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Excited Spanish Travel, Rail Pass Matanza July 10, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Andorra, Europe, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Trip , trackback

Six-thirty am. I’m already dressed and out of the couchette as the train slows to a halt in the darkness. Outside, nothing but gravel and a road on one side: on the other, the small halt with its sign L’Hospitalet and the bus waiting to bear us on the long winding climb, leaving behind an ever-lengthening panorama pierced with points of light. The snow stands in cliffs on the uphill side of the road, cut by snowploughs only hours before.

In Old Andorra, Peter is waiting with his Santana Land-Rover, and greets me heartily. Has there been a matanza yet? I ask. “There was one at Margarita’s on Monday. I think there’s another tomorrow at Mestre’s,” he answers.

Our goal is fourteen dizzying kilometres up into the Spanish Pyrenees. A community still living in an almost cashless economy, to a pattern already set in the fourteenth century. One of the last outposts of a peasant culture which is rapidly passing from the world, governed entirely by the seasons and depending little on manufactured inputs.

Their days, months and years move to the pace, and are sustained by, the products of their pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens and rabbits — which are, in a sense we have long forgotten, domestic animals.

It is those pigs which are the engine of the domestic economy. Bought as weaners in early spring, they are fed on kitchen scraps together with some bought-in meal; and in their pen below the kitchen are a living larder, evidence that the household will be able to feed itself in the following year. The climax of the year, and the time when next year’s meat supply is laid down, comes in a hectic fortnight from Christmas Eve through into January, when the Festival of the Pig takes place. Or as the people themselves call it more plainly, La Matanza. The Killing.

Next morning, the appointed day, I find myself with the whole village, thirty-six people plus two generations of children and grandchildren who have come out from town for the occasion, gathered at the home of the mayor, whose matanza it is. Everyone has coffee, anisette, brandy, toasted bread and aioli for breakfast at 8 am. And then the work starts.

Travel GuidebookIn the little square where three alleys meet, one man takes a spade and lifts away a few slabs of frozen snow, and makes sure the killingbench sits steady on its four short legs. It is a kind of long U split from the fork of two parallel branches, with legs drilled into their backs.

Up the steep alley beside the house, from the pens in the downhill basement, saunter the three pigs, with a neighbour, Cisco, shushing them from behind with a switch of scrumpled-up feed bags. They take their time, sniffing the stones and the muddy corners as if he wasn’t there. Everyone stands round in a ring, closing the exits from the square between the houses. No-one hurries.

Andres, the slaughterman, has a long butcher’s hook in his hand, about two feet long and sharpened at one end. The other end curves round the heel of his hand. He walks up to the first pig, hooks it through the jaw and drags it to the bench. The others all gather round to push it from behind, and then, once there, grab it by the legs and hump it up onto its side. The other two pigs continue their wayside investigations, taking no notice of the first one’s screaming. Screaming like the brakes of a train. Eeeee, eeeee.

It doesn’t stop as Andres put the broad-bladed knife into its neck and cuts the carotid artery. Margarita, the lady with the village telephone and the warm, kindly brown eyes, crouches with her bucket to catch the blood, whisking it to stop clots from forming. Andres opens the wound a little further so that it runs in a free jet. The pig carries on screaming, but its voice grows lower and softer. The men hold its jerking legs. The screaming is going to sleep.

In half a minute the bad dream is over, and it lies peaceful. Four sets of hands lift it across and lay it on a bed of arm-thick branches. Cisco brings half a bale of straw and covers the carcass reverently, as if tucking it up in bed, before putting his cigarette lighter to it. While it burns, filling the air with the smell of singeing hair, Margarita carries her bucket across to the steps by the front door of the house, where the owner’s wife has placed a tin bath full of stale bread for black puddings. She pours in the blood and stirs with a big wooden spoon until all the bread is soaked. Andres hooks the second pig, and she follows back over with the bucket. The ash on the cigarette between the slaughterman’s lips is barely a quarter-inch longer than before the first pig was taken.

Soon all three carcasses are lying on their stick pyres. Someone brings a long-spouted tin oil-jug full of alcohol, pouring a thin stream all over, drawing squiggly patterns of fire along the pig’s side. The flames lick and join up, glimmering like brandy on a Christmas pudding. After that, water, and a scrape with an opened sardine can until all is smooth and clean.

Now Andres takes complete charge: he is the master butcher as well as the killer. The others merely wait on him like assistants in an operating theatre. As he works, others come to carry away each part as he frees it. A big bowl, large enough to bath a baby in, receives the entire coiled heap of intestines; the lungs and heart are bestowed like the Three Kings’ gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, borne on open palms.

Men’s and women’s work is rigidly separated. The women take away and work the material, preparing the laborious transformation, while the men cut up and supply them. The ham is freed from the hip joint, lifted high and taken away; as much as a man can carry, ready for salting. Then the shoulder blade is freed and lifted out, cut away from the shoulder, the whole foreleg borne away likewise.

Twelve hams in a day, a year’s meat supply. When cured, they will be hung in pillowcases in the airy upper rooms of the house; not cooked, but eaten raw. Fine Parma ham, the strong, resilient red meat beloved of peasants all over Europe.

Andres is working so fast that he is taking out slabs of meat more quickly than his workers can fetch them away. It is impossible to overpraise the skill and precision of his dissection. None of the crude chopping and sawing that our butchers do. Finally, all that is left is the pig’s white waistcoat of backfat. Later in the week, this will be boiled up, together with any waste olive oil from the kitchen and some caustic soda from the pharmacy in town, to make soap.

Inside the house, the women have a long table set out. The town cousins are set there inexpertly to trim the meat off the bones, handling their knives clumsily, hacking and scraping, piling up the trimmings. Nothing will be wasted. To the left, at the sink, Pepita, one of the older women, is washing innards, dunking them in a big can of water. When she has finished she lays them aside and carries her can along past the toiling apprentices at the bone table, and empties it over the rail into the alley below. Beyond, the mountains can be seen, always brooding, always protecting. The winter sunlight dazzles in, and as the stream of scarlet liquid falls, it glows like molten rubies. On the table, a complete spine is almost clean. Guisepp, the son of the house, picks it up and puts it over his shoulder like a small pet dinosaur to bear it up to the bedroom for storage. All the bones are kept and dried for soup stock.

There must be thirty-five people in the house now, all working in a scene of incredible industry: purposeful, concentrated, happy — yes, happy above all. It is, after all, a harvest time; and by tonight the whole harvest of a year’s meat will have been gathered and stored. Now all the men sit at the table; the women wait, or eat standing out on the balcony. We start with thin soup, meat balls and elbow noodles; then plates of white beans followed by boiled mixed meats, with thin slices of liver and chops after that.

Salad — sliced tomato, red pepper and olive in oil and vinegar — comes before plates piled with biscuits, puffy and sugar-sprinkled. Then the meal is cleared, the table scrubbed, and two big mincers set up at opposite ends. This is the women’s empire, and they range themselves all along each side. The task of mincing three whole pigs — all but their legs — and blending in onion, salt, herbs and spices to fill the carefully- washed guts, will stretch out into the evening.

Some sausages are boiled; others simply hung in the upper rooms to dry in the winter air. Treated that way, they will keep fresh and tasty, redolent of mountain herbs, until July or August. Giusepp carries a trayful of them upstairs to lay on a sheet on the floorboards for a while. Probably to the room that was his sister’s before she married and moved to town. Today they seem to have no. bedrooms for sleeping in: only sausage-rooms and bone-rooms.

In between filling the gut casings with mince, little Miguel reaches up a hand and lets the moist trails of meat hanging out of the mincer rest in his palm, feeling it like a breast, squeezing it between his fingers, playing with it. No-one wants to stop him: he is experiencing food, the goodness of the land and its animals.

Drinks are brought round in a big pot, warm spiced wine ladled into glasses, so that all can quaff and refresh themselves. It is half past three, and everyone knows the work will not be finished until midnight. The numbers of people thin out, some come, some go, but several have gone off to feed or milk their animals. They will return later for the next phase, to relieve those toiling at the table. Everyone is tired, but all know the job must be finished before they can stop. Then we shall eat and drink together again.

And indeed, at midnight, we are all still sitting round the table, the mincers stripped for cleaning, the empty plates from a meal lying in front of us, the coffee cups being filled for the second time and the brandy bottle passed around. Little Miguel is prancing around in his grandfather’s beret. He has picked up one of the mincer nozzles and holds it in his teeth like a trumpet. “Pa para pa para,” he goes. Time to celebrate.

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