○ Interlude 3: Keystone

The central segment of Gunslinger Girl is a connecting bridge between two halves, after the introductions and before the final resolution.  It serves then as a preparation, developing the main heroine and bringing certain truths into sharp focus in a way that can no longer be ignored.

Henrietta Dreaming

Henrietta's passion is growing.  While she was always fervent and loyal, her dream deepens as she aspires to be more than Jose's subordinate, uniting the two halves of her world.

It begins with Henrietta's character as a young girl and the romantic feelings that have been developing inside of her.  Such an impulse causes her to not merely be content with following Jose's orders; with love filling her heart, she wants to be better for him.  He doesn't approve of her conditioning, but it too plays a part, and its alignment assures her that her feelings cannot be wrong.  For Bianchi to suggest she control her emotions is ludicrous and easily disregarded.

Such love calls out for reciprocation, and the culmination of this line of thought is the marriage of her two greatest ambitions: to fulfill her purpose to Jose while achieving romantic harmony for herself.  This is how the girl and the cyborg can agree, reciprocally using the promptings of one to further the other; as his female half she can both support and be cherished, bound and forever assured of his love.  It is the ultimate blissful state she can imagine.

Turning outward, Henrietta has looked for examples to utilize.  Through reading magazines, watching movies, and observing other couples at a distance, she seeks to construct a vision of the perfect romantic relationship.  That way she can learn to be an ideal female for him, and then, along with her dutiful service, Jose will naturally see her as worthy.  This quest dominates her psyche, and its importance cannot be overstated.

However, there are hurdles in the way of this dream, not the least of which is Jose himself.  He envisions her as a normal girl for reasons that are divorced from reality.  And, of course, he does not view Henrietta as a romantic prospect.  Why doesn't Henrietta see this?  The answer lies in her misapprehension of his gifts and outings.

Despite what he says to Enzo, they are not wages.  Jose most certainly treats her for personal reasons, just not the ones Henrietta wants.  More worryingly, not the ones Henrietta understands either.  In attempting to cover up her unnaturalness and buy happiness, he has once again failed to explain himself.

Unable to pierce the vagaries of his behavior, and prompted by her love, she can only come to one conclusion: these must be signs of endearment.  How else can she explain why she receives so many lavish rewards from her trainer compared to the other girls who perform their duties just as well?

It is this interpretation, that these gifts are representative of Jose's love in return, which makes them so valuable and allows Henrietta to believe her dream is possible.  But if he feels the same, why doesn't he just show it?  It must be that he is guiding her, helping her find happiness in his own mysterious way.  Then when she is good enough he will let her know openly how much he loves her.

Henrietta Awakening

Throughout the series, Henrietta's emphasis on repressing herself in the service of Jose, never questioning his commands or the feasibility of her quixotic quest, has given the impression that she is completely naive, perhaps even a bit dull.  Just an adorable doll full of unrealistic aspirations, blissfully oblivious of the reality around it.

In her conversation with Bianchi these assumptions are shown to no longer be true.  Far from being a docile and easily-misled puppet, Henrietta demonstrates a keen awareness of her world.  She doesn't harbor any illusions about the SWA and immediately sees through the front that Bianchi presents.  That he believes sending Ferro away would trick her shows how greatly she is being underestimated.

Henrietta is also beginning to exhibit a new behavior: deception.  While she may have told minor falsehoods before, this faculty is now under her conscious control.  She understands what these people want to hear, what she desires for herself, and how to omit and misdirect the evidence to achieve it.  Even more interestingly, she has learned that she can deceive Jose as well, stealing a piece of her yet-undeserved dream on the Spanish Steps.  This is a significant level of psychological acumen, and a flag for the mental maturation that is occurring within.

However, she isn't a proficient liar and Bianchi can quickly see through her attempts.  So it would not be unreasonable to assume that her capacity to grasp the people around her has only developed recently, a new skill that she is still exploring and practicing.  Henrietta wasn't foolish before; she was a child figuring it all out with a natural blind spot toward the object of her worship.

More ominously, Henrietta is not as happy as appearances would indicate either.  Underneath the anxiety has been pooling, with each failure to satisfy Jose feeding into a single reservoir that has gotten larger with time.  It has become so dire that she is beginning to exhibit physical symptoms, her body frantically signalling that all is not right with its master.

What is occurring is the very beliefs that sustained her are now running in reverse.  If Jose asks and she cannot achieve, then it is her fault.  Repeated enough times she begins to suspect that it is not her actions which come up short, but she herself.  Her entire existence is predicated on being able to execute his will, and it is with a profound unease that she contemplates the possibility that she may not be enough.

At the end of the conversation with Bianchi, her new awareness turned back on itself.  Learning to keenly observe others, she now saw herself clearly for the first time and recognized the indisputable signs of distress.  Up until that moment she believed she was happy, as serving Jose it was impossible to be otherwise.  The realization that she is not is the first unresolvable crack to appear in her world.

Marco:

Despite expectations, Pasta is not Angelica's episode.  It is Marco's, for he is the prince of the Pasta Kingdom, and the only handler other than Jose who receives such attention.  It is a cautionary tale of how even good men are not immune to this place, and that their fall is all the more appalling for the savage apathy that results.

"Once upon a time, there was a kingdom of pasta.  In this kingdom there lived a prince who loved pasta and he ate pasta everyday.  But there was only one fork in the whole kingdom, so the prince always had to eat pasta alone."

In the beginning Marco was genuine.  He had lived a good life, full of fortune; this is not an indictment against his own hard work, but merely that he had the health, faculties, and circumstance to make the most of his character.  This too he had some grasp of, if not consciously then at least in the generous goodwill to wish he could help others using his comparative riches.  To have only one fork was a tragedy for everybody, including the prince.

It is important to not misconstrue this as pride.  He simply knew he was a good man, for it was true.  That he had attracted the gentle Patrizia to his side bears witness to his purity; this is not a story of hidden evil being revealed.  Similarly, he was used to success following his actions; while minor problems had occurred, he was confident that he could persevere.  Life was under his control.

Once ensnared at the agency, Marco was faced with a conundrum: he was a good man working for an evil organization.  It was the same problem Jose, Hilshire, and Raballo would eventually struggle with.  Yet here Marco was shielded, his exceptional innocence preserved, for Section Two was not operational yet; it allowed him to ignore the future under the guise of helping a broken, abandoned girl recover.  A good man wouldn't leave her.

But the awareness that he was furthering evil was never far away, and it began to work its inevitable moral decay; knowing where a path leads, but refusing to face it, in time wears down any capacity to choose otherwise.  He now required evidence that he was a good man to counteract the accusations of his conscience.  In this he could point to Angelica, the care he had given her and how much she loved him back for it.  This was irrefutable.

"The prince is the only one who is allowed to eat pasta in the Pasta Kingdom.  That's why there's only one fork, and there's only one person who can call themselves 'Pasta.'"

More ominously, the message of his story began to change.  Good men deserve good lives, after all.  Rather than a lamentable truth that so many went without, his bounty was now unassailable proof of his special position and merits.  Subtle resentment of the misfortunes he had once overlooked began to creep in.

What finally arrested him was Angelica's first mission.  Forced suddenly down to reality he could not avoid the fact that this had always been about preparing her to kill.  His precious evidence that he was helping her now rebounded as an indictment of his misdeeds, for she had trusted him and this is where he had led her.  Then when her memory began to fade his failure was complete.  He had not saved her, and his rationalizations now accused him instead.

However, he could not abandon being special.  But if he was no longer exceptionally fortunate, then what was he?  He was exceptionally unfortunate, for life had robbed him of his birthright, his kind deeds rewarded with sorrow, isolation, and the loss of his precious girl.  Surely such horrific consequences couldn't follow from what he had done, so they must be the product of somebody else's malign intent or the impersonal injustice of the world.

With this final excuse, Marco could collapse into an enforced frantic apathy.  It is a desperate last-ditch attempt to save his own self-image.  If this had happened in spite of his efforts, if he really didn't have control of the outcome, then everything he had done was futile.  Moreover, nothing was his fault.  So absolved, he was free to wallow in his own victimhood.

Marco now enshrines his sorrow.  Refusing to take responsibility, he yet laments Angelica's fate, the depth of his feelings confirming his goodness to himself.  It is a paradoxical form of self-praise, and he continually indulges in deepening his misery to prove it.  He has become fully blind to his girl, treating her as dead rather than living because he can no longer tolerate her presence; he needs her memory to feel sorrowful, not she herself.

Yet in order to utilize this narrative he pays a terrible price.  His conscience has abandoned him and he can find no peace, knowing that every silent moment awaits him with accusations anew.  Marco is left constantly looking for a place to hide from himself, separating further and further from the man he once was.

Angelica

Angelica is the last of the primary girls, but she is a strange addition.  Introduced late, she has only had a minimal presence, flitting in like a wraith for Orione, only to vanish until now.  Even within "her" episode she is hardly seen.  There is a reason for this: Angelica is not a character but an archetype for the cyborgs.

She is their progenitor, the original myth upon which the other "side stories" were fashioned.  As the immaculate master copy she exemplifies the goodness, sincerity, and vulnerability that has been seen to lie at the heart of the other girls.  Her love in particular contains a pure quality, an unadulterated aspect that survives even the most brutal of treatment.  She is a testament to how resilient these feelings are, and an indication that they do not vanish when the handler fails.

It is to achieve this clarity that her own personality is minimal; unburdened by confounding details, she lets the light through in a way that can be obscured by the individuality of the others.  The result is the knowledge that she and all the girls deserve to be cherished and protected.  That they are not is a breathtaking tragedy.

Keystone

Angelica, by condensing the stories of the cyborgs, performs one more service.  While the truth was always there, that the implants were permanent and they would live short and troubled lives, Pasta indelibly pulls the curtain from the future.  This is not merely a possibility, it is fate.

Wheelchair-bound and ignored, creaking mournfully through the agency, just as Angelica reflected their beginnings so too does she prophesy their end.  Having come to see each of these girls as vibrant and invaluable beings, we must admit that they will be gone soon.  Their memories will vanish, their bodies malfunction, and their trainers... what will their trainers do?

Jose, who began as a sympathetic character, is faltering.  He cared for his girl, and even though he has become entangled in himself, he was still burdened by the knowledge that he could do better.  It gave us hope that, having been given a taste of what it's like to truly care for Henrietta rather than himself, this man would improve and overcome his weaknesses.  Be the hero of the story and succeed in Raballo's stead.

But just as Angelica dispelled any illusions for the girls, so Marco does the same for Jose.  Jose has not acted genuinely since Orione, and there is no guarantee that he will pull out of his descent.  The chilling similarity between the two men gives us, and him, a worrisome glimpse of where this current trajectory will lead.

This is the keystone of the tragedy: what is happening would seem preventable, yet about it clings an air of inevitability.  Everybody knows what the future will bring, and how terrible it will be, and yet it comes nonetheless.  How much longer will Henrietta have to wait before Jose comes for her?  She has little time to spare.

←Episode 8

Episode 9→