The Kiss of the Spider Woman

The Kiss of the Spider Woman Summary | Chapter 1 Summary

In Chapter 1, we are privy to the conversation of two men, Molina and Valentin. The entire chapter is told in dialogue between the two. The author, Manuel Puig, indicates dialogue with a dash before each speaker's words, rather than with the more conventional quotation marks.

At first we don't know where the two men are. But little by little, bits of their conversation lead us to believe they are in prison. For example, Molina mentions getting water when "they" let him out of the john. Valentin remarks about when "they" opened the doors to the showers.

Also, it comes through as Molina and Valentin talk that Molina is homosexual. Most of the dialogue consists of Molina telling Valentin about a movie, or "picture" that he saw. This creates a story within a story. In the movie, a woman named Irena is at a zoo drawing pictures of a black panther. A man comes up behind her, distracts her, and her drawing starts to blow away. The man and the woman strike up a conversation after he retrieves the drawing for her. She is from the Carpathians. The man tries to ask her out, and she tells him she'll be in the same spot tomorrow.

The next day, the man, who is an architect with a female assistant who secretly loves him, leaves his office to go back to the zoo. But Irena isn't there. By sheer chance, a few days later he passes by an art gallery, and she just happens to be there showing her work—all of it drawings of panthers.

The man goes in, and the two leave the gallery to go out to lunch. Afterward, they go to do an errand; the man is buying a present for his assistant. They walk into a bird shop and immediately all the birds go crazy, as if a wild animal is threatening them. She hurries out of the shop.

They fall in love, but she is very mysterious and will not let him kiss her. One night, they're out to dinner, and another woman, a very catlike woman, approaches them and says something in a strange language to Irena. Irena becomes very upset by whatever the woman said. They go to his apartment, and she tells him of a legend from her mountain village in which the devil makes a pact with a woman who is afraid of being killed by wild animals. The devil protects her, and then the woman had a daughter with a face like a cat. According to Irena, women still have panther children in that village. For some reason, if a man kisses these women, they turn into savage beasts.

The man asks Irena if she would like to stay in his apartment forever, to marry him. She says yes. But they cannot consummate their marriage at first, because she is wary of having him kiss her. Eventually, she agrees to go to a psychiatrist to work on this problem. She goes once, but never goes back, even though her husband thinks she does. She goes to the zoo instead and looks at the black panthers.

The man gets tired of not being able to be intimate with his wife, and the assistant who still loves him finds out. The husband works late a lot, not because he wants to cheat on his wife, but because it is too painful for him to go home and face her. One night, Irena makes a lovely dinner for him, but he is at a bar with the assistant. Irena goes looking for him, sees them together and follows the assistant as she walks home afterward. The assistant hears Irena's shoes making a sound on the sidewalk and gets nervous about being followed. But soon, the sound is gone, and in its place is the sound of catlike feet not on the sidewalk but in the bushes. That is where Molina stops telling the story for now, and the end of Chapter 1.