OF CATTLE AND MEN

In Brazilian author Maia’s second book to be translated into English, strange events upset work at a slaughterhouse.

At Touro do Milo Slaughterhouse, trucks deliver cows “tapdancing in their own faeces and urine,” and the nearby Rio das Moscas (River of Flies) is salty with animal blood. Outside the slaughterhouse people beg for rotten meat; inside, men live beside cattle. “Only the voices on one side and the mooing on the other distinguish the men from the ruminants.” Maia’s cast of characters includes no women. She focuses on Edgar Wilson, the stun operator who marks cows with the sign of the cross before hitting them with a mallet. “He believes these animals have a soul” and admits he’s a murderer: “He knows his own violence will never allow him to see the face of his Creator.” The foreman is Bronco Gil, a “self-proclaimed hunter” who lost an eye to a vulture. There’s Helmuth, the splitter, who chain-saws cows in half. The nicest guy, Santiago, sips mushroom tea and likes electric eels. Perry adroitly translates the world of dust and blood Maia has assembled. There are no rants against the meat industry—Maia lets the facts condemn it. The pacing is quick, with threads of grim poetry: “The hue of the twilight sky resembles that of a pomegranate cut in half.” Tensions rise when cows start to miscarry, graze for food west instead of north, slam themselves into walls, and drown. The men hunt for a possible predator or cattle rustlers to no avail. The cows suddenly choose death en masse rather than be slaughtered. When asked how this could happen, Edgar surmises it’s “one abyss calling out to another abyss.”

Brutal yet gripping, as if Cormac McCarthy penned an anti-meat noir.