SocialistStories حكايات اشتراكية

This fascinating play (85pgs) by Mario Benedetti is about torture, and has found a lot of praise from comrades who went through the horrible ordeal of torture at the hands of the amerikkkan-trained security forces in South America. To introduce it, I think it would be best to put here the introduction which Benedetti wrote for this play:

"Originally, I conceived of Pedro y el Capitan as a novel, and I’d even given it a title: El Cepo, for the rope-and-stick torture device that’s used to squeeze prisoners’ arms against their bodies. I remember telling the Uruguayan critic Jorge Ruffinelli, when he interviewed me in 1974 and asked about my future projects, that I had in mind a novel called El Cepo. And what I said, more or less, was that it would be “a long conversation between a torturer and his prisoner, in which torture won’t be present per se, but will be there as a great shadow weighing on the dialogue. I’m thinking of taking the torturer and the person being tortured beyond the prison or military base, to where their private lives figure into the mix." Well, there you have it: Pedro and the Captain.

I see the play as a dramatic inquiry into the psychology of a torturer, a sort of answer to the question of what it takes, what has to be going on, for an ordinary person to become a torturer. While torture is the ostensible theme of the play, it never comes onto the stage as a physical act. I’ve always believed that torture has its place as an artistic subject in literature or film, but in theatre its aggression is felt too directly, and this makes it difficult for the spectator to keep a needed distance. If the torture is there only indirectly, however, as an evil yet unseen presence, then the audience is able to be more objective, and if what we are judging is the degradation of a human being, objectivity is essential.

The work isn’t a confrontation between a monster and a saint, but rather one between two men, two flesh and blood beings who both have their points of vulnerability and resistance. For the most part the distance between the two of them is ideological, and this perhaps holds the key to their other differences―the moral, the spiritual, the sensitivity to human pain, the complex terrain that lies between courage and cowardice, the lesser or greater capacity for sacrifice, the gap between betrayal and loyalty.

Something else that should be stressed is that, in a way, the work suggests a relationship between torturer and victim that often comes up in situations of true repression, at least as it is practiced in the Southern Cone, though this has hardly been touched upon in theatre. In Pedro and the Captain, the four acts are mere intermissions, times of truce between one bout of torture and another, brief periods in which the "good cop" receives the prisoner, who a has just been brutally tortured and is therefore presumed to have his defenses down. But the person who has been tortured is not necessarily a defenseless victim condemned to an unavailing defeat or a betrayal of others; he or she can also be (and recent history proves that thousands of political militants have faced it this way) a person who can vanquish a seemingly absolute power, a person who uses silence almost as a shield and negativity almost as a weapon, who would rather die than betray others. In order to sustain this wholly incorruptible dignity, though, prisoners must develop personal defenses so real as to convince themselves that they will never have to give in. When Pedro thinks up the metaphor that in reality he’s already a dead man, most of all what he’s inventing is a trench, a barricade behind which he can safeguard his loyalty to his comrades and his cause.

In the play there are two transformative processes crossing each other: the military man who has been changed from a “good boy" into a torturer, and the prisoner who starts out as a simple man and becomes a consciente martyr. But perhaps the real dramatic tension lies not in the dialogue, but rather in the inner being of one of the characters: the captain.

I haven’t wanted the prisoner to come across as a militant of some particular political tendency. The extreme repression in Uruguay has swept over virtually the entire Left and even reached further, into other sectors of the opposition like the Church and traditional political parties. Pedro is simply a political prisoner of the Left who doesn’t inform on anyone, and who, although he is in agony, somehow humiliates his interrogator and vanquishes him. Each one of the four acts ends with a No.

I should add that, even in times of defeat like the one we’re living through at present, I don’t favor a literature—and even less, a theatre—-that is defeatist or weepy, aimed at inspiring pity or sympathy. We have to reclaim objectivity, as a way of reclaiming truth. And we have to reclaim the truth as one of the prerequisites for deserving victory."

—Mario Benedetti 1979

Enjoy comrades:

Liberation:

Pedro and the Captain - Mario Benedetti.pdf