The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [147]
In the fall, Igertu turns bright as a New England hillside, because the choriceros are hung on the house to dry. They are also hung from pipes in the white tile kitchen, forming red drapery that completely covers the ceiling. The peppers that are dried outside keep their brightness, but almost half are lost to rot. The indoor ones are not as colorful, but the losses are only 10 percent. The next year the dried seeds are replanted in the fields across the road.
THE SEVEN MEN held Pepe down on his side across a wooden bench, and one of them placed a green plastic basin on the ground under the pig’s neck. The knife went into the neck as the pig squealed even louder and struggled harder. But the men held him. Slowly the squeals turned into growls and then descending grunts. As the wound was worked with the knife and the blood poured out, one man kept the basin stirring to avoid clotting. After five minutes, the pig was only making low grunts and sighs and the blood was still pouring.
An ancient belief of Hebrews and some other cultures that an animal that dies an agonizing death is less edible has been upheld by modern science, and so commercial slaughterhouses avoid this kind of killing. In industrial pig slaughter, the animal is stunned and then the unconscious animal is bled. But these farmers insisted that the industrial way of killing was “not as beautiful.” They explained that the blood was darker and not as good. This blood was brilliant red.
The pig was then dragged to the edge of the field, for the long process of burning off the hairs by covering the carcass with pitchforks full of dried ferns and grasses and setting it on fire. It took more than an hour of turning and burning before the skin was completely blackened and hairless. Then the pig was washed and scraped with a knife. It now seemed like a huge, jellylike brownish object.
Meanwhile, the women were chopping guindillas, the slightly hot, thinner red peppers, cutting out the stems, opening the peppers with scissors, carefully removing the seeds and saving them, and chopping only the shiny red skin. They also chopped parsley. During this entire day of working and talking, there was never a moment of discussion about who would do what. There were the men’s jobs and the women’s jobs and no mixing of them.
They joked as they worked, speaking in Euskera and Spanish, mostly in Euskera. They talked about a recent soccer match. The referee had not been a Basque speaker and angrily told the players to speak in Spanish. Finally, he gave a yellow card, a penalty warning, to the Basque speakers. The team later protested. Some of the pig scrapers thought they should have protested; others thought that since the referee asked them to speak Spanish, they should have spoken Spanish.
With a long steel hook, the toenails were yanked off, and then the four feet were cut off and saved to make pigs’ feet. Julián worked with surgical precision, opening the stomach with long, sure knife strokes, cutting through larger bones with a hatchet.
Etching by Jean Paul Tillac, 1937. (Collection of the Musée Basque, Bayonne)
Julian was born in 1931 and was seventeen years old the first time he butchered a pig. As he chopped, he talked about what he had seen when Guernica was bombed. “Planes buzzed overhead and you could hear the bombs,” he said, laying aside the bloody hatchet and working close to the bone with his knife, “but what I remember more was over there.” He pointed to the wooded hills beyond the harvested pepper fields. “By the next