The pact of silence

The pact of silence is the strict collective secrecy that, according to the author's account of the news story behind the novel, bound the members of a group after the reported ritual killing of a fourteen-month-old child. Its consequence was not merely that participants withheld details: the child's body disappeared, the story faded from the newspapers, and the confession remained almost entirely buried.

Nature and Operation

The pact is described as a rigorous obligation observed by every member of the sect through the present. The account identifies no formal wording, ceremony, or punishment for breaking it; its force is conveyed instead through the members' shared and enduring silence. That silence persisted despite a reported confession from a remorseful witness who claimed to have participated in the crime.

The witness's account and the group's continued silence are presented together, creating a tension between disclosure and concealment. A confession had surfaced, but it did not bring a fuller public record: the news report was brief, and the author found no further reference to the event when she searched. The pact thus appears not as absolute muteness, but as a barrier that left an isolated admission unable to undo the broader suppression of the crime.

The Reported Crime

The incident behind the pact was said to have taken place thirty years before the date the author assigned as Amaia Salazar's birth, at a farmhouse in an unnamed locality in Navarra. The witness reportedly claimed that a group had carried out the ritual killing of a child who was only fourteen months old. The child's own parents were said to have handed her over as a sacrifice; afterward, the body disappeared.

These details describe what the news item and its reported witness alleged, not a verified reconstruction of events. The author emphasizes that the novel grew from a handful of facts and many suppositions, and explicitly disclaims presenting its fictional account as a hypothesis about what actually happened. The pact therefore belongs both to the reported story's account of a community's concealment and to the limits of what that account allows anyone to know.

Consequences and Significance

In the author's telling, silence surrounds the case at several levels: the body is made to disappear, the news passes out of the papers, and further references prove difficult to find. The pact's significance lies in this accumulation. It protects the group from public knowledge while leaving the child without a grave and the reported confession without the fuller record that might have clarified the crime.

The author's note connects this silence to the novel's concern with the harm that perverted beliefs can authorize. The pact is not presented as an explanation that makes the violence intelligible or acceptable; rather, it helps preserve the conditions in which a group can hide violence against an innocent child. The contrast between the solemnity of a ritual and the absence of a name, a body, and a public account makes secrecy part of the injury itself.