The following forty lines from Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden (1990), take place in scene 1 of Act 3, after Roberto has been tied up by Paulina and threatened with being tortured the same way as she had been, and then shot. In response to Paulina´s threats, Roberto begins confessing the brutality of his actions and his motives. This confession may be true; however, Gerardo has advised Roberto to indulge Paulina, to confess as this would save his life. Whatever the case, the extract is important because it portrays how a man can slide into brutality, without initially meaning to. Second, the extract is important because it helps expose the iniquities of dictatorial military governments. Finally, it is also important because it gives us an idea of Roberto’s character and personality.
In this extract we clearly see the stages by which a respectable doctor became a brutal sadistic torturer. Though Roberto’s brother told him that helping the torturers could be a way to “pay the communists back for what they did to [his] dad,” Roberto stresses that he accepted the job for “humanitarian reasons.” Firstly, he wanted to help the prisoners who “were dying” from the tortures as “someone to help care for them, someone they could trust.” Later on, however, Roberto became involved in more “delicate operations” and was asked to ”sit in on sessions where [his] role was to determine if the prisoners could take that much torture.” This indicates that he was there while the prisoners were tortured, watching these brutal scenes. Roberto thought this “ was a way of saving people’s lives,” as he “ordered them to stop or the prisoner would die;” however, watching brutalized him, and slowly the “virtue [he] was feeling turned into excitement.” Soon, “brutalization took over [his] life” and he began “to truly like what [he] was doing,” so much so that, from an observer, he became a participant. Torture became a “game” for him, a game that was “partly morbid, partly scientific,” as he tortured women to find out things like “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?” By the end, Roberto had become a sadist totally obsessed with “carry[ing] out all [his] fantasies” of sexually torturing women who were “entirely in his power,” women with whom he could do “whatever [he] want[ed].” So, stage by stage, we see in the example of Roberto how men can slide from positions of respectability and motives of kindness and compassion to becoming human monsters, men who delight in the sufferings of others.
