Almost two decades since Death and the Maiden was published it is still fresh and current. The story begins with Paulina Calas sitting on the terrace. She is married to a human rights lawyer, Gerardo Escobar, who has been appointed a member of the country’s commission to investigate the human rights abuses of the previous regime in a country that is not mentioned.

Paulina then imprisons the guest of her husband’s house, the seemingly benign and even kind Dr. Roberto Miranda because she believes he tortured and raped her when he was a political prisoner. The book consists primarily of an ongoing conversation between the trio.

Paulina’s nightmare began on April 6, 1975. Three got out of a car and one pointed a gun at her, listened and said: “One word and we’ll leave you speechless, miss.” She was then taken to prison, tortured and repeatedly raped. One of his torturers was a doctor. Although he couldn’t see him because he was blindfolded, he never forgot his voice. When she hears Dr. Miranda speak at home, she is sure he was her jailer.

It seems that at first the torturers hired the doctor to alleviate the suffering of the prisoners. But over time, the brutality he witnessed transformed him into a monster. He was less interested in the well-being of his patients, and his pain became a drug that turned him on.

He became more concerned with how much a tortured human can endure before dying. He was interested in how torture, including the use of electric current, affects a woman’s sexuality.

When Paulina Salas was arrested, it was too late and the virtue of the doctor had been supplanted by sadism. She had become the embodiment of evil and willingly participated in the mass rapes of female prisoners.

Death and The Maiden is an obvious reference to various regimes in South America. Dorfman’s native Chile was ruled by General Pinochet for almost two decades until he resigned in 1991. His government was a monument to the brutal intolerance and persecution of dissidents. However, the unmistakable parallels with the regimes on our own continent cannot be overlooked either.

It seems impossible to separate the author from the character of Gerardo, the humanitarian human rights lawyer. The role of the character seems to have a submerged affinity with the author’s message. The author also forces us to wonder what caused Dr. Miranda to become a monster. He is an educated and even refined man with a deep love for music. However, when anarchy occurred, his rougher instincts and the evil side of his nature took hold.

Perhaps Ariel Dorfman is an advocate for the rule of law that applies even to the best of us. Since when there are no restrictions and everything is allowed, even the most virtuous are capable of total degradation.

The book also cleverly depicts the human forces that are unleashed when victims finally confront their torturers. Show how this confrontation can sometimes lead to healing. I found that the political message of the book was only a marginal dividend. Dorfman is a natural reconciler and the last paragraph of the story is a demonstration of that.

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 given, why do I always have to bite my tongue, why?

In Paulina, despite her anger, there seems to be a grudging acceptance of the need for forgiveness. It is both a human and a pragmatic need.

What do we lose by killing one of them? What do we lose? What do we lose?

With these last words Paulina finally frees herself from her grave of anger, and seems to be wondering: What do we gain by killing one of them? What we win? What we win? With this, the breadth of your soul and the depth of your mind are revealed. It is as if he realizes that sometimes the battle between good and evil can end in a truce.

Paulina is the central character in the story. It is his portrait that shines, and the other characters are only marginal. She is aware of the importance of her decisions. It is their ordeal, their anger, and it is their final response that frees others to move on with their lives.

Death and the Maiden, while sad, is a thoughtful read, deeply subtle and wonderfully entertaining. It exposes the gruesome and extremely disturbing face of a dictatorship and raises the moral questions of justice, retribution and forgiveness.