Sometimes, after a day among the swine, he would be afraid to lie down in his wretched hut. Actually, the swine weren’t bad company. They were intelligent animals, not any greedier than decent men he had known; he came to enjoy feeding them and hosing them down. They would close their eyes under the spray, grunt contentedly as the water washed away their grime and left them, if not whiter than snow, at least tolerably clean, then prance around in giddy pleasure, kicking up their heels.
The worst company was himself.
Sometimes he would be annoyed to a frenzy by a buzzing fly in a corner of the hut. He would stalk it from resting-place to resting-place; then, teeth clenched, he would dispatch it with a single stroke of his palm. If it had been merely stunned, he would impale it and set it on fire. He could feel his heart assuaged for an instant as the translucent wings went up in a flash and left, at the end of the pin, a tiny charred ball.
Many years later, after his own pain had been transformed in a different kind of fire, he made a vow never again to kill a fly. Whenever one of them trespassed into his house, he would trap it in a jar he kept under the sink (sometimes, with a hyperactive fly, this could take five or ten minutes). Then he would release it from a window or bring it outside to freedom. It wasn’t out of guilt, or out of compassion, that he made this vow, since he saw quite clearly that he was responsible for everything in his life. But simply as a reminder: to acknowledge that once upon a time he had been stopped at the crossroads of the horrible and the sacred.