Chapter 3
Once, on the wall of a public restroom, I saw a poem
TELL ME WHAT YOU EAT
AND I’LL TELL YOU WHO YOU ARE
The trip was faster this time. Or at least it seemed that way. My head spun with the memory of that murdered couple, tinted bright red. They’d been on vacation, happy, and then … that. There was nothing I could do. If I’d dared to react, I would have ended up just like them.
Every now and then, going around a sharp curve, I’d hear a rattle in the trunk and my stomach would churn.
Judging by the car’s speed, we’d exited the highway and entered a wide but very busy road—maybe Avenida Brasil?
After several more minutes, we turned onto a dirt road, heading uphill and through more desolate areas devoid of traffic noise. Finally, the car came to a stop.
“You can get out,” said Umberto.
I took off the blindfold. In front of me was an expansive lot, its perimeter marked by a barbed wire fence.
In the center of the plot were two industrial warehouses topped with spotlights and huge exhaust fans—a large factory in operation.
We were in the middle of nowhere. The sun was already beginning to set, painting the sky a beautiful and ominous orange.
“Let’s go,” said Umberto.
We passed through a gate flanked by two armed security guards and crossed the dirt.
Nothing—not even the manhunt at the police station—could have prepared me for what lay beyond those walls.
I’d never thought human beings were capable of imagining so much cruelty, much less executing it.
I’ll try to describe what I saw in those few minutes I spent inside those warehouses.
It’s important for you to know, but trust me, this isn’t easy for me.
I know that by now all this woe-is-me, crisis-of-conscience shit must be starting to wear a little thin for you.
Because no, I didn’t do anything to stop it.
I walked through those corridors, went into those rooms, watched horrific spectacles of violence and death, without lifting a finger against any of it.
Two or three times I thought I was going to pass out, but that does nothing to lessen my culpability, I know.
I left whatever shred of humanity I still had and plunged into a pit of suffering with no return.
That was the moment I truly turned into a monster.
So be warned. Into the slaughterhouse we must go.
The small door at the south end of the first warehouse led to what looked like a law firm waiting room, where we collected badges from a silent receptionist. From high windows came a mechanical hum, mixed with what sounded like the murmur of an audience waiting for the show to begin.
“Which of the senses do you think is the most important?” asked Umberto as we arrived at a turnstile.
“Sight. I could handle being deaf or mute, as long as I could see.”
“Wrong. Without taste, life is miserable, Dante. Taste is the only sense exempt from the ethics that govern the others. Imagine a performance artist mutilating an animal at a gallery or a musician capturing the sound of a tortured animal—it would be unthinkable! Yet for years, we’ve been killing, mutilating, and torturing animals simply because they taste good.
People excuse so much suffering for their food.
Anything is possible in the name of taste, my friend.
That’s the principle you’ll witness here today. ”
At the main entrance, before turning the door handle, Umberto looked back at me.
“I forgot one more thing. Your phone, please.”
I handed it over, praying he wouldn’t find the recording I’d made at the police station or the dropped pin I’d sent Cora.
For a moment I had this horrible feeling that I’d never get out of that place alive.
But Umberto powered off my phone without even glancing at the notifications on the lock screen and handed it back to me.
I put it in my pocket, and we started down a series of well-lit corridors with clean white walls, like in a high-end private hospital.
From the other side of a set of metal doors came continuous sharp howls and animalistic growls, which Umberto didn’t seem to notice.
At the end of a corridor was a larger metal door where the loudest screams seemed to come from, accompanied by desperate pleas.
These were human screams. Two security guards in white overalls and tool belts were stationed at the door.
With a nod, Umberto walked past them and opened it.
Instantly, a strong smell hit me. There were no windows or ventilation, just powerful white spotlights to mimic daylight. I took a few steps and my feet sank into a mixture of vomit and blood. Stacked against the walls were large cages, with naked, filthy, injured men and women chained to the bars.
There were at least thirty people, mostly women.
Most of them looked homeless, though they could have taken on that appearance—bruised skin and blackened scabs—after their kidnapping.
Placed in front of them were pots of greenish water and mustard-colored paste.
Most seemed too drugged up to eat or say anything.
Those who were still awake begged for help in muffled wails. I avoided their eyes.
“There are chickens and hogs in the other rooms. But nothing compares to the money we generate here,” Umberto said like a proud butcher. “We keep the lights on twenty hours a day so they’ll keep eating. In two weeks’ time, they’re slightly overweight, with that delicious layer of fat.”
I imagined myself in this place for two weeks, crammed inside a cage, sleeping on a layer of excrement, drugged and deformed by heat and sheer terror. Many of the people behind those bars were passed out, maimed, bleeding, with exposed bones protruding from their wounds.
Suddenly a yellowish light flooded in from the corridor and my attention turned to the door; two men in overalls came in, carrying the kidnapped woman from the highway patrol station.
Her hands were still tied behind her back, but she was awake, desperately asking for her husband.
Her distress seemed to awaken the other captives, who began to cry out even louder.
“For the love of God, somebody muzzle that seagull,” Umberto ordered.
One of the workers took a meat mallet from his tool belt and struck the woman hard between her eyes, knocking her unconscious. The other workers tried to contain the widespread upheaval, beating people with batons, pulling their hair, stomping on fallen bodies and pepper spraying them.
“In order to lower our overhead, we unfortunately have to keep the seagulls in these conditions, which puts them under severe stress,” explained Umberto once the situation had been handled.
“The important thing is to calculate how close to death we can keep them without them dying prematurely. Luckily for us, humans are quite resilient.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“The fresher the meat, the higher the value. Go ahead, pick one, Dante.”
“What?”
“Well, you’ve come all this way, go ahead, choose your seagull. It’s just like picking out a lobster in a restaurant tank.”
“I’m not going to choose shit, Umberto.”
He signaled for one of the men to drag the woman from the station’s unconscious body to our feet, and kicked her head like a soccer ball.
“Pick one.”
“No, I—”
Another kick. The woman’s jaw dislocated—clack—but Umberto didn’t relent.
“I said pick one, damn it!”
Without thinking, I pointed at the person in a cage closest to me.
She was a white woman with curly hair, with wounded and bloodied skin.
Umberto nodded and the men approached to remove her from the cage.
She howled, trying to evade them, but was quickly subdued with a blow from the meat mallet to the back of the head, and had to be dragged out of the room.
“It’s time for us to go now, too,” said Umberto, looking at his watch.
I hoped that meant this nightmare had come to an end, but I was wrong.
The next room was like a ward, full of gurneys and IV poles everywhere.
Two staff members in medical uniforms were examining people strapped and handcuffed to hospital beds.
They were injecting them with syringes, drawing blood, taking various samples.
“Here’s where we test the seagulls for disease … That way we can ensure the meat is hygienic and safe to eat.”
“And if they’re sick?”
“Then they’re destroyed,” he said with scientific clarity. “Doctors check blood types and extract any organs that can be sold on the black market.”
“Black market?”
“Other business ventures, Dante. The lucky ones are anesthetized and taken to an operating room with a medical team. The others go to slaughter.”
We left the infirmary and went back into the hall.
Stepping over a drop in the floor, I realized we were in an underground tunnel from one warehouse to the other.
The hum of machinery buzzed in my ears. Forced to stand aside and watch that hellscape powerless to act, I felt responsible for the lives of all those people kept among pigs and chickens, tortured just to pad my bank account and feed my ego.
I grabbed Umberto’s shoulder, bringing him to a stop.
“What else do you do to them?”
“All food has a price, Dante, and that price is the animal’s life.
Don’t you think it’s fair that the species who reaps the benefits also pays the price?
” he asked, stone-faced. “Soon after the first dinners, Vladimir partnered with the owner of this slaughterhouse, who was able to set aside some space for our seagulls. Now we’re hosting secret dinners in several cities. ”
“What do you mean?”
“Keep walking,” Umberto ordered, heading farther down the corridors.
“We’ve got operations in S?o Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, and Brasília.
We host events for trusted clients and provide special cuts of meat, delivered to homes throughout the country and even abroad.
Free raw material made from the scum of the earth; nobody misses these seagulls.
If you ask me, an excruciating life is worse than an excruciating death. ”
The chicken and hog slaughter rooms were large and divided into stalls, with workers wearing white aprons, rubber boots, surgical gloves, and masks.
At the back, in a smaller facility, was where the human slaughter was taking place.
The staff worked nonstop, performing a coordinated series of movements like a macabre dance.
White lights shone from the ceiling onto the tile floor, where there were toolboxes with chainsaws, steel butcher gloves, tenderizer mallets, slicers, shears, pliers, rotary saws, sharpeners, knives of various sizes.
Umberto talked the whole time as we walked between stalls, pointing out slaughterers, deboners, evisceration processors, and those responsible for splitting the carcasses.
I paused to look at the machines, their whir of chains lifting bodies through the air on hooks.
That loud metal clanging mingled with the squeals of animals from neighboring stalls, and the cries for help from the people dragged into that place.
At the same time, there was this false sense of comfort brought about by the sterile, white cleanliness and the synchronization of the machines.
The technology was stripping people of their humanity and turning them into objects on a production line.
We stopped at an empty stall where two workers were hosing down the bloody floor.
They continued their work, ignoring our presence, until the woman I’d selected was brought out and left in the middle of the space.
Her face was disfigured, her arms crooked and broken.
When they cuffed her wrists and tried hoisting her up on the chains and pulleys, she howled in pain.
Her screams were so piercing that I stopped hearing whatever it was that Umberto was saying.
The worker finally caught on that her right arm was broken and lowered her back to the ground, securing shackles to her ankles to hoist her upside down.
Hanging naked from the hooks, the woman really did look like a piece of meat, her muscles stretched, her chest heaving, blood running down her long, bristly hair, pooling on the ground.
By this point I’d assumed she’d be dead already or at least unconscious, but she remained lucid, moving her torso as best she could, screaming as she watched herself be butchered. Finally the shorter worker approached with a pneumatic pistol and fired into her skull. The woman collapsed instantly.
“That’s called stunning,” Umberto said. “It’s a humane slaughter technique.”
The worker pulled a knife from his tool belt and carved a neat chunk of flesh from her left buttock. He made another cut on the side of her abdomen. “Just make it stop,” I asked desperately.
The man grabbed a chainsaw from the tools hanging on the wall.
I couldn’t stand to be there any longer.
I didn’t care about the consequences; I turned my back on that monstrosity and ran.
I could hear Umberto shouting for me to come back, but I didn’t stop.
I fled the room, down empty corridors and stalls.
The workers didn’t even look at me, absorbed as they were in their mind-numbing labor, but two security guards stopped me as I was passing from one warehouse to the other.
I started to scream. They gripped me tightly as I flailed my arms and legs.
It seemed for a moment like they were about to hook me up, too, and slice me up.
In my despair, I remembered the look on that hunted woman’s face back at the station, witnessing the execution of her husband and dog and then being taken to the slaughterhouse.
If I’d known what they did to people here, I would have killed her on the spot.
Out of pity. To spare her more suffering.
The security guards dragged me to the infirmary.
As I lay on the floor near the entrance, immobilized, my head spinning, a worker approached, syringe in hand.
I tried to escape, but my legs wouldn’t move.
I felt a twinge in my arm, which soon went numb.
Seconds later, my body collapsed, and I was plunged into darkness.