"The Blindfold's Eyes" by Dianna Ortiz

An American nun who survived the torture chambers of Guatemala describes her ordeal and the fear and guilt that still haunt her.

By Donna Minkowitz

Nov 19, 2002 | My first exposure to torture was the comic Nazi on the laugh-tracked POW comedy "Hogan's Heroes" hissing, "Ve have vays of making you talk." My second exposure was the excitement of watching Batman and Robin suspended above boiling oil. American children's media has a surprisingly high number of references to torture, but our adult pop cult has even more -- just count the gorgeous scarred chests and backs on an average episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Don't even get me started on music videos. If you judge by our entertainment media, Americans find torture jazzy and titillating. Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But what's truly weird about it is that we love watching depictions of an experience less likely to happen to us than to almost any other population in the world. Americans are not crueler than other people, or even more sadomasochistic. Why do we so like to fantasize about the terrible things that the rest of the world -- oh, for example, Central Americans, Africans, and Bangladeshis -- can readily undergo without the benefit of fantasy?

Part of it is the nature of torture itself, which breeds obsessive horror in all persons, everywhere -- including Africans and Bangladeshis. Like us, those most likely to be its victims also spend long hours wondering what it might be like to have mice inserted into their bodies or to rationally, hopefully wish to die.

But in this country, most of us are so distant from torture as an everyday reality that our imaginings of it have the quality of a Sensurround thrill. The poet Carolyn Forche (who was, years ago, a human-rights observer in El Salvador), wrote that the only way to get entertainment-oriented Americans interested in news about that country was:

" ... to give
them what they want: Lil Milagro Ramirez,
who after years of confinement did not
know what year it was, how she walked
with help and was forced to shit in public.
Tell them about the razor, the live wire,
dry ice and concrete, grey rats, and above all
who fucked her, how many times and when."

Dianna Ortiz is one American whose relationship to torture is different. That's because she was tortured in 1989, during a two-year stint in Guatemala as a young, politically unsophisticated nun from a Kentucky convent, teaching children to read in a rural province. She was abducted from a convent garden one morning by a U.S.-trained Guatemalan army captain, a police intelligence officer and their campesino torture temp, and installed in the secret basement of a police training institute called the Politecnica. (This was a regular site for torture conducted on orders of the military high command.)

They took Ortiz not because she was any kind of radical but simply because she was a garden-variety Catholic missionary working with the poor at a time when the military wanted to seriously scare the church. (Priests and nuns, human-rights workers, doctors, labor activists and randomly chosen campesinos had been tortured in Guatemala for decades, not so much to get information as to terrorize entire trades and populations.)

Ortiz was held for only 24 hours, unlike many other torture victims, whose ordeals last, incredibly, for months or even years. But those 24 hours resulted in a complete loss of memory of everything in her life prior to being tortured. She had to be reintroduced to her own parents, and she still has almost no memory of her childhood, her college years, how she became a nun, or her pre-torture friendships.

But she has intense memories of everything from her abduction onward. Ortiz's book, "The Blindfold's Eyes," is an extraordinary, moving, sharply focused account of what it is actually like to be tortured and what the experience does to the rest of your life.

Though the book credits a co-writer -- Patricia Davis -- "The Blindfold's Eyes" has a strong flavor of coming direct from Ortiz, without the rounded sentences or empty flourishes that are the usual hallmark of ghostwriters. The first-person voice is mordant, self-aware, tender, often bitterly funny, the opposite of the common stereotype of the trauma victim as a soggy bladder-bag of ugly feelings, unable to control any part of herself or her world, traumatized into nothingness.

In fact, what Ortiz tells us later about her need to control the way her story is told makes it likely that she was intimately involved in the production of every sentence. (Of course, figuring out whether to think of oneself as in or out of control of one's abuse is the painful dialectic of all victims. If you think of yourself as having been in control of it, you're fucked because it's your fault. But if you realize you were out of control, you're even more fucked, because it's much more painful to have been victimized and not have been able to do anything more about it than merely to have been victimized.)

Paradoxically, Ortiz is strong enough to show us the times that she was helpless -- not just during her imprisonment, but through many occasions of frantic self-hatred, flashbacks and just being profoundly not OK in the years afterward. Sometimes, the torturers talk to her late at night in her bedroom, before she goes to sleep. What I really admire in this book is Ortiz's willingness to show that although she was not damaged utterly and entirely by the torture, she was indeed damaged.

So: what happened to her. This is the hard part to write about, although it's not the hardest part of the book to read. Part of the problem is the fear of re-creating Ortiz's experiences by writing about them -- as though torture could be enacted simply by being thought of -- but the other part is the fear of diminishing them through the reviewer's hurried paraphrase or, worse, making them into another piece of S/M porn.

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