Tender Is the Flesh

Tejo leads the applicants to the desensitization room, where a stunner knocks out the head one by one to prepare them for slaughter. Sergio, the stunner on duty, is a friend of Tejo’s who once turned down a promotion, saying, “I prefer striking” (61). The applicants watch as Sergio restrains, soothes, and then clubs a female on the forehead, knocking her out. The shorter applicant appears eager to try stunning, but Sergio explains how difficult it is to knock the head out without killing them, which ruins the meat.

As they proceed to the slaughter sector, Tejo suspects that the shorter applicant only wants to witness the spectacle and isn’t seeking employment. They watch as a worker slits the throat of an unconscious head and allows it to bleed out.

As the employees chat, not knowing that Tejo is watching, the female Sergio stunned regains consciousness and momentarily escapes her restraints. After the worker uses a captive bolt pistol to stun her, Tejo scolds him, pointing out that her fear will ruin the meat. He reassigns the worker to the offal room. Meanwhile, the taller applicant crouches, feeling sick, while the shorter one continues to watch with fascination.

After bleeding out, the bodies pass into a tank of boiling water to be scalded.

As they watch the carcass of the female Sergio stunned continue through the plant, Tejo explains that almost every part of the product is used. After the hair is burned off, the limbs, heads, and skins of the carcasses are removed, with individual parts separated for various purposes. The resulting torso is then cut open, and various organs are removed. In the offal room, employees clean and sort entrails.

Tejo wonders how many humans they kill every month to support his father in the nursing home. He reflects that his sadness is the only thing that reminds him he’s alive.

In the next room, the remaining carcasses are cut in half before being treated and stored. One of the cutters, Pedro Manzanillo, resents Tejo for his role in firing Ency, a former employee. Ency was intelligent and friendly, but he became increasingly withdrawn over time. One day, he attempted to free several head, opening their cages with a chainsaw, so Tejo fired him and arranged for him to receive psychological treatment. A month later, Ency died by suicide.

The shorter applicant smiles as he watches the cutters. Tejo notices that he has a phone with him, which should have been confiscated by security. Throwing the phone to the ground, Tejo warns him never to return.

Tejo leads the applicants to the exit, where he has security confront the shorter applicant. He dismisses the taller applicant, promising to contact him later.

Tejo is smoking a cigarette when he receives a call from Cecilia, who tells him that she is not yet ready to return home. He recalls his and Cecilia’s extended efforts to conceive a child together, with Cecilia undergoing various fertility treatments before finally becoming pregnant, only for the newborn child to die.

Arriving home late that night, Tejo checks on Jasmine before taking the small bed that was intended for his son, Leo, into the yard. He breaks it with an ax and burns it as Jasmine watches. Before falling asleep in the grass, he cuts the restraining rope tied around Jasmine’s throat.

Tejo dreams that he is in a room with his father, who walks in circles, and a wolf, who is eating his son. A man, possibly Manzanillo, appears and cuts Tejo’s chest open with a chainsaw, after which Sergio removes his heart. Cecilia appears with Spanel’s face and places a black stone where Tejo’s heart was before stunning him with a club.

Waking up, Tejo sees that Jasmine is asleep next to him. He notes her beauty before returning her to the barn. A few minutes later, he leaves for Spanel Butchers, where he finds Spanel in the middle of cutting some meat. He kisses her forcefully before they engage in foreplay, blood dripping onto them from a disembodied arm hanging above the table. From behind a glass door, Spanel’s assistant, El Perro, watches as Tejo and Spanel have sex. Spanel lets out a scream “as if beneath this hell there was another hell, one from which she didn’t want to escape” (89). Afterward, she smokes and smiles. Tejo leaves without a word.

Back in his car, Tejo answers a call from Marisa, who invites him over for lunch; he reluctantly accepts but indicates he does not want any meat, pretending he is on a diet. In fact, he stopped eating meat when Leo died.

Tejo arrives at Marisa’s home. She is concerned to see him walking without an umbrella, which the government recommends as protection against possible viral contamination from bird droppings. Unlike Tejo, Marisa follows government regulations and social norms without question. After a brief argument, Marisa changes the subject to discuss her children, including their fondness for a game that lets them keep virtual pets.

Tejo notices that Marisa has a newly installed cold room and realizes that Marisa intends to raise domestic head.

Marisa and her husband, Esteban, have two children, preteen twins Maru and Estebancito. Arriving home from school, the twins greet Tejo mischievously. During lunch, Marisa scolds them for whispering to each other, and they admit that they are trying to guess how Tejo tastes, a favorite game of theirs. Marisa is furious, insisting, “We don’t eat people” (100). The twins are amused by her reaction. Playing along, Tejo speculates about how the twins would taste.

When Marisa asks about buying head from the plant, Tejo curtly changes the subject to Armando, implying that Marisa should take her children to visit him; she says they are too busy. To taunt her, the twins beg her to take them to visit their grandfather. Tejo leaves, tossing the umbrella Marisa gives him into a nearby trash can.

Tejo drives to the zoo, where he walks by abandoned exhibits and a sales booth, all disfigured by graffiti. Stopping in the aviary, he thinks back to Leo’s funeral, at which Marisa cried while he did not. Later, during the cremation, Cecilia collapsed.

Tejo continues to explore, passing a playground before entering a former restaurant and following signs to a serpentarium. He reads a graffiti poem on the wall about masking one’s fear of death. Following a sound, Tejo discovers four puppies living in a terrarium. He pets and plays with them.

Watching the puppies, which he names after the Rolling Stones, Tejo remembers his dogs, Pugliese and Koko, whom he reluctantly killed due to a governmental decree even though he believed the virus was a hoax. Koko was particularly fond of Armando, who rescued her.

When adult dogs appear, growling, Tejo temporarily blocks them from entering while he leaves another way. He makes sure they will be able to enter the terrarium eventually. Pursued by the dogs, whom he considers “beautiful,” he gets into his car with seconds to spare.

As he arrives home, Tejo recalls that Koko found Pugliese, then a malnourished pup, and Pugliese remained loyal to Koko. Taking a bucket and soap, he leads Jasmine out of the barn to clean her as rain falls. She is scared but submissive. As he cleans, he notices her scent, which reminds him of jasmine. He hugs her and then, in violation of laws prohibiting sex between people and head, has sex with her.