Over the last month, he had seen her employ this elixir of womanhood, a trick that transformed misery into pleasure and made the men do things they would not otherwise do: walk when they wanted to rest, live when they wanted to die. But in that moment of intoxication—a second, a minute?—he began to believe he could do the job; he told himself that what he was about to do was little more than basic butchery.
