7-07-07, 11:21 am

In 1992 the Chilean Ariel Dorfman debuted his work Death and the Maiden. Although without specific references, the drama alludes to the years of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and the first years of the formal recuperation of democracy in Chile. Paulina Salas is the character who represents the women raped by the regime and by all of the dictatorial regimes of the period, of universal history, that sadistically practiced physical torture and moral torture. Sexual violation has, in this case and in all others, the particularity of combining in one and the same act almost all the forms of human violence of which other animal beasts are incapable. For this reason we should not refer to this type of featherless biped as an 'animal' but as 'a certain traditional kind of man.'

Another character in the drama is a doctor, Roberto Miranda, who also represents a famous class of sophisticated collaborators with barbarism: torture sessions were almost always accompanied with the advances of science: instruments more advanced than those employed by the old ecclesiastical inquisition in Europe, like the electric cattle prod; terribly subtle methods like the principle of uncertainty, discovered or rediscovered by the Nazis in the educated Germany of the 30s and 40s. In order to use all of this technology of barbarism it was necessary to rely on technicians with many years of study and a sick culture to legitimate it. Armies of doctors at the service of sadism accompanied the torture sessions in South America, especially in the years of the poorly named Cold War.

The third character in this play is Paulina's husband, Gerardo Escobar. The attorney Escobar represents the transition, that group given the task of darning with bobby pins the bloody and painful social wounds. As has been common in Latin America, each time reconciliation commissions were created they appealed first to political necessities over moral ones. Which is to say, the truth does not matter as much as order. A little bit of truth is alright, because it is the victims' demand; the full truth is not possible, because it bothers the violators of Human Rights. Those of us in the Southern Cone who demand the whole truth and nothing but the truth were characterized, invariably, as extremists, radicals and trouble-makers in a moment in which Peace was necessary. Nonetheless, as the Ecuadorian Juan Montalvo had already observed ( Ojeada sobre América, 1866), war is a disgrace proper to human beings, but the peace that we have in America is the peace of slaves. Or, stated in a language from our 1970s, it is the peace of the cemeteries . Paulina knows it. One night her husband returns home accompanied by a doctor who kindly had offered him assistance on the road, when Gerardo's car broke down. Paulina recognizes the voice of her rapist. After other visits, Paulina decides to kidnap him in her own home. She ties him to a chair and threatens him in order to make him confess. While aiming a weapon at him, Paulina says: 'but I am not going to kill you because your are guilty, Doctor. I am going to kill you because you haven't shown any damned remorse. I can only forgive someone who truly asks for forgiveness, who stands up before his peers and says I did this, I did it and I will never do it again.' Finally Paulina frees her alleged torturer without receiving a confession from the accused party. Dorfman cannot be accused of creating a Manichaean scene where Paulina does not take vengeance, emphasizing the goodness of the victims. No, because recent history does not record cases of vengeance and much less have these been the norm. The norm, rather, has been impunity, for which reason we can say that Death and the Maiden is a drama that is, besides being realist, absolutely true to life. In addition to being constructed from concrete characters, they represent three kinds of Latin Americans. We have all met at some time a Paulina, a Gerardo and a Roberto; even though not everyone could recognize them by their smiles or their kind voices.

A problem derived from this play transcends the social, political and perhaps moral sphere. When Paulina's husband observes that revenge will not proceed because 'we cannot use their methods, we are different,' she responds ironically: 'it isn't revenge. I am thinking of giving him all the guarantees that he gave to me.' On various occasions Paulina and Roberto must be alone together in the house. Without the vigilant and conciliatory presence of the spouse, Paulina could exercise any manner of violence against her violator. From this situation a problem is derived: Paulina could exercise all the physical force necessary to kill the doctor. Including torture. But, how could she exercise that other violence, perhaps the worst of all, moral violence? 'I am thinking of giving him all the guarantees that he gave to me' could be translated as 'I am thinking of doing to him the same thing that he did to me.'

That is when a significant asymmetry emerges: why couldn't Paulina sexually violate her old rapist? That is, why would that apparent act of violence, in another heterosexual coitus, not result in humiliation for him while it would cause a new humiliation for her?

In my novel La reina de América (The Queen of America, 2001) when the protagonist manages to avenge herself against her rapist, now vested with the power of a new economic position, she hires men who kidnap her rapist and, each in turn, violate him in a forcibly homosexual relation while she witnesses the scene, as in a theater, the violence of her revenge. Why could it not be her who personally humiliated her aggressor practicing her own heterosexuality? Why is this impossible? Is it part of the ethico-patriarchal language that the victim must preserve in order to avenge herself? Do both moral violence and dignity, then, derive from the codes established by the masculine sex itself (or by the system of production to which the patriarchy responds, which is to say, the agricultural and pre-industrial form of survival)?

Octavio Paz, improving in El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950) upon the production of his fellow countryman Samuel Ramos ( El perfil del hombre en la cultura de México, 1934), understands that 'the one who pentrates' offends, conquers. 'To be opened' (to be 'chingado,' 'torn open'), to be exposed is a form of defeat and humiliation. It is manly to not be 'torn open.' 'To be opened' signifies a betrayal. The 'gash' is the feminine wound that does not heal. Jean-Paul Sartre himself saw the feminine body as carrier of an opening.



Opposite the virginity of María (Guadalupe), is the other supposed Mexican mother: la Malinche, 'la chingada.' From a psychoanalytic point of view, they are comparable – only in masculine psychology, carrier of dominant values? – Mexican territory which is conquered, penetrated by the white conqueror, with Marina, la Malinche who opens her body. (The conqueror who climbs the mountain or sets foot on the Moon, both substitutes for the feminine, does not only raise a flag; he drives in a stake, a phallus.) Malinche does not do anything very different from the indigenous leaders who opened their doors to the white-skinned barbarian, Hernán Cortés. Malinche had more reason to detest the local power of the time, but her sex condemns her: the sexual conquest of the woman, of the mother, is an offensive penetration. The betrayal of the other masculine chiefs – let's forget that they were tribes subject to another empire, the Aztec – is forgotten, does not hurt as much, does not signify a moral wound.

But it is a colonial wound. Patriarchy is not a particularity of the old base communities in pre-Colombian America. Rather, it is a European system and incipiently a system of the Aztec and Incan imperial upper echelon. But not of the lower strata of these empires where woman and the myths of fertility – not of virginity – predominated. The appearance of the indian virgin to the indian Juan Diego takes place on the hill that before had belonged to worship of the goddess Tonantzin, 'our mother,' goddess of fertility among the Aztecs.

Now, back to the present from this anthropological limit, which establishes the relativity of moral values, there are absolute elements: both the victim and the victimizer recognize an act of rape: violence is an absolute value and one that the stronger decides to exercise over the weaker. This is easily defined as an immoral act. There are no doubts about its present value. Speculation, questioning about how those values are formed, those codes throughout human history pertain to speculative thought. They help us to understand the why of a human relationship, of certain moral values; but they are absolutely unnecessary at the moment of recognizing what is a violation of human rights and what is not. For this reason, criminals are not forgiven by human justice – the only justice that depends on us, the only justice we are obligated to comprehend and demand.

Translated by Bruce Campbell.