Cleaving (30 page)

Armando asks what I'm looking to see, to which I say, "Whatever you've got." He explains that right now we are going to a
stockyard where one of his herds is being kept. It turns out it's been a very wet summer and fall. His land is marshier than
most plots, which was the reason he decided to take a chance on water buffalo in the first place. He says he's the first in
the country to try it. But this year has been too wet for even his muck-loving animals, so he's had to move them to a feedlot
to keep them heavy and healthy. Problem is, according to import regulations in Europe, no animal that has spent even one day
on a feedlot can be sold there. So now Armando is left with the dicey proposition of selling his meat domestically, which
is neither as profitable nor as certain. Still, he maintains a positive, can-do attitude, is sure that he can make this go
over big here, that Argentines are changing their lifestyle, becoming more concerned with their health and with the provenance
of their food. He reminds me of Josh, always looking for the Big Idea, always full of plans that would seem grandiose if they
did not so often come through in the end.

"Have you eaten at La Brigada?"

"I have. I love it!"

"La Brigada sells my
bufala
meat."

"Oh yeah? I should try it." (Not really believing I'll be able to resist ordering another big old strip steak the next time
I go.)

"And Santiago's other restaurant, you have been there?"

Santiago also runs an Asian restaurant, a sort of noodle shop, catercorner to Standard. "No, haven't been yet."

"He serves my buffalo there as well. It's got a very good flavor."

After about an hour we arrive at the stockyard. Armando gets out of the car to unchain a gate and we turn onto a rutted road.
On either side are churned-up muddy pastures. Chickens pick through the manure and smooshed hay. We pull up to a complex of
barns and corrals and one low concrete building that I assume must be the office. We both climb out into the mud. While I
greet the dogs that come trotting up, Armando shakes hands with a series of men in rubber mud boots and windbreakers. Some
of these men work with the stockyard; others are buyers Armando is trying to tempt. There's much business he needs to do today,
so after he introduces me to everyone, for the sake of politeness I recede into the background, following the group a few
paces behind as we all move through a series of gates to a pen where Armando's water buffalo huddle together in a great glinting
black mass of sleek hides and dark eyes and shiny, wide horns that curl down over their entire heads, giving the impression
of brilliantined hair parted down the middle--a bunch of 1920s dandies.

A couple of guys start herding the buffalo into a chute at one end of the corral. The animals seem terribly nervous, but also
terribly obedient. The biggest cause for panic for an individual buffalo appears to be being alone. Once the men have gotten
the first few headed into the chute, the others seem content enough to simply follow, nose to tail, without protest, nothing
but a few dumbly pleading glances over the wood-plank fence. Armando tells me to stand to one side, at a safe distance, and
though I can't see that these guys are much of a danger to me, I do as he says.

In a neighboring pen, a cow has just given birth to a calf. As in
just
just. As in the calf, a lovely white creature with two parallel black marks across its cheek, like the healed scar of an
encounter with a puma, is still wet and not yet on its feet, curled up napping, and the cow is still passing the placenta.
As Aaron would say, you learn something new every day, because now I know what cows do with their afterbirth. Ew. She must
be a Tom Cruise fan. A stockyard dog, a black mutt, manages to get some of the stuff, or at least lick up some of the blood.
Which, again, ew. But she's a sweet dog, and when she comes up to me after gleaning what she can from the scene of the birth,
I cannot deny her even though she still has thick crimson splashes across her muzzle.

Meanwhile Armando, with the help of his two assistants, is loading the buffalo one at a time into the scale at the end of
the chute, just a cow-sized raised box with doors at each end that slide up and down, guillotine style. One by one they load
the cows onto the scale. Often a second one will try to squeeze in with the first. I guess for cattle, claustrophobia doesn't
trump the fear of being left behind. The stockyard workers force them back with quirts and shouts, then shut the door on the
beast inside. The scale's needle swings back and forth until it settles on a weight. If the number is high enough, the buffalo
heavy enough, Armando marks the animal with a swath of white paint by reaching through the narrow spaces between the planks
with a brush lashed to a three-foot dowel. Then the door on the other side of the box is raised and the creature trots out
hastily down the ramp, its hooves clopping loudly on concrete as it hurries to the farthest corner of the enclosure. One by
one the
bufula
clomp into the chute and back out again in half panic, some of them slipping alarmingly, falling to their knees or even over
onto their sides, then scrambling up again in terror and dashing to press close together. Once there, they stare at us humans
as if they know we're apt to grab one of them and take them down like a lion taking a wildebeest. They, of course, have had
millennia to develop the sense that this is the sort of death most likely for them, but it's terribly unhelpful now. I wonder
what evolutionary leap would suffice to free the herds, to teach them to free themselves. They all look identical to my eyes
but for their spangled white marks. In this particular case, it's the star-bellied, or star-flanked, Sneetches that are going
to lose out sooner rather than later. But not just yet.

It takes about forty-five minutes for Armando to weigh out his herd, choose those ready for the abattoir. I stand with a foot
on a rail of the fence, sometimes watching the calf, who is bright white and spindly legged and cow-licked in the senses of
both its hair being whorled and its mother being attentive, as it slowly gains its feet. And sometimes I watch the watchful,
shining black, nervously shifting mass of buffalo, their hooves clacking brightly on the asphalt, their breath steaming and
tails whooshing testily. When the family's all together again, for now, the gates are opened and they all trudge on up the
hill toward a barn twenty yards away up a muddy track. A guy in galoshes and a dog follow them, but the herd knows where it's
going and needs no encouragement. And then we head back to the city, and I return to my apartment smelling like cattle, again.

That night, on TV, miraculously, my favorite episode ever of
Buffy
is on. "The Wish." It's dubbed into Spanish, but it doesn't matter; I've seen this episode so many times I know it nearly
line for line. The story is this: Cordelia Chase, high school queen bee who gave her love to a geeky boy and then lost it,
as well as all her friends, when he fell in love with another, decides that Buffy Summers, vampire slayer, is the source of
all her problems. Everything was right in Cordy's world until Buffy came to town. Unfortunately, she makes the wish that Buffy
had never come to Sunnydale in front of a vengeance demon, who immediately grants her request. At first it seems the wish
is a great success. Her social standing is restored: boys ask her out on dates instead of treating her like sloppy seconds.
But it turns out a world without Buffy is not a nice one to be in at all.

I wonder: is this new world a nice one to be in? It seems so, sometimes, when I'm petting a sweet dog flecked with afterbirth,
in this beautiful foreign place surrounded by cattle. But then there are the other times, the after-nap times, the predinner
times. What am I supposed to be doing now that I'm here?

The next morning, July 9, Dia de la Independencia, it snows in Buenos Aires. For the first time in a hundred years.

It's not much of a snow. And it kind of edges on toward slush at the end of the day. But all morning it falls, snow-globe,
fairy-tale flakes, and the effect of it on everyone is magical. I leave my apartment after staring out my window for a bit,
and on the street everything has stopped. No one is shopping in the shops or eating in the cafes. The furiously whizzing black
taxis have disappeared. Everyone stands on the sidewalk, staring up, incandescent smiles on their lips. Children and adults
alike raise their faces and stick out their tongues. They laugh in disbelief, they kiss, they take pictures. There's no accumulation
on the ground, nowhere near enough to make a snowball, but everyone's having an imaginary snowball fight. Everyone is behaving
as if there's a six-foot blanket of sparkling snow on the ground and he has nothing waiting at home but a bottle of wine or
a mug of hot chocolate, a roaring fireplace, and a lover or a mom, whichever is appropriate for the age and situation, ready
to share it.

I've no one to share a fireplace with now. But I think I'm fine with that. Because how many girls can say they've seen it
snow in Buenos Aires, and in a world they've managed to crack open for themselves, like a bone saw exposing the marrow?

I
T IS POSSIBLE
that I haven't fully thought this through.

I mean, Argentina made sense. It's somewhat traditional, after all--at Fleisher's anyway--for butchers to travel after they've
learned their trade, hit some of the world capitals of meat. Aaron went to Spain, Josh to Vancouver; Colin is planning a trip
to Italy. But now here I am stretched out across the four seats of a middle aisle on Aerosvit Flight W132, direct to Kiev.
I've got an enormous collection of Isaac Babel stories on my lap. I have just taken a sleeping pill, swallowed down with the
worst wine I have ever tasted. The Cyrillic script on the bottle should have given me a clue; perhaps it actually would have,
if only I could read one word of Cyrillic.

Scratch that. I have definitely not fully thought this through.

Seriously, why am I going to western Ukraine? If you asked me, I couldn't tell you. It's not as if it's some renowned mecca
of cuisine, meaty or otherwise. I've always wanted to go to the Carpathians, I suppose there's that. They're reputed to be
beautiful, but that's not really the root of my fascination. Maybe it's a
Buffy
hangover. More likely it's an earlier, deeper yen, to see the place all the dark stories come from, Vlad the Impaler and
holocausts and dictators people insultingly name "butchers" and dark Transylvanian castles on stormy nights. (Teri Garr in
a dirndl tossing herself around in the back of a farm cart, trilling, "Roll, roll, roll in ze hay!" probably has a little
something to do with it too.)

But that's not a good enough reason to go flying around the world again, not reason enough to buy another ticket almost as
soon as I arrived back in New York. I think the reason is, really, that when I walked back into my apartment, I knew, knew,
that I wasn't ready to be back. It wasn't Eric, it wasn't D or Robert the Dog, or New York itself. It was me. I felt undercooked,
liquid in my center. I stayed a couple of months, veering between caged frustration at home and wild self-loathing. But I
knew I had to get out again. The anguish in Eric's eyes when I tried to explain this almost made me quail, but there was a
panic deeper, for once, than the panic at the thought of hurting him. To tell the truth, it didn't matter where I went, much.
I excused my absence as a continuation of my butchery journeyman education. But in truth I might as well have thrown some
darts at a map on the wall. I am going to the places I wanted to go at the moment when I bought the ticket--Ukraine, Tanzania,
a brief stopover in Japan. Names on an itinerary, chosen very nearly at random.

A friend of my brother's has occasionally worked in Ukraine as a consultant for politicians who really almost definitely had
nothing to do with the mysterious decapitation of their rivals. He's hooked me up with a young woman, Oksana, educated in
the States, fluent in English, and by all accounts totally fantastic, who has agreed to do serve as my guide. The day after
I fly into Kiev, she's going to meet me and we're going to take the train together to Kolimya, her hometown in the western
part of the country. All I have to do by myself is get from the airport to the Tourist Hotel, near the Livoberezhna metro
station on the left bank of the city, then manage to feed myself and get around for one day and night in Kiev without getting
mugged or hit by a car, or falling down a manhole.

The pill doesn't seem to be working; you'd think the combination of it and a tower of Babel would do the trick, but I remain
wakeful and restless. I fondle the phone in my pocket; a backlog of chatter is rising, and I have no prospect of soon easing
the pressure. I wish my doctor had prescribed something stronger. Like, I don't know, OxyContin or something. Unfortunately,
he knows just enough about my various addictions to know not to bring out the big guns, drugwise. I pull out one of the notebooks
I've brought with me. I'm going low-tech for this trip. I haven't brought my laptop, and though I have my BlackBerry for emergencies,
I'm going to endeavor not to use it--both because that phone has become so dangerous to me, a false lifeline that instead of
keeping me from foundering threatens to pull me out to sea, and because I can't bear to even imagine the phone bill. So I'm
taking up a little old-fashioned letter writing.