Summary
In the first scene, the old man is on top of a stool, leaning out the window. The old woman lights a lamp, bringing the room into clearer focus, and then pulls the man down from the chair. She tells him the water appears stagnant and that he should get away from there. He gets annoyed with her.
They talk about whether it is day or night and he leans out the window again. He comments that he wants to see the boats, but she says that it is nighttime and therefore too dark to do so. She then pulls him back once more.
The man sits on the woman's lap and she comforts him in a strangely motherly tone. She caresses him and asks if he would like to play make-believe. He calls the woman Semiramis. She then tells him to imitate the month of February, which he does by scratching his head. She then compliments him. He says he is a general factotum.
The woman asks to hear a story, as she is specifically excited about getting to the moment in which he says "then at last we arrived." He complains that he is tired of repeating the same story every night but then she finally convinces him to do it. He says they came to a garden in Paris after wandering around for an extended period of time.
The woman says that he could have been something great at one point. He describes their arrival at the garden and how a bare-bellied man dropped rice on the ground. He says that they laughed for a long time at the man and they begin to laugh together. He ends by saying they should just be content with what they have.
They then discuss his career and the man cries, wondering if he spoiled it. He devolves into baby talk and the woman consoles him as if he were a small child. They speak in sing-song tones back and forth to one another. He says he is an orphan and continues to cry. She tells him to get it together to communicate the message he is always talking about.
The man talks about his message, stating its dramatic importance and suddenly seeming resolute about delivering it to the people. She wipes his nose and reaffirms that this is his life's purpose. The man seems to regain his confidence and once more restates his importance in the world and his ability to deliver this message to the people around him.
Analysis
A major theme in these early scenes is dependence. The man relies on the woman for comfort, treating her as more of a mother figure than a wife. He appears to have a distinctly fragile sense of self and needs her constantly to validate his intelligence and importance. The strange moment in which he begins to fall into immature speech suggests that he enjoys this comfort and can only get the emotional support he needs when he takes on the role of a child. The man's portrayal shows that this kind of dependence hinges entirely upon his helplessness.
In a similar vein, the woman needs the man to speak. She asks him to repeat a story about some earlier point in their relationship. It is a story she has heard many times but still requests every single night, as its conclusion seems to provide her with some sort of mysterious comfort. She also pushes him to deliver his message by insisting that he could have had a more impressive and meaningful career. While the man treats her as a kind of mother figure, she also plays into the role he has assigned to her by emphasizing the importance of his words and intellect. Their mutual dependence on one another, and their constant need to enact fantasy roles for one another, suggests that their world is fragile and founded on illusions and falsehoods. This idea is further amplified later in the play.
This early part of the play also grounds its ideas about language. The man and woman talk a great deal, but their communication often appears to be faulty at best. The man's retelling of the garden story brings the woman happiness, but doesn't contain a particularly substantive narrative. The man reverts to the babble of a small child while trying to get the comfort of the woman. The woman emphasizes the importance of the message he may or may not possess for the world. In all of these examples, the characters are using language in a way that is essentially valueless, as they do not manage to communicate anything of importance to one another. The incoherence of their talk suggests the futility of their discussion.
The dramatic tone in which the man talks about his message also reveals his preoccupation with status. Dissatisfied with his role as a general factotum, the man feels as though he has thoroughly failed in his career, attaining little to no stature for himself. His wife supports this perception, telling him that he could have been so much more important, as she believes his intellect is more significant than he was given proper credit for. This concern with importance in a social hierarchy is made all the more strange given the emptiness of the stage that the man and woman inhabit together. They appear to be the only real people in the scene, and yet they both bemoan his lack of importance in the outside world.
Finally, the opening lines serve as foreshadowing for the events to come in the play. The man leans out the window precariously and the woman keeps trying to get him to come back inside. She describes the stagnant quality of the water, noting the mosquitos she is trying to keep out of the room. These unsettling moments suggest that both the man and his wife will come to harm and that the play, like the water, will remain very much unchanged by them at its conclusion.
