Snake

The Snake is both a real animal that Ingrid Bauer kills during an encounter with Sofia Papastergiadis and a recurring image associated with Ingrid’s embroidery and desire. Its sudden appearance turns a private room into a scene of danger; later, Sofia understands the snake’s violence as an emblem of Ingrid’s wish to sever her desire, not Sofia herself.

The Encounter at Ingrid’s Country House

After showering, Ingrid and Sofia sense that something is wrong before they see the threat. A blue snake slips from a basket of kindling beside the fire and crosses the stone floor toward the window. The delay between their apprehension and the animal’s appearance makes danger felt before it can be named; when Ingrid identifies it, she repeats the name in Spanish, making the creature unmistakably present in the room.

Ingrid takes a small axe from a log and approaches the snake cautiously, leaving wet footprints on the stone. She strikes its head, but the severed body continues to writhe in two parts. The killing does not immediately settle the danger for Sofia: she remains unsure that the snake is dead, even as Ingrid turns it over to reveal its white underside. Ingrid’s calm, controlled action contrasts with Sofia’s trembling, while the animal’s continued movement makes the apparent solution disturbingly incomplete.

Desire, Violence, and the Embroidered Images

Sofia’s fear does not end when Ingrid strikes the snake. Still unconvinced that it is dead, Sofia tells Ingrid to move away, but Ingrid wants her to come closer. Sofia drinks from Matthew’s bottle of wine; its taste of crushed plums and bay leaves, and the purple stain it leaves on her lips, accompany her approach. She kisses Ingrid while circling her waist with one arm, and uses the other to take the axe from Ingrid’s fingers. The moment joins intimacy to danger without resolving either: Sofia has been frightened of Ingrid since they met, yet moves toward her, and the gesture that brings them together also disarms her.

They dress and leave as if the dead snake were simply another object in the room. The scene’s residue remains sharply material: the soft sheets, sewing machines and fabrics, fig bread, aromatic wine, wet footprints on the stone floor, and the blue body in two pieces while the shower continues to drip. The composure of their departure does not erase what has happened; it places violence among the domestic and handmade things that surround Ingrid, then carries the encounter into the next scene, where Leonardo waits by the car.

The snake also belongs to a set of images Sofia associates with Ingrid’s embroidery. Remembering what Ingrid told her surfaces in her mind while she embroiders, Sofia recalls three of them together: a snake, a star, and a cigar. The grouping matters against Sofia’s thoughts about women’s prescribed roles: she does not want to be the girl who must lament at funerals, but wants to smoke and exhale like a volcano or a monster. In that juxtaposition, the snake is not only a creature to fear or kill; it sits among images through which Ingrid’s private imaginative life becomes legible to Sofia.

Later, Sofia understands that Ingrid did not literally want to behead her. She interprets the threat as Ingrid wanting to behead her own desire for Sofia, a desire that felt monstrous to Ingrid; Ingrid had made Sofia into the monster she believed herself to be. Sofia’s retrospective understanding gives the animal’s severed body a second meaning, without undoing its physical reality in the room. The snake’s appearance, Ingrid’s violence toward it, and Sofia’s later recognition connect the scene’s bodily danger to a desire that Ingrid has watched, concealed, and experienced as frightening.

The Snake and the Hidden Gaze

Sofia Papastergiadis’s later understanding shifts attention from the snake as a visible threat to the desire Ingrid Bauer had kept concealed. Ingrid had not literally wanted to behead Sofia; Sofia recognizes that Ingrid wanted to sever her own desire, which she experienced as monstrous. In this reading, the animal’s divided body does not simply stand for a wish to harm Sofia: it gives physical form to a desire Ingrid wanted to cut away from herself.

Sofia also understands Ingrid as a voyeur of her own desire, watching and waiting in secret. She recalls Ingrid as having lurked near her throughout the summer, silent and still, while her presence persisted in Sofia’s thoughts as a voice, a glimpse of someone hiding, and the sound of breathing. The snake’s sudden visibility thus resonates with a desire that had long remained out of sight but had not been absent. Sofia’s recognition does not cancel the encounter’s physical danger; it reframes that danger as part of Ingrid’s struggle with a desire she had projected onto Sofia as monstrosity.

A Creature in a Network of Images

The snake’s significance depends on its company as much as on its own violence. When Sofia recalls Ingrid’s embroidery, it appears beside a star and a cigar, a compact set of images that shifts the creature from the stone floor into a private vocabulary of thought. The surrounding reflection turns to the temple of Athena and to the gendered division of ancient Greek life: women and girls were expected to mourn aloud, while men stood back. Against that prescribed role, Sofia imagines the force of smoking and exhaling like a volcano, refusing to be confined to lament. The snake therefore shares a charged imaginative space with signs of power and danger, rather than carrying a single fixed meaning. Its bodily reality remains intact, but the later recognition that Ingrid feared her own desire gives the image an inward dimension: what appears monstrous is also something Ingrid cannot comfortably claim as her own.