While My Wife Prayed, I Was with the Veterinarian

During the first few years, Esteban and Mercedes couldn’t keep their hands off each other. They had married in their early twenties, at a time when desire always won out: in the morning before work, in the kitchen against the countertop, on the sofa with the TV on and the volume up to drown out the noises. Mercedes had an easy laugh and a way of biting her lip that he knew how to read instantly.

All of that began to fade the winter she met the congregation. A neighbor invited her to a prayer meeting, and Mercedes came back different. First it was Wednesdays. Then whole Sundays. Then came the pastors with their meek smiles and their speeches about bodily purity and the sanctity of marriage as they understood it.

—Pleasure for pleasure’s sake is a trap, Esteban —she told him one night, already in her long nightgown buttoned up to the neck—. The body is a temple.

A locked temple, he thought. With a closed-for-business sign on it.

Little by little, the caresses disappeared. Mercedes prayed before bed, turned over, and switched off the light. When he tried to get close, she would take his hand gently and move it away, as if forgiving him for something. “God doesn’t want that,” she would murmur. Esteban would lie there staring at the ceiling, his body tense and his head full of a dull rage he didn’t know where to put.

***

Rocío ran the veterinary clinic across the street. She was in her thirties, with dark hair always tied up with a pencil she would pull out halfway through the day, and a way of looking straight at you that threw Esteban off the first time. He met her one ordinary afternoon, when he brought the dog in because it was limping on one leg.

She bent down to examine the animal, and the white smock pulled tight across her back. Esteban looked away too late. Rocío lifted her head, caught him watching her, and said nothing; she only smiled slightly, like someone filing information away for later.

After that visit, the dog developed a suspicious number of ailments. Its stomach, its ear, it wasn’t eating much. Rocío always welcomed him with the same calm smile, and Esteban began to notice that she wasn’t in any hurry to get rid of him either.

—Your dog is perfectly fine —she told him one afternoon, while the place emptied out and the last light came in slantwise through the window—. You’re the one who comes in here with something else.

Esteban opened his mouth to make up an excuse. None came out. Rocío walked over to the door, slid the bolt, and came back toward him without taking her eyes off him.

—It’s okay —she said softly—. Sometimes you need someone else to say it first.

She kissed him slowly, as if measuring him, and when he answered with the urgency of months of piled-up hunger, she smiled against his mouth. Esteban’s hands found her waist, then the curve of her hip under the smock, and Rocío let out a low sigh that had nothing fake about it.

***

They did it right there, on the stainless-steel exam table cold against their skin. Rocío undid the buttons on her smock one by one, unhurried, enjoying the way he looked at her. Esteban ran his mouth along her neck, down over her collarbone, and bit her shoulder softly. She tangled her fingers in his hair and pulled his head back so she could look him in the eyes.

—Slowly —she murmured—. We don’t have to rush.

But Esteban’s body had been silent too long. When he finally sank into her, both of them held their breath at the same time, and then everything was motion and heat and the metallic sound of the table banging against the wall. Rocío sank her nails into his back, bit his neck to keep from crying out, and when she came she did it trembling all over, her face buried in his shoulder.

He held on a little longer, just long enough to see her come undone again, and only then did he let himself go. They stayed stuck together, sweaty, laughing under their breath like two teenagers who had just pulled a huge prank.

It took Esteban a few minutes to catch his breath. He brushed his thumb over her cheek, moved a lock of hair stuck to her forehead aside, and was surprised by how badly he wanted to stay. It wasn’t just the body he’d been missing all those months; it was this, the after, the warm weight of someone who didn’t turn over to switch off the light.

—Come back whenever you want —Rocío told him, buttoning up her smock—. But leave the dog at home, poor thing.

***

They became lovers with the naturalness of people who finally find the missing piece. Two, three times a week. In the office after hours, at her apartment on Sundays when Mercedes spent the whole day in her meetings, in the car parked out in some vacant lot on the outskirts, with the windows fogged up.

Esteban discovered that he could talk with Rocío. That it wasn’t all about sex, even if sex was the engine. She told him about her animals, about her ex-husband who had left her out of boredom, about how she wanted to go live near the sea someday. He listened to her and felt, for the first time in a long while, truly seen.

Sex with her didn’t resemble anything he remembered either. Rocío had no shame and no hurry: she asked for exactly what she wanted, laughed when something came out clumsy, guided him with her hand when he hesitated. One night at her apartment she made him sit on the edge of the bed and settled herself on top of him facing him, setting the pace herself, biting his lower lip every time she was about to finish. Esteban learned to read her body as he had once read Mercedes’s, and discovered that paying attention was, in itself, a form of pleasure.

One afternoon he took her to his own house, a transgression that excited him more than he wanted to admit. He laid her on the marital bed, over sheets that smelled of Mercedes’s perfume, and whispered in her ear while kissing her back.

—I shouldn’t be doing this here.

—That’s why you like it so much —she answered, arching against him.

He took her from behind, slow, sinking all the way in and pulling almost all the way out, toying with her impatience until she begged him to stop torturing her. He traced her spine with his tongue, bit the nape of her neck, whispered things he would never have dared say out loud. Rocío came twice before he finished, biting the pillow, and afterward they stayed wrapped around each other in the forbidden bed until the clock forced them apart.

***

Meanwhile, Mercedes began to suspect. She found a long dark hair on the collar of a shirt. She smelled a perfume that wasn’t hers. But instead of confronting him, she prayed harder, as if faith could cover up the hole opening in her house. Esteban lied without effort —“it was work,” “I ran into a client”— and she preferred to believe him, because the alternative was a world her congregation had never taught her how to handle.

The day Rocío called him with a broken voice, Esteban knew before she said it.

—I’m pregnant —she murmured—. It’s yours. There was no one else.

He went speechless for a few seconds, the phone pressed to his ear. Then he felt something strange in his chest, a mix of panic and an absurd pride he hadn’t expected.

—I’m coming over —he said.

***

He didn’t leave her alone. In his own twisted way, Esteban took responsibility: he gave her money for the clinic, bought whatever was needed, went with her to the checkups by inventing work trips. And they kept seeing each other, of course. The pregnancy, far from slowing him down, lit him up in a way he didn’t even understand. Rocío’s body changing month by month, the new curves, the more sensitive skin.

—Careful —she warned him with a laugh, when he laid her down gently and kissed her round belly—. We’re not made of rubber.

—I’ve got you —he answered, and treated her as if she were made of glass, which only drove her even more insane.

The problem was still Mercedes. The late arrivals, the money missing from the account, the foreign smell. One night, sick of the prayers and the nightgown buttoned all the way up to the neck, Esteban decided to tell her the truth. Or something like the truth, tailored to what she was capable of believing.

***

He walked into the bedroom where Mercedes was reading the Bible under the lamp, sat on the edge of the bed, and arranged his face into the most solemn expression he could manage.

—Mercedes, I need to tell you something. I had a revelation.

She looked up, alert.

—Last night, while I was asleep, a light appeared to me. I don’t know how to explain it. A presence. And it spoke to me —Esteban lowered his voice, like someone sharing a sacred secret—. It told me there’s a child on the way, in a woman’s womb in the neighborhood. That this child is special, chosen. And that you and I have the mission of raising it as our own.

Mercedes dropped the Bible onto the bedspread. She brought both hands to her mouth.

—A… revelation? —she whispered, eyes filling with tears—. To you?

—To me —he nodded, barely holding his expression together—. I know it sounds impossible. I didn’t believe it either.

Mercedes slid out of bed and fell to her knees on the rug, clasping her hands. He swallowed it whole, Esteban thought. The pastors had left her so ready for miracles that a house-call miracle seemed the most natural thing in the world to her.

—It’s a sign! —she cried—. After all that praying! Of course we’re going to raise it. It will be our child, the child God sends us. That’s why the church was preparing me, can’t you see? That’s why.

***

From then on, Mercedes threw herself into the project with a devotion that was a little frightening. She visited Rocío, brought her books and food, stroked her belly while speaking to “the chosen child.” Rocío, who had a devastating sense of humor, played along with the face of a saint.

—Yes, sister —she would say—. It’s a miracle. I feel it kicking and think about how blessed we all are.

And as soon as Mercedes crossed the doorway, Rocío would turn to Esteban with one eyebrow raised.

—Your wife is something else —she’d tell him, dragging him by the arm toward the back room—. Come on, we’ve got about an hour before she’s back with more books.

She’d pin him against the wall, hike up her dress, and take him right there, holding back laughter and desire at the same time. Rocío would bite his shoulder to keep from making noise, and the two of them would come smothering their laughter and moans in the same motion.

***

They had twins, to everyone’s surprise: two healthy boys with Esteban’s unmistakable nose. Mercedes received them as a double blessing and gave them biblical names he didn’t even bother to argue about. She raised them with fanatical tenderness, praying over their cradle, convinced she had two chosen ones sleeping in her house.

Esteban paid for everything, kept both lives in balance, and sometimes wondered, in the few nights when insomnia left him room to think, how long a tightrope like that could last. But then morning came, Mercedes ironed his shirt while singing hymns, Rocío sent him a message from across the street, and he decided he would deal with it tomorrow.

—The Lord provides —Mercedes would say with a serene smile, while serving him coffee.

—Yes —Esteban would answer, looking out the window toward the veterinary clinic across the street—. It seems that way.