The Confession of the Unknown Woman on the Night Train

The midnight train crossed the plain with that monotonous clatter that invites sleep or madness. I was in a window seat, watching the black countryside slide by outside like a film with no plot. We had left Las Lomas station after midnight, and there were still hours to go before we reached the capital.

Beside me, an old man dozed with his mouth half open, snoring softly like a tired engine. But what kept me awake was the woman in the seat across from me. She had to be in her fifties, with dyed hair that had once been blond but was already starting to fade, and a dark dress that had ridden up above her knees. She sat with her legs crossed, and every time the carriage lurched, the fabric slipped a little higher.

She wasn’t a magazine beauty. She was something else: a woman who had lived a lot and carried that life written across her face, in her crooked smile, in the way she looked at me without the slightest shame. Her lips were painted a red that had begun to feather at the corners, and her eyes, when they rested on me, asked nothing. They only confirmed.

The carriage was almost empty. A couple of passengers slept farther ahead, and no one else was around. She knew that. So when she realized I was watching her, she didn’t look away. On the contrary: she slowly uncrossed her legs, crossed them the other way, and let her skirt ride up even higher.

She’s not teasing me by accident.

She leaned forward as if she’d dropped something on the floor. The neckline of her dress opened, and I saw the weight of her breasts hanging free, braless. When she straightened again, she had a new smile.

—It’s hot in here, isn’t it? —she said in a rough, years-of-smoking voice.

—Pretty much —I answered, and that was all I could manage.

She got up with a clumsy movement from the train’s sway, took two steps, and sat down beside me, pressing her thigh against mine. The old man didn’t stir. She glanced at me sideways, amused, and lowered her voice until it became a murmur.

—You’re the kind who looks and does nothing, right?

—Depends —I said.

—On what?

—On whether the other person wants me to do something.

She gave a low, guttural laugh and put her hand on my knee. She moved it slowly, with no attempt to hide it, until her fingers found the bulge already straining against the fabric of my trousers. She squeezed me calmly, like someone checking something she already knew.

—Well, look at that —she whispered, licking her lips—. And here I thought you were going to sit there nice and still the whole trip.

I said nothing. I took her hand and pressed it against me, and she understood that the game of looks was over. She flicked a glance at the old man, then at the empty aisle, and leaned over my lap.

***

The man’s snoring covered us like a blanket. She opened my trousers with quick, expert fingers, the hands of a woman who had done this many times, and lowered her head. I felt the wet heat of her mouth close over my cock with an obscene ease, as if it had been made to measure for her. She didn’t test it for even a second. She sucked me slowly at first, her tongue dragging over my glans, licking the tip, tasting me as if she wanted to rip away all the patience I had left in one blow. Then she took me deeper, swallowing the whole length until her nose nearly brushed my pubis, and came back up with a suction that weakened my back.

She wasn’t in any hurry. She sucked me as if she had the whole night, stopping when she noticed I was close, starting again with her mouth wet and a filthy sound that the train’s rattling couldn’t quite drown out. I held her head for a moment, feeling the dyed hair between my fingers, and she responded by pressing her lips harder, taking me in and out with her tongue hard, wetting my balls with one hand while the other massaged the base, as if she knew exactly where to touch to drive me insane.

I closed my eyes. The train’s clatter set the rhythm, and for a moment I lost all sense of where we were. I saw her open her mouth just enough to draw breath, saliva shining on her chin, and then sink back onto me with an eagerness that was no longer play. I had to tug gently at her hair to slow her down.

—Not here —I told her in her ear, my voice breaking—. Come on.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and smiled. There was a wet mark at one corner of her mouth and her eyes were lit up, as if the heat had risen all through her body. She stood, unsteady with the motion of the carriage, and walked ahead of me toward the back, with a sway of the hips that was anything but innocent. We went into the train bathroom, a narrow cubicle that smelled of disinfectant and cold metal. I locked the latch.

Before I could say anything, I turned her against the sink. In the dirty mirror I saw her face, eyes half-lidded, mouth open in expectation. I hiked her dress up to her waist and found her cunt soaked, hot, already open for me, the lips shining with wetness. I ran two fingers over it, just sliding them in enough to feel how she swallowed me, and she arched her back with a rough gasp, biting her forearm to keep from crying out.

—Come on —she panted—. Don’t make me wait, I’ve waited plenty in my life.

I parted her legs with my knee, settled myself behind her, and took her by the hips. The tip of my cock pressed against her entrance and I entered slowly, feeling her give centimeter by centimeter, tight, hot, trembling around me. She pushed back, impatient, seeking me deeper, swallowing me with that hunger of a woman who already knew exactly how to receive. The train jumped at every rail joint and each jolt did the work for us, deepening the motion without either of us having to do much. The bathroom was so small that the mirror gave me back the image of her tits bouncing with every thrust, of the dress bunched up at her waist, of my hand clenched on her hip.

I covered her mouth with one hand when a moan slipped out too loud, and with the other I held one breast, kneading it, rolling the nipple between my fingers until it stood hard as stone. She dug her nails into my thigh, trembling, and started moving on her own, driving her ass back against me in a desperate rhythm, demanding more, harder, deeper. Every blow of my hips against her buttocks sounded wet, brief, brutal, mixed with the squeal of the rails and her broken breathing.

I leaned over her back, swept her hair to one side, and bit her shoulder, tasting the salty skin. She answered by throwing one hand back, groping for my face blindly, as if she wanted to touch my mouth, force me to look at her even with her face pressed to the sink. I gave it to her faster, burying myself to the hilt, feeling how her cunt embraced me in short spasms, already on the edge of coming. The warm vapor of our bodies fogged the mirror. Outside, the train kept clattering, indifferent, while inside everything was the sound of flesh striking flesh, of my breathing, of the wet splashing of her sex opening and closing around me.

She came first, biting my fingers, her whole body shaken by a long spasm that made her knees buckle. I felt her clench inside, throbbing, squeezing my cock with hot convulsions while I held her up so she wouldn’t slip away from me. She broke into a rough moan, almost a bark, and the orgasm left her back rigid, shoulders up, nails raking my skin. I held out a little longer, looking at her in the mirror, seeing her face undone, the sweat shining on her neck, until I couldn’t anymore. I pulled out at the last second and finished over the curve of her back, marking her skin with a thick spill that slid between her shoulder blades and cooled at once in the cubicle air.

We stood there for a moment, catching our breath amid the smell of sex and the screech of the rails. She was breathing deeply, her legs still trembling, and I could feel my pulse hammering in my throat. Then she straightened her dress, ran a hand through her hair in front of the mirror, and looked at me over her shoulder.

—It’s been a long time since anyone fucked me on a train —she said, and she said it almost tenderly.

***

We went back to the carriage as if nothing had happened. The old man was still asleep. She sat down across from me again, but closer now, with her legs apart and the serenity of someone who has nothing left to hide. The train had left the last lights of the intermediate towns behind and was now moving through pure darkness, lit only by the dim ceiling lamps and the intermittent glow of the poles flashing past like lightning.

That was when the old man stirred. He opened his bleary eyes, adjusted his crooked glasses, and looked at her with a mixture of habit and resignation.

—So? Did you have fun? —he muttered thickly.

She let out a hoarse laugh, the kind that comes from the bottom of a throat full of years.

—More than you have in a long time —she replied, giving his knee a gentle pat—. But don’t act offended. You know what I’m like.

The old man sighed. There was no anger in his face, only the weariness of someone who had heard the same story a thousand times.

—Tell me, go on —he said—. You always tell the same thing when you get like this.

The woman leaned forward, rested her elbows on her knees, and looked at me, not at him. As if the confession were meant for the stranger and not for the husband.

—All my life people have called me every name in the book —she began, softly, knowing the train noise covered her—. And at first it hurt. Then it stopped hurting. And in the end I even started to like it, because it was true and I had no intention of apologizing for it.

She paused, ran her tongue over her lips, and went on.

—When I was young, I used to slip out at night. I’d go off with the first man I liked, without asking his name. Once it was the boy who delivered bread; he took me behind the shed and we didn’t come back until dawn. Another time it was a traveling salesman who stopped in the town for just one night. I got into his car, we did it on an empty road with the lights off, and in the morning he left and I never saw him again. I never wanted them to come back. I liked it that way: the desire, the moment, and then each of us back to our own life.

The old man nodded slowly, as if he recognized every chapter.

—Then came the trucker era —she went on, smiling now—. I’d get in at the highway gas station and ride with them for miles. Some just wanted company. Others asked for more, and I gave it to them in the cab, with the fields flying past the window at full speed. One of them dropped me off at dawn in a town I don’t even know the name of, and I walked to the station feeling like the freest woman in the world. Free, you understand? That’s the word the people who insult you never use.

She fell silent for a while, looking out the window at the black countryside. When she spoke again, her voice was lower.

—And you know how I kept going —she told the old man—. Husbands, boyfriends, lovers. Some good, some not so much. But I never stopped being the same. Never stopped wanting what I wanted. People think a woman like that is broken. It’s the opposite. I chose every single thing I did. Every one.

She looked at the man with shining eyes, almost defiant.

—And today, on this train, with this young man, the same thing. I wanted it. I went after it. And I’d do it again.

The old man looked at her for a long while, with no reproach, with the resignation of someone who accepted everything decades ago. He put a wrinkled hand on her thigh.

—You’re impossible —he said at last.

She smiled and pressed his hand against her leg.

—And you’re still with me. Despite everything.

***

A silence fell among the three of us. The train kept heading toward the capital, carrying that raw confession that floated in the air like the smell still soaked into our clothes. The woman closed her eyes, satisfied. The old man went back to snoring softly. And I, from my seat, realized I had heard every word, and that something still didn’t quite add up.

Because she had spoken to the old man about me. She had told him about the bathroom, the train, this young man. But not once, not a single time, had she looked at me while saying it. As if I weren’t there. As if she were talking about a memory, not about something that had just happened.

I felt a chill that didn’t come from the air conditioning. I turned toward the window, looking for my face in the glass, that reflection night always gives back when everything outside is dark.

There was no one there.

The glass reflected the empty seat, the sleeping old man, the woman with her eyes closed. But where I was sitting, there was no reflection. No man. Nothing.

Something broke inside me, like a certainty arriving too late. I looked down at my own hands on my knees. I could see them. I could feel them. And yet the glass insisted: there was no one there. An old man and a woman sleeping, the black countryside, the poles flashing by like lightning. But nothing, absolutely nothing else.

***

Arriving at the terminal, past ten in the morning, the tracks multiplied beneath the train like the lines of an open hand. Another story had been woven, unwoven, and woven again in an ordinary carriage, between two strangers who may never have existed in the same way.

The woman woke up, straightened her dress, and got off on the old man’s arm without looking back. I stayed seated, watching them walk away along the platform through the crowd, getting smaller and smaller, until they vanished. I wanted to stand up, and I didn’t know whether I did. Shadows, what weighs and what relieves, blurred in yet another morning, among the specters and purgatories of a railway station.

And then the carriage was completely empty, and for the first time in a long while I understood that the confession she had made to the old man was, in truth, without knowing it, made to me.