, shrivelled and were lost: a transmutation of bristle into an unpleasant odour of brimstone. As the fiery cloud passed, the blade of Noe’s knife rasped at the stubble, shaving it to the follicles with the excruciating scraping of excoriation. The carcass was a motley of flesh: sooty, bloodied, blushed, porcine pink, scorched and grazed, in parts afflicted by vitiligo—a mottling of charred epidermis yet to be scraped off. The seared hooves were coal-black, the keratin reigniting with a breath of wind and kicked away by steel toe-capped boots. With sootied hands and a grimy face, Beto scraped the contours of the scorched ears and muzzle with equal amounts of precision and flourish, like a time-served barber wielding a cut-throat razor.
… serge boiler suits stole the lingering stench from the air around us
With the carcass scraped, the flames were quenched, and Chente pulled yesterday’s newspaper from the inside pocket of his boiler suit. He folded the front page of El Periódico Extremadura’s tabloid five times into a thirtytwomo wad of newsprint and stoppered the guarro’s wound.
A pervasive, pungent, sulphurous odour of singed keratin hung around the yard. The fibres of our blue serge boiler suits stole the lingering stench from the air around us, adding to the sweat, blood and mire that already soiled them. Seven valiant caballeros stood around the guarro as it lay conquered beneath us, reflecting on the tourney that had just passed. If a lance had been our blowtorch, then hubris was our shield, all but Noe’s warhorse parked at the back of the yard; his pickup readied for the guarro’s stiffening carcass to be carried to Papa for butchering. Without unnecessary haste, Tito unfastened the breast pocket of his boiler suit and removed a silver hip flask. He took a sip, looked at Chente, drew a deep breath, exhaled, and nodded. Raising the flask, he said softly, ‘Died well Chente… quickly,’ before passing the flask to the others, who without much thought were all in agreement.
Chente doffed his woollen beanie.
First published by South Carolina Review: 57.2 on 22 April 2025.
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