Digestion

A few metres from the Englishman’s motionless body, the older man is still processing the piece of chicken he tore into with his teeth the night before, misplacing some of the bird’s skin between incisors and premolars. Digestion…, the old Sherpa thinks. A primitive mechanism that wears down the teeth and shakes up the entrails. He’d like the tourists to witness his digestive processes up close. Show them to them, they who are so sensitive to naturalist allegories. They who get besotted by any story with a holm oak or a wild hare as minor characters. They who dream all the time of the tender pastures of March, the succulent stags of autumn served up on the grass for predators’ fangs.

Tourists, the old man thinks, invented the superiority of the immaculate, of the virgin. They cannot understand the beauty of the wheat field polished by the hand of man; they do not enjoy the subject of history cast upon the environment, ploughing and reaping according to the logic of terrestrial translation. They evoke a pre-social dimension, confident in the weakness of organisation; they long for a time when inequities were resolved by blood in favour of the animal best endowed for the fight.

Learn this, the old Sherpa would say to them: that chicken died by human hands. There was premeditation; there was a plot. Malice aforethought. The tourists feel comfortable eliding those details. But they are part of the virtuous circle of extermination that brings poultry production to their plates, to their yellow and green tin bowls on the southern slope of the giantess, a few metres from where the Englishman suffers his immobility.