do you think you could explain the last line of tender is the flesh? got stuck on the last scene and i don’t think i’ve quite understood it
"she had the human look of a domesticated animal" is playing off two epistemological dichotomies the characters have to contruct and rely on in order to maintain their sanity as cannibals: first, human vs inhuman, and second, domestic vs savage.
human vs non-human: the transition to cannibalism required establishing an unbridgeable gap between humans and non-human animals, a logic extended to absurdity by the designation of the 'head' as non-human. humanness thus functions not as a biological descriptor but as a political class, which bazterrica is using to intensify and comment on real processes of dehumanisation (think of how the head with light skin are considered more desirable than those with dark skin, or the treatment of pregnancy and reproductive labour).
domestic vs savage: we see this come up throughout the novel. the scavengers are 'savage' despite engaging in the same act of cannibalism as everyone else, because they're poor. the head are bred and controlled to be docile and obedient, but we know that the characters consider pregnant head specifically to be wild, aggressive, and dangerous. marisa keeps a 'domestic head' in her home for ease of consumption, an echo of a housepet because she doesn't see the man as a person but as livestock. marcos finds the puppies at the zoo, names them, and treats them more like pets (a defunct linguistic category) than like animals (non-human and dangerous).
marcos's relationship with jasmine is told from his perspective, which means the central act of rape is euphemised because he is presenting it to himself as a romantic partnership. thus, he perceives himself as humanising jasmine in a way that is forbidden to do with the head, but as readers we can clearly see that by repeatedly raping her he is participating in more of the same violence that the cannibalistic system, and his job at the slaughterhouse, requires. by moving her inside the house with him, marcos perceives himself as crossing both the human-animal barrier and the domestic-savage one; he thinks he is elevating jasmine to the level of his wife cecilia, a person and a civilised one at that.
however, after jasmine gives birth to his child, marcos no longer sees her body as valuable to him in the same way, and the illusion shatters. cecilia is there to reclaim her place as marcos's wife, making jasmine superfluous and causing her body to once again appear to marcos as animal and savage. he is now disgusted by having brought her inside: the "human look of a domesticated animal" is a violation of her assigned role as head. she is supposed to be meat, instrumental and non-sentient; even humanising her to the extent of a pet (like the puppies) is now intolerable to marcos. slaughtering her is his resolution to the paradox, because it reaffirms her body as meat (now a carcass) rather than human. having her around was an implicit challenge to the dichotomies marcos relies on in order to psychologically survive the cannibalistic world he lives in.
thus, all of his moral posturing throughout the novel is confirmed to have been hollow; at the end of the day, he's unable to face the reality of the killing he participates in. maintaining the categories of "human" and "domesticated" is how the characters continue to live with themselves post-transition. challenging those ideas would require radical political and social restructuring, because it would threaten the entire sense of order that the human meat industry has imposed upon marcos's world.
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