Death and the Maiden

Just before evening. PAULINA and GERARDO are outside, on the terrace facing the sea. ROBERTO inside, still tied up. GERARDO has the cassette recorder on his lap.

PAULINA. I don’t understand why.

GERARDO. I have to know.

PAULINA. Why?

Brief pause.

GERARDO. Paulina, I love you. I need to hear it from your lips. It’s not fair that after so many years the person to tell me, ends up being him. It would be – intolerable.

PAULINA. Whereas if I tell you it would be – tolerable.

GERARDO. More tolerable than if he tells me first.

PAULINA. I told this to you already, Gerardo. Wasn’t that enough?

GERARDO. Fifteen years ago you started to tell me and then . . .

PAULINA. Did you expect me to keep on talking to you with that bitch there? That bitch came out of your bedroom half naked asking why you were taking so long, and you expected me to –

GERARDO. She wasn’t a bitch.

PAULINA. Did she know where I was? Of course she did. A bitch. Fuck a man whose woman wasn’t exactly able to defend herself, huh?

GERARDO. We’re not going to start all this again, Paulina.

PAULINA. You’re the one who started.

GERARDO. How many times do I have to . . . ? – I’d spent two months trying to find you. Then she came by, she said she could help. We had a couple of drinks. My God, I’m also human.

PAULINA. While I defended your life, while your name stayed inside me and never left my mouth – Ask him, ask Miranda if I ever so much as whispered your name, while you . . .

GERARDO. You already forgave me, you forgave me, how many times will we have to go over this? We’ll die from so much past, so much pain and resentment. Let’s finish it – let’s finish that conversation from years ago, let’s close this book once and for all and never speak about it again, never again, never never again.

PAULINA. Forgive and forget, eh?

GERARDO. Forgive yes, forget, no. But forgive so we can start again. There’s so much to live for, my . . .

PAULINA. What did you want me to do, to talk in front of her? To tell you, what they did to me, in front of her, that I should – ? How many times?

GERARDO. How many times what?

PAULINA. How many times did you fuck her?

GERARDO. Paulina . . .

PAULINA. How many?

GERARDO. Baby . . .

PAULINA. How many times did you do it? How many, how many? I tell you, you tell me.

GERARDO (desperate, shaking her and then taking her in his arms). Paulina, Paulina. You want to destroy me? Is that what you want?

PAULINA. No.

GERARDO. Well, you’re going to destroy me. You’re going to end up in a world where I don’t exist, where I won’t be here. Is that what you want?

PAULINA. I want to know how many times you fucked that bitch.

GERARDO. Don’t do this to me, Paulina.

PAULINA. That wasn’t the first night, was it, Gerardo? You’d seen her before, right? The truth, Gerardo.

GERARDO. People can die from an excessive dose of the truth, you know.

PAULINA. How many times, Gerardo. You tell me, I tell you.

GERARDO. Twice.

PAULINA. That night. What about before that night?

GERARDO (very low). Three times.

PAULINA. What?

GERARDO (raising his voice). Three times.

PAULINA. She was that good? You liked her that much? And she liked it too. She must have really enjoyed it if she came back for –

GERARDO. Do you understand what you’re doing to me?

PAULINA. Beyond repair, huh? Irreparable.

GERARDO (desperate). What more do you want from me? We survived the dictatorship, we survived, and now we’re going to do to each other what those bastards out there couldn’t do to us? You want that?

PAULINA (quietly). No.

GERARDO. You want me to leave? Is that what you want? You want me to go out that door and never see you again? Good God, is that what you want?

PAULINA. No.

GERARDO. That’s what you’re going to get.

Brief pause.

I’m in your hands like a baby, I’ve got no defences, I’m naked in front of you like the day I was born. You want to treat me like you treat the man who –

PAULINA. No.

GERARDO. You want me to . . . ?

PAULINA (murmuring). I want you. You. I want you inside me, alive. I want you making love to me without ghosts in bed and I want you on the Commission defending the truth and I want you in the air I breathe and I want you in my Schubert that I can start listening to again –

GERARDO. Yes, Paulina, yes, yes.

PAULINA. – and I want us adopting a child and I want to care for you minute by minute like you took care of me after that night –

GERARDO. Never mention that bitch of a night again. If you go on and on about that night, you’ll – kill me. Is that what you want?

PAULINA. No.

GERARDO. Are you going to tell me then?

PAULINA. Yes.

GERARDO. Everything?

PAULINA. Everything.

GERARDO. That’s the way, that’s how we’ll get out of this mess – without hiding a thing from each other, together.

PAULINA. That’s the way.

GERARDO. I’m going to turn on the recorder. You don’t mind, love, if I turn it on?

PAULINA. Turn it on.

GERARDO turns it on.

GERARDO. Just as if you were sitting in front of the Commission.

PAULINA. I don’t know how to begin.

GERARDO. Begin with your name.

PAULINA. My maiden name is Paulina Salas. Now I am married to Gerardo Escobar, the lawyer, but at that time –

GERARDO. Date.

PAULINA. April 6th, 1975, I was single. I was walking along San Antonio Street –

GERARDO. Be as precise as you can.

PAULINA. – at about two-fifteen in the afternoon, and when I reached the corner at Huérfanos Street behind me I heard – three men got out of a car, one of them stuck a gun in my back, ‘One word and we’ll blow you away, Miss.’ He spat the words into my ear – he had garlic on his breath. I was surprised that I should focus on such an insignificant detail, the lunch he had eaten, begin to think about how he was digesting that food with all the organs that I had been studying in anatomy class. Later on I’d reproach myself, I would have lots of time to think about it, why didn’t I call out, I knew that if that happened you’re supposed to scream, so people can know who is – call out your name, I’m Paulina Salas, they’re kidnapping me, if you don’t scream out that first moment you’re already defeated, and I submitted too easily, obeyed them right away without even a gesture of defiance. All my life, I’ve always been much too obedient.

The lights begin to go down.

The doctor wasn’t among them. I met Doctor Miranda for the first time three days later when . . . That’s when I met Doctor Miranda.

The lights go down further and PAULINA’s voice continues in the darkness, only the cassette recorder lit by the light of the moon.

At first, I thought he would save me. He was so soft, so – nice, after what the others had done to me. And then, all of a sudden, I heard a Schubert quartet. There is no way of describing what it means to hear that wonderful music in the darkness, when you haven’t eaten for the last three days, when your body is falling apart, when . . .

In the darkness, we hear ROBERTO’s voice overlapping with PAULINA’s and the second movement of Death and the Maiden.

ROBERTO’S VOICE. I would put on the music because it helped me in my role, the role of good guy, as they call it, I would put on Schubert because it was a way of gaining the prisoners’ trust. But I also knew it was a way of alleviating their suffering. You’ve got to believe it was a way of alleviating the prisoners’ suffering. Not only the music, but everything else I did. That’s how they approached me, at first.

The lights go up as if the moon were coming out. It is night-time. ROBERTO is in front of the cassette recorder, confessing. The Schubert fades.

The prisoners were dying on them, they told me, they needed someone to help care for them, someone they could trust. I’ve got a brother, who was a member of the secret services. You can pay the communists back for what they did to Dad, he told me one night – my father had a heart attack the day the peasants took over his land at Las Toltecas. The stroke paralysed him – he lost his capacity for speech, would spend hours simply looking at me, his eyes said, Do something. But that’s not why I accepted. The real real truth, it was for humanitarian reasons. We’re at war, I thought, they want to kill me and my family, they want to install a totalitarian dictatorship, but even so, they still have the right to some form of medical attention. It was slowly, almost without realising how, that I became involved in more delicate operations, they let me sit in on sessions where my role was to determine if the prisoners could take that much torture, that much electric current. At first I told myself that it was a way of saving people’s lives, and I did, because many times I told them – without it being true, simply to help the person who was being tortured – I ordered them to stop or the prisoner would die. But afterwards I began to – bit by bit, the virtue I was feeling turned into excitement – the mask of virtue fell off it and it, the excitement, it hid, it hid, it hid from me what I was doing, the swamp of what – By the time Paulina Salas was brought in it was already too late. Too late.

The lights start to slowly go down.

R08BERTO: . . . too late. A kind of – brutalisation took over my life, I began to really truly like what I was doing. It became a game. My curiosity was partly morbid, partly scientific. How much can this woman take? More than the other one? How’s her sex? Does her sex dry up when you put the current through her? Can she have an orgasm under those circumstances? She is entirely in your power, you can carry out all your fantasies, you can do what you want with her.

The lights continue to fade while ROBERTO’s voice speaks on in the semi-darkness, a beam of moonlight on the cassette recorder.

Everything they have forbidden you since ever, whatever your mother ever urgently whispered you were never to do. You begin to dream with her, with all those women. Come on, Doctor, they would say to me, you’re not going to refuse free meat, are you, one of them would sort of taunt me. His name was – they called him Stud – a nickname, because I never found out his real name. They like it, Doctor, Stud would say to me – all these bitches like it and if you put on that sweet little music of yours, they’ll get even cosier. He would say this in front of the women, in front of Paulina Salas he would say it, and finally I, finally I – but not one ever died on me, not one of the women, not one of the men.

The lights go up and it is now dawning. ROBERTO, untied, writes on a sheet of paper his own words from the cassette recorder. In front of him, many sheets of handwritten pages. PAULINA and GERARDO watch him.

ROBERTO’S VOICE (from the recorder). As far as I can remember, I took part in the – interrogation of ninety-four prisoners, including Paulina Salas. It is all I can say. I ask forgiveness.

GERARDO switches off the cassette recorder while ROBERTO writes.

ROBERTO. – forgiveness.

GERARDO switches the cassette recorder back on.

ROBERTO’S VOICE. And I hope that this confession proves that I feel real repentance and that just as the country is reaching reconciliation and peace . . .

GERARDO switches off the cassette recorder.

GERARDO. Did you write that? Just as the country is reaching reconciliation and peace?

He switches it on again.

ROBERTO’S VOICE. – so too should I be allowed to live the rest of my days with my terrible secret. There can be no worse punishment than that which is imposed upon me by the voice of my conscience.

ROBERTO (while he writes). – punishment . . . my conscience.

GERARDO switches off the cassette recorder. A moment’s silence.

And now what? You want me to sign?

PAULINA. First write there that this is all done of your own free will, without any sort of pressure whatsoever.

ROBERTO. That’s not true.

PAULINA. You want real pressure, Doctor?

ROBERTO writes down a couple of phrases, shows them to GERARDO, who moves his head affirmatively. ROBERTO signs. PAULINA looks at the signature, collects the paper, takes the cassette out of the recorder, puts another cassette in, pushes a button. We hear ROBERTO’s confession on the tape.

ROBERTO’S VOICE (on tape). I would put on the music because it helped me in my role, the role of good guy, as they call it, I would put on Schubert because it was a way of gaining the prisoners’ trust. But I also knew it was a way of alleviating their suffering.

GERARDO. Paulina. It’s over.

ROBERTO’S VOICE (on tape). You’ve got to believe it was a way of alleviating the prisoners’ suffering.

GERARDO (turning off the cassette recorder). It is over.

PAULINA. Almost over, yes.

GERARDO. So don’t you think it’s about time we . . .

PAULINA. Right. We had an agreement.

She stands up, goes to the window, breathes in the air of the sea deeply.

To think that I would spend hours here like this, at dawn, trying to make out the things left behind by the tide during the night, staring at those shapes, wondering what they were, if they would be dragged out to sea again. And now . . . And now . . .

GERARDO. Paulina!

PAULINA (turning suddenly). I’m glad to see that you’re still a man of principle. I thought I’d have to convince you now, now that you know he really is guilty, I thought I’d have to convince you not to kill him.

GERARDO. I wouldn’t stain my soul with someone like him.

PAULINA (throws him the keys to the car). Right. Go and get his car.

Brief pause.

GERARDO. And I can leave him alone with you?

PAULINA. Wouldn’t you say I’m old enough?

Brief pause.

GERARDO. All right, all right, I’ll go get the car . . . Take care of yourself.

PAULINA. You too.

GERARDO goes toward the door.

PAULINA. Oh – and don’t forget to give his jack back.

GERARDO (trying to smile). And don’t you forget to return his Schubert cassette. You’ve got your own.

He exits. PAULINA watches him leave. ROBERTO unties his ankles.

ROBERTO. If you wouldn’t mind, I would like to go to the bathroom. I suppose there is no reason why you should continue to accompany me?

PAULINA. Don’t move, Doctor. There’s still a little matter pending.

Brief pause.

It’s going to be an incredibly beautiful day. You know the only thing that’s missing now, Doctor, the one thing I need to make this day really truly perfect?

Brief pause .

To kill you. So I can listen to my Schubert without thinking that you’ll also be listening to it, soiling my day and my Schubert and my country and my husband. That’s what I need . . .

ROBERTO. Madam, your husband left here trusting that you – you gave your word . . .

PAULINA. But when I gave my word – I still had a doubt – a teensy-weensy doubt – that you really were that man. Because Gerardo was right, in his way. Proof, hard proof – well, I could have been mistaken. But I knew that if you confessed – and when I heard you, my last doubts vanished. Now that I know, now that you are that man, I could not live in peace with myself and let you live.

She points the gun at him.

You have a minute to pray, Doctor.

ROBERTO slowly stands.

ROBERTO. Don’t do it. I’m innocent.

PAULINA. You’ve confessed.

ROBERTO. That confession, ma’am . . . It’s false.

PAULINA. What do you mean, false?

ROBERTO. I made it up. We made it up.

PAULINA. It seemed quite true to me, painfully familiar as far as I’m concerned . . .

ROBERTO. Your husband told me what to write, I invented some of it, some of it was invented by me, but most of it was what he got from you, from what he knew had happened to you, so you’d let me go, he convinced me that it was the only way that you wouldn’t kill me and I had to – you must know how, under pressure, we say anything, but I’m innocent, Mrs. Escobar, God in Heaven knows that –

PAULINA. Do not invoke God, Doctor, when you are so close to finding out whether He exists or not. Stud.

ROBERTO. What?

PAULINA. Several times in your confession you mention Stud. He must have been a large man, muscular, he bit his fingernails, right, he bit his goddamn fingernails. Stud.

ROBERTO. I never met anyone like the man you’re describing. The name was given to me by your husband. Everything I said comes from what your husband helped me to invent. Ask him when he comes back.

PAULINA. I don’t need to ask him. I knew that he’d do that, I knew he’d use my words for your confession. That’s the sort of person he is. He always thinks that he’s more intelligent than everybody else, he always thinks that he’s got to save somebody. I don’t blame him. That’s why I love him. We lied to each other out of love. He deceived me for my own good. I deceived him for his own good. But I’m the one who came out on top in this game. I gave him the name Bud, Doctor, I gave him the wrong name, to see if you would correct it. And you did correct it. You corrected the name Bud and you substituted the name Stud and if you were innocent –

ROBERTO. I’m telling you it was your husband who – Listen. Please listen. He must have thought Stud was the name a man like that would – I don’t know why he – Ask him. Ask him.

PAULINA. It’s not the only correction that you made. There were other. . . lies.

ROBERTO. What lies, what lies?

PAULINA. – small lies, small variations, that I inserted in my story to Gerardo, and you corrected most of them. It turned out just as I planned. You were so scared that if you didn’t get it right . . . But I’m not going to kill you because you’re guilty, Doctor, but because you haven’t repented at all. I can only forgive someone who really repents, who stands up amongst those he has wronged and says, I did this, I did it, and I’ll never do it again.

ROBERTO. What more do you want? You’ve got more than all the victims in this country will ever get.

He gets down on his knees.

What more do you want?

PAULINA. The truth, Doctor. The truth and I’ll let you go. Repent and I’ll let you go. You have ten seconds. One, two, three, four, five, six. Time is running out. Seven. Say it!

ROBERTO stands up.

ROBERTO. No. I won’t. Because even if I confess, you’ll never be satisfied. You’re going to kill me anyway. So go ahead and kill me. I’m not going to let any sick woman treat me like this. If you want to kill me, do it. But you’re killing an innocent man.

PAULINA. Eight.

ROBERTO. So someone did terrible things to you and now you’re doing something terrible to me and tomorrow somebody else is going to – on and on and on. I have children, two boys, a girl. Are they supposed to spend the next fifteen years looking for you until they find you? And then –

PAULINA. Nine.

ROBERTO. Oh Paulina – isn’t it time we stopped?

PAULINA. And why does it always have to be people like me who have to sacrifice, why are we always the ones who have to make concessions when something has to be conceded, why always me who has to bite her tongue, why? Well, not this time. This time I am going to think about myself, about what I need. If only to do justice in one case, just one. What do we lose? What do we lose by killing one of them? What do we lose? What do we lose?

They freeze in their positions as the lights begin to go down slowly. We begin to hear music from the last movement of Mozart’s Dissonant Quartet. PAULINA and ROBERTO are covered from view by a giant mirror which descends, forcing the members of the audience to look at themselves. For a few minutes, the Mozart quartet is heard, while the spectators watch themselves in the mirror. Selected slowly moving spots flicker over the audience, picking out two or three at a time, up and down rows.

A concert hall. An evening some months later. GERARDO and PAULINA appear, elegantly dressed. They sit down facing the mirror, their backs to the spectators, perhaps in two chairs or in two of the seats in the audience itself. Under the music we can hear typical sounds of an audience during a concert: throats clearing, an occasional cough, the ruffling of programme notes, even some heavy breathing. When the music ends, GERARDO begins to applaud and we can hear the applause growing from what is an invisible public. PAULINA does not applaud. The applause begins to die down and then we hear the habitual sounds that come from a concert hall when the first part of a programme is over: more throat clearing, murmurs, bodies shuffling toward the foyer. They both begin to go out, greeting people, stopping to chat for an instant. They slowly distance themselves from their seats and advance along an imaginary foyer which is apparently full of spectators. We hear mutterings, etc. GERARDO begins to talk to members of the audience, as if they were at the concert. His words can be heard above the murmurs of the public.

ACT THREE