Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps
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will open old wounds. Miranda compares the army to the Mafia: “yes, a secret brotherhood, nobody gives out names and they cover each others’ backs. The Armed Forces aren’t going to allow their men to give testimony to your Commission and if you people call them in they’ll just ignore the summons. Whatever they please … they’ve got the guns.…”5 This late night exchange between the two men discloses the tenuous nature of the new government, the uneasy alliance that exists between the duly elected democratic leaders of a transitional democracy and the former regime that still has “the guns.” It captures the difficult and dangerous process by which such a government attempts to provide redress to the victims of abuses committed on a massive scale, a process complicated by a military establishment that is in retreat but far from powerless.
Because of the late hour, Gerardo invites Dr. Miranda to spend the night. Paulina, who has been huddling in the hallway in a kind of posttraumatic stress reaction to any late night knock on the door, recognizes Miranda’s voice (she was blindfolded during her imprisonment) as that of the doctor who tortured and raped her fifteen years earlier, crimes that will be ignored by the president’s Commission because she did not die. Confronting the failure of legal state retribution, she decides to take personal revenge. After the men have gone to sleep, she finds Gerardo’s gun, ties up the doctor, and gags him. She then hides his car; in it she discovers a cassette recording of Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden,” the very music her torturer played repeatedly as he raped her.
The audience is left to wonder whether Miranda is actually Paulina’s torturer or whether she has fallen past sanity into delusions. Small clues are dropped—like the cassette tape of “Death and the Maiden” and Paulina’s memory of characteristic phrases the torturer used that Miranda also uses (“teensy-weensy bit”)—but we can never be certain that Paulina is right. It may be that her damaged psyche and her new knowledge that she will have no chance for retribution combine to find someone—anyone—to blame.
When Gerardo awakens, he is, naturally, shocked at what Paulina has done to their guest, and he accuses her of being ill. Paulina responds: “All right then, I am. But I can be ill and recognize a voice…. It’s his voice…. The way he laughed. Certain phrases he used…. It may be a teensy-weensy thing, but it’s enough for me. During all these years not an hour has passed that I haven’t heard it, that same voice, next to me, next to my ear, that voice mixed with saliva, you think I’d forget a voice like his?”6 That Paulina identifies her torturer by his voice reflects the polarization of language that occurs in torture in which “the prisoner become[s] a colossal body with no voice and the torturer a colossal voice … with no body.”7 For fifteen years, Miranda has remained a “colossal voice,” all language, to the silenced, purely sentient Paulina, who has been unable to tell even her husband the details of her torture. Language itself has become part of the disbalance that occurs with such a harm.
Gerardo asks Paulina what she intends to do with the bound and gagged Miranda, and she explains: “We’re going to put him on trial, Gerardo, this doctor. Right here. Today. Or is your famous Investigating Commission going to do it?”8 The curtain drops to end Act One.
In Act Two, the “trial” commences. Gerardo protests that Paulina is merely mirroring the tactics of her own kidnappers: “If something revolted me about them it was that they accused so many men and women, that they forged evidence and ignored evidence and did not give the accused any chance of defending themselves, so even if this man committed genocide on a daily basis, he has the right to defend himself.”9 In response, Paulina assigns Gerardo as Dr. Miranda’s “defense counsel.” Gerardo insists that Paulina’s actions will destroy him, that he will have to resign his new government post on principle, even if no one finds out about Paulina’s actions. Paulina replies: “Because of your mad wife, who was mad because she stayed silent and is now mad because she suddenly began to speak?”10
The lawyer Gerardo represents the prudent voice of the new democracy that must compromise to appease the army and must make practical decisions about the country’s future. Its decisions mean that people like Paulina will never have a chance to speak out officially against their torturers, will never have an opportunity to tell their stories and have them officially acknowledged. The state has forgone retribution for them. Gerardo tries to explain the practicalities: “If he’s guilty, more reason to let him go. Don’t look at me like that. You want to scare these people and provoke them, Paulina, till they come back …? Because that is what you’re going to get. Imagine what would happen if everyone acted like you did. You satisfy your personal passion, you punish on your own, while the other people in this country with scores of other problems who finally have a chance to solve some of them, those people can go screw themselves—the whole transition to democracy can go screw itself—…. Let him go, Paulina. For the good of the country….”11 Miranda, in his own self-interest, also presents a compelling argument against any action: “So we go on and on with violence, always more violence. Yesterday they did terrible things to you and now you do terrible things to me and tomorrow the same cycle will begin all over again. Isn’t it time we stopped?”12
Paulina is unconvinced and unwilling: “What about my good? … You’re asking me to forget.”13 She lays out for Gerardo her emotional response when she first heard Miranda’s voice that night. At first she wanted an eye for an eye; she wanted someone to rape him: “But I began to realize that wasn’t what I really wanted. And you know what conclusion I came to, the only thing I really want? I want him to confess. I want him to sit in front of that cassette-recorder and tell me what he did—not just to me, everything, to everybody—and then have him write it out in his own handwriting and sign it and I would keep a copy forever—with all the information, the names and data, all the details. That’s what I want.”14
Gerardo later concedes that he understands Paulina’s need: “It coincides with the need of the whole country. The need to put into words what happened to us.”15 And this, he realizes, should be the task of his Commission. As the scene ends, Paulina, with a gun aimed at the head of a kneeling Miranda, poses the question at the heart of the play: “Why is it always people like me who have to sacrifice, who have to concede when concessions are needed, biting my tongue, why?”16 A giant mirror descends to the stage and the audience members are forced to look at themselves.17
Gerardo and Dr. Miranda are right, of course. Paulina’s possible violence toward Miranda both mirrors and perpetuates the horrors committed against her. She remains enmeshed in a cycle of violence that may have no end. All the arguments are there: why dredge up the past and dwell on past wrongs? Why risk a backlash? Let bygones be bygones and move forward in a spirit of reconciliation.18 But Paulina’s needs are personal, not political. She seeks, as do most victims, a rebalancing. Her torture took something from her that she wants to take back. The Latin root of “retribution” is “retribuere” meaning “to pay back” (re + tribuere). Adequate retribution for Paulina will pay back to her something that she lost as a result of the crimes against her. The play symbolizes this loss by Schubert’s string quartet, “Death and the Maiden,” her favorite piece of music to which she cannot listen since her torture. In the play’s final scene, Paulina is shown at a concert at which the musicians are tuning up for “Death and the Maiden.” A surreally lighted Dr. Miranda is also present at the concert, and the audience is left to decide whether he exists only in Paulina’s imagination or is real: whether she fired the gun or let him go after his confession. In either case, she has her Schubert back, but was the balancing gained through violence or language?
This book will argue that it was language, that Paulina lost language as well as Schubert.19 Her ability to articulate her pain was taken away by her torture, and any adequate balancing she would achieve requires a restoration of that language. Pain and oppression destroy a person’s ability to use language, and the rebalancing that is at the heart of revenge and retribution requires the recovery of that destroyed language. Paulina was surprised to discover that words were what she needed; she wanted Miranda’s confession. She wanted the story of what happened to her to be heard and acknowledged.
So, what happens when a new and fragile democracy turns its back on some (or even