Three Months of Silence Until the Annual Award Dinner
The question fell in the middle of the after-dinner conversation like a stone into a still pond. Sofía, Mateo’s wife, asked it while pouring coffee: «do horns hurt more when they come out or when they grow?». It was the kind of line that on any other night would have provoked laughter, but that time something in the air twisted too soon.
Mateo answered first, with the clumsiness of someone who wants to sound profound. Tomás, Daniela’s husband, added something about the conscience of betrayal. And Hernán, my lifelong friend, married to Camila, tossed out the line that blew the evening apart.
—Better let’s hear from Martín, who for that he surely knows and feels better than the rest of us.
He said it with no hidden meaning. I’d known him since we were twenty and he was incapable of needling someone on purpose. But the moment he finished, Camila went white as a sheet, bored her eyes into her husband as if she wanted to strike him dead, then lowered her gaze to the tablecloth. Beside me, my wife Elena choked on a cookie and started trembling.
Three reactions at once. Three warnings.
Hernán apologized, confused, and I told him there was nothing to forgive, that the day he spoke with malicious intent it would hail upside down. While I answered the question with some cheap theory about emotional pain, my mind was already far from the table. I watched the rest of the group from a false distance for the rest of the night. Camila avoided my gaze when I looked straight at her, but she kept spying on me out of the corner of her eye every time my eyes met Elena’s. My wife, meanwhile, could not unclasp her hands from her lap for the whole after-dinner stretch. She pressed them together so the trembling wouldn’t show.
By the time we got home that dawn, I already knew. The only thing I was missing was the name.
***
The exercise to find it was simple: make a list of everything that existed in our life now and did not exist three months earlier. In twenty minutes Federico Vargas appeared, owner of the appliance chain that had become the star client of the agency where Elena was a partner. Federico, married to the heiress who owned most of the shares. Federico, with his silver hair and his smile of a buyer used to buying everything.
That same week I called a technician and asked him to install discreet cameras in the living room, kitchen, and bedroom. Not only to watch, I made clear: to listen as well. I invented a story about robberies in the neighborhood. The guy charged me in advance and asked nothing else.
The following Friday I told Elena I was going fishing with two colleagues from the hospital. I’d leave Friday afternoon and come back Sunday at noon. I gave her the news on Wednesday, two days ahead, enough time for her to organize whatever she had to organize.
On Friday at seven in the evening I kissed my wife at the door, loaded the portable cooler into the car, and drove to a hotel fifteen blocks from home. By seven twenty I was connecting my laptop to the cameras. At seven thirty the doorbell rang in my own living room.
And only one person didn’t come in. Two did.
***
What I’m telling now was told to me by Elena months later, when she had nothing left to lose, in one of the few emails we exchanged during the divorce.
When she opened the door and found Federico and his manager Esteban —whom she barely knew from a few presentation meetings—, she didn’t manage to close it. They burst in like a stampede, kissed her at the same time, one in front and one behind, and turned her into the filling of a sandwich before she could say a word. Federico was biting her neck while Esteban lifted her dress with one hand and pulled down her panties with the other.
—I’ve been waiting almost two weeks for this moment, sweet thing —the younger one whispered in her ear.
They made it to the living-room sofa stumbling over their pants around their ankles. Esteban sat down first and arranged her on his lap, with her back to him. Federico knelt on the floor and spread her legs. Elena felt one cock pushing between her ass cheeks and another sinking into her cunt at the same time, and with the first thrust she lost the ability to think. She closed her eyes.
—Alternating or simultaneous? —the one behind asked.
—First alternating.
It was Federico giving the orders. She understood right away: when one went in, the other came out, and vice versa, in a rocking motion that turned her into a meat rocking chair. When they moved on to simultaneous thrusting, both of them sinking in together and coming out together, Elena came for the first time without warning, biting the back of her hand so she wouldn’t scream. She came again when one twisted her nipples and the other ran his tongue over her clit.
They asked to move to the bedroom, to our bed. She didn’t want to. Nor did she agree to let them stay the night. That night, in her own words, she left them both dry.
Meanwhile, I watched everything from the hotel. Every thrust, every moan, every grimace. The red-hot iron didn’t go into my stomach: it ran straight through me.
***
On Saturday midmorning the bell rang again. This time it was just one man. Gonzalo, another executive from the same chain, whom she had received the afternoon before with a mate when he came to pick up some papers at the agency.
With Gonzalo it was different. She dragged him to the couch as soon as he closed the door, pulled his pants down, and sat on top of him astride, with not a single word spoken that wasn’t his name breathed through gasps. There was no order, no choreography; there was a different kind of urgency. That hurt me more than the night before, although it shouldn’t have, because I understood that there was not just desire there: there was something close to tenderness.
I turned off the laptop screen. I spent two hours staring at the hotel-room ceiling.
***
On Sunday night, after doing the pantomime of coming back with two trout bought at the supermarket, I told Elena that the following Saturday I was going to use the high-definition copier they had in the studio. I needed to print some statistics to present at the hospital and my printer couldn’t handle the quality. I clarified that I’d go early, before anyone arrived, and that I’d bring the material on a pen drive. She nodded without looking up from her plate.
On Saturday I went in with the key she herself had given me months earlier. I walked past the copier and sat at her desk. The computer password was her mother’s birthday, as always. The emails with Federico took up two and a half months of history: nothing explicit, just loose phrases about «seeing each other again» and a recurring request of «don’t wear pants next time». Enough to confirm dates, not to humiliate her in public.
What I was looking for was in a folder hidden three levels down, labeled «Jer». Three files. Three points of the same iron.
The first was a photo. Elena in her own single chair in the office, blouse open, bra shifted aside, one breast out and the other pinched by a hand whose fingers looked like claws. Her knees hooked over the armrests, her panties pulled off to one side, her own fingers spreading her lips open for the camera. Federico’s face, in profile, pressed against hers in a kiss. Behind, over the man’s head, you could make out the abstract painting I had given her for the studio’s first anniversary.
The second was a short video, taken minutes later. Elena sprawled on the big sofa, eyes closed, head tilted, a whitish thread escaping from the corner of her mouth. Her skirt bunched at the waist, her ass at the edge of the seat, her legs open. The same mouth that said good morning to me every day.
The third, the last, I closed after ten seconds. The camera was angled from above, focusing on my wife’s face kneeling on the studio’s tile floor, sucking with both hands like someone holding a trophy.
I logged out. Turned off the machine. Turned on the copier to preserve the alibi. Printed forty pages of technical garbage she was never going to check. Locked up and went out to walk around the park for two hours with no destination.
***
The opportunity fell from the sky three weeks later. The Advertising Council awarded Elena and her three partners a national prize for Federico’s chain campaign. A gala dinner at a downtown hotel, with forty guests, the partners’ husbands, and, of course, the award-winning client with his wife Verónica, the real owner of the share package.
I took care of the seating arrangement myself. I asked the organizer, a young and nervous assistant, to put Verónica next to me and Federico next to Elena. I made up a story about strategic alliances and pending conversations. The girl wrote everything down on her sheet and didn’t ask questions.
During dinner I was the most charming guest at that table. I poured wine for Verónica, asked about her children, listened with genuine interest to her complaints about private schools. Meanwhile, across the table, I watched Federico slide his phone toward Elena under the pretext of showing her a photo, and his arm disappearing beneath the tablecloth toward her skirt, and my wife closing her eyes and clenching her fists on the napkin.
Hernán, seated two places to my right, was telling an anecdote about a woman he had helped that afternoon put out an engine fire in her car in front of his shop. The laughter was polite. I waited until he finished, took a sip of water, set the glass down carefully, and spoke.
—Taking advantage of the fact that Federico has Elena on the verge of orgasm, caressing her under the tablecloth, and continuing with the subject of the roles each of us plays in life, I want to confess something. For three months I’ve been playing the role of cuckold. Those two have been lovers since before the contract was signed. Since I don’t want to be the only one left with the news, it’s also only fair to tell Verónica that the two times a week when her husband says he’s in meetings, he’s fucking my wife on the studio couch. And that the manager Esteban and executive Gonzalo also take part, because Federico is the kind of man who shares what he considers his own.
The silence was so dense you could cut it with a knife. Verónica looked me straight in the eyes, paled, folded the napkin on top of her plate, and left without saying a word. Federico, frozen, reacted when he heard the door slam and went after her. Elena made the move to stand up and I stopped her without raising my voice.
—Don’t even bother going home. The lock’s already been changed. Send me a text to my cell telling me where you want me to send your things.
***
The consequences were the predictable ones: two divorces, an agency with three partners instead of four, one executive fired, and one client lost. There was also the initial anger of the other partners’ husbands, who reproached me for showing disrespect toward the man of the house. I let three weeks go by, then sat down with Hernán for coffee. I explained the full chronology: the cameras, the files, the dinner. When I finished listening to myself, he squeezed my shoulder and said nothing.
—And how did you find out? —he asked at the end.
—The night your wife went pale at your horn joke. Camila knew from the beginning. I suppose she was waiting for mine to change.
—I’m going to talk to her.
—Don’t tell her I told you. She did what she could.
Today I still get together with the group on Friday afternoons. The three women made a bet among themselves over which one has the best eye for introducing me to candidates. So far they all lose, because I’m still not ready. But time, as my old man used to say, sorts everything out.