Melbourne, 1989. José was the first Salvadorean refugee to tell me his story. José’s father had been tipped off by a friend that his son’s name was on ‘the list’, so they acted swiftly. Within hours José had packed his things, left his family, and was on a bus bound for the border. Although he didn’t know it then, his life as a refugee would last more than a decade.
He had been forced to flee his homeland because his name was on a death-squad list—simply because he was affiliated with a trade union. In El Salvador that was all it took to make someone a military target.
Many of his co-workers had already been rounded up and taken away. (They became the desaparecidos, the disappeared.) Many were tortured. The military had absolute power over ordinary people’s lives and they exercised this brutally. José escaped with his life, but was scarred none the less ...
Two months into my second year of Spanish classes at university, we were assigned a play to read, Pedro y el Capitán. It is a short work of only four scenes—a long conversation between torturer and tortured. Although torture does not figure physically in any part, author Mario Benedetti explains its presence as a great shadow that weighs on the dialogue. This is not the drama of a monster and a saint. It is about two human beings, two men, each with their own vulnerabilities. The major difference between them is ideological.
Imprisoned and tortured, Pedro drifts in and out of consciousness. The Captain has the upper hand but Pedro uses his silence, and his words, wisely. It becomes apparent that the Captain is captive too, a weak man caught in a brutal system. Escape for him is just as impossible. Pedro, a courageous character, dies loyal to his compañeros and his cause, and in the process he breaks the Captain.
Pedro y el Capitán is a simple, evocative drama about the reality of life in Latin America. Yet after reading it, I found the issue of torture casting shadows on my own life ...
For class purposes students were required to write an essay on the play, but each of my attempts finished with a blank page. The expectation was that we would detach ourselves, write as if the drama were fiction. Yet, for me, who through Benedetti’s imagery had glimpsed another reality, it wasn’t fiction.