El matadero by Esteban Echeverría: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

The story takes place in Buenos Aires “in the year of Our Lord 183…”, during Lent. Torrential rain floods the city; Federalist preachers blame the flood on the “impious Unitarians”, and the Convalecencia slaughter yard, also called the Alto, goes fifteen days without a single head of cattle. Meat runs out and chickens and eggs soar in price, until the Restorer’s government orders cattle brought in at any cost, and fifty steers arrive, swimming.

The narrator then describes the slaughter yard: mud soaked in blood, butchers with knives in hand, women scrambling for tripe and fat, dogs, seagulls, and the red slogans on the judge’s hut: “Long live the Federation”, “Death to the savage Unitarians”. Among the steers is a fierce bull that breaks out of the pen; the lasso whips loose and beheads a boy watching from the fence, and the bull’s flight leaves an Englishman sunk in a bog while the crowd roars with laughter. Matasiete, “cutter of Unitarian throats”, finishes it off.

With the slaughter over, a butcher shouts: “Here comes a Unitarian!” He is a young man of about twenty-five riding toward Barracas, without the Federalist badge and without a mourning band on his hat. The mob throws itself on him, and the yard’s judge orders him taken to the hut.

The story portrays the rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas in Buenos Aires, when his supporters, the Federalists, hunted down the Unitarians and the Mazorca spread terror. The slaughter yard works as the whole country in miniature, as the narrator says when some boys knife-fight over a piece of tripe: “Simulacro en pequeño era éste del modo bárbaro con que se ventilan en nuestro país las cuestiones y los derechos individuales y sociales” (“This was a small-scale image of the barbarous way questions and rights, individual and social, are settled in our country”).

It is considered the first Argentine short story and one of the most studied texts in Latin American literature. It blends the sketch of manners, satire and raw realism with the indignation of Romanticism. The manuscript has never been found: his friend Juan María Gutiérrez published it in the Revista del Río de la Plata in 1871. It is still read because it shows how a fanatical crowd turns violence into a festival.

Esteban Echeverría was born in Buenos Aires on 2 September 1805 and died in Montevideo on 19 January 1851. He lived in Paris from 1825 to 1830 and, on his return, brought Romanticism to Argentina with books such as Los consuelos (1834) and Rimas (1837), which includes the poem La cautiva.

He was the central figure of the Generation of ’37 and wrote the Dogma socialista. An opponent of Rosas, he spent his last years in exile in Uruguay; his literary fame rests above all on El matadero.