The Twelve Trials Began on My Birthday

There are decisions made about you without your even knowing it. Mine was made on a Friday in September, in a palace on the Grand Canal, two weeks before my birthday. I, of course, was not there. That night I was sleeping wrapped around my husband in our flat in Valencia, oblivious to everything.

It would take me months to learn that the Brotherhood of the Black Lily existed. That twelve men gathered every equinox beneath white masks, in a windowless hall lit only by candelabras. That that night, the youngest and most nervous of the twelve had handed around a dossier with my name, my age, my height, and a photo in which I was laughing in a workshop in Florence I didn’t even remember visiting. That the leader had asked him whether I would agree to submit to the twelve trials. That he, in a low, dragged-out voice, had answered yes, because the Renaissance was my weak spot.

But I learned all that later. On my birthday night I only knew two things: that I was turning twenty-eight and that my husband Andrés had been behaving strangely for weeks.

Smiles at odd moments, looks that lingered longer than necessary, calls he cut short as soon as I came into the room. I chalked it up to the present. Andrés was terrible at keeping secrets and always got nervous when he was preparing something big.

My family arrived at noon. First my brother Tomás, then my parents with my aunt and uncle Roberto and Mercedes, their two teenage daughters, and my grandmother, a ninety-two-year-old woman who hardly recognized anyone anymore but still handed out kisses to whoever came near her. Andrés had prepared the living room with white flowers and a table covered in tapas: battered king prawns, parsley clams, fried little fish, olives for the girls. I had put on a floaty dress the same color as the flowers.

“You’re beautiful,” my mother told me, kissing my forehead. “Twenty-eight years old. Incredible.”

The presents came out even before we sat down to eat. My aunt and uncle gave me a Russian ring necklace, three interlocking hoops, with my name and Andrés’s engraved in silver. I put it on at once and felt the cool weight on my collarbone.

“And this,” said my father, handing me a white envelope, “is from your mother and me.”

I opened it slowly. Inside were two plane tickets and a printed itinerary. Rome, Florence, Venice. The trembling began in my fingers and rose to my shoulders.

“Dad…” my voice cracked. “This is too much.”

“You deserve it, sweetheart. You’ve been talking about Italy for years.”

I had studied Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage and had dragged around from university an almost religious obsession with the Italian Renaissance. Botticelli, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo. Their names made me close my eyes as if they were being recited to me in a whisper.

“I’ll give you my present later,” Andrés murmured, leaning toward me. “Not suitable for minors.”

I felt his breath on my neck and my mouth went dry.

***

The afternoon stretched on amid wine, laughter, and my grandmother dozing off with her head tilted in the armchair. My cousins retreated to their phones after the second course. The conversation drifted toward the small restoration business I had set up with two former classmates. Three women, a tiny workshop in the old quarter, the first serious commissions starting to come in.

“Lucía, the new star of Valencian restoration,” my uncle Roberto joked, raising his glass.

“If only. For now I just restore eighteenth-century boards and return paintings to country parishes.”

When my grandmother woke with a start and my uncle announced that it was getting late, I looked at the clock and discovered it was eight. The afternoon had evaporated in my hands. Long farewells, my grandmother’s noisy kisses, my mother promising to call the next day so I could tell her about every museum on the itinerary.

Andrés and I flopped onto the sofa as soon as the door closed. I leaned against his chest and closed my eyes.

“Happy birthday, my love,” he whispered.

“And my present?”

He laughed into my hair.

“Ah, yes. The present. Come with me.”

***

The bedroom was dark except for the bedside lamp, which Andrés had left on with a new, warmer bulb. On the bed, a box wrapped in burgundy paper with a gold ribbon. It was light.

“Open it alone,” he said. “Let me know when I can come in.”

He kissed me on the forehead and closed the door behind him.

I undid the ribbon slowly. Inside I found, first, a smaller rigid cardboard box. I opened it and caught my breath: a set of black lingerie, very fine lace, with details embroidered in burgundy thread. Bra, panties, garter belt, and thigh-high stockings. It wasn’t the sort of gift Andrés usually gave me. What we had, in five years of marriage and the seven years of dating before that, had gradually lost intensity until it had become a comfortable, predictable routine. This was something else. This was a declaration.

Under the set, wrapped in tissue paper, was a Venetian mask. White, papier-mâché, with golden filigree around the eyes and a black feather tilted over the right temple. I lifted it with both hands and turned it under the light. It was beautiful, and at the same time it sent an inexplicable shiver through me, as if it were the one looking at me.

It took me a while to get changed. The stockings were fussy and the garter belt was a geometry I’d never practiced. When I finally looked at myself in the wardrobe mirror, I didn’t recognize myself. My short, messy hair, the pallor of my chest, the black lace breaking up my silhouette. I put on the mask and then, yes: the woman in the mirror was a stranger.

“Andrés,” I called. “You can come in now.”

The door opened and I heard his breath catch.

“My God,” he said, and for several seconds he said nothing else.

I held out my hand. He came over barefoot, in a white shirt and without a belt, and put his arms around my waist.

“There’s something I haven’t told you,” he murmured, kissing my neck right where the clasp of the bra ended. “The trip to Italy. It already has a date.”

“When?”

“Carnival. We end in Venice, right in the middle of Carnival.”

I pulled back to look him in the eyes.

“Are you serious?”

“Completely.”

I felt my heart pounding against the lace. Venice at Carnival. The gondolas, the squares, the masks drifting through the narrow streets like specters dressed in silk. I kissed him on the mouth with a violence I hadn’t expected to feel.

***

Andrés pushed me toward the bed without breaking the kiss. His hands traced my back and slid down the curve of my waist until they found the elastic of my panties. He hooked two fingers under it.

“Careful,” I protested. “They’re new.”

“I’ll buy you others.”

And he tore them off in one yank.

I was left somewhere between laughter and surprise. It had been years since Andrés had grabbed me like that, with a hunger that seemed to have forgotten manners. He pinned my wrists to the mattress and moved down over my chest, biting through the lace. I closed my eyes and let the weight of his body sink me into the bed.

When he freed my wrists to slide lower, I felt his tongue between my thighs and a deep moan escaped me, a sound that didn’t seem like mine. I seized his head with both hands and closed my legs around him. He licked slowly at first, then with a more insistent rhythm, until I had to let go of his hair so I wouldn’t dig my nails into him.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he said suddenly, pushing himself up.

He stripped in two movements and positioned himself over me. The Venetian mask had slipped to one side. I pushed it back up with my hand. Andrés laughed.

“Leave it on.”

He entered me slowly. Too slowly. I needed something else.

“Harder,” I asked.

He picked up the pace a little, but it wasn’t enough. I dug my heels into his thighs.

“Harder, Andrés. Please.”

He tried to go faster, but I could feel him slipping away. I knew that breathing. I knew that stiffness in his shoulders that appeared five seconds before he finished. I pushed him away firmly before it was too late.

“Stop.”

He stayed lying on his back, confused, his chest rising and falling. I straddled him, guided him with my hand, and let myself drop down onto him with all my weight. We both gasped at once. I braced myself on his shoulders and started moving at my own pace, lifting my hips and lowering them again, searching for the exact angle. I felt the mask tilt again over my cheek and didn’t bother fixing it.

“Lucía,” Andrés panted. “I’m going to…”

“Hold on. Hold on a little longer.”

“I can’t.”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” I repeated like a prayer, feeling that I was close too, that I needed very little, that with three more thrusts I’d get there.

He came before I did. I felt him shudder beneath me, his hips arched, his fingers digging into my sides. I kept moving for a few more seconds in the hope of catching up, but he went limp quickly and I felt him slipping out of me. I lowered myself onto the mattress and lay down beside him.

“Sorry, my love,” he murmured, covering his eyes with his arm. “I couldn’t hold on any longer.”

“It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t.

I took off the mask and left it on the bedside table, next to the tickets. Andrés fell asleep in five minutes, breathing with that deep calm only satisfied men allow themselves. I stayed awake. My clit throbbed, my nipples brushed the lace of the bra, and in my head there was no longer the bedroom or Andrés or Valencia. There was Venice. The empty streets at dawn. One mask crossing another on a bridge.

I slipped my hand inside the torn panties and finished myself off, biting my lip so I wouldn’t wake him. The orgasm came quickly, brief, enough to sleep.

***

I woke the next day with the sun full in my face. Andrés was snoring on his back, completely naked, the sheet tangled around his ankles. I got up quietly and shut myself in the bathroom. In the mirror I discovered, still stuck to my skin, the dried trace of my husband’s semen. I got into the shower and let the hot water run down my back for a long time.

When I came out, wrapped in my robe, Andrés was already on the sofa, coffee in hand.

“Want one?”

“Yes, please.”

He got up to the coffee maker and from there, over the noise of the grinder, he threw me the question:

“So do you like Venice for the end? I’ve always wanted to see the masks.”

“I like it.”

“They say Carnival is a bit transgressive,” he added, poking his head out from the kitchen doorway with a smile that was at once ingenuous and sly.

“As it should be,” I replied.

And for some reason, while he disappeared behind the grinder again, I looked at the mask still on the bedside table in the bedroom, the black feather still tilted like a finger pointing at someone who had not yet appeared in my life.

I thought that trip was going to be unforgettable.

I was right, though neither of the two reasons I would later remember it had anything to do with art.