Waiting for the Barbarians

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1980

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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2 Summary

The Magistrate notices a young woman, of indeterminate age, begging around the settlement and realizes that she was likely one of the prisoners that Joll had brought weeks prior. The Magistrate feels sympathy for her and offers her lodging in his apartment, under the pretense that begging and vagrancy within the town is against the law. The Magistrate also offers her a job as a maid and an assistant in the kitchen at the inn. Eventually, the Magistrate becomes extremely curious about the girl’s story. She has noticeable wounds on her ankles from imprisonment, walks with the help of rudimentary crutches, and appears to have damaged eyesight. The Magistrate orders the girl to show her feet to him, which she does, and the Magistrate begins rubbing them. There is the hint of a sexual fetish here that the Magistrate implicitly recognizes.

As the girl spends more time in her new position at the inn and with the Magistrate, there is an increasing sense that he is infatuated with her story, if not with her as a person. He has an intense curiosity to know how her eyesight came to be damaged, which she finally reveals was the result of torture at the hands of Joll’s men. Hot irons were brought so close to her eyes that it damaged her vision.

Eventually, as the winter sets in, the girl becomes increasingly prepared for a sexual relationship with the Magistrate. The rubbing of the feet has proceeded into a similar kind of activity across her whole naked body. The girl assumes that she is becoming his concubine and expects that kind of treatment, but the Magistrate is unable to bring himself to consummate the sexual act with her. Instead, he seeks sex with sex workers at the inn. This distresses the girl, and she becomes confused as to the Magistrate’s motivations and behavior toward her. The Magistrate realizes that in some ways, he is treating her as a possession, which he recognizes as not all that far removed from the way Joll’s men had treated her.

New conscripts of the guard arrive and inform the Magistrate that they are there because there are rumors of a planned offensive against the town by the local nomadic communities. The Magistrate questions the veracity of this rationale and claims that there is really no reason to suspect an attack in winter. He explains to the new leader of the conscripts the how the Indigenous nomadic peoples move about through the seasons. The Magistrate and the lieutenant have a long discussion in which the latter concludes that the former is perhaps a sympathizer with the enemy because of his resistance to the idea that they have a threatening enemy.

Part 2 Analysis

There is an irony in the Magistrate’s intense curiosity in finding out what Joll and his men did to the girl. On multiple occasions, the Magistrate asks the girl what happened to her eyes, and she is not inclined to answer. Finally, after much prodding from the Magistrate, the girl says to him: “You are always asking me that question, so I will now tell you” (40). What the Magistrate fails to recognize in his behavior is that he is likewise interrogating the girl. Rather than a forceful confession brought out violently, the Magistrate pesters and pries and does not yield until he gets an answer. Without him realizing it, the girl’s initial refusal to disclose details of the incident that led to her blindness exacerbates the Magistrate's sense of entitlement. His intention is to possess the girl, and the exposure of the secret enables him to do so more thoroughly.

As the extension of the Empire that he is, the Magistrate knows that he shares at least some responsibility for the girl’s torture and the destruction of her life. Alleviating his own guilt is one possible explanation for why the Magistrate takes the girl in, offers her work, and tends to her initially. Washing and rubbing her wounded feet and ankles is a purification ritual for the Magistrate that he performs to relieve himself of his own guilt and remorse. When the ritual escalates into a quasi-sexual nature, the Magistrate is unable to bring himself to fully completing it. He cannot bring himself to have intercourse with her. Instead, he becomes frustrated at her, calls her “obstinate” and to convince himself that his lack of sexual attraction is her fault, not his, he visits with one of the sex workers in town and has intercourse. Importantly, the girl is not submissive to him. In fact, she has the power over him to shut down the conversation. When he asks her what she feels toward the men who made her blind, she says, “I am tired of talking” (41), and the conversation is over. The Magistrate recognizes that the girl's experiences have made her wise to the ways of men like him.

The Magistrate is a man prone to the pleasures of the flesh, and he speaks of this often throughout the novel. That he cannot desire the girl in a sexual way bothers him. He reflects on this throughout the chapter, and this inability of his can yield different interpretations. One way to look at it is the Magistrate sees intercourse with the girl as a further defilement of her. He is a fat old man and imposing himself on her in a sexual way would extend her degradation. The Magistrate is a man with many faults, as he readily confesses throughout the novel, but he understands the general degradation wrought on the locals by the Empire. He is not supportive of this, and his refusal to perceive the girl as a sexual object highlights how the Magistrate is different from the likes of Colonel Joll.