Beat Sterchi

The Cow

«The cow lifts her head. All wobbles and trembles: she pulls her weight on to her front feet. She’s trying to get up. With nostrils dripping red, she trumpets through the slaughterhouse. She sits there and rolls her head round to the right, the left, the right again. I retreat……I close my eyes, with my back to the wall, I slip down into a crouch, and try not to think any more.»

"Some have milking machines, and some have foreigners in the cowshed!" as the locals say in Innerwald. Farmer Knuchel has opted for the foreigner and hired Ambrosio from Spain as a farm hand. In the cowshed Ambrosio meets Blösch, the herd’s splendid golden matriarch. Sterchi's superb first novel, which made him a best-selling author in 1983, asks what life in the Swiss backwater has in store for the guest-worker and for the cow.
“The foreigner in the cowshed” is both the basic dilemma upon which the novel is based and its driving force. Brought to Switzerland to muck out the cowsheds, Ambrosio himself ends up fouling the nest of the seemingly idyllic Swiss farming community. Through his sheer foreignness, the Spaniard shows Switzerland up as a country of cows: provincial, narrow-minded and prejudiced. In a series of dramatic scenes, Sterchi describes Abrosio's work at Knuchelbauer's farm and in the slaughter house, and confronts the population with their stereotypes. The action takes place in the course of a single day; all other episodes in the novel are memories. The narrator tells of the culmination of an exploitative production process: the day on which Ambrosio meets Blösch, now an emaciated wreck of an animal, in the slaughterhouse.
The issue of the guest-workers invited to Switzerland as cheap labour in the 1960s is still a thorny one today. But it is above all Sterchi's use of language that makes the novel a brilliant read. The High German text bursts apart in a firework of Swiss-German dialect, stylised shards of Spanish and fragments of Italian Guest-worker language.

(Christa Baumberger, transl. by Anja Hälg)

Translation of title: Blösch

Faber & Faber, London 2000

ISBN: 0-571-20052-4