For week three of the STACKTEMBER event hosted by
at BEHENIAN RHAPSODY.Prompt: The Threshold - Crossing into a place you can’t cross back from.
The hog, happy in his hog home, believes that you feed him sweet acorns to eat because you love him. His piggy eyes gleam with gratitude as he snuffles up his yummy treats. He can't know that you feed him such tasty stuff so that when you slit his throat and hang up his haunches to cure, it makes for the most exquisite ham. He can't be allowed to know it, because the foreknowledge would sour his sweet flesh and make him unpalatable.
Jamón de bellota, presunto, prosciutto de San Daniele. The delicacy, that melting texture, the sweet and salt tastes balanced on a knife edge. It depends on oblivious ignorance as well as the layer of the hog's own fat seasoned with salt and pepper that's smeared all over to encase the haunch for curing. Sealed in by a layer of your lardy unknowing, complacent in your own rich tallow, as you acquire subtle piquancy. There's a delicious symmetry at work throughout the process.
So it is with humans. If those jolly folk toiling on my pigfarm knew what awaits them at their end, it would spoil them: not their meat, for I am not some crude cannibal, but their value to me as productive workers. The man who wields the knife would lose all savor for life and his cutting would become jagged and imprecise. Then the hog would become distressed just as the blade sawed painfully through his gullet and all the hard work of keeping him happy and unaware in life would be wasted in that awkward final moment. Thus the unknowing must be sealed in more completely, and the lard of complacency spread more widely still.
He's called Gianfranco. The pig-cutthroat, my trusted foreman and overseer. He's been my family's loyal retainer his whole life and has slaughtered over fifty thousand hogs with his keen-edged blade and steady arm. I have all the figures in my books. His father before him was my father's chief slaughterer Lorenzo. His mother Gianna cared for the hogs as she cared for him, baby on the breast, shovel in hand. His brothers, his wife, his parents-in-law. All employees of my hog farm. It's a family business. Both family and business.
So it was a matter of some concern that Gianfranco reported to me some six weeks ago that my son Daniele had gone missing. Last seen traipsing around in the hog stalls in his aimless way, poking at the select breeders in the studfarm.
—Did you know that Dowager Empress Lü of China had her rival, the Concubine Qi, who contested with her for her son the Emperor's affections, converted into a hog? Woman to piggie: hands, feet, nose and tongue sliced off, eyes gouged out and ears scorched away, and then thrown into a pigsty. Lü called her victim the "human swine" and proudly showed her off to her former lover the Emperor. Not sure why that occurred to me, just seemed like an interesting anecdote which you might enjoy.
Very interesting, Don Amato.
Anyway, I decided not to notify the authoriities of Dani's disappearance. The lad was something of a playboy, he would take off to Ibiza at the drop of a hat. He probably did that and then lost his cellphone on a beach somewhere. No biggie, I thought. È tutto la stessa cosa.
Now they tell me they found his cellphone here in the main house. Absent-minded layabout. I can scarcely confide the family businesses for him to inherit when I’m gone. The football club, maybe, but the media conglomerate? Requires a steady hand.
And the pork product business? Something that needs sensitivity and taste. People look at hogs and they think: filth dwelling in filth. But they need to look past the outward appearance and think of the delicate flesh inside, which requires only our tenderness to be made exquisite. Sensitive care when alive, discernment at the hour of slitting throats.
Don Amato, don Amato, they entreat. Come to the studfarm. A new breeder to show me. Gianfranco is proud of this one, he says.
And the new animal is strange-looking, sure enough, but somehow delightful. It cavorts in its little stall like a puppy, pink and wholesome, though smeared with excrement here and there.
—-The smear of filth that makes the sweet flesh all the tastier, say I.
He’s fattened on the finest acorns, says Gianfranco. He didn’t want to eat at first but I made him eat, stuffed them down his throat.
Stuffed down his throat. The words stir something in me. The throat, inviting, so easily cut.
—Why does the new hog stumble around so in its stall, Gianfranco?
Lost his eyes in an accident. Ears singed off at the same time. Un po' zoppo – a bit lame – but fat, fat this one, fattened to a delightful plumpness by the acorn pap I stuffed down his throat.
Stuffed down his throat. The suggestion of it. The mush going down, squeezing through the throat. It makes me feel... that way. It makes me hard.
—Thank you Gianfranco, you may go now.
Grazie, Don Amato. And he withdraws, discreetly, respectfully, the long slaughtering knife under his apron strings behind his back. Gianfranco the loyal, my faithful servant. If only you knew what happens in the end...
Now we are alone, the new breeding hog and myself. I open the stall and step in through the threshold into the stink. I am as always dressed in my farmer suit – English tweeds, yellow waistcoat, club tie, the homburg. The green rubber boots like the English lords wear on their estates. Il cavaliere – a gentleman through and through.
The fly on a pair of tailor-made Saville Row corduroy trousers can be unbuttoned with ease, not like these new-fangled zippers you find in off-the-peg pants. Classic style: pop-pop-pop. And so I slither out the hardening thing. The master’s rod: la verga del padrone.
The new breeding hog is reluctant at first, but I recall Gianfranco’s words. Stuffed down his throat. It gives me resolve to do likewise, and soon it’s in – in to that delicious dirty place, that soft warm gullet that awaits the sacrificial blade. Where I come now, the steel edge will follow...
Padrone!
I shudder and finish, discharging myself in its gorge. I look round to where Giancarlo stands, flashlight in one hand and knife in the other.
—Gianfranco, I can explain, I say. I was testing this new one for shingles, and...
No need, padrone. Gianfranco opens the pigsty door a little wider. Standing in the threshold is his wife Bianca and his little boy Amatino, named for me his beloved employer and patron.
We saw the whole thing. The little one too. We’re not shocked, because we know all about you, Don Amato, know what you do to the animals, to your employees. To my father.
—You’ll never be able to prove it, Gianfranco. The police, the judges, they know me...
Again, padrone, no need. We have a different solution. Your boy Daniele may even be enjoying it, I don’t know. Unfortunately he is unable to speak about his experience. His... uh, unique experience. And the idea was your own: all those times you told me about the Empress Lü and her human swine...
—That! That thing is my son?
Si padrone, it is little Dani converted into your little plaything, just as you like him. Just as you like us, just as you use us, so you have had him.
I make to leave, but Gianfranco flashes the blade against my throat.
Soon you’ll be alongside him, and in your own piggie way, you two will be able to talk about it. Maybe compare notes, who knows? A new breed, but unfortunately you won’t make a breeding pair.
I kneel in the filth and weep. The thing nuzzles at me with its cauterized face and its blinded eyes. Is it trying to say something? My son, my swine? Gianfranco’s wife Bianca brings in a silver tray with a white cloth over it.
Gianfranco raises the cloth to show the delicate slices, marbled with fine threads of fat.
We took the liberty of making a fine ham for you to try. We call it prosciutto de Danino. Would you care to taste it, padrone?
I raise the delicate slice to my lips. My hand trembles but my mouth waters. The smell is delicate, sweet, salty, redolent of oaken acorns, with that slight nearly imperceptible touch of fecal earthiness to set it off.
I place the cut in my mouth. It dissolves on the tongue in a delicate spiral of abhorrence and love, the taste of life and the taste of myself dissolving in myself.
It is the absolute perfection of flesh.
EPIGRAPH
Terra di infanti, affamati, corrotti,
governanti impiegati di agrari, prefetti codini,
avvocatucci unti di brillantina e i piedi sporchi,
funzionari liberali carogne come gli zii bigotti,
una caserma, un seminario, una spiaggia libera, un casino!
Milioni di piccoli borghesi come milioni di porci
pascolano sospingendosi sotto gli illesi palazzotti,
tra case coloniali scrostate ormai come chiese.
Pier Paolo Pasolini "Alla mia nazione"
[TRANSLATION]
Infantile land of the famished and corrupt, government for the owners, rancid politicos, lawyers with slick-back hair and stinking feet, freemarket functionaries like scumbag uncles. Barracks, seminary: a public beach made filth. Millions of petty bourgeois like millions of hogs rootling round beneath immaculate mansions, colonial buildings, farms decayed as churches "To my nation"
====== » { PIG HOUSE // END } « ======
With all credit to the master Pier Paolo Pasolini, this story inspired by his film Porcile/Pigsty and the unbridled savagery of it by the (still-unseen by me) Salò.
The poem is from Selected Poems of Pier Paolo Pasolini (2014), edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli (giving my own translation in preference to the rather anodyne and toothless translation by Sartarelli).
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uuuuuurrrrrrgh! Madonna!
Che "Camerona!" che schiffo!
dragged squealing across the sty gate, unable to cross back.