Everybody in the room that day was crying, everybody except for the man who had moved us all to tears, the former prisoner of war whom my son Rodrigo and I had traveled thousands of miles to meet. We had hoped to do justice to his story in a biopic, Prisoners in Time, that the BBC wanted to make for television, based on his autobiography, The Railway Man.1
And what an extraordinary story it was!
Eric Lomax, a British officer in World War II, had been tortured by the Japanese in Thailand while working on the infamous Bangkok-Burma railroad, the one most people know about through another film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. Eric, like so many victims of atrocities, was plagued by the experience, his life destroyed by memories of his agony and the desire for revenge. What differentiated him from so many others persecuted worldwide was not only that, more than forty years later, he tracked down the man he held responsible for his suffering, the anonymous interpreter at his beatings and waterboardings, but the astounding fact that this tormentor, Takashi Nagase, once he was found and identified, turned out to be a Buddhist monk. Nagase had spent the postwar decades denouncing his own countrymen for their crimes and trying to atone for his role in the atrocities he had helped commit by caring for innumerable orphans of the Asians who had died building the railroad. The one scorching image from the war he could not escape was that of a brave young British lieutenant over whose torture he had presided and whom he had presumed to be dead.
Once Eric Lomax resurfaced; once the two former enemies, now old men accompanied by their second wives, met in Kanchanaburi, next to the River Kwai, where they had last parted; once they were face to face, Nagase begged for forgiveness. It was not instantly forthcoming. But some weeks later, in Hiroshima of all places, Lomax offered Nagase the absolution that he needed in order to live and die in peace.
The BBC had chosen me to tell this tale because, in my play Death and the Maiden, I had already probed the issues of torture, memory, mercy, and vengeance from the perspective of our beleaguered country, Chile. But in that play there had been no pardon offered and no pardon sought, so writing about Lomax’s dilemma seemed a way of furthering that original exploration with a series of new questions. Is reconciliation ever really possible when the wounds are searing and permanent? Does anything change if the victimizer claims to have repented? How can we ever know if those claims are legitimate, or if that remorse is merely an ego-trip, an accommodation for the sake of outward appearances?
There was also an aesthetic challenge: given the extreme reserve of both antagonists, their inability to articulate to one another—not to mention anybody else—what they had been feeling all these years, how was one to imagine for the screen the dialogue that our two silent former enemies never said but that would remain true to their affliction? How to bring that story to those who can’t possibly imagine what torture does to those who suffer it and those who create that suffering?
Our visit to Eric and his wife Patti at their home in the far north of England was a way of trying to coax from that emotionally repressed man some information—entirely absent from the memoir he had written—about how he had dealt with the barren wilderness of his sorrow, what it meant to survive torture and war more dead than alive. We were accompanied by director Stephen Walker and celebrated psychiatrist Helen Bamberg, who had helped Eric name his demons, and so saved him and his troubled marriage.
That day, in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Eric confided to us, after several hours of halting monosyllables, a painful, unbelievable story. When he returned to England by ship after those traumatic years as a prisoner of war, he discovered just before disembarking that the British Army had deducted from his back pay the cost of the boots he had lost during his captivity. Bamberg, who had managed to get Eric to speak out after many distressing past sessions in London, asked him if he had told anyone about this at the time.
“Nobody,” Eric said. And then, after a pause that felt infinite, “There was nobody there, at the dock.” He stopped and again long minutes of silence went by before he added, “Only a letter from my father. Saying he had remarried, as my mother had died three years before.” Another long pause followed. “She died thinking I was also dead. I had been writing to her all that time and she was dead.”
That’s when we all started to cry.
Not just out of sympathy for his grief, but also because Eric had delivered this story about his loss in a monotone devoid of any apparent sentiment, as if all that despair belonged to someone else. Such dissociation is typical of torture victims. Their mental survival during their ordeal and its unending aftermath depends on distancing themselves from their body and its fate. And it is in that distance that they dwell.
We were crying, I believe, for humanity. We were crying in the Lomax living room because we were being confronted with a reality and a realization that most people would rather avoid: when grievous harm has been done to someone, the damage may be beyond repair. Eric Lomax had been able to tame the hatred raging in his heart and, reaching into the deepest wells of compassion, he had forgiven one of the men who had destroyed him. And yet, there was still something irreparable, a terror that ultimately could not be assuaged.
The film we wrote back in 1994 tried to be faithful to that desolate moment of revelation and at the same time not betray the inner peace that Eric had attained, the fact that he no longer heard Nagase’s voice in his nightmares demanding, “Confess, Lomax, confess and pain will stop.” He had triumphed over fear and fury, but that spiritual victory had not been achieved in solitude. Besides his wife Patti’s support, it was due to the healing process he had gone through with Helen Bamberg. Not until he had fully come to terms with what had been done to him, until he faced his trauma in all its horror, was he able to “find” Nagase, whose identity and location had, in fact, been within easy reach for decades.
Eric’s tragedy and his attempt at reconciliation had a special meaning for me: it connected his life to that of so many friends in Chile and other countries who had been subjected to inhuman interrogations. It was a way of understanding the common humanity of all torture victims, especially since the method that Bamberg employed to resurrect Eric’s memories and restore his mental health had first been elaborated as a therapeutic response to the flood of damaged Latin Americans exiled in England during the 1970s and 1980s when grim dictatorships dominated that continent. Eric Lomax, she said, had the sad privilege of being the first World War II veteran with PTSD who was able to take advantage of this new psychological treatment.
We could not know, of course, that 9/11 awaited us seven years in the future, that the waterboarding inflicted on Eric in the 1940s by the Japanese, and on the bodies of so many Latin Americans decades later by their own countrymen, would go global as the United States and its allies fought the “war on terror.” Nor could we have guessed that so many millions in that future would prove so indifferent to a form of punishment that has been classified as a crime against humanity and is against international treaty and law signed onto by most of the world’s nations.
It would seem, then, that Eric Lomax’s story is today more relevant than ever—a story that, one would hope, brings home again the ultimate reality and anguish of being tortured. Or can we accept that the questions Eric Lomax asked himself about forgiveness and revenge, about redemption and memory, no longer trouble contemporary humanity?
How would our friend Eric, who died in 2012, react to the news that so many Americans and so many of the very countrymen he served in the war now declare torture to be tolerable, as recent polls indicate? What would he say to former Vice-President and war criminal Dick Cheney, who has reiterated over and over that “enhanced interrogations” have been and still are absolutely necessary to keep Americans safe? How would he answer the bluster of Donald Trump?
Perhaps he would whisper to all those who believe this horror is justified the words he wrote to Nagase when he forgave his enemy: “Sometime the hatred has to stop.”
8.
WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT FOR DONALD J. TRUMP FROM JAMES BUCHANAN, 15TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
Sir:
How long have I waited for your advent, prayed for someone like you to come along? All these years, since my death in 1868, I have watched each election cycle, hoping that finally my savior would appear, a man—heaven forbid it should be a woman!—who would rescue me from my status as the worst president in the annals of the United States.
Limited as your knowledge of our past may be, surely you are aware that I have been blamed for the secession of the Southern states in 1861, just as my term was ending. Unfairly faulted for the Civil War that ensued, I am now relieved to know that the presidency will soon be in the hands of someone who will, I am certain, go down in history as a leader who most bitterly divided the nation and undermined the foundations of our democracy.
I am excited, indeed, about your chances of outshining me. If you persist in your campaign to drill, extract, and pollute, if you enable the climate deniers and help to overheat our spacious skies, you will have led us, not to the brink of a conflagration that killed a mere million, but to a more substantial achievement of worldwide significance: taking the whole of humanity to the brink of extinction. That is a record that will considerably exceed my own lapses and make me seem a paragon of wisdom to future citizens (at least, those who survive).
As to the peoples’ daily lives, you are likely to far surpass the harm I have wrought there as well. Many families cursed my name as they received news of their maimed or dead kin, but many more will curse yours when their well-being deteriorates as you assault the country’s healthcare system.
Regarding corruption, I am also hopeful you will outstrip me. My offenses (accused of bribery, extortion, and abuse of power by a congressional committee) will be deemed petty compared to those that loom for you, guaranteeing an administration rife, at all levels, with sleaze and conflicts of interest. But do not tarry over your manifest financial or ethical dilemmas. I managed to avoid impeachment and so will you, given your proven ability to convince your supporters that facts do not matter. Would that such talents had been bestowed upon me, and oh that television and social media had been invented in my day. I could have blamed Mexico for our Civil War.
Could you address two other matters? The first is abortion. It was during my presidency, in 1859, that the American Medical Association urged the criminalization of women who terminated their pregnancies, and you have the chance to revert our laws and customs to that pristine moment when the gentle sex recognized that their bodies belonged to their menfolk. And then Cuba. I tried in vain to buy that island from Spain and then favored invading it. You can complete my dream. Extend the reach of our empire into the Caribbean and beyond, intervene vigorously in the affairs of enemy and allied nations. Pay special attention to China, where I made the mistake of being only marginally involved in the Second Opium War. I am sure you will do better when you engage the Chinese in the First Asian Trade War.
I am not alone in urging you to stubbornly follow your instincts. Other deceased presidents also entertain high expectations for your reign. Richard Nixon wishes that your slurs and insults would make people forget his own foul language, and he eagerly anticipates manifold Trumpgates that will make Watergate seem small potatoes. Warren G. Harding is certain that your outrages will go far beyond the Teapot Dome scandal, which fraudulently favored the oil companies. And Herbert Hoover, reviled for ignoring the oncoming Great Depression, is confident you will be even more obtuse, and that when you precipitate a worse economic catastrophe his actions will thus appear less disastrous. He expects you will also best him in union-busting and the massive deportation of immigrants.
Presidents who occupy the top tier of favorite leaders, including several Founding Fathers, have reproached me for appealing to what they call the worst angels of your nature. They are preparing a collective message counseling moderation and praying that you are not further deranged by the power of your high office.
Franklin Roosevelt believes that informing you that he regrets the internment of Americans of Japanese origin will discourage you from a roundup of Muslim Americans. Harry Truman, haunted by the ghosts of Hiroshima, would press you to abolish nuclear weapons instead of starting a devastating arms race. Dwight Eisenhower intends to reiterate his warning against the military-industrial complex—so naïve, our Ike, unable to realize that representatives of those powers are about to be blatantly ensconced in your Cabinet. And Mr. Lincoln, whose party you have terribly transmogrified, trusts that if he were to whisper daily guidance in your ear, the Republic might, once more, be saved.
I have no doubt that you will not heed him or any other meddling altruist.
After all, I send these words of encouragement inspired by your own example. You have taught me that it is better to bolster one’s image in the Presidential Celebrity Sweepstakes than to sacrifice oneself for the good of the country.
And so, farewell, until the moment you join the former presidents on the other side of death, when I will be delighted to steer you to the very bottom of the heap, where I have languished for a century and a half. What a pleasure finally to be able to look down upon someone who has done damage to the United States in ways unimaginable to me in my most desolate dreams.
With my sincere thanks for all your efforts to rescue me from the nethermost abyss and from the title “worst of the worst,” I remain, sir, your humble servant,
JAMES BUCHANAN
9.
A MESSAGE FROM THE END OF THE WORLD
Here in Chile, in the far south of the Southern Hemisphere, it has been the summer of our discontent. Never have so many natural catastrophes in a row hit this country at the end of the world. For once, it is not the earthquakes that have assailed us since time immemorial or the tsunamis that often follow, devastating land and coast, mountainscapes and ocean. This time, our unprecedented woes have all been man-made.
First were the forest wildfires, mostly to the south of Santiago, the worst in recorded history. Countless acres have been burned to cinders, killing people and livestock, leveling a whole town, destroying centenarian trees as well as newer woodlands meant for export. The conflagration was not controlled until supertanker planes that could carry tons of water were flown in from abroad.
For those not directly threatened by the raging blazes, there were other costs. The air here in Santiago, befouled with smoke and ash, became unbreathable for weeks, a situation aggravated by inordinately high temperatures that did not diminish even at night, as was habitually the case, when we used to have the chance to cool off and face the next day refreshed and energized.
We prayed for rain, though we are aware that it never rains during the summer months. When our prayers were answered, it was not what we had expected. A deluge descended, not in the zones where the fires continued to flare up now and then, but deep in the Andes and its glaciers, and with such ferocity that rivers overflowed and avalanches of mud and debris descended on villages and valleys, roads and bridges.
As such a downpour had never come to pass before in the summer, the water-processing plants were distressingly unprepared. This left millions of Chileans without water in our homes, unable to drink, cook, clean, or bathe. It is as if we had been cursed with a plague: stray dogs expiring of thirst on the streets and plants withering and lines of people with buckets, wash basins, and bottles, standing endlessly in front of emergency distribution centers.
First so much fire that we cannot breathe, then so much water that we cannot drink. What comes next?
The news that many beaches in Chile have been closed as, once again after last year’s plague, armadas of jellyfish wash up on the shores and fish perish. And then, there are the recent reports that a gigantic crack has deepened in an Antarctic ice shelf, increasing the possibility that an iceberg extending nearly 2,000 square miles will crash into the sea and, as it melts, alter forever the seascape of the planet, with Chile (whose territoria
l claim in that continent is governed by a treaty with six other nations) one of the first victims.
It is hardly strange, therefore, that Chile does not close its eyes to what is happening to our water, forests, and coastline. Everyone here—and I mean everyone, from extreme right to extreme left—understands that in this land, whose name comes from the Aymara language for the place where the earth ends, we are witnessing a cataclysm of epic proportions that presages another sort of end, the end of the world as we know it. And so we all are conscious that something just as epic must be done to change course before it is too late.
We also understand, of course, that such a change depends on what other international actors do elsewhere.
What is truly intolerable, what enrages and saddens me—as the fires rage in the forests and the rain falls when and where it should not and the rivers are choked with mudslides and the fish disappear from the ocean and the Antarctic breaks up—is what is transpiring simultaneously in the remote United States. Precisely at this dire moment in Chile’s natural history, precisely now I am forced to watch how the government of the powerful country that my wife and I have adopted as our home is gutting the very environmental policies that, even if insufficient, were at least steps in the right direction.
As we get ready to return to the United States, our friends and relatives ask, over and over, can it be true? Can President Trump be beset with such suicidal stupidity as to deny climate change and install an enemy of the earth as his environmental czar? Can he be so beholden to the blind greed of the mineral extraction industry, so ignorant of science, so monumentally arrogant, not to realize that he is inviting apocalypse? Can it be, they ask?
The answer, alas, is yes.
10.
SHOULD IAGO BE TORTURED?
Homeland Security Ate My Speech Page 4