“I have not seen the capital since I was a young man” (2).
The simple, important quote at the opening of the novel shows that at his outpost, the magistrate has been out of touch—cut off from the evolution of colonial government, in particular the development of the Third Bureau. The magistrate lives close to the people in his outpost. This is revealed in his earliest conversation with Colonel Joll, when he suggests allowing a native to take him and Joll fishing. This ignorance of Joll's hatred of the native people, and this distance from “the capital,” is important because it sets him apart from Joll and defines his naivety in the face of the new Empire.
“ ‘A certain tone enters the voice of a man who is telling the truth. Training and experience teach us to recognize that tone” (4).
This is the place where the magistrate has asked Joll about torture. Joll has just tortured the first two prisoners at the outpost. In the most direct discourse between the two men on the topic of torture, the magistrate argues with Joll over his claim to be able to hear the tone of truth. As the magistrate surmises, the tone that Joll speaks of is the tone of someone in pain. “Truth,” for Joll, is the sound of suffering.
“I never wished to be drawn into this…I did not mean to get embroiled in this. I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out my days on the lazy frontier, waiting to retire….I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times” (8).
This quote encapsulates the magistrate's state of denial, his avoidance of the violent facts of his Empire, and his desire to disassociate himself from any responsibility as a beneficiary of the Empire's evils. The quote reflects the broader appeal of those preferring to be removed from, and ignorant of, the violence that may facilitate their life. The quote is a literal plea of innocence, hearkening the question of guilt by association.
“Looking at him I wonder how he felt the very first time: did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that instant he was trespassing into the forbidden? I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men” (12).
After the first series of tortures in which Joll has gone into the barracks with the prisoners for a week, the magistrate contemplates Joll’s ability to return to his “civilized” life after committing such sadistic acts. His query speaks to that.
“The distance between myself and her torturers, I realize, is negligible” (27).
The magistrate’s first view of how the nomad girl perceives him is in association with Joll. This deeply upsets him, and it sets the tone for his relationship with her. He begins by trying to mark a difference between himself and Joll. He wants her to feel safe and comforted. Eventually though, this will wear off and he will come to torture her in a different way, through his disgust for her maimed body. He will partake in a new stage of the torture when he refuses her any affection, while she weeps in his bed and feels herself hideous and he does nothing to ease her pain. Instead he will put her out of his room.
“It’s been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on this girl’s body are understood, I cannot let go of her…” (31).
The strange nature of the magistrate’s obsession with the nomad girl is expressed in this quote. He is on a mission to “understand” the girl’s suffering, as though this can be done by studying her scars closely enough. The quote reveals the empirical nature of his imagination—or the limits of his imagination. He intends to know an intimate experience of trauma by exterior, objective observation.
"How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman’s body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!” (44).
In this quote, the magistrate is struggling with the problem of his lack of attraction for the nomad girl. He is upset that he feels repulsed by her, and he fears that this repulsion associates him with the Joll and the Empire. In this way, his desire to see the girl as beautiful is also a desire to differentiate himself from the torturers.
“The thought of the strange ecstasies I have approached through the medium of her incomplete body fills me with dry revulsion as if I had spent nights copulating with a dummy of straw and leather. What could I ever have seen in her?” (47)
The magistrate's disgust for the nomad woman is shown here to be a projection of his disgust with himself. His previous attraction to her seems perverse to him—as though it was perhaps related to the attraction of a torturer for their victim’s “truth.” This isn’t to say that his torture of her isn’t redoubled by his revulsion. But as we see here, an important part of what disgusts him is his own previous fascination and motive.
"However kindly she may be treated by her own people, she will never be courted and married in the normal way; she is marked for life as the property of a stranger, and no one will approach her save in the the spirit of lugubrious sensual pity that she detected and rejected in me. No wonder she fell asleep so often, no wonder she was happier peeling vegetables than in my bed!" (135).
Here the magistrate meditates on the traditional social impact of rape and how it bears out in personal relations. The woman is considered property. If she has been raped she becomes defiled property. The scars of the nomad woman's torture reveal that she has been handled by other men. In this way, as the magistrate knows, she is considered damaged. None of this has do with feelings of the woman herself, how she experienced the trauma of violation, and how she may hope to recover. All of it is projection of those who are socialized to consider her violation a defilement. She has been "ruined" by being touched. As the magistrate notices though, she herself does not want to be pitied. Her own feelings are different than those who perceive her.
"No one can accept that the imperial army has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and cannot read or write" (143).
At the end of the novel, when the imperial army is scattered, the magistrate speaks the mind of the people who have believed in the power of their Empire because it is what they identify with. The idea that people of a nomadic culture might fight and defend their own way of life and push back against the colonizer, is outrageous to the mind of the imperial subject who has fallen for the lines of their militant leaders.
