The Slaughter Yard

The text in the first uniform[note 2] edition of Echeverría's works (ed. Gutiérrez together with Gutiérrez's editorial commentary) may be downloaded from the Internet Archive.[1] A printed English translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni has been published.[note 3]

The following is an English-language précis of the original Spanish text.

The action takes place on some unspecified date in the 1830s during the season of Lent. The City of Buenos Aires has been isolated by floods. Pounding their pulpits, the preachers thunder that the Day of Judgement is nigh; that God is angry with the wickedness of man – and, more especially, with the heretical unitarios (adherents of the proscribed Unitario political party).

Eventually the floods abate but not before the city has run out of beef. The government gives orders that 50 bullocks are to be slaughtered, ostensibly to provide beef for children and the sick (for otherwise meat is forbidden to Catholics during Lent). The reader is given to understand that the meat is really intended for privileged persons including Rosas himself and his corrupt clergy.

Echeverría proceeds to paint the slaughter yard scene in lurid colours: in the pens, the cattle stuck in the glutinous mud; the blood-smeared, half-naked butchers – brutal men, staunch Rosas supporters to a man; the hideous black female offal-scavengers; the growling mastiffs; the screaming carrion birds; the riotous youths who amuse themselves by pelting the females and each other with lumps of bloody meat or guts; the cynical, bestial language.

On a ruinous shed there are signboards declaiming: "Long live the Federation"; "Long live the Restorer[note 4] and the heroine doña Encarnación Ezcurra";[note 5] "Death to the savage unitarios". Presiding there is the sinister Judge of the Slaughter Yard. By order of Rosas the Judge enjoys absolute power over this collection of debased humanity.

Forty-nine bullocks are slaughtered, flayed and quartered with axes. One more animal remains. But there is a suspicion that he may be no bullock, but a bull – though bulls are not allowed in the slaughter yard. Driven mad with rage by the crowd's handling, he charges. A horseman lassoes him but owing to an accident the taut lasso decapitates a child. The animal escapes and heads off to the city, pursued by a crowd, which, incidentally, tramples a passing Englishman.[note 6] After an hour the animal is recaptured, taken back to the slaughter yard and despatched in horrific terms by the butcher Matasiete (the name means braggart, bully, literally "he kills seven"). The "bullock" is then cut open and proves after all to possess an enormous pair of retracted testicles – much to the amusement of the crowd, which by now has forgotten the decapitated boy.

At this point the chief protagonist, who is never named but is a man of about 25, enters the scene. The crowd immediately spots that he is a unitario (supporter of the proscribed political party). His sideburns are cut in the form of a letter U (for unitario); he is not displaying the mandatory rosista emblem; neither is he wearing the obligatory mourning for Rosas' late wife. (It is not explained why the protagonist has chosen to ride about Buenos Aires dressed in this illegal, indeed reckless manner.) Furthermore, his horse bears a silla or gringo saddle[note 7] – in the crowd's mentality, the sure sign of the effete city slicker.

Egged on by the crowd, Matasiete throws him from his horse, seizes him by the necktie and holds a dagger to his throat.

"Cut his throat, Matasiete" jeers the crowd. At that point the slaughter yard Judge rides up and orders that the protagonist be taken to his shed, which is also a rudimentary courtroom. In this room is a massive table never without glasses of grog and playing cards "unless to make room for the executions and tortures of the Federalist thugs of the slaughter yard". After the crowd has shouted threats and ribald insults the Judge orders everyone to shut up and sit down.

There then transpires an angry dialogue between (on the one hand) the Judge and taunting crowd and (on the other) the defiant, brave but rather high-minded protagonist. The Judge and the crowd speak in direct, colloquial street Spanish but, curiously, the protagonist, even when insulting them, uses correct literary language, addressing them in the third person.

At last the Judge delivers his ruling: "Drop this city slicker's underpants and give him the verge[note 8] to his bald buttocks". The reader is assumed to understand the inward significance of the word Mazorca (mazorca is Spanish for "corncob": the corncob is the Mazorca's chosen instrument of torture by rectal insertion). The protagonist is violently stretched out on the torture-table and he develops paroxysms of uncontrollable rage, demanding to have his throat cut rather than submit to this indignity.

After a terrible struggle the young man bursts a blood vessel and dies on the spot. The Judge comments: "Poor devil; we only wanted to amuse ourselves, but he took it too seriously."

According to the American editor, translator and Borges collaborator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, "Esteban Echeverría’s El matadero, written towards the end of the 1830s, is chronologically the first work of Argentine prose fiction…. Owing in part to its brevity – a mere 6,000 or so words – it may be the most studied school text in all Latin American literature. It is certainly known and acclaimed beyond the borders of Argentina."[2]

For Borges himself, who wrote a foreword to one edition, "In Echeverría's text there is a sort of hallucinatory realism, which can recall the great shadows of Hugo and Herman Melville".[3]

"If one text has exercised a decisive influence in Argentine literature and art, it seems to be The Slaughter Yard, spearhead of a large number of editions and studies, and seed of a still-prevailing movement where new readings and meanings are sought."[4]

A 1998 survey of U.S. universities found the work was required graduate reading at 73% of Ph.D.-granting Spanish faculties, the highest score for any Spanish American nineteenth century work of fiction.[5][note 9]

Echeverría's oeuvre extends to five printed volumes,[6] but his literary prestige chiefly depends on this single short story.[7]

Although The Slaughter Yard is a story, it is based on some elements of fact. English-speaking memorialists described the setting (the south Matadero shown in the Vidal image) and their accounts corroborate many of Echeverría's details.[8][9][10] The clergy indeed upheld Rosas' dictatorship.[note 10] It was indeed compulsory to display rosista emblems including "Death to the savage unitarios.[note 11] The butchers in the slaughter yards were indeed staunch Rosas supporters and did supply thugs for his Mazorca.[11] The Mazorca did use the corncob as an instrument of torture.[12] Further, according to Gutiérrez[13]

The scene of the "savage unitario" in the power of the Judge of the Slaughter Yard and his myrmidons is not an invention but a reality that happened more than once in that ill-fated era. The only thing in this picture that can have been the author's invention would be the moral appreciation of the circumstances, the language and the victim's conduct, which functions as the noble poet would have done himself in an analogous situation.

There is endless discussion about the literary type or genre to which "The Slaughter House" belongs: story, novel of manners, essay or hybrid.[19] For German scholar Christian Wehr, "The Slaughter Yard" is the foundational text of an autochthonous Latin American genre he called Diktatorenromans : the dictator novel.[20]

As noted, the protagonist speaks in elite literary Spanish but the slaughter yard denizens (including the Judge) use the direct street Spanish of low class Buenos Aires. "The Slaughter Yard" is the first work to record this argot. It may be fruitfully compared with the vernacular Spanish of the city that is in use today, long after the massive Italo-Hispanic immigrations of the early twentieth century.[note 12] The text appears to be the first to record the typical Argentine interjection "che".

In its immediate or obvious meaning it is simply a story of biting political criticism: almost as obvious is the symbolism of the slaughter yard as a microcosm of Rosas' polity where, but for the hero and the one bull who does have cojones, all are easily controlled. However all sorts of interpretations or symbolic meanings have been sought: Freudian,[21][22] as a necessary ritual sacrifice,[23] as an item in "Argentina's necrophilic catalogue",[24] as a racist attack on Rosas' Afro-Argentines,[25] from a feminist perspective,[26] and as Echeverría's (and indeed his political school's) crisis of masculinity.[27]