Marcos Tejo

Quick Facts

• Role: Protagonist and first-person narrator; high-level manager at the Krieg Processing Plant
• World: A post-Transition society where a virus makes animal meat poisonous, normalizing the slaughter of humans (“head,” “special meat”)
• First appearance: Opening pages of the novel, touring and auditing the plant
• Key relationships: Wife Cecilia; father Don Armando; gifted “female” Jasmine; occasional lover Spanel
• Core themes: Complicity and Moral Corruption; Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization

Who They Are

Marcos Tejo is a man professionally fluent in the language of slaughter and privately sickened by it. He supervises a system he despises, auditing the industrial steps that turn people into product, even as he narrates the rot spreading through his society—and himself. Marcos’s grief over his infant son’s death hollows him out, sharpening his clarity about the world while blunting his capacity to resist it. His story is a study in how survival and longing can metabolize into participation in atrocity, fusing Complicity and Moral Corruption with the numbing force of Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization.

Personality & Traits

Marcos presents as efficient, laconic, and controlled, but the novel is most interested in the gap between his professional shell and his inner collapse. He polices words to police feelings, yet his body keeps betraying what the euphemisms conceal. The same man who tenderly washes the “female” he names Jasmine can also think—and finally act—like a technician of death.

• Internally conflicted: He uses the plant’s clinical vocabulary to function, even as those terms “strike him. Destroy him.” His narration continually translates procedure into moral shock, revealing a conscience at war with routine.
• Numbed by grief: Leo’s death evacuates his inner life; Marcos clings to pain as proof he’s still human: “Without the sadness, he has nothing left.” This hollowness explains both his deadened days at the plant and his reckless, yearning intimacy with Jasmine.
• Pragmatic, then complacent: He rationalizes his job through necessity—salary, stability, paying for his father’s care—until necessity becomes permission. What begins as survival hardens into a practiced ability to look away.
• Observant and cynical: He dissects euphemism as a political technology—“there are words that cover up the world”—tracking how the Power of Language and Euphemism sanitizes cannibalism and keeps desire, guilt, and profit aligned.
• Capable of tenderness—and brutality: His careful cleaning, clothing, and naming of Jasmine suggests revival of feeling; the novel then reveals that his tenderness is instrumental, culminating in calculated violence when she threatens his desired future.
• Physical markers of turmoil: Chronic insomnia leaves bags beneath his eyes; a pig-bite scar from his father’s old plant brands him with the “before” world, foreshadowing how old habits of slaughter simply change targets.

Character Journey

Marcos begins as someone who despises the system from within it, a master of its procedures and a skeptic of its justifications. When El Gringo gifts him a live “female,” he’s repulsed—then he begins to care for her, crossing line after line: washing, clothing, naming her Jasmine, and finally conceiving a child with her. This seems like an act of resistance against a society that forbids acknowledging the humanity of “head.” But as his longing for a family intensifies, the same logic he condemns—Dehumanization and Objectification—re-enters his thinking, now in the language of protection and legitimacy. The birth of his son clarifies his choice: to secure a “proper” family and restore a life with Cecilia, he kills the woman he humanized. The arc isn’t redemption through love; it’s the full absorption of his private life into the system’s violence, perfected by his own hand.

Key Relationships

• Jasmine: Introduced as an FGP (“First Generation Pure”) product, she becomes the vessel for Marcos’s pain and hope. He projects domesticity onto her—name, clothes, pregnancy—while maintaining the power to revoke her humanity at any moment. The relationship exposes his capacity to convert intimacy into ownership, and love into a pretext for slaughter.

• Cecilia: Estranged after Leo’s death, she embodies the “normal” life Marcos thinks grief stole from him. Her reemergence catalyzes his final choice; to clear a path back to marital legitimacy, he removes the “illegitimate” partner who made his new child possible.

• Don Armando: His father’s decline—and Marcos’s financial responsibility—becomes the moral cover for staying at the plant. Yet the older man also represents a lost ethical horizon from the pre-Transition world, heightening the irony that Marcos’s filial duty funds the machinery that destroys his own moral self.

• Spanel: Their violent, transactional sex mirrors the industry’s dynamics: intimacy stripped to function and sensation. As a foil, she performs the society’s logic without Marcos’s self-lacerating doubt, throwing his selective scruples into relief.

Defining Moments

Marcos’s story is punctuated by scenes where domestic craving and industrial logic collide, each pushing him further from private horror toward practiced efficiency.

• Receiving Jasmine from El Gringo: He initially treats her as a “problem,” then breaks protocol by naming and caring for her.

  • Why it matters: His first decisive step from observer to participant in humanizing what the system deems meat—and claiming power over it.

• Burning Leo’s cot: Drunk and grieving, he destroys the last shrine of his dead son.

  • Why it matters: An attempted purge of the past that paradoxically frees him to script a replacement future, setting up his fixation on family at any cost.

• The birth of his son: A moment of genuine joy reframed as a security problem to be solved.

  • Why it matters: Fatherhood becomes the new rationale for violence, converting tenderness into a mandate to “protect” by eliminating its source.

• Slaughtering Jasmine: He stuns her and prepares the kill like any other plant task.

  • Why it matters: The climax of his moral collapse—the private adoption of the system’s lexicon and methods—erases the difference between Marcos the grieving man and Marcos the efficient butcher.

Essential Quotes

Carcass. Cut in half. Stunner. Slaughter line. Spray wash. These words appear in his head and strike him. Destroy him. But they’re not just words. They’re the blood, the dense smell, the automation, the absence of thought.

This catalogue of terms reveals how language does the system’s first violence. Marcos recognizes that words don’t merely describe procedures; they anesthetize conscience. His sensitivity here foreshadows the tragedy: he knows exactly how the euphemisms work—and eventually uses them on himself.

His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.

Marcos articulates the mechanism of normalization: legality and cleanliness as moral alibis. The insight underscores his complicity, because he continues to operate inside the very linguistic shield he critiques.

One can get used to almost anything, except the death of a child. How many head do they have to kill each month so he can pay for his father’s nursing home? How many humans do they have to slaughter for him to forget how he laid Leo down in his cot...

Here, grief, economics, and murder collapse into a single calculus. Marcos turns suffering into a ledger—what quantity of death will purchase numbness and care? The ellipsis mirrors his inability to finish the thought without retreating into euphemism.

As he drags the body of the female to the barn to slaughter it, he says to Cecilia, his voice radiant, so pure it wounds: “She had the human look of a domesticated animal.”

This chilling line exposes the final turn: admiration phrased as taxonomy. Marcos recognizes Jasmine’s “human look” but immediately downgrades it to domestication—an aesthetic quality, not a moral claim—justifying her death as if she were livestock. His “radiant” voice marks the relief of a conscience finally subdued.