The Oppression of Objects

Of greatest importance this evening, above even happiness – an illusory phenomenon to which no one is entitled, least of all herself, thinks Hortensia– is an achievement of balance. As in a simple pendulum, the collective body of the self and the other oscillates between complements. It is not movement one seeks to control, Hortensia thinks, but simply its velocity.

As a girl, Hortensia had, as per course for cultured girls her age, taken painting lessons. All the girls in the academy had adored a particular male teacher who taught oil. As a collective body, they were strident in their effort to please him, for he was both quite brilliant as well as demanding. His critiques of their paintings were always thorough, often harsh but without needless cruelty, and so well articulated, Hortensia recalled, as to inspire awe. Memories from these lessons always provoked some degree of pain, sharp and surprising like a thorn. Hortensia felt the professor never was particularly impressed by her paintings — there was always some flaw or lack of precision that annoyed him. After a critique, though she understood he had been speaking of her oil technique, she felt compelled to analyze her character and moral piety for several hours, feeling, instinctively, that this would improve her abilities as an artist. But critique after critique, she always seemed to fall short of his visions for her paintings, and she felt increasingly despairing. She sensed that, a space that in his favorite students was filled with relished accomplishment, in herself was occupied by anxiety alone.

One day, after the class had ended and the professor had left, Hortensia had been, in what can only have been a collective effort, been compelled to sing a song before the other girls. Someone had told her to sing, and because she couldn’t find a reason why she shouldn’t, she sang it, in a voice clear and high, as instructed to do, though she did not know what she sang or for what purpose. After, at the park, she had cried to her boyfriend Nacho about the event, the horrid girls, mean as spiders, and he had comforted her with kisses.

She gazed now at Vicenzo, admiring his strong, masculine profile, his boyish, disheveled hair, not unlike that of her poor Nachito, killed in a gang war two years after Hortensia sang. She loved Vicenzo, she thought, for this lightness of being, an infectious naïveté as she understood it, that she felt warped her sense of reality. This sort of shield he provided for her from the outside world made Hortensia less interested — or, in her own words — less prepared, for socializing; in fact, she simply preferred the impenetrability of their private experience, in which time and space were unfixed, to society’s rigid confines and structures. She preferred the open field of the relationship, a space in which she could act and be acted upon without threat of injury or accident. Even when he agitated her and she felt unhappy, she knew it to be a tolerable agitation, one which she could manage, organize, and distribute within herself.

  Light passes over the seated figures and lazes upon the tile floor without shame nor conceit. The pond cypress through the window meets the woman’s gaze: its lime leaves eager to mitigate her solemnity, its knees dotted by the serene lavender of hyacinths.  Hortensia moves her eyes from the window to a glass on the table. She notes her unpainted face, trepidly aging, as though not to offend her – the fullness of her lips, on which she always relied for affection, not yet shriveled. A blue heron lacerates the symbiosis of the foliage, its call a reminder of the day’s mutability.

Like every other day, Hortensia had fastened the locket around her neck upon waking, an action as involuntary, she knows, as the beating of her heart. The coolness of its silver against her skin soothes her even as it reminds her of her essential confinement. She hadn’t liked it when Vicenzo gave it to her. A heart-shaped locket — how juvenile, she’d thought. But this dismissal, she now knew, masked a fear of what would become, as she understood it, the oppression of objects. His expectation that she wear it, and her obedience, wasn’t simply a matter of decorum, but of necessity. She watched it now in the mirror as though watching a spider, all too aware of its divine intelligence. The locket, she knows, envelops them; thirty-five millimeters in diameter against her skin, its field expands much beyond their home, encapsulating her and Vicenzo’s shared past and future. Without it, they do not exist.

Hortensia rises and moves from the table into the kitchen, as though drawn by a punctual cord. Clean, blue tile countertops greet her; upon them the basket of fruit picked this morning: purple, pink, and orange spheres, sharp enough in focus to appear almost cruel, Hortensia thinks. After a moment: plum. Nectarine.

She dices a papaya into sixths.

Before setting down the knife, her eye catches on a violently saturated hue in her peripheral vision and the phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Hortensia. It’s Claudia.”

Hortensia’s cousin, Claudia, could be expected to call on a Sunday. As teenagers, the two had spent much time together, and though close, were often in vicious rivalry. When Claudia birthed a son at fifteen, Hortensia felt an inexplicable loss – that something not just of Claudia, but herself, was gone forever. With the birth of Alejandro, Hortensia felt she lost a certain psychic power over Claudia, that her aura had been absorbed to such an extent by her son that the two, together, became spiritually omnipotent. Hortensia could never reveal to Claudia how excluded she felt from this partnership. As a result, as adults, while the two women live in the same barrio in Mexico City, each maintain almost entirely distinct lives. The urge to harm is only assuaged, for both in equal part, by knowing next to nothing about the other’s emotional experience. Besides formalities, they disclose to one another only external occurrences, because if one experienced an emotion so strong or an internal state so foreign that it was incomprehensible to the other, jealousy could quickly turn to rage.

She was calling, she said, to inform Hortensia of Alejandro’s upcoming wedding. The wedding would be held at the Church of San Bernardo this Saturday, the fifteenth, and she would have called sooner, or sent an invitation, of course, but everything has been incredibly hectic, of course, although she is managing quite well. She wanted to know how Hortensia was managing and was pleased to know how well she was, and said she would be very pleased if Hortensia and Vicenzo would be in attendance of the ceremony, although she would understand if this proved an unsurmountable impossibility, given the short notice, and given Hortensia’s aversion to large social gatherings.

It was not so much that Hortensia was averse to socializing, Hortensia disclosed to Claudia, so much as it was that she believed Vicenzo would fear it might “upset her equilibrium” in some sense. Claudia knew, without Hortensia having to say, that she did not wish to see Alejandro be wed, and that Claudia very much so wanted her to see it. Being his mother, Claudia could not avoid attending the wedding, and did not believe, Hortensia assumed, that Hortensia deserved to be spared the same anguish. Still, Hortensia thought she might get away with it: she often used Vicenzo as a weapon against Claudia, knowing that invoked in her an insecurity, that of her estrangement from Andres. But something in her own speech, its hurriedness or pitch, she can only conclude, overrode this defeat in favor of performing a kind of torture on Hortensia, Vicenzo, or even her son and herself. Any pain inflicted might be satisfactory for each, Hortensia thought, knowing how difficult it can be to make an Event out of anything at all. Claudia’s response was delivered with such self-possession and force that it allowed for no argument:

“Alejandro and I will stop by this evening.”

Hortensia, feeling a need to wield some authority without acknowledging her coercion in the creation of this futurity, replied: “Not before seven.”

Hanging up the phone, Hortensia decides she must carry on the with the day as usual. She will not cook anything particularly elaborate or expend any energy on thoughts about any matter at all. Without a word to Vicenzo about the conversation, she exits the kitchen through the sliding glass door to accompany the fly trap on the back patio.

The Venus fly trap: another gift from Vicenzo, presented to her five years into their marriage, and six and a half after the presentation of the locket, Hortensia calculated. He had bought it for her as a birthday present and she had feigned surprise, knowing, of course, his penchant for oddities, and also for the way in which he loved her without being able to help trying to insult her, though only ever through metaphor, and while seeming often as perplexed by his changing attitudes toward her as she is accustomed to them. A Venus fly trap, she’d imagined he’d thought, is a perfect symbol and a perfect purchase for my wife.

Hortensia respects the stoicism of the plant in its solitude. She admires its fuchsia mouth, its beauty inherently vicious and somehow sublime. She waters the plant, as Vicenzo had reminded her to do. The soil must be completely saturated, she remembers. She watches the plant subsume a visiting arachnid.


 After first receiving the plant, she had watched the opening and closing of the trap in a sort of involuntary amusement.

“How does it work?” She’d asked, allowing the plant to trap the tip of her finger to charm her husband.

“Scientists believe that the touch of tiny hairs on the leaves activates ion channels, prompting the plant to subsume its prey.”

“Do you think I am annoying it?” She laughed.

“Yes. Stop it.”

He did not scold her, but only smiled slightly at her mischief. She had, at that time, felt comfortable in her marriage — if asked, she would answer that she felt content and believed that she would feel content, on the same level, into the future.

In truth, she had been relieved by the gift. She felt, in the moment he presented it to her, something of the locket diminish as if consumed by the plant. There had been a rearrangement of balance, she decided, like the way a pinch in one arm relieves pain from the other. The locket, which had previously caused an itchy rash on her chest, one Vicenzo had teased her for in such a manner to make her blush and cry in secret, transformed for Hortensia into something of an antidote, rather than cause, of her ailment. While the fly-trap, to Hortensia, was like a strange guest in her house, the locket had expanded into a location, the cool crisp air of their vacation in the alps, the warmth of Vicenzo’s arm on her waist.

She watches the fly-trap catch another insect — a successful afternoon, undoubtedly. The sun, she thinks as she lowers herself onto the wood and lies on her stomach, face turned to look across the lawn to the distant hyacinths, is good for us both. Her eyes close.

That the trap and the pendant shared something of each other’s nature was something Hortensia could recognize, but she could not conflate them as being one and the same, though something was urging her to do so. There must exist differentiation, she insists, frustrated, or else I will go blind!

Later, while stirring sauce at the stove, Vicenzo seems strange to Hortensia. Upon awakening she initially felt a deeper intimacy with her spouse, a sort of achievement over Claudia’s failed marriage. A thirty minute interval, and his expression now at the edge of the kitchen, had mostly dissolved it. He looked very pleased, which annoyed her because she felt as though she had done nothing to be especially pleasing. She felt he had a responsibility to be neither pleased or displeased and careful not to show pleasure or displeasure, in the same way that she was. This was their protocol for entertaining guests. She lets his pleasure hang in the air. It falls in the sauce. He will eat it. They all will.

“We must’t go to the wedding,” she states to Vicenzo without looking up from the sauce.

“And why is this, my doll?” He returns, notably unperturbed.

She explains that it is one of only two days off he has every week, and that it was such short notice, after all, and that there will be so many people there that not only would they not be missed but to attend would only add to an imbalance already beyond its limits, and that, of course, went against their principles. She begged Vicenzo to understand, and to do as she asked, and Vicenzo could find no reason to disagree.

A portrait of a dinner party: what Hortensia later observes in it, and what she omits, might be attributed to a number of factors, although Vicenzo, she knows, will posit her inability to remember specific details to illness alone, a most detrimental obstacle to happiness that she must resolve to overcome.

The vagueness of Hortensia’s portrait may be attributed to a lack of sustained attention, as caused by inflammation of the brain, anxiety, loneliness, or some other character flaw; it might also be conferred, Hortensia thinks, to Vicenzo’s talent for diverting conversation and the resulting disorientation in all but the most vigilant, detached observants. What appears parallel he juxtaposes, and what is unrelated he seduces into symmetry. He is able to do this, Hortensia hypothesizes, as much through a manipulation of logic as through the dominance of his aura. This is why she had chosen him — he radiated an energy that was not overbearing, but simply convincing. Claudia, by contrast, carried into the house an incisive, pointed aura, which brought with it an intolerance for ambiguity, outweighing the placidity of her feeble son.

“You will just love his little bride. She is absolutely precious.” She runs her long, fuchsia painted fingernails through her son’s hair, and he pushes her away with a boyish embarrassment. Claudia is, of course, utilizing a talent that works best against Hortensia: she manages to smile and exude what seems to be a genuine pleasure, one she wishes to share with her sister and brother-in-law, while maintaining the subtlest coldness in her eyes. Upon saying this, her eyes move swiftly to the locket hanging on Hortensia’s collarbone.

“Your skin looks lovely, Hortensia. You’re just glowing.”

It is not their presence of guests alone that upsets Hortensia. It is the plant. How did it arrive at the dinner table? She had not moved it. Vicenzo had not moved it. And its aura expanding into infinitude, around which they are irrefutably reduced to valence electrons — even Vicenzo is dwarfed. It wants to become a location for something, Hortensia knows, some kind of container, and it frightens her that she knows not for what contents.

She looks to Alejandro as a beacon: his lanky frame, circled eyes and dark brows. To his youthful face she assigns a pinnacle of goodness, a purity she is unwilling to recognize any perversion in. The recognition of any cruelty in this being would alter her perception of reality so irrevocably that she avoids it like avoiding looking directly at the sun.

“How did your painting for El Ciudad turn out?” Hortensia asks him, knowing well that, like herself, he took to the arts, and was, naturally, a much better painter than she.

“I won second place, Tia.”

“No,” Hortensia says, waving her hand. “The judges must have been corrupt. Your skills are far superior to those of your peers.”

Shortly after the child was born, Hortensia had a series of dreams about him in which he made her aware of his spiritual gifts. The sequence of the dreams was such that, as he grew older, she felt a stronger sense of separation, not just from Alejandro, but from a deity or source. By the time he was five and she was twenty, she felt, despite having grown up a practicing Catholic, entirely separated from God. Her belief in a divinity was stronger than before, but her connection to one felt not just severed, but as though it had never existed. She esteemed him above all others as possessing a superior spirituality and longed for a deeper relationship with him, one which Claudia made impossible, not through any direct action but by mere fact of being his mother.

“That’s right,” Vicenzo says, stroking Hortensia’s shoulder and motioning to a painting hanging on the wall opposite them, directly behind Claudia and Alejandro. It is a painting Alejandro gifted them, his first win in a city prize at age thirteen, a portrait of Claudia, Hortensia and Alejandro as a young boy based on a photo taken shortly before Hortensia met Vicenzo. “Takes after his aunt.”

“Not at all,” Hortensia insists. “It must be further down the bloodline. Neither I nor Claudia were anything special in painting.”

“She’s right. I never won any prizes,” Claudia admits. “But I think I was rather overlooked, actually.”

“You like to paint, Claudia?” Vicenzo asks, pleasing Hortensia with his politeness.

“Not especially. It’s such a mess, and smelly, with all the turpentine .. but I think I have an eye for beauty anyway.”

“We might as well go to the wedding,” Hortensia says aloud, as though It had been a topic of debate, compelled to say it by a force as much outside of her as inside of her, as much by her own will as by that of another. She stands abruptly, reaches across the table and leaves through the glass door. She returns without the plant to her seat at the table.

That night, Hortensia dreams herself, supine, naked without her pendant, her vagina a large Venus fly trap. It opens wide to consume bugs, flowers, and fruits to feed Vicenzo, only recognizable as the man who remains in the flower’s mouth. In the dreamscape, Hortensia is aware of herself in both a corporeal and etheric sense: the weight of her breasts and the fullness of her hips ground her in place, while her etheric body helps her physical body synthesize her and Vicenzo’s spiritualities. She is aware of the essential role the flower plays in this process – at once invaginated within her and an entity outside of her, savage in its green leaves, a more ferocious nature than she dares to possess. Watching it beneath her belly as it engulfs, transforms, and releases herself and someone of her nature, she is frightened. Her physical body contracts even as her etheric and astral bodies continue to expand and embody increasingly multidimensional states of being. She watches herself birth Vicenzo: she observes her physical body writhe in pain, awakening and brightening her higher bodies.

Upon awakening, she retells the dream in great detail to Vicenzo. Without waiting for his response, and at once terrorized and triumphant, she feels as though she has completed the first task of a set of essential tasks.