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pockets in handfuls, having no doubt stolen them somewhere along the way.
    In the first pen that Orschwir showed me, dozens of piglets a few weeks old were playing on fresh straw. They chased one another, collided with one another, and poked one another with their snouts, all the while emitting little cries of joy. Orschwir tossed them three shovelfuls of grain, which they rushed to devour.
    In the next pen, eight-month-old hogs were walking around, jostling and challenging one another. You could feel their strange, gratuitous violence and aggressiveness, which nothing in evidence justified or explained. They were already large, thick beasts, with drooping ears and brutish faces. An acrid stench assailed my nostrils. The straw the animals sprawled on was filthy with their excrement. Their grunts caromed off the wooden walls and struck my temples. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.
    Farther on, in the last pen, pale, immense, long-loined adult hogs were dozing. They looked like so many small boats. They all lay on their sides, panting through open snouts, and wallowing in black mud as thick as molasses. Some of them watched us with great weariness. One might have thought them giants changed into beasts, creatures condemned to a fearful metamorphosis.
    “The ages of life,” Orschwir murmured. I’d nearly forgotten his presence, and the sound of his voice made me jump. “First you saw innocence, then stupid aggression, and now, here, wisdom.” He paused for a while and then began speaking again, slowly and very softly. “But sometimes, Brodeck, wisdom’s not what we think it is. The creatures you see before you are savage beasts. Truly savage, however much they look like beached whales; brutes with no heart and no mind. With no memory, either. Nothing counts but their belly, their belly; they think of one thing and one thing only, all the time: keeping that belly full.”
    He stopped talking and looked at me with an enigmatic smile that contrasted sharply with the heavy features of his dirty face. Bread crumbs adorned his mustache, and his lips still glistened a little with bacon fat.
    “They’re capable of eating their own brothers, their own flesh. It wouldn’t bother them at all—to them, it’s all the same. They chew it up, they swallow it down, they shit it out, and then they start all over again, indefinitely. They’re never sated. And everything tastes good to them. Because they eat everything, Brodeck, without question. Everything. Do you understand what I’m telling you? They leave nothing behind, no trace, no proof. Nothing. And they don’t think, Brodeck, not them. They know nothing of remorse. They live. The past is unknown to them. They’ve got the right idea, don’t you think?”

VI
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    ’m trying to return to those moments, to get as close to them as I can, but what I’d really like to do is to forget them and run away, run far away, on light feet and with a brand-new brain.
    I have the feeling that I’m the wrong size for my life. I mean, I feel that my life is spilling over everywhere, that it was never cut to fit a man like me, that it’s full of too many things, too many events, too many torments, too many flaws. Is it my fault, perhaps? Is it because I don’t know how to be a man? Because I don’t know how to sort things, how to take what I need and leave the rest? Or maybe it’s the fault of the century I live in, which is like a great crater; the excesses of every day flow into it, and it’s filled with everything that cuts and flays and crushes and chops. My head—sometimes I think my head’s on the point of exploding, like a shell crammed with gunpowder.
    That famous day, the day after the Ereigniës , wasn’t so long ago, and yet, in spite of everything, it’s slipping through my fingers. I remember only certain scenes and certain words, very exact and very clear, like bright lights against a deep black background. And I also remember my fear, my