I Recorded My Wife Confessing What Happened with the Retired Neighbor

—Dr. Aranda, I don’t know where to begin. I haven’t been able to think about anything else for days.

—Mateo, breathe. That’s what we’re here for. Take your time and tell me what’s burning you up inside.

The patient twisted on the couch. I switched on the recorder and settled into the armchair. I had realized during our very first visit that this man was carrying something heavy, something he couldn’t share with anyone in his circle. And I confess, my curiosity was beginning to take hold of me.

—It happened last week, Doctor. Carmen asked me to take out the garbage. She was wearing a very sheer nightgown; you could see everything through it. I was sprawled on the sofa and didn’t feel like going downstairs, so I told her to take it out herself. She grumbled, went into the bedroom, and came back out wearing a completely worn-out pair of pajama pants and a dark green knitted T-shirt, with no bra. Her nipples showed through the fabric.

—Go on.

—She went out, and five minutes later I started to wonder what was taking so long. It takes a minute to throw out the garbage. When ten minutes had passed, something strange ran down my spine. I slipped on my flip-flops and opened the door very slowly, without making a sound. When I peered through the stairwell, I heard voices. Low voices, whispering. One was hers. The other was a man’s voice, deep and very calm, and Carmen was answering in a tone I’d never heard from her before. It wasn’t anger. It was something else.

—And what did you do?

—I leaned out a little farther. I saw her body, two floors below, moving around. As if she were trying to pull herself away from someone. I saw a broad hand on the small of her back, sliding beneath her shirt. She removed the hand herself, pushed it away. But before she did, Doctor, she let it stay there for a couple of seconds. She didn’t yank it away. She moved it aside slowly. And that man gave a hoarse laugh before she started coming upstairs.

—Do you know who he is?

—Of course I do. He’s Anselmo, a retired ex-soldier who lives right below us. Late sixties, an asshole, lean, with a terrible temper—the kind of guy the whole street respects while he respects nobody. He ignores me. When we go downstairs together, he doesn’t even look at me. He only looks at her. He throws compliments at her with his mouth twisted to one side, grabs her by the elbow under the pretext of greeting her, and she laughs nervously. I’d been swallowing it for years without saying a word. Until that night.

—Go on.

—I closed the door before she finished coming upstairs. When she came in, her face was flushed and she was breathing hard. I asked her what was wrong. She told me, “Nothing, keep watching TV.” She went straight into the bathroom. And that was when what really brought me here happened.

I maintained a professional silence. Mateo ran his tongue over his lips and looked at the ceiling. He was tense, his legs crossed and his hands clenched over his stomach.

—I got up from the sofa and went to the bathroom. The door was ajar. I pushed it open a few inches. She had already turned on the shower. The screen is made of frosted glass, but once the water starts falling, it becomes transparent enough to make out what’s on the other side. And what I saw, Doctor, left me rooted to the spot.

—Describe it to me.

—Carmen wasn’t washing herself. She was touching herself. She ran her soapy hand over her tits and squeezed them hard, pinching her nipples until they were stiff as rocks. She pulled them upward. I’d never seen her do that to herself. Never. Over the years, I’d practically stopped touching her myself. She moved her hand down her stomach and slipped her fingers between her legs. I heard her moan—a tight, restrained moan, as if she were afraid I might hear her from the living room.

—And you?

—My hand was inside my pants. I was hard before I even realized it. The scene was making me sick with arousal. She grabbed the showerhead, turned the spray up full, the kind that comes out under pressure, and put it directly against her pussy. Doctor, she leaned against the wall with her legs spread and left it there. She was grinding it against her clitoris like crazy. I heard her moaning louder and louder, biting her hand so she wouldn’t scream. She writhed. She fondled her tits with her free hand. She was fucking the water while thinking about something that wasn’t me.

—What was she thinking about, in your opinion?

—Him. Anselmo. That old bastard’s hand sliding beneath her shirt. What he might have whispered in her ear on the landing. What he would have done to her if she hadn’t moved away. I knew it at that moment. She was coming while thinking about the neighbor, her mouth open, her eyes squeezed shut, while the water pounded her cunt. And I, Doctor, instead of smashing the shower screen, came too, inside my underwear, leaning against the doorframe.

There was a silence. Mateo was breathing heavily. In the armchair, I felt a tug between my legs that I pretended not to notice. This material was pure gold.

—Did she come?

—Hard. She let out a huge, guttural moan, an animal sound I hadn’t heard in twenty years of marriage. Then she dropped to her knees on the shower floor, with the water pouring over her. I left before she could see me. I went back to the sofa and cleaned myself up as best I could. When she came out of the bathroom in her robe, she smiled at me as if nothing had happened. And I, Doctor, it was as if they’d changed me from the inside. I no longer looked at her the same way. I looked at her like a slut I’d uncovered. A slut who wanted someone to fuck her. And I wanted to watch.

—Mateo, what you’re telling me isn’t as unusual as you think. It’s a type of desire that’s becoming increasingly common. The possessive feeling in old-fashioned marriage is losing its weight. Fidelity as ownership is no longer an absolute value. Some men discover, as you have, that their wife’s pleasure, even when it comes from someone else, doesn’t disgust them. On the contrary, it arouses them.

—So I’m not sick?

—Neither sick nor strange. Different.

—Doctor, do you think I could get her to fuck Anselmo? With my consent?

I looked at him. He had it. He had opened himself completely. His eyes shone with that mixture of fear and arousal that, to be honest, interested me professionally—and also interested me in another way it shouldn’t have. This man was going to feed my fantasies for the next few weeks.

—I’m going to suggest something, Mateo. Exercises. Steps. Mutual confessions. And in a month, if you know how to pace things, you won’t be the one taking her to the neighbor. She’ll be the one asking you to go downstairs.

—Doctor, do whatever it takes.

—I’ll see you Tuesday at five.

***

Tape number three, fifteen days later. Mateo came in more relaxed, a folder under his arm. He lay down without waiting for me to tell him to.

—Doctor, it happened. It happened last night.

—Tell me.

—I did everything you told me. I gradually introduced the subject into our conversations. I asked her which man had turned her on lately. I confessed that imagining her with someone else aroused me. At first she blushed, laughed, called me a pervert, and changed the subject. But she came back to it on her own that same night, in bed. And a week later she was already telling me fantasies about the neighbor while touching herself in front of me.

—Good. Continue.

—Last night we both went downstairs with the garbage. I stayed on the landing, leaning against the railing. Anselmo opened his door before we reached it, as if he could smell us coming. He fixed his eyes on Carmen. She was wearing a short black skirt and heels she never wears to take out the garbage. I’d told her to put them on. She looked at me, then at him. And she said to the old man, with a trembling smile, “Anselmo, my husband wants to go up to the roof to smoke a cigarette. Can I come in for a moment?”

—And you?

—I went upstairs, Doctor, but I didn’t smoke a damn thing. I went down through the service staircase, entered his kitchen through the back door he always leaves unlocked, and hid in the storeroom. I left the sliding door to the living room open a crack. And from there I saw everything.

—Describe it to me, Mateo. Everything. Don’t hold back.

—Anselmo sat her on the sofa, stood in front of her, and took her chin between two fingers. He said to her, very calmly, “I’ve been waiting twenty years for you.” Carmen stayed there looking up at him. Her hands were trembling. He unbuttoned her blouse one button at a time. He pulled her tits out of her bra and squeezed them with his broad hands, those big, calloused man’s hands. He licked them slowly, sucking her nipples one by one. She moaned and grabbed his head to press it harder against her chest. There was no fear anymore. There was hunger.

—Continue.

—He lifted her skirt and saw that she wasn’t wearing panties. He laughed, laughing with his mouth twisted to one side, and told her, “Well, look at what a filthy slut you are. Look how your pussy’s dripping.” He pushed two fingers inside her and she arched her back. He drove them deep and pulled them out wet and shining, showing them to her before pushing them back in. With his other hand he opened his pants, pulled out a thick cock, Doctor—not very long, but very thick, with the head already wet—and put it in Carmen’s mouth without asking. And she opened her mouth. She opened it herself. She took the whole thing in, sucked him like she’d never sucked me in my life, drool hanging from her chin, wet sounds coming from her mouth, one hand squeezing the old man’s balls. Anselmo had one hand on the back of her head, setting the pace. He told her, “That’s it, slut, suck the neighbor’s cock, suck it properly, let yourself drool.”

—And you kept watching?

—With my cock out, Doctor. Pulled from my pants, my hand wrapped around it. I couldn’t stop. I was watching her suck that old bastard she’d been swallowing compliments about for twenty years, and instead of breaking down the door and killing him, I was jerking myself off. He lifted her from the sofa, turned her around, stood her up with her ass sticking out over the backrest. He slapped her butt so hard it echoed through the whole living room. The imprint of his hand remained on her skin. She moaned and spread her legs wider. And the son of a bitch drove into her in one thrust. All the way in. Carmen let out a scream that she swallowed by biting the backrest.

—Go on.

—He was fucking her hard, Doctor. Every thrust made a sound, the old man’s thighs smacking against my wife’s ass, and she begged for more. “More, fuck, harder, don’t stop.” I’d never heard her talk like that in bed. Never. Anselmo grabbed her hair with one hand and gently squeezed her throat with the other, not choking her, marking her. He told her, “Tell your husband what the neighbor is doing to you,” even though he didn’t know I was listening two yards away. And she panted, her voice broken: “He’s fucking me, he’s fucking me so well, he’s fucking me like he never does, he’s splitting me open.” That was when I came, Doctor, silently, into my hand, biting my fist so I wouldn’t let out a moan.

—And her?

—She came twice. The first time with his cock inside her while he rubbed her clitoris with a thumb wet with his own saliva. Her knees buckled and he held her by the hips so he could keep thrusting into her. The second time came afterward, when he put her on her knees on the carpet and came all over her tits and mouth, thick jets, and she opened her mouth to swallow whatever landed there, moaning like a bitch. She stayed there on her knees, the old man’s semen on her face and neck, and he wiped her chin with his thumb and put it in her mouth. And she sucked it, Doctor. She sucked his thumb as if she were thanking him.

—Impressive, Mateo.

—When she came home, she didn’t wash out her mouth. She got into the shower and rinsed her body, but not her mouth. She went to bed with me with his taste on her tongue, climbed on top of me, rode me bareback, and whispered everything the neighbor had done to her while I came inside her. That he’d spread her legs. That he’d squeezed her throat. That he’d called her a slut. That she’d swallowed another man’s cum while thinking of me. Doctor, I’d never enjoyed myself so much in my life.

I stopped the recorder for a moment. I looked at the man in front of me and knew that from that tape onward, he would no longer be just a case. He would become my obsession. In the margin of my notebook, I wrote in handwriting even I wouldn’t be able to decipher later: “Voyeur of the voyeur. Clean contagion.”

—I’ll see you next Tuesday at five, Mateo. Don’t miss it.