49 pages • 1 hour read
Agustina BazterricaTender Is the Flesh
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 12-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary
Driving home with Armando’s ashes, Tejo ignores repeated calls from Marisa, whom he suspects of planning a farewell service to comply with social customs. Stopping at the zoo, he carries his father’s ashes to a hanging bridge in the aviary. He recalls visiting the zoo with his father following his mother’s death. His father taught him about birds and explained the significance of a stained-glass image of Icarus, saying it was enough for him to fly like a bird, if only for a short time before his wings melted in the heat of the sun.
Tejo also remembers seeing his mother and father dance to jazz music and recalls his father teaching him to whistle. He scatters his father’s ashes over the bridge. On the way back to the car, he refills the urn with sand.
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary
Back in the car, Tejo accepts a call from Marisa. She asks him to bring the urn to her house within a day or two so she can hold the farewell service soon. He refuses, saying that he’ll bring it when he wants to, not before. As she responds, he hangs up.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary
Tejo falls asleep in his hammock and dreams that he is in the aviary at the zoo. The image of Icarus falls to the ground as Tejo notices that he is surrounded by flying animals and insects that are frozen in place. As he touches them, they disintegrate. After a nightingale lets out a cry of despair, Tejo explores the rest of the zoo, which is filled with people who are all, paradoxically, him. One by one, he speaks to them, and they die. When one of the men hugs him so tightly he struggles to breathe, he runs away into a forest filled with human body parts. He finds a baby covered in human ears. The baby stops breathing, and Tejo awakens with a scream.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary
The next morning, Tejo checks on Jasmine and then calls Krieg. In light of Armando’s death, Krieg offers him the day off. Instead, Tejo insists on visiting Valka Laboratory as planned. However, he makes Krieg promise never to send him to the laboratory again.
After passing through security, Tejo enters the laboratory, where he is met by Dr. Valka. As she discusses her latest research, she quickly notices that Tejo is not his usual attentive, flattering self. She leads him on a tour of the laboratory, explaining to Tejo the exact qualifications of the head she intends to purchase from Krieg for use in her experiments. Dr. Valka walks with a cane since one of the “specimens” from her experiments escaped and bit her a few years ago. As Dr. Valka comments on the prejudices she experiences as a woman in her profession, Tejo is sympathetic. At the same time, he finds her need to build herself up through an endless stream of self-congratulatory words off-putting.
Ongoing experiments Dr. Valka shows Tejo involve forced drug addictions, starvation, removal of skin without anesthesia, cutting open a chest to examine a still-beating heart, sedating a mother to observe her infant’s reactions, simulating car accidents, and more. As Tejo’s disinterest becomes clear, Dr. Valka grows angry, and she accuses one of her employees of incompetence. When Tejo points out that she hired the employee, she tells him to leave. He does so, happily.
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary
Marisa continues to pester Tejo about the farewell service. On the day of the service, he attends to Jasmine before leaving. He arrives late and gives the urn to Marisa, who is obviously pleased to be playing the part of hostess. He notices that photos in the slideshow have been digitally altered to make it seem like Marisa and her children were close to Armando.
Seeing the appetizers, Tejo realizes that Marisa is serving meat from the domestic head she now keeps in the cold room. Going to investigate, he spots a book titled Domestic Head: Your Guide to Death by a Thousand Cuts and sees the domestic head looking mournful through a glass door.
When Marisa confronts him for snooping, he “feels the stone in his chest shatter” (196). In an angry outburst, Tejo tells Marisa that he finds her repulsive and superficial. As he leaves, Marisa begs him to stay for the guests’ sake, but he ignores her. She runs out to the car without an umbrella to offer him the urn, but he drives away.
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary
On his way home, Tejo receives a call from Mari, the secretary at Krieg, who asks him to come to the plant immediately to deal with an emergency. As he nears Krieg, Tejo sees that a truck transporting head to the plant has been turned over by armed Scavengers, who are now killing the head. Accelerating past the scene, he finds Mari, Krieg, and other employees observing the Scavengers from a distance. Mari informs him that the truck driver was killed. As they re-enter the plant, Mari expresses her opinion that the Scavengers should be killed systematically.
Krieg wants to kill the Scavengers immediately. Feeling as though he has shards of stone in his throat, Tejo suggests that they wait a few weeks, then give poisoned head to the Scavengers to scare them away. Krieg agrees. In the meantime, they will guard shipments with armed staff. Driving home, Tejo knows he should pity the Scavengers but feels nothing.
Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary
Arriving home, Tejo sees that Jasmine’s water has broken. Alarmed at the color of the liquid, he calls Cecilia and demands that she come over immediately. When she arrives, she is alarmed to learn about Jasmine but agrees to help deliver the baby. After the baby, a healthy boy, is born, Tejo and Cecilia admire him and keep him away from Jasmine.
Tejo calms Jasmine, then stuns her with a club. As he drags her to the barn, Cecilia asks him why he intends to slaughter her instead of using her to produce more children. He replies, “She had the human look of a domesticated animal” (209).
Part 2, Chapters 12-19 Analysis
In these final chapters, the plot escalates toward its climax as Tejo acts with increasing boldness and disregard for consequences. While the plot has hinted that Tejo will rebel against this dystopian society, a plot twist in the final chapter has him reject seeing Jasmine as human, opting to kill her and go back to his old life with Cecilia instead. This outcome deviates from genre conventions, as most dystopian novels chronicle a protagonist’s rebellion. As such, the novel ends with a bleak tone, suggesting that this society’s cannibalism is there to stay. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine the end of systems like animal farming or capitalism.
Tejo’s final visit to the zoo demonstrates his continued grieving process. His grief for the pre-Transition world is compounded by the loss of his father and his son’s death. Tejo’s decision to scatter his father’s ashes at the zoo reflects his realization that the world his father knew and loved has been destroyed. Now, lacking motivation and connection, Tejo begins to feel fractured and confused, as his dream reveals. Though this dream does not lend itself to any obvious interpretation, it does seem clear that Tejo is experiencing some type or degree of dissociation.
Ironically, the dream seems to give Tejo a renewed sense of selfhood and determination, as his visit to Valka Laboratory shows: Tejo not only insists that this will be his last visit to the lab but also treats Dr. Valka with an air of indifference that infuriates her. Like Urlet, Dr. Valka subjects the humans she purchases from Krieg to terrible fates, but she does so to satisfy morbid intellectual curiosities rather than to seek primitive thrills. Her actions illustrate that using people for meat is not necessarily the worst form of abuse. The depravity of her scheme can also be extended, by analogy, to animals such as rats, which are commonly used as subjects in academic and other experiments.
Tejo’s rebellious streak also manifests in his relationship with Marisa, whose attempts at grieving he considers to be mere social performances. Her concern for the presence of the urn containing Armando’s ashes at the farewell service takes on ironic undertones after Tejo fills the urn with sand from the zoo. The implication is that Marisa did not truly know or value Armando, just as she does not know what lies within the urn. Tejo finally loses his patience with Marisa when he realizes that she is keeping a human as livestock in her home. To him, Marisa’s disregard for their father is linked with her wholehearted endorsement of cannibalism and all that it entails.
Paradoxically, shortly after lashing out against Marisa for keeping a human as livestock in her home, Tejo rushes to work to deal with a work emergency. Despite his misgivings throughout the novel, he does this smoothly and effectively, supporting the system of cannibalism on a much larger scale than his sister ever could. As he suggests the optimal solution to the problem—poisoning meat and feeding it to the Scavengers—Tejo feels the stone from his chest make its way into his throat, showing that the changes in his heart, including his lack of empathy and concern for others, are beginning to affect his words and outlook.
This duality between the pain of his loss and the necessity of doing his work as unemotionally as possible highlights Tejo’s dual roles in the capitalist system. As a manager at a plant that turns humans into meat, Tejo trains himself not to feel concern for those who are slaughtered. Privately, however, Tejo is filled with sadness at the losses and changes that upset his family life. The conflict between these two spheres finally converges and comes to a crisis point when Jasmine goes into labor. Merely acknowledging such a birth—and the relationship that led to it—would mean a total reversal of Tejo’s fortunes, costing him his job and even his life. Meanwhile, Cecilia’s return pits Tejo’s former life and hopes with his wife against the new life he has built with Jasmine. With chilling coolness, he kills Jasmine, offering as rationale the suggestion that Jasmine was too human in appearance to be allowed to live. By killing her, Tejo hopes to quench the conflict and anguish that continue to rage in his heart between what he judges to be necessary for his family and what he believes to be right. However, if prior events are any indication, Tejo’s complicity in this act of violence will only fester and increasingly trouble him as time passes.
