Of Cattle and Men

Novel · 99 pages · 2023 – Charco Press

Blood, Processed

In a remote valley where a slaughterhouse organises work, food and survival, Ana Paula Maia’s Of Cattle and Menfollows Edgar Wilson, the stun operator responsible for killing every animal that enters the line. He performs the task with precision, marking each animal before striking so that death arrives cleanly. The distinction he maintains between killing and cruelty appears stable at first. The slaughterhouse does not operate here as a symbol or concealed moral space. It is already visible, already functioning. The pressure comes from how little that visibility changes.

The early movement fixes the structure. Work extends beyond the kill floor into transport, processing and sale, linking death to product and to the worker’s inability to afford it. Edgar’s killing of Zeca does not interrupt this order. It confirms it. A man who violates the discipline of slaughter is removed through another act of controlled violence. The novel absorbs the act and continues. Edgar’s care refines his function within the system.

As the book widens, men are defined by task and endurance. Helmut dismantles carcasses with a force that echoes earlier damage in his own life. Emetério measures survival through continued employment. Vladimir carries a prior industrial accident into the present, linking one site of extraction to another. Bronco Gil appears earlier in On Earth as It Is Beneath. The violence of the penal colony gives way here to the regulated violence of the slaughterhouse without altering its underlying logic. These lives are organised through repetition and exhaustion. The slaughterhouse is one node in a larger system that organises bodies through labour and disposes of them through the same logic.

The first strain appears in classification. A shipment of cattle triggers panic when national categories are thought to have been mixed. The system depends on these distinctions, yet they fail on contact with the herd. Edgar resolves the problem through behaviour rather than official markers. The order loses its ability to sort before it loses its ability to explain.

From here, explanation is repeatedly attempted and fails to hold. A predator is suspected, then rustlers, then madness, then contamination. Each explanation relocates the source of disorder away from the system that contains it. If accepted, each would leave the organisation of labour and killing intact. The novel removes them one by one, a move that recurs in Tender Is the Flesh, where institutional logic remains stable even as violence intensifies.

Maia develops this shift through image systems that change function across the book. Eyes move from signs of presence to surfaces that cannot be read with confidence. Blood shifts from work to a shared medium linking worker, carcass and consumer. The river moves from a disposal route to a poisoned boundary. These changes alter the conditions of labour without interrupting the structure that organises it. The prose maintains this control by staying flat and procedural, keeping events at the level of task rather than allowing them to accumulate symbolic weight.

A visit by students to the slaughterhouse forces proximity. They arrive as observers and leave without distance. When Edgar is called a murderer, he offers the tool. The separation that allows consumption to remain abstract breaks down in contact with the process. The scene clarifies dependence.

The strain deepens through the herd. Birth fails. Hunger gathers at the perimeter. Direction shifts. Animals move without clear stimulus. Attempts to restore order rely on the same habits of explanation that have already weakened. When the cattle leave the barn and move towards the cliff, there is no visible external force. The animals advance and fall one after another. The movement exposes the limits of explanation and shifts attention to what follows.

Edgar’s position remains unchanged. He recognises what has happened more directly than the others, but recognition does not grant him distance. His difficulty with sheep marks a change in proximity. The procedural rhythm that structures cattle killing no longer holds. The sheep remove the distance that allows killing to function as labour, bringing the work back to the body.

The final chapter returns the novel to the system it has been tracing. The dead cattle are stripped for food before any formal account is produced. The police convert the event into accident and theft, an explanation sufficient for administration. Work resumes. Expansion is planned. Edgar moves to another slaughter site. The fall gives way to what processes it. Hunger takes the bodies. Paperwork fixes the account. Business continues.