Once I went to steal things from a junkyard full of junk and the owner caught me, a retired cop from my town. He slapped me a couple of times and threatened to shoot me if I didn't tell him where the rest of the gang was. The "gang" was hiding among some old, broken, beat-up cars, from which we had set out to steal a couple of tires to decorate the little "club" we had built after watching The Goonies. I, the chubby kid who couldn't run fast even if his life depended on it, stayed outside keeping watch, with a walkie-talkie to alert the others about any strange movement.
What none of us knew, in our innocent stupidity, is that that lot had already been robbed the day before. And it wasn't robbed in the sense we wanted to 'rob' it, just taking out a couple of rusty tires from some broken cars to hang as trophies of bravery in our meeting place. They had dismantled it! The lot had a house in the middle, which wasn't evident from outside, whose doors had been broken, the floor messed up, everything they could take looted, and what they couldn't, broken. I knew nothing about this when I signed up for the mission, but the owner of the place knew very well.
"What are you doing here?" he said as soon as he got out of the car he was patrolling the area with.
"No, nothing, sir. I'm just here.." I remember I answered, not very convinced.
"Ah, yeah... and what's that?" he retorted, pointing at my walkie-talkie.
"A radio, sir. I'm listening to the game..."
"Who do you take me for, kid? Come here!"
That's when he grabbed me by the hair, dragged me inside, and wanted to know the names of all of us. I was scared to death, it's true, but using the Goonie code, I chose silence. In vain, because this was a guy used to interrogating suspects, so he was going to get the truth out of me no matter what. The first slap took me by surprise, crossing my face like burning fire. This is real, I remember thinking immediately after the blow. More real than anything that has ever happened to me before. And for the first time in my life, I feared the possibility of ceasing to exist.
I didn't even have time to recover when he asked me again for the names of my friends. This time I saw the slap coming, because I answered the same as before, with a firm "I don't know, sir." Not that it hurt less for having predicted it. On the contrary, that second blow put me in my true place. In the place of a child who was defenseless and about to be beaten up by a violent adult. And I burst into tears. I cried like the child I was and couldn't hide it. I even begged for my life! It was that moment of immense vulnerability that he chose to show me the revolver he carried at his waist and accuse me of being the one who had robbed him the day before.
There was no way to convince him that no, it was all a mistake, that neither I nor my friends had anything to do with it. That we knew nothing! Neither tears, nor shouts, nor apologies, nothing convinced him. And in hindsight, it must be said, it was something quite hard to believe. What a coincidence!
So, with my life on the line, I finally spilled everything. I said my name, my friends' names, what we were doing there, and even what I had eaten for lunch. The guy, seeing that we were all from "well-known and reputable families", and realizing that he had also messed up, let me go with the promise that I would never tell anyone anything about what had happened that afternoon, which seemed great to me.
So this, besides being an anecdote, means the breaking of that pact of silence. I don't know how I feel about it, honestly.
