Marieta Rojas Agüero
Stalker
Opening Reception Sunday March 3, 2024
@ 6:30 PM
March 3rd - March 17th, 2024
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Marieta Rojas Agüero
Stalker
Opening Reception Sunday March 3, 2024
@ 6:30 PM
March 3rd - March 17th, 2024
Stalker represents the first solo exhibition of Marieta Rojas Agüero’s work. A single painting has been presented for your consideration.
The exhibition also announces the availability of Valeria Vela’s An Education. The story appears in full below:
Well we were all boys those days. We had our fun. Those four years blur together now, a haze of parties and classes and nightclubs and booze. Every night, we ended up in somebody’s apartment, holding onto each other, singing. We all took the same courses, and we sat together in libraries, and we closed out bars, and we heeded the same heady call toward more, more, more. We had been told since birth that it would come; now it came.
On holidays, we sat at long tables under glowing lights, and the caterers would come marching in a file, endless, a single gloved hand holding up each identical silver platter. We spent those holidays dancing in gardens, screaming into each other’s ears the words of songs that said perfectly everything we felt.
At dinner, before the waiters uncovered the food, I sometimes caught myself looking at my reflection on the metal. People tell me they have a hard time knowing what I’m thinking, and I have a mouth breathing problem. I’ve never known quite what to do with my hair. I have acne and eyes that stare. But on these holidays, hours spent under a honeyed sun, linen shirt draped off my chest like a cape, or a robe, it became totally possible to forget all of this, to forget that the warm, glittering bodies surrounding me and I weren’t one.
People ask if we were scared of life after, if anybody thought this grandeur couldn’t last. But didn’t they know the things that everybody wanted came easier to us, and we knew it?
-
I’ve always had the greatest weakness for girls. With a proper education, the proper resources, you come to learn the difference in the quality of a person’s beauty, a difference in the skin and eyes and the joints. On our travels, we drank the smoothest bottles of tequila and we exchanged one model with the next, watched them fix their hair nervously and take pictures sprawled on golf carts. Sometimes I drove them. I liked to tear down long stretches of beach. Sun over tropical waters, wheels kicking up sand. My glasses shining, a holler in the wind that was either a friend’s, one of the girl’s, or mine.
-
Her name was Abundance. We brought her home after a party on one of the last days. Classes had been over for a while, and the festivities were building. Something, anything, was bound to happen.
My buddy helped me pick her up. I’d never seen her before, not in any of the clubs or dining halls or libraries, but she must have been a student.
I had a driver take us home. In the back of the car, we sat next to each other perfectly, and I knew she was strange by the way her eyes moved, always around.
“Where are you from?” I asked her.
“I’m from here,” she said, and immediately looked away, folding into herself like a bird.
“I’m trying to figure out who you are,” I told her, and this time she opened herself a little longer.
“Really?”
“What do you read?”
“Homer?”
And my thoughts went to my youth.
-
I grew up surrounded by people. My family, their friends. We traveled all around the world, from one crowded, beautiful room to the next. It was a life very much like the life I live now.
We spent long days on the boat. I wasn’t an easy child. I couldn’t stand to be around anyone. At all the parties and dinners, I would lock myself in other rooms, get lost roaming the grounds. Other children ignored me. The adults couldn’t figure me out. I could never shake the feeling that my life hadn’t started, that everything would be resolved when it did. And I knew, when I found the substance that constituted my real, actual life, that these people would have no part in it.
In my very earliest memories I am standing, I am telling my sister that nothing binds us; blood is just water, without water there is nothing.
My mother looks horrified. Somehow, she knows it too.
So I have always known I was alien.
-
“I couldn’t figure you out at the party,” Abundance tells me. “You would take random breaks just to walk next to me. But you looked lost. Like you didn’t even know where you were. And I didn’t know if I was into you.”
“When did you decide you would go home with me?”
“When I told you about my job, how I had work in the morning, and you said I didn’t look like someone who sat around in meetings all day.”
As she moves to leave, I grab her hand.
But she says, “I have work in the morning.”
And I don’t know if it’s the blow making me stare at her as she pulls on her dirty white sneakers, making me follow her to stand with her while she waits for the elevator. “You talk so funny.” It just comes out of me.
She says, “So do you.”
I have her head between my hands; I’m holding on too hard. “You’ll call me? We’ll see each other?”
She laughs her strange laugh. The elevator doors ding shut.
-
All my life, I’ve felt walled off from everybody else. I can’t tell when it started. Maybe it has always existed. Idleness, meaninglessness, all that holds people apart.
But why can’t we just lie next to each other? What stops two people from being able to stand being in a room with each other?
The easiest way to deal with this has been to stop letting people in the room all together.
And when I built this wall around myself I did wonder who I was walling in.
-
When we have sex the next day she tells me she dreamt of a flood before meeting me. She was in a house she’d never been in before and it started going underwater. The light came in through the skylights.
“I grew up on a boat also,” I say.
“A boat?”
“It was a yacht, yeah.”
We’re lying side by side. Just our heads touching. Looking at the ceiling. I invite her to my graduation party the next day, and she accepts.
-
The party ends too quickly. Already I feel the great sweep of things away from each other. My siblings rail blow and listen to ítalodisco.
Abundance comes to the after party at my apartment with a friend, and she waits in a corner, a single white line dripping from her nose.
The powder is in my head too. It tells me I need her in my hands.
“Come.” It isn’t enough. She stands there.
I can’t stop thinking about how in a few days this place will be gone.
I go over to her and embrace her.
She meets my eyes, startled, and looks away immediately. I kiss her once, twice, delicate like you kiss a young animal, which I suppose she is.
The music deepens. Behind us my siblings stand on chairs. I like feeling the weight of her bones. Really, she’s too competitive, not pretty enough, too poor. But her eyes flash, and I imagine in their unfathomable distance that I am there, that I’ve found something as genuine and alien to others as myself. Almost immediately, I’d seen her for what she was: that shimmering substance around which society accumulates and divides itself like dust, people unable to look away from those few flashes of something looking back. If she and I belong to different parts of that society, then we are also the only thing that keeps it going.
The birds have already started their morning songs, and I know I have to let her go.
When everybody begins to leave, I turn to her friend. “Take her”
Though she hasn’t said anything else, had stiffened when I touched her, now she startles. Her wrist strains where her friend tugs her way. “No please-” she gasps. “I’m leaving forever tomorrow.”
I tell her friend, “Get her home safe.”
The door closes and I go to bed.
-
When I went to sleep, I dreamt of those gentle nights on the ocean, long nights far from any land. I loved the glow of the ship’s light on water, the parting of the waves, the glowing sea foam, and the stars. I dreamt of when I had hidden to cry, and then my family all sat in a warm pile around me. My mother’s body heavy next to mine. My real, actual life. And I had understood; the world would never be more than this, ours.
-
The blow wakes me up.
I am alone in my blankets. At dawn, she sends me a string of hearts. I still feel next to her, together within the walls. I still have a few more moments.
The young leaves of spring whisper over a new dawn. And I know that the same thing that brought me into this world on those ocean nights has now taken me out of it. Some vise had loosened its grip.
If love’s first illusion is togetherness, its second is loneliness.
This is not a life about choice. I am lucky to live it.
-
My collar stuck to the sweat on my neck the day after, graduation.
I looked at my roommate slumped over his lap, at an ex-girlfriend receiving her degree. I felt for the first and only time that there was no way this could go on. The next day I would pick up everything in that apartment.
I look out the window now to the city before me, and look to the birds which make me think of Abundance.
The exhibition will be on view from March 3rd through March 17th. It is open by appointment only. Please contact the gallery at 305-343-9997 or info@quinnharrelsongallery.com.