It is the last day of summer, and I am walking under a blue prairie sky through the grounds of a medium-security prison in Alberta, Canada. It has been 33 years since I was raped, and I am on my way to meet my attacker. Laura, who was also raped by him, has travelled with me. We spent last night at the Best Western, where wrought-iron signs dared us to “Walk on the Wild Side”.

Everyone has asked us why we want to meet him. I tell them what Laura, one of the wisest, most articulate people I’ve known, says. “Because I’d like to meet the man I’ve been in a relationship with for my entire life.”

For myself, I want to even out the power imbalance between us, to sit across the table on my terms and look into his eyes. The meeting has been arranged by Brad and Abbey, restorative justice facilitators with experience not only in Canada but in Rwanda and South Africa. Abbey has had several talks with the man, John Horace Oughton, once only known as the “paper bag rapist” on account of him covering his victims’ heads with a paper bag or with a piece of their own clothing during the attacks. She warns us about the Nirvana Outcome, which rarely happens and consists of the offender offering a heartfelt apology to his victims. Laura and I tell her that we are expecting no such thing.

As we walk through the prison, we are greeted by the chaplain, a warm, pleasant, middle-aged man with a firm handshake and gentle eyes. A couple of inmates read on a couch in the office area, and the chaplain escorts us into the chapel itself. We set up a table and five chairs, placing Oughton, due to arrive any minute, across from Laura and me. Three young corrections officers, two women and a man, walk through the chapel, making no pretence as to what brought them here: they want to get a look at Oughton’s victims. Inmates take turns looking through a small window at the far end of the room.

Finally, he enters, walking with a cane. We stand. He offers me his hand.

“I’m John. Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Carmen. Nice to meet you again.”

It is the oddest thing to say. And yet it is true. In many ways the attack taught me what I was made of, and for that, I am grateful. It is also not the first time we have met.

***



It happened on a sunny late April day in Vancouver in 1981, the first hot Sunday of the season. I was 13, my cousin Macarena a year younger. We had spent the morning slouching around the house in our pyjamas. Bored out of our skulls, we’d decided to go for a stroll. A friend of the family had given me a wraparound skirt, made of printed white cotton. I decided that this sunny day was the perfect time to wear it, with a white cotton button-up shirt and my new wedge Brazilian brown leather sandals.

After some rambling in which nothing of interest happened (in other words, no cute boys were spotted), we made our way to my school grounds, a few minutes away from our house. I was at school in Canada, my Marxist parents having fled Chile after Pinochet’s coup. My childhood had involved several years with the resistance, travelling through Peru, Bolivia and Argentina, before staying in Canada as a refugee with my extended family.

Surrounded by forest, University Hill secondary school was right next to the court house. The week before, I had attended a lunchtime presentation by Rape Relief. As the women talked about sexual assault, the causes of it – according to them, the patriarchy – and the notion that it was rarely about sex and almost always about power, all I could think was: “That will never happen to me.” The following day, a Royal Canadian mounted police officer came to the school and issued yet another warning about the paper bag rapist, who’d been attacking girls for three years. Police sketches of his face appeared on the evening news on a regular basis.

We arrived at the school grounds to find a soccer game about to begin on the field. One of the teams was Chilean. Thrilled to see our uncles, aunts and cousins, we chose to stay a while. But first, we decided to duck into the woods to smoke the Benson & Hedges Light cigarette Macarena had stolen from her father, Boris. Macarena was a diminutive yet badass 12-year-old who wore a T-shirt that proclaimed “This body runs on beer and bullshit”. Once, when she was eight, Uncle Boris had sat her down and asked, in the sternest voice he could muster: “Macarena, have you been stealing my cigarettes?” to which she responded: “No, Papi. I quit a while back.”

Now, in the woods by the school, knees wobbly from the cigarette, I let her have the last drag. We had entered the familiar trail, gone over a little mound, and stopped at the bottom. This afforded us the luxury of still being able to see the car park through the trees and spy on the cute Chilean boys getting out of their cars.

Out of nowhere, a cold feeling seized my gut. I knew it well: fear. It had gripped me many times in my life with the resistance. A twig snapped behind us. Watch out, my intuitive inner voice told me. The other voice took over. It’s the cigarette, dummy. It makes you wobbly, gives you goosebumps. That’s all. A sparrow flew up from where the twig had snapped. See? It’s just a bird.

Macarena dropped the butt on the trail. Just as I was about to grab her and hurry out of the woods, a male voice spoke calmly from behind a tree in front of me. “Put your hands on your head, turn around, and don’t look back.” Macarena’s head snapped up, eyes wide like a Cabbage Patch doll. I took her forearm so we could make a break for it.

“Don’t try to run. I have a gun and I will shoot you. Do as I say.”

There was nothing we could do. He stood between the entrance to the trail and us. Obedience was the only option.

He would always know where to find us, where to look for our family. They’d be murdered at his hands if we told anyone

Within a moment the barrel of a gun was at the base of my skull. He grabbed the back of my blouse. Kicking my calves, he ordered, “Put your hands on her shoulders and walk. If either of you turn around, I’ll shoot. You!” he growled at Macarena. “Walk! I have the gun to your sister’s head and I’ll shoot her if you don’t walk. Off the trail, into the bush. Now.”

“You have two choices,” he said. “Either you make love to me or I kill you.”

“First of all, it’s not making love, it’s rape. Second of all, if you’re asking me to choose between rape and death, I choose death,” I answered.

“It’s not rape. You were hooking. I fell into your trap. Only a hooker would wear a skirt like that and be sneaking a cigarette in the woods.” I was silent. Macarena lay face down, hands behind her head. He had pulled me away from her, after getting each of us to whisper our name, phone number and address in his ear (“If either of you changes a detail, I’ll kill you”). He would always know where to find us now, where to look for our family. They’d be murdered at his hands if we told anyone about this afternoon, he warned.

He covered my face with my white cotton blouse. I heard the song of a robin perched on the branches of the trees. I felt myself soar into the blue sky, a bald eagle coasting on the wind. After interminable moments, it spread its wings farther, and I fell back to earth with a bump.

He had gone. There was a ringing so loud I feared my eardrums would explode, and then, two feet away, Macarena’s weeping.

Carmen Aguirre’s grade nine school photo, taken when she was 13, five months after the rape by John Horace Oughton, the ‘paper bag rapist’. Photograph: courtesy of Carmen Aguirre

***

In the early spring of 1985, when I was 17, I received a phone call. After four years, Macarena and I were contacted by the police, requesting our presence at the station. I was in my final high-school year. Immediately after the attack, we had told the police what had happened and I had been taken to hospital so that they could collect physical evidence using a rape kit.

“You OK?” I whispered in Macarena’s ear when we met in the parking lot of the police station. She nodded, black eyeliner smudged around her bloodshot eyes. Inside were about 50 women and girls, sitting and standing in the waiting area, some with parents, others with husbands and babes in arms. I noticed they were all white.

A police officer informed us that we were to wait our turn to look at a lineup. “A lineup?” I asked. “Yes, you will be asked to identify the paper bag rapist.”

Macarena and I stared at each other. “You mean you caught him?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

Although I had never seen him, he lived in me. His voice, his smell, the taste of his saliva, the texture of his skin were imprinted on me, the way one’s first love might be, only in this case causing a visceral repulsion.

The question was, how could we identify him if we’d never seen him? After two hours of waiting, watching women and girls emerge with the colour drained from their faces, I stood at a window and looked at the lineup. There were 12 men, each with a number pinned to his chest. They all wore jeans, a white T-shirt, and bare feet. They were medium build, six-feet-tall white men in their 30s with light-brown hair and moustaches. In turn they walked up to the one-way mirrored window, stood about three feet away, and stared ahead. They all looked the same. I was at a total loss.

No 12 changed that. From the second he reached me, goosebumps erupted on my skin and my stomach was queasy. Grinding his jaw, his palms formed fists, then opened. My heart galloped. He walked away and joined the lineup again. I wrote 12 on my piece of paper, handed my sheet to the policeman outside and joined Macarena, chain-smoking with the others in the waiting room.

“Give me one of those,” I said, demanding a cigarette. After lighting up, I asked: “What number did you write down?”

“Ten.”

“Oh.” I exhaled, my stomach sinking. “I wrote down 12.”

“I wrote down the one with the hands that kept making fists.”

“That’s the one I wrote down. How did you know it was him?”

“Gut instinct.”

She exhaled through her nostrils, a tremor in her hand. Years later, I’d learn that between each victim they would change the numbers on the men’s chests.

On the way back home that day, a small smile graced my lips. They’d got him. They had finally got him. I didn’t wish him dead. I wished him cured. I didn’t know then that he would be diagnosed as a psychopath, a condition for which there is apparently no cure.

A month later, the Province newspaper proclaimed that the paper bag rapist had been caught and named him for the first time. The following year he was convicted on 14 counts of rape and assault.

***



I was 25 years old when my lifelong dream of being an actor was flattened. My teachers didn’t hold back: you are not taking risks, you are freezing up, you are so uncomfortable on stage that you are painful to watch.

Although I had spent time away from school going to a therapist, and attended a group therapy session at drama school for rape and sexual abuse survivors, evidently it still hadn’t done the trick. In my four terms at theatre school, I’d played Lady Macbeth, Juliet and Gertrude. I’d done Chekhov, Shepard, Beckett and Williams. All to no avail.

I emerged from the office as a newly kicked-out acting student, went home, lay down and sobbed. And then the phone rang. The director of the school said I could stay on to learn the art of playwriting and directing. Years passed before I understood the magnitude of that gift.

For the rest of my time at theatre school, I coached my peers on acting, did research for the directors I assisted, filled countless notebooks with ideas. I wrote my first play. Titled In A Land Called I Don’t Remember, it took place on a bus crossing the Andes mountains from Argentina into Chile. In it, I explored my dual identities, personified by two female characters who were the same age and sat next to each other. I discovered that taking a risk on the page was not as difficult as it was on stage. But I was able to perform in my own plays, too; when playing these parts I felt audiences respond to me.

One morning in May 1995, 10 years after Oughton was convicted, my mother phoned me. I was at my computer finishing a new play, a dark comedy called Chile Con Carne, about an eight-year-old Chilean refugee in Canada in the 70s. “Go get the Vancouver Sun,” she said. It was a front page story about Oughton. One of his victims was calling on fellow survivors to join her at his parole hearing. She’d been going to all his hearings, which happened every two years, as mandated by Canadian law. She had always wondered why she was the only victim there, and had come to realise that most victims didn’t know he was eligible for parole, or that we were allowed to attend his hearings. I decided I would go.

In May 1995, a group of victims went to Mountain Institution, where Oughton was an inmate. There were eight of us, all female, most with our parents, one with a girlfriend, another with a husband, as well as a woman about my age, 27, who, like me, was alone. A woman from the parole board walked us through the procedure and then answered questions. I learned that three of the women, Barb, Laura and Jean, had seen Oughton during the attack. They had been part of the case against him and so had been in court with him for months.

Barb, there with her husband, was the oldest of us; it was she who had written the article in the paper. She was the only known adult victim, and was also the final one, her attack leading to Oughton’s arrest. He’d been blindfolding his victims for years, but after almost a decade of evading capture, in his cockiness he hadn’t done so with her. She was raped in a park while she held her little one in her arms, gun held to the back of her infant’s head. “My baby was so scared, he scratched my neck to shreds,” she told us.

Laura, the other lone woman, a star witness at the trial, was attacked at eight years old, along with a friend the same age, in the early days of Oughton’s rampage. He’d walked through their school in a policeman’s uniform. “I had to sleep with my parents for years,” Laura said.

Like me, the remaining four had been blindfolded or had a paper bag put over their head. They had gone to the lineup and hadn’t attended the trial. For them, too, this would be the first time they’d be in the same space as Oughton since being attacked.

John Horace Oughton is thought to have carried out more than 100 attacks. He is still in prison.

The stories flew out the way one exhales after holding one’s breath for a scary amount of time. Overlapping, leaning in, we heard the penny drop: he’d done the same thing to all of us.

The woman who was there with her girlfriend said: “I was with my friend when it happened. We were being kids, that’s all.” Her words jolted me, because in them was an empathy I’d never had for myself. We were being kids, that’s all.

That’s what Macarena and I had been doing. Being kids. Yet for years, I felt that I had brought the rape on myself. For being physically developed at the age of 13, for wanting to check out guys on the day it happened, for smoking a forbidden cigarette in the woods, for being brown. But being in that room of blond women confirmed one thing in flashing neon words: it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t personal.

I had had many communities in my life – the Chilean community in exile, the underground resistance community in South America, the Latino community in Vancouver, the theatre community – but in that room I encountered a new tribe. It was the community of the paper bag rapist’s victims and their families.

The survivors’ group went through divorces, children, heartbreak, depression, disease, bankruptcy, career highs and lows

Once we’d all settled, a door near the table opened. A guard came in, and behind him a man about my mother’s age. The man who had graced the covers of so many newspapers, who had monopolised the evening news so often, whose moniker, the paper bag rapist, incited the same reaction in our area that “the bogeyman” did in other places, was here. Dressed in jeans, denim shirt and cowboy boots, he still sported a moustache.

Watching him walk towards his place at the table, where he would sit with his back to us, I was grateful that I was seated. I took note of how fear and excitement caused the same sensations in my body. I would spend my entire life trying to distinguish between the two.

The hearing lasted all of one minute, because as soon as the parole officer started his welcome speech, John Horace Oughton interrupted by yelling: “They wanted it!” He then leapt up, ran towards us, brushed by our knees, and dashed through the door from which we had come in, two guards in hot pursuit.

Parole was denied, and the request was made that he be cuffed at the wrists and ankles at subsequent hearings.

We continued going to the hearings every two years, and saw him denied parole more than 15 times. Controlling, attention-seeking behaviour on Oughton’s part became expected, from refusing to show up at the last minute while we all waited in the next room, to his insistence that “They wanted it. I am their victim.”

The survivors’ group went through divorces, children, heartbreak, depression, disease, bankruptcy, career highs and lows. I had a short-lived marriage, lived in Los Angeles, and moved back to Vancouver.

I wrote a number of plays, including one about the attack, called The Trigger. Victims who’d never gone to the parole hearings came when it premiered, and waited to speak to me after the show. I played the rapist and the main victim. The play ended with a monologue in which “Carmen” imagined the rapist having a sudden rush of feelings: “All his feelings of remorse, compassion, sadness, grief, anguish, devastation and bone-crushing pain come up like a flood. And his heart explodes.”

Carmen (second left), her sister Ale (left), and their parents, in San Francisco, December 1974. The family fled from Chile following Pinochet’s coup. Photograph: courtesy of Carmen Aguirre

Two years ago, soon after seeing Oughton denied parole for the 14th time, Laura and I requested to meet him face to face. We were told he was open to it from the beginning, but plans stalled when he had two heart attacks in June. I immediately made the connection with the end of my play. Finally, in late summer, a date was set.

As we approach the prison, the sun lights up the willow trees lining a path to our right. An inmate is mowing the lawn.

“The sound of a lawn mower is a trigger for me,” Laura says, swallowing. “My father was mowing the lawn when I got home after the assault.”

“The sound of birds is a trigger for me, but in a good sense.” I say. “There was a robin singing in the branches above me right after the rape, and it brought me peace and comfort.”

Moments later we are sitting opposite him. He has beads on his right wrist, a gold-coloured watch on his left, and a red string around his neck. His white hair is combed back, his white moustache trimmed. “May I offer you snacks? Cheezies? Crackers? Root beer? It’s part of my Buddhist practice to make an offering,” he says.

We let him talk, get it out of his system. I notice how calm he seems, sitting still, the cane laid out on the table in front of him. “I’m learning compassion,” he says.

Eventually, Brad, the facilitator, steers the meeting towards a conversation as opposed to a monologue. Laura talks to him about her attack, and the effect it had on her and her parents. To my surprise, he seems affected by her story, his eyes welling up. But he says he remembers none of it.

When Oughton agreed to the encounter, his only reluctance had centred around my presence. According to him, I was not his victim. He had been charged with 18 offences and convicted of 14. Laura was one of the latter. I was in neither the former nor the latter group, because the physical evidence collected after my rape was never given to the police. So he stood steadfast: “She is not my victim.”

There was some truth to this: there was so much more to my identity than being a victim. I tell him I understand that he denies being my attacker, that I nonetheless believe he was, and that we can agree to disagree on that. And then I tell him about the effect the rape had on Macarena, my parents, my siblings, my friends. And I say that causes me the most pain. I don’t feel comfortable going into my intimate life, the effect it has had on me and my relationships.

“You are not my victim,” he challenges, looking me straight in the eye.

I inhale and keep my eyes on his. “You are not my victim because I don’t remember you and because you are not white. All my victims are white,” he says.

“I remember your voice,” I counter firmly.

“What were you wearing?”

“A white wraparound skirt, a white cotton blouse, and brown sandals.”

“No. I don’t remember. There were hundreds. I don’t remember.”

He starts rocking back and forth a little, shaking his head, breathing hard, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. I plough forward.

I talk about the gun, the psychological torture, the threat that he’d kill my family. I can see his T-shirt trembling, his face flushing, his eyes getting wet again. It is shocking to see him moved.

“You say I did that to you?” he asks in a barely audible voice.

“Yes.”

“These are stories I hear in group... I blindfolded you with your shirt?”

“Yes.”

“Did I ask you to do it or did you do it yourself?”

“You asked me to do it while you held the gun to my head.”

“I don’t own a gun. I own a rifle.”

“You told me it was a gun. It could have been a stick for all I know – I never saw it.”

“And I held it to your head while you tied the shirt around your face?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now that rings a bell.”

It was more than I expected from him. I nod and exhale.

For a fleeting moment the Nirvana Outcome seems within reach.

“We would like you to apologise for what you did to us,” Laura says.

“I can’t give you that. I can’t because I don’t remember any of it. But I understand the concept of compassion for my victims. Not viscerally, but cerebrally.”

“There’s a need for genuine remorse, John,” Brad pushes.

He becomes agitated again, rocking harder, shaking his head with more force, his voice tight. “No. I don’t feel that. I can’t offer that. How can I feel remorse over something I don’t remember? But I’m learning compassion.”

We nod and decide that what he is offering is enough. It is time to leave. In parting, I say my piece.

“John, I have spent many years pondering why you did what you did to me. And I know why. It was to teach me compassion. Even in the moment, during the actual attack, I could feel your pain. I could feel it” – I patted my heart – “right here. And so I want to thank you.”

As we leave, I become aware of dozens of singing birds that have taken over the tree outside the chapel, and their noise overpowers me. My heart expands, and I think of the ending of The Trigger again. It wasn’t his heart that exploded from feeling too much, it was mine •

• This is an edited extract from Mexican Hooker #1: And My Other Roles Since The Revolution, by Carmen Aguirre, published by Granta on 14 April at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 684. Carmen Aguirre will be appearing at Sydney Writers Festival, which opens on 18 May