Page 81 of The Secret Dinner

“There are chickens and hogs in the other rooms. But nothing compares to the money we generate here,” Umberto said like a proud butcher. “We keep the lights on twenty hours a day so they’ll keep eating. In two weeks’ time, they’re slightly overweight, with that delicious layer of fat.”

I imagined myself in this place for two weeks, crammed inside a cage, sleeping on a layer of excrement, drugged and deformed by heat and sheer terror. Many of the people behind those bars were passed out, maimed, bleeding, with exposed bones protruding from their wounds.

Suddenly a yellowish light flooded in from the corridor and my attention turned to the door; two men in overalls came in, carrying the kidnapped woman from the highway patrol station. Her hands were still tied behind her back, but she was awake, desperately asking for her husband. Her distress seemed to awaken the other captives, who began to cry out even louder.

“For the love of God, somebody muzzle that seagull,” Umberto ordered.

One of the workers took a meat mallet from his tool belt and struck the woman hard between her eyes, knocking her unconscious. The other workers tried to contain the widespread upheaval, beating people with batons, pulling their hair, stomping on fallen bodies and pepper spraying them.

“In order to lower our overhead, we unfortunately have to keep the seagulls in these conditions, which puts them under severe stress,” explained Umberto once the situation had been handled. “The important thing is to calculate how close to death we can keep them without them dying prematurely. Luckily for us, humans are quite resilient.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“The fresher the meat, the higher the value. Go ahead, pick one, Dante.”

“What?”

“Well, you’ve come all this way, go ahead, choose your seagull. It’s just like picking out a lobster in a restaurant tank.”

“I’m not going to choose shit, Umberto.”

He signaled for one of the men to drag the woman from the station’s unconscious body to our feet, and kicked her head like a soccer ball.

“Pick one.”

“No, I—”

Another kick. The woman’s jaw dislocated—clack—but Umberto didn’t relent.

“I said pick one, damn it!”

Without thinking, I pointed at the person in a cage closest to me. She was a white woman with curly hair, with wounded and bloodied skin. Umberto nodded and the men approached to remove her from the cage. She howled, trying to evade them, but was quickly subdued with a blow from the meat mallet to the back of the head, and had to be dragged out of the room.

“It’s time for us to go now, too,” said Umberto, looking at his watch.

I hoped that meant this nightmare had come to an end, but I was wrong. The next room was like a ward, full of gurneys and IV poles everywhere. Two staff members in medical uniforms were examining people strapped and handcuffed to hospital beds. They were injecting them with syringes, drawing blood, taking various samples.

“Here’s where we test the seagulls for disease … That way we can ensure the meat is hygienic and safe to eat.”

“And if they’re sick?”

“Then they’re destroyed,” he said with scientific clarity. “Doctors check blood types and extract any organs that can be sold on the black market.”

“Black market?”

“Other business ventures, Dante. The lucky ones are anesthetized and taken to an operating room with a medical team. The others go to slaughter.”

We left the infirmary and went back into the hall. Stepping over a drop in the floor, I realized we were in an underground tunnel from one warehouse to the other. The hum of machinery buzzed in my ears. Forced to stand aside and watch that hellscape powerless to act, I felt responsible for the lives of all those people kept among pigs and chickens, tortured just to pad my bank account and feed my ego. I grabbed Umberto’s shoulder, bringing him to a stop.

“What else do you do to them?”

“All food has a price, Dante, and that price is the animal’s life. Don’t you think it’s fair that the species who reaps the benefits also pays the price?” he asked, stone-faced. “Soon after the first dinners, Vladimir partnered with the owner of this slaughterhouse, who was able to set aside some space for our seagulls. Now we’re hosting secret dinners in several cities.”

“What do you mean?”

“Keep walking,” Umberto ordered, heading farther down the corridors. “We’ve got operations in São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, and Brasília. We host events for trusted clients and provide special cuts of meat, delivered to homes throughout the country and even abroad. Free raw material made from the scum of the earth; nobody misses these seagulls. If you ask me, an excruciating life is worse than an excruciating death.”

The chicken and hog slaughter rooms were large and divided into stalls, with workers wearing white aprons, rubber boots, surgical gloves, and masks. At the back, in a smaller facility, was where the human slaughter was taking place. The staff worked nonstop, performing a coordinated series of movements like a macabre dance. White lights shone from the ceiling onto the tile floor, where there were toolboxes with chainsaws, steel butcher gloves, tenderizer mallets, slicers, shears, pliers, rotary saws, sharpeners, knives of various sizes.