I AM WITH MY CHILDREN and I have barely finished telling them the dream when it happens. We didn’t hear the crunch of tires. Did they walk up the hill? It doesn’t matter. That night, on the night of January 5, 1958, they lead us into an abyss that devours us, even our screams.
Soledad has brought the hot kettle to the table. We are about to drink another cup of lemon balm tea. Félix and his sisters have gone upstairs to play cards. Soli goes to the back door to let in some air. It’s so hot. We rarely use the back terrace, though it’s larger and nicer than the one at the front of the house, because it opens onto wild, scrubby bushes. It’s long since been abandoned to the neighbourhood’s stray cats.
That’s how they come in.
When she opens the door, Soledad realizes that the rain has puddled here and there on the cement slabs. “We should wipe all this up before someone slips and falls,” she says. She walks down the stairs, and standing on tiptoe, stretches her arms up to reach the mop that’s hanging on the wall. She stands back down, and that’s when she hears them in the bushes. In the half light, slowly, they move forward.
After the evening prayer, the sky is full of knives again, inky with the seep of death. I hadn’t noticed until one of the twins, Maria maybe, came into the study. She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me to the window. Without a word, she nodded her head to show me the sky. I don’t know how to interpret these signs; for some people, they’re omens. I bit my lip. The festering breath of the assassins was already hovering over us.
The marauders don’t need to break down the door, they simply come into the house. One of them, Breton Claude, grabs Félix by his pyjama collar as he’s coming down the stairs and smacks him so forcefully that he crashes to the other end of the room, behind the sofa. Félix passes out, in shock. Soledad rushes at the man, and Sonia leaps at him. Like two tigresses they cling to him, biting at his hands. The man throws Soledad back against the door. He flings his free arm against Sonia’s face, breaking two of her upper teeth. In the meantime the others are destroying everything with sledgehammers—in the study, in all the bedrooms, everywhere. Maria is holed up in one of the bedrooms, she is screaming and the screams alternate with the blows splintering the furniture and the doors.
They’re taking us, me and Soledad.
Wrenching us along, dragging us by the hair, they haul us down the hill. The cars pull out of the bushes, and the men push us each in a car. Then we are folded into the night.
Wedged in the backseat between two sweaty thugs, I try to imagine what a woman who lets herself be seduced by these animals might look like. I strive in vain to give her a face, features. How, I ask myself, disgusted, I wonder how a woman can have a man like this by her side, in her bed—a man who comes home night after night with his hands red with his victims’ blood. How can she let him touch her, let herself be stroked by those hands, accept that mouth on her, the touch of love from a mouth that orders death night after night? An executioner, a murderer close to you, against you, inside you. You hear him snoring, you feel his breath, you breathe the same air he breathes. You watch as he placidly gives himself over to sleep. It is a devil’s game. Only the devil could do this.
The hour has come. The bastards will sink their fangs in my flesh and the flesh of my daughter, marking us both to the bottom of our souls.