kiss of the spider woman
We’ve been kind of sleeping on the book club lately, but now it’s back with the great Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig that I was surprised hooked me in so much. Usually, I need some foreplay with a book like knowing some things about the author or what it is about to get into it, however, with this one, I went into it mostly blind and I wasn’t prepared for the writing style or setting at all.
I’ve been trying to read more nonfiction lately, but that gets dry after some time. I don’t always want to read about the topics I’m interested in, funnily enough. Least of all before bed. So having this one chosen for this month came in clutch when I realized that my TBR list was 90% nonfiction. I typically read one or two nonfiction books alongside a fiction book to keep myself engaged, but it just so happens that I get through fiction much faster which tilts my book balance in favor of nonfiction. For example, I finished this book in two days one week apart.
Puig wrote this novel as a dialogue between two inmates in an Argentine prison in Buenos Aires during the neoliberal dictatorship of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Molina, a trans woman sentenced to eight years in prison for “endangering minors” is incarcerated together with a Marxist revolutionary named Valentín. It takes a moment to identify who is who since the dialogue isn’t labeled, but you get there quickly enough. Most of their conversations are about movies that Molina finds glamorous or, as she puts it, divine, mostly in the evenings after lights out to help Valentín sleep after a long day spent studying. The retelling would often be interrupted and we would casually learn more about the characters’ understanding of the world, their problems, fears, who they are, who they left behind outside, and why they are in prison.
Later on in the book, we learn from prison reports that Molina is a well-behaved prisoner and Valentín is not. Reading that, I thought that they put them together because Molina’s good behavior could allow them to dangle before her the prospect of a pardon in exchange of slowly worming herself into Valentín and collecting intel on him for the warden. But V-Coding, as Ava points out, could also have been the goal since they have sex together towards the end, although it was all consensual. Anyway, the warden would ask to speak to her under the guise of receiving a visit from her lawyer and mother who would be the ones bringing her groceries for all Valentín knows. In reality, it’s the bribery she knows she can ask for from the warden for her services, naturally framed as tools necessary to get closer to Valentín.
V-Coding or not, Molina grows attached to Valentín, and I’d go as far as to proclaim that she never intended to rat out her cell-colleague because all the care she showed him appeared genuine until the exposé halfway through the book broke the illusion. She might’ve thought that prisoners typically are bad people and betraying them way okay, but she probably learned soon enough that this can’t be generalized. She repeatedly insists on him not telling her anything about his revolutionary activism for fear that the warden could order torturing that info out of her. Eventually and before her release—intended to find out whether she’s now working for Valentín’s group because she never relayed the warden anything—, she relents and lets him tell her how to help him from the outside which would be by relaying his sabotage plan that he came up with to his comrades. He teaches her how to detect surveillance and tells her how long she can expect to be surveilled after her release. Both of which fail her because she gets killed in a shoot-out between the secret service and the revolutionaries.
While Molina is outside, they monitor her phone calls, her movements, and her relationships—all of which is detailed in the form of a timestamped log. What cracked me up was just how stupid the secret service agents were. This is a queer person hanging out with queer people living queer culture which is obviously beneath the secret service to know of even for their own benefit. They think her inside jokes and using character names at random with Lalo is a cryptic language until they fail to decode it. In another instance, she receives a phone call to meet up with her two female friends who use female pronouns but have a pre-transition male appearance and voice. When they show up, the person on the phone the police identifies as male is present with another “man” as a companion that they expected to be a woman. What the secret service agents think isn’t that this is just a trans woman pre-transition, but that this must be a secret plot to deceive them. They are so fucking incompetent! They see a plot where there is none because they’re too incurious to consider that maybe a culture unfamiliar to them is being performed here.
Molina’s death trying to relay information to the revolutionaries was probably only possible because whoever was surveying her recognized that she longed to be with Valentín from her routine of standing at her window on the third floor in the afternoon looking in the direction where the prison is. Additionally and crucially, Molina appears to be preparing for the possibility of her death or leaving the country by withdrawing all her savings and leaving them at the notary’s for her mother which the police learn of. From that, the police deduce that her model citizen behavior was just to throw off her scent so she could fulfill her promise and hopefully see her—now—lover again. One of the exceptions to her killers’ stupidity.
After her death, the scene changes back to the prison where we learn that Valentín is being brutally tortured from his trembling one-word answers to the infirmary nurse’s questions. Against what seems to be protocol, they give him morphine and Valentín descends into a fever dream in which he mistakes Marta, his first real love, for Molina. We can tell because Marta would speak to him of things only Molina would know and say. To me, this signifies that towards the end Marta and Molina were about equal to his heart and that Molina truly meant something to him if his subconscious was merging the other woman who meant so much to him.
What a tragic love story that ended in delirium! One of the reasons why I like reading fiction a lot is seeing the world through a character’s eyes with whom I have little in common, and then filling in the blanks from my own storage of biases. I like to imagine where they are, how they look like, and how they say things. When it’s a book written as a dialogue, you get to imagine it all yourself without sifting through descriptions of their world. It’s like listening to two friends entertain each other and discuss their ridiculous experiences while you’re on mute in a voice chat. That’s exactly how reading this book felt like. I grew attached to the characters like they were my friends and then a third voice hopped onto the call to tell me how my friends died so it hurt to put the book down at the end.
Hence, I would recommend friends to read this book because it’s an easy and honestly enriching read. While it’s not sold where I live and I depended on pirated, badly formatted ebooks, I enjoyed it a lot. That’s all from me!