Free Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) by Italo Calvino

names, marking beside each name some feature that will enable him to recall the image to his memory; he tries also to make a synthetic sketch of the shape. He writes “Pavé d’Airvault” and notes “green mold”, draws’a flat parallelopiped and to one side notes “4cm. circa”; he writes “St-Maure”, notes “gray granular cylinder with a little shaft inside” and draws it, measuring it at a glance as about “20 cm.”; then he writes “Chabicholi” and draws another little cylinder.
    “Monsieur! Hoo there! Monsieur!” A young cheese-girl, dressed in pink, is standing in front of him, as he is occupied with his notebook. It is his turn, he is next; in the line behind him everyone is observing his incongruous behavior, heads are being shaken with those half-ironic, half-exasperated looks with which the inhabitants of the big cities consider the ever-increasing number of the mentally retarded wandering about the streets.
    The elaborate and greedy order that he intended to make momentarily slips his mind; he stammers; he falls back on the most obvious, the most banal, the most advertised, as if the automatons of mass civilization were waiting only for this moment of uncertainty on his part in order to seize him again and have him at their mercy.

Marble and blood
     
    The reflections the butcher’s shop inspires in someone entering with a shopping-bag involve information handed down for centuries in various branches of learning: expertise in meats and cuts, the best way of cooking each piece, the rites that allay remorse at the ending of other lives in order to sustain one’s own. Butchering wisdom and culinary learning belong to the exact sciences, which can be checked through experimentation, bearing in mind the habits and techniques that vary from one country to another; sacrificial learning, on the other hand, is dominated by uncertainty, and moreover, it fell into oblivion centuries ago, but still it weighs obscurely on the conscience, an unexpressed demand. A reverent devotion for everything that concerns meat guides Mr Palomar, who is preparing to buy three steaks. Amid the marble slabs of the butcher’s shop he stands as if in a temple, aware that his individual existence and the culture to which he belongs are conditioned by this place.
    The line of customers moves slowly along the high marble counter, past the shelves and the trays where the cuts of meat are aligned, each with its name and price on a tag stuck into it. The vivid red of the beef precedes the light pink of the veal, the dull red of the lamb, the dark red of the pork. Vast ribs blaze up, round tournedos whose thickness is lined by a ribbon of lard, slender and agile counter-filets, steaks armed with their invincible bone, massive rolled-roasts all lean, chunks for boiling with layers of fat and of red meat, roasts waiting for the string that will force them to enfold themselves; then the colors fade: veal escalopes, loin chops, pieces of shoulder and breast, cartilage; and then we enter the realm of legs and shoulders of lamb; farther on some white tripe glows, a liver glistens blackly . . .
    Behind the counter, the white-smocked butchers brandish their cleavers with the trapezoidal blade, their great knives for slicing and those for flaying, saws for severing bones, pounders with which they press the snaky pink curls into the funnel of the grinding machine. From hooks hang quartered carcases to remind you that your every morsel is part of a being whose living completeness has been arbitrarily torn asunder.
    On the wall a chart shows an outline of a bull, like a map covered with frontier lines that mark off the areas of consuming interest, involving the entire anatomy of the animal excepting only horns and hooves. The map of the human habitat is this, no less than the planisphere of the planet; both are protocols that should sanction the rights man has attributed to himself, of possession, division, and consumption without residue