Mirror Mirror on the Wall

Jaime Antonio Mendoza Rivera is, to put it bluntly, a bit of a doormat. A college professor once told him success was a paradise that could only be accessed in two ways, either by being exceptionally good at walking over people or by being exceptionally good at sucking up to them. Since Jaime didn’t have the right name, complexion or social capital for the first route, he really ought to choose the second one if he wanted to achieve something in his life. At the time, it sounded like solid advice because Jaime did want to achieve something in his life. As the oldest son of a second-generation immigrant family, his parents had worked hard to grant him the privilege of upper education, and he didn’t see failure as an option. Ten years later, Jaime works at a hedge fund management firm in Manhattan with a salary that still makes him dizzy some days, money he can use to pay for his parent’s medical bills, to help out his siblings and to lavish his nieces and nephews in gifts. The price for his affluence was high, paid for in lifeblood, humiliation and a decade of methodically dismantling his moral principles and personal boundaries. Jaime has swallowed the word No so many times that it’s lost to him entirely, which is how he finds himself at an art gallery he doesn’t want to go to with a group of colleagues he despises, on his first day off in months.

Listlessly, he saunters from one painting to the next until one catches his eye in passing. He backtracks, involuntarily intrigued. The painting, titled Mother Theresa, sticks out among the other works like a sore thumb, a bulldozer to the senses. It’s a demure, unfinished portrait of an elderly Black woman sitting stiffly in a garden, her image brutally disfigured. Garish neon colors carry out a fierce battle for dominance atop the portrait, interspersed with splashes of black paint that look like gaping wounds. White words pour out of them like blood and flood the war-stricken canvas. The words are hurtful yet the painting doesn’t look hurt. It looks like an accusation. Like pushing out your chin in protest, daring the world to try and take you on. It’s large too, unafraid to take up space, in fact demanding space, demanding to be seen. Jaime can’t decide if he is appalled or fascinated. The painting is more than a No, it’s a loud and clear Fuck You. Looking at it feels like looking at a reflection of everything he is not: assertive, brave, unwilling to compromise integrity for the comfort of others. The nasty thought should make Jaime recoil but instead, it wakes in him a strange hunger for more. He can’t look away and he doesn’t want to, and so he stays. That in itself feels like a small revolt, as if he’s becoming the painter’s accomplice. He even secretly snaps a picture of the painting. Eventually, the thrill fades and he moves on to the foyer, where his colleagues are discussing which bar to go to. Jaime hates drinking with his colleagues but it’s necessary for maintaining good connections, or so he tells himself. When they ask if he’ll join, he nods automatically, then freezes. Blinks once. Blinks twice. Hesitates and…shakes his head. “No, actually,” he says, surprising himself more than anybody else. “I think I’ll head home.”