Prologue for Paulina

      In the winter of 1992 in London, I attended one of the first performances in English of Death and the Maiden, a play by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman. Juliet Stevenson’s brilliant depiction of Paulina Salas presented a transfixed audience with a compelling question: what happens when a new and tenuous democracy, because of political necessity, turns its back on some of the victims of the regime it has replaced? Paulina is just such a victim, and the play provides a troubling answer.

      The play opens when Gerardo, Paulina’s husband, returns very late to the isolated house he shares with Paulina. He is late because he had a flat tire and was rescued and driven home by a considerate stranger, Dr. Roberto Miranda. Paulina hears only voices outside as she waits inside the darkened house, clutching a gun and “rolled into a foetus-like position.”¹ Gerardo, a lawyer, is returning from a meeting with the country’s president, the most “important meeting of my whole life,”² in which he has been named head of a commission that will investigate some crimes committed by the recently displaced military dictatorship. The initial dialogue between Paulina and Gerardo reveals that Paulina’s response to the voices outside was typical: she has frequent breakdowns resulting from her treatment when she, as an activist student fifteen years in the past, was kidnapped and tortured. Rather than pleasing her, however, Gerardo’s appointment to head the commission further disturbs her:

      Paulina’s fragile emotional state is thrown into turmoil by this official pronouncement in which her husband is complicitous: her kidnapping and torture will not be investigated because they are not considered to be among the “most serious” crimes committed during the dictatorship. For all official purposes, her pain and humiliation did not happen and she is forced back into her ongoing silence—“I don’t like to talk about this, Paulina.” The “this” is ambiguous: does Gerardo not like to talk about the Commission’s limited mandate or, more tellingly, does he not like to talk about what happened to Paulina? Paulina, in fact, has told Gerardo very little about her imprisonment and the treatment she received; she has not even told him that her torture included rape.⁴ The political process, she now discovers, promises only that her silence must continue. The new government, the government in whose cause she refused to give over names, including Gerardo’s, will not take retribution for her.

      An hour later, after Gerardo and Paulina have gone to bed, Roberto Miranda, the stranger who assisted Gerardo with his flat tire, reappears to return Gerardo’s patched tire, which was inadvertently left in his trunk and because he heard on his car radio that Gerardo Escobar, the very man he aided, has been named to head the president’s