4 ideas
He commissions a doll modeled on his wife, María Hortensia, and it becomes the center of his obsession. The dolls are later filled with warm water to imitate a living body, María begins posing as a doll herself, and Horacio loses his hold on which one is real.
A copy made to intensify desire for a real person can end up absorbing that desire. Once the doll can be posed, displayed and controlled, the living wife starts to seem like a less adequate version of it.
The tableaux work because Horacio controls the framing, lighting and order of viewing but leaves the story implied. This makes spectators, and Horacio himself, supply the missing narrative. The pleasure comes from ambiguity that has been deliberately produced, so the fantasy has to be restaged constantly and fed with new scenes.
A solitary fantasy does not stay private. It needs collaborators to sustain it, including craftsmen, staff, guests and eventually the spouse. Each participant makes it more elaborate and harder to leave. As the fantasy is outsourced and later reproduced as a product for others, the person who created it loses authorship of it and becomes one of its objects.