A Year of Cybersex and at Last I Wanted to See His Face

In all my years of marriage, I had never been unfaithful to my husband. Not a glance too long, not a message I had to delete. But long afternoons alone at home are endless, and one gets bored of staring at the ceiling. I started going into chat rooms almost out of curiosity, to pass the time, and without realizing it I ended up talking every day with the same person.

He went by Adrián. I told him my name was Marina, though that isn’t my real name. With him I began building a trust I had never had with anyone, that strange kind of trust that only anonymity gives you. When you know that whatever you say will not be the words of a married woman with an orderly life, but of a character you’ve invented, you dare to do anything. And sometimes that character is more real than the face we show the world.

—Marina, do you realize we’ve been doing this for almost a year? —he wrote to me one night—. Two, three times a week. I know corners of your body your husband doesn’t even know.

—I know —I answered, with the living room lights off and the screen lighting my face—. And I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I come more from thinking about what you ask me to do than from anything I can think up myself.

It was true. I liked his fantasies more than my own. I submitted to him with a facility that scared me. He asked me to do things in front of the camera, things I thought at first I would never do, and I obeyed with trembling legs and my heart in my throat. I still remember the first time we turned on both cameras at once, that mix of panic and excitement at seeing his body and letting him see mine.

In time I learned to recognize his way of writing even before he said who he was. The way he took a little longer to reply when he was aroused, the spelling mistakes he made when he had one hand busy. I found myself mentally noting his schedule without meaning to. I knew he logged on after dinner, when everyone in his house was already asleep, and that he would cut off abruptly if he heard a noise in the hallway. Those pauses of his, that shared fear of being discovered, bound us together as much as the sex.

Still, he never let anything slip about his real life, just as I never did about mine. It was a rule neither of us had ever said out loud, and one we both obeyed to the letter. No surnames, no old photos, no street names. We told each other the filthiest desires without the slightest shame, but the neighborhood where we lived was a sacred secret. I knew his body by heart and had no idea what his face looked like when he laughed.

—I never imagined something like this could get me this fucking worked up —he confessed—. Every time you do what I ask, I go crazy. I thought you wouldn’t dare half of what I ask of you. Don’t you think it’s time we saw each other’s faces for real?

I stared at that sentence for a long while before answering.

—Adrián, I’m married. You’re single, you live with your parents, you have it easy. For me, taking that step is complicated, do you understand? And then there’s the distance. I’m from Salamanca and you’re from Santander. We don’t have time to meet without anyone suspecting.

—Then let’s meet halfway —he wrote immediately, as if he’d had it planned for a long time—. Burgos works for both of us. This week. I can’t stand it anymore, Marina.

***

It took me two full days to answer that. Two days turning it over in my head, looking at myself in the mirror, making excuses not to go and then undoing them one by one. The idea utterly mortified me. It’s one thing to strip behind a screen, where you can shut off the computer if anything goes wrong, and quite another to be in front of someone flesh and blood.

—I’m terrified, I swear —I finally wrote—. I’m shy, I’m a bit chubby, I’m not the woman from the movies. But you’re right. Enough of fantasies. I want something real. I really want you.

—And how far would you be willing to go? —he asked me.

—I don’t know. Whatever you want. You decide, you always come up with better ideas than I do.

Then that part of him I liked so much lit up.

—Let’s do something. Do you remember that game we talked about once? Make a list of six fantasies, numbered one through six. When we’re in the hotel, I’ll roll a die and we’ll do whichever one comes up. No arguing.

—And if the worst one comes up?

—Especially if the worst one comes up —he replied—. I promise to accept everything, no limits. No matter how intense whatever I get is, I’ll do it. Swear to me you’ll do the same.

—I swear —I wrote, and felt heat climbing up my neck.

—But let me see your face first, even if it’s just a photo —he insisted.

—No, you pest. I’d die of embarrassment. We’ll just meet there directly, that way I won’t back out.

We arranged to meet two days later. In Burgos, at a café on Calle de la Paloma called El Sifón, at five in the afternoon. I told him what I’d be wearing so he’d recognize me: jeans, a light blue shirt, and a denim jacket.

—And you —I added, laughing to myself in front of the screen— put on a tracksuit. It’ll be more fun.

—You’re mean —he answered—. What if I get hard, and you know I’m going to? In a tracksuit it’ll show. You’re so mean.

I went to bed that night with my body burning and a list of six fantasies hidden in my bag, written in my worst handwriting so my husband wouldn’t understand it if he found it.

***

The day of the date I couldn’t eat a thing. I made up some excuse, some errand I had to do in another city, and drove to Burgos with sweaty hands stuck to the steering wheel and the radio on without listening to it. I parked three streets away from the café and still stayed in the car for a while, touching up my lipstick in the mirror, wondering what the hell I was doing.

At five on the dot, dressed exactly as we had agreed, I pushed open the door to El Sifón.

I saw him at once. It was impossible not to. He was the only man in the entire café sitting in a tracksuit, on a barstool at the counter, stirring a coffee that must have already gone cold. I imagined him just as nervous as I was, about to finally meet the woman he had seen come more times than anyone in his life. I knew he wanted me. He had been wanting me through a screen for almost a year, and now he was going to find out whether the face lived up to the rest.

I took a deep breath, crossed the room, and sat on the stool beside him. He slowly turned his head to look at me.

And then I couldn’t suppress a shout that made half the café turn around.

—My God… You’re Adrián?

He went white. The spoon fell from his hand into the cup.

—And you… you’re Marina? —he asked in a thin voice that wasn’t his own.

We both fell silent. A terrible silence, one that lasted centuries, with the sound of the coffee machine in the background and some laughter at the next table that suddenly felt unbearable to me. He broke it, his voice cracked.

—This can’t be. Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me this isn’t happening.

—You haven’t told anyone, have you? —was the only thing I could think to say—. Please, tell me you haven’t told anyone.

—How could I tell anyone? —he replied, covering his face with his hands—. What do you call this between siblings? What have we done?

Because that was who he was. Not some stranger from Santander. My brother. The one who slept in the room across from mine, on the other side of the hallway, in the same house where we had both grown up.

—You said you were from Santander —I muttered, gripping the edge of the counter so I wouldn’t fall off the stool—. That you lived alone, that…

—And didn’t you say you were from Salamanca? —he cut in, with a bitter laugh that was frightening—. Liar. You live fifteen meters from me. We sleep under the same roof. Every Sunday we have dinner with our parents at the same table.

I had lied about the city to protect myself, just as he had lied to me. The two of us had invented a distant life so the other would never be able to find us, so that it would never leave the screen. And by inventing the same lies, without knowing it, we had ended up meeting halfway to nowhere, both of us leaving the same house that morning, each with our own excuse.

I thought of every night of that year. Of every thing I had shown him, of every thing he had asked me to do and I had done. Of the cameras turned on. Of the list of six fantasies I had in my bag at that very moment, numbered one through six. My stomach churned and, at the same time, I felt something else in the center of my body that made me even more ashamed, because it wasn’t only revulsion.

—How embarrassing, my God —I whispered, not daring to look him in the eye—. How humiliating if anyone ever found out.

He looked at me with an impossible mixture of horror and something else neither of us dared name. The waitress asked if we wanted anything. Neither of us answered.

We were still sitting there side by side, at the counter of that café in Burgos, with a cold coffee and a die he had taken out of the pocket of his tracksuit without realizing it, and which now rested on the wood between us.

Neither of us got up. Neither of us left.

And now what?