SLAVE TWINS

Valentina

Valentina did not know what it was like to wear shoes since that afternoon, six years ago, when she was kidnapped, nor did she know what it was like to wear anything else besides those brown panties, since her arrival at the slave camp two days later. But she knew very well what it was like to wear shackles on her ankles and wrists, which had only been changed to larger ones with the passage of time and the growth of her body. On that sunny afternoon, it was three weeks since she had been assigned to the group in charge of building the new wall of the horrible camp. From seven in the morning until five in the afternoon, she was obliged to apply all her strength to break the rocks with the use of a heavy pickaxe. She only had half an hour's rest at noon, which was used to have lunch and go to the bathroom, always under the supervision of Parcer or one of his subordinates. The change of jobs, which took place once a month, was one of the few things she could be grateful for; before she had been working with the tree cutting crew, and only once, when she had just turned eighteen, had she worked in the coal mines, a job considered a punishment, where only the most rebellious girls or girls worthy of receiving a punishment due to their bad behavior were sent. Valentina was not rebellious, nor did she commit any faults, but her incomparable beauty produced feelings of hatred in one of the junior foremen, who never hesitated to pass his whip across the back of the beautiful girl, and who used any excuse to punish her. Fortunately, in the previous years, she had not been under the control of that abominable being; his name was Pascual, he could be about thirty years old, with a dark complexion and a slender figure, with expressions on his face taken from a horror novel. The girls, up to the age of seventeen, were controlled by another group of foremen, who were in charge of assigning them much lighter jobs, such as cultivating the farms, taking care of the cleaning, or preparing the meals. Likewise, although they were also forced to wear shackles, the punishments were much milder; it was forbidden to use the whip on them and their dungeons were somewhat more comfortable. But on the day they left seventeen behind, everything changed radically. They were transferred to the area of the adults, they were assigned much heavier jobs, the crack of the whip could be heard at the slightest fault or inattention, and the punishments could range from a dozen lashes to spending a couple of hours hanging from a cross, the latter being the most feared by all of them. For Valentina, the coal mines meant the awakening of that desire to escape, which had died a few months after her arrival, when she realized the impossibility, for a twelve-year-old girl, of carrying out an action of such magnitude. But that day, barely three months ago, when she felt for the first time the force of Parcer's whip on her back, the pain, traveling from the tips of her hair to her toes, brought back to her that long-forgotten idea. She knew of her inability to endure that way of life and the need to do something about it. She would die in that place if she did not manage to escape. Being there could not be compared to the sentence of a prisoner, who could think of her freedom after serving her time of confinement; she was there for life, until death, without the right to protest or to think of something slightly different for her life. She was aware of the disappearance of the older women when they turned fifty-five, but she did not know exactly where they were being taken. Rumors spoke of a retirement place where no work was done, while others mentioned a quick and painless death, although there was also talk of cruel and slow methods being used to end their lives. But she was sure she did not want to wait thirty-seven years to find out the truth; she would rather die much sooner and not give those men, who loved each other and seemed to have no need for women, the pleasure of continuing to abuse her through forced labor and cruel and unjust punishments. But in order to escape she would have to contact her sister. After she had defeated her in that mud fight six years before, she had never seen her again. At first she was convinced of her death, thinking of it as the punishment she had received for losing that fight, but six months later, it was one of the junior foremen, whom she had never seen before, who told her the truth: ‘’Valentina, there is a girl who looks exactly like you on the other side of the camp, working in the cleaning and in the kitchen of Parcer's house’’. Hope had returned to her, her sister was alive, it was the best news she had received since her arrival in that place. But the joy had been fleeting, or had faded with the passing of the days; she did not hear from her again for a long time, and she was not sure she could still count her among the inhabitants of this world. However, a few days after her fifteenth birthday she heard about her again; it was the same young foreman, named Vartar, who informed her about the fate of her beautiful sister: <<She is so good at cooking, that they are rotating her in the houses of all the older foremen, the bad thing is that she is very rebellious, and they have had to punish her more than anyone else’’.  The attractive young foreman, no more than twenty-two years old, was detailed in his description of the punishments to which Estefania had been subjected: ‘’They made her spend the whole night sitting with her ankles in the stocks or cleaning the stables, or pushing the cistern wheel... If she were eighteen she would have spent several hours hanging from the cross’’. Valentina was aware of the difficulties to which her dear sister would be exposed if she continued to behave in that way. She had always been rebellious, the kind of girl who was not willing to lose an argument or to accept her parents' orders when she perceived them as illogical or unjust. She had been born to command and not to receive orders, to speak but not to listen, to live convinced that she was right. The punishments were evident, Valentina thought in those days, inflicted on her if she did not change her ways, something difficult to happen in a person with that degree of rebelliousness. But the passage of time had put uncertainty back into wide spaces in her mind. Some months ago, when the twins were about to turn eighteen, according to Vartar's words, Stephanie had been transferred, for an indefinite period of time, to the extensive stables, with the mission of keeping them impeccable. The young foreman, not having access to that part of the camp, had no fresh information about her fate. ‘’I can only tell you that it is one of the worst jobs... There are more than fifty horses in that area, and she is obliged to clean up all the filth they make’’, said Vartar during their last conversation. If she's in that lousy job at seventeen, she's going to spend her time between the coal mines, the cross and the flagellation post as soon as we turn eighteen - those were the kind of thoughts nestled in Valentina's head in those days. And with the arrival of that date, hated by all the underage girls in that place, Valentina's premonitions began to come true.