The Trunk That Revealed My Great-Grandmother’s Secret Lover

The house in Valldosera had been passed from hand to hand in my family for two generations, and when it finally came into mine I had only gone up into the attic a couple of times. Dust, beams eaten through by woodworm, sagging furniture, and moth-eaten clothes: there was nothing up there that seemed worth the trouble. Until the first autumn rains opened a leak in the roof and the mason told me I had to clear everything out so he could work.

So I spent an entire afternoon hauling junk up and down. Most of it went straight into the garage. But there was one piece I set aside: a dark wooden trunk, heavy, with blackened brass locks. I carried it down myself, step by step, to my study, and set it by the window, where the last light of the afternoon fell across the lid.

I opened it expecting old tablecloths. I found something else.

On top of everything was a small burgundy velvet pouch. Inside, hanging from a fine silver chain, was a locket. I opened it with my fingernail and, in the oval, a faded photograph showed the face of a beautiful woman with a serene gaze. On the other side, held beneath a tiny crystal, were a few strands of vivid red hair. The woman in the portrait wore her hair straight and pinned up. The red curls belonged to someone else. Whose lock do you keep pressed to your chest? I thought, and felt an absurd tingling at the nape of my neck.

I’m a redhead too. Maybe that’s why I stayed staring at that lock of hair for so long.

Under the pouch there was clothing, surprisingly well preserved thanks to a mountain of mothballs. Folded carefully, set apart from the rest, was the lingerie. Underwear from another century: ribbons, hooks, silks that had turned ivory with age. In its day it must have been scandalous. Today it felt almost like a fetish, and when I ran my fingers along the embroidered edges I could feel that the fabric still held warmth.

Beneath that, a row of books. I recognized some spines: masterpieces of nineteenth-century erotic literature, several of them first editions. They would look magnificent in my library. And among them, a handwritten diary with a beautiful, twisting script, penned in ink. On the first page, a single line: “So that no one knows what I was, except whoever finds this.” It was signed with an initial, a large, curved C.

Casilda. Later the diary would give me the full name, but that night I only had the initial and a suspicion that grew with every object.

At the bottom of the trunk, two bundles of letters tied with silk ribbon and a leather-bound album in black. The photographs were prints made from old glass-plate negatives. And, half disassembled among the remains of a cardboard box, a carved cock—no other word for it—of dark wood, polished ebony, so realistic it made me snatch my hand away on instinct and then reach out again a second later.

I left the diary and the letters for later. First I wanted to see the photos.

Casilda appeared in them wearing less and less clothing. The camera had stripped her slowly, page by page, as if whoever was pressing the shutter had been as spellbound as I was. She had a body of firm lines, not voluptuous: high, conical breasts with wide areolas and dark nipples, the very pale skin of someone who never took the sun. Her waist, narrowed by years of corseting, gave way to wide hips and a generous ass that in one of the photos she offered to the camera on all fours, looking back over her shoulder with a smile that was anything but innocent.

I turned the pages more slowly. My skin had caught fire without asking permission.

In the last pages of the album, Casilda was no longer alone. Another woman was with her. A mass of curls that the black-and-white photos didn’t reveal, but whose color I knew, with the locket still open on the table. They were naked, kissing, one woman’s hands tracing the other’s body. In one, they were touching each other’s breasts. In another, one had her face buried between her lover’s parted thighs, and the curve of her back, the tension of her fingers dug into the sheet, left no doubt about what was happening.

There were only a few photos. Too few for my taste. How I would have loved to be the one holding the camera that afternoon. But they were enough to understand everything: those two women had loved each other in an era when loving each other was a secret kept in a trunk, under lock and key, under mothballs, under a hundred years of family silence.

The sofa on which Casilda displayed her body in the photographs was the same one I had carried down to the garage two days before. The same wood, the same finishes. The whole house, suddenly, stopped being mine. It was hers first.

***

I stood up and compared the lingerie to my own body, holding it up in front of my pajamas. We were almost the same size. Almost the same height. Curiosity burned in my hands, and not only curiosity. Will it fit me? I wondered, and I knew I was going to find out even if it was an absurd idea.

I took off my pajamas and began dressing in her clothes. I did it slowly, with an almost ceremonial care, as if she might take offense at any haste.

First, a pair of gossamer-thin panties, in a silk so light it was barely there. It took me a few seconds to understand the opening sewn right over the sex. A woman wearing lingerie like that didn’t have to undress to relieve herself. Nor to be taken. The cut left the vulva bare beneath the fabric, and just thinking about it I felt myself growing wet.

Over that, a muslin petticoat so light it barely brushed my skin. I can’t understand how human hands could weave something like that, or how it had survived so many years. On the bed, the corset. To lace it properly I would have needed another pair of hands, so I only put it on and fastened enough hooks to feel it: to feel how it lifted my breasts and cinched my waist until my breath came short. Pulled tight, it must have been a torture device. Barely snugged, it was already a firm caress that reminded me of my own body with every inhale.

I looked at myself in the study mirror. And for a moment I didn’t recognize myself. The low light, the red curls loose over my pale shoulders, the old silk hugging me: I could have been either of the two. The woman in the portrait, or the one in the locket.

Before reading a single line of the diary, I gave myself a few minutes. I placed my camera on the shelf, set the timer, and took a few photographs of myself, imitating Casilda’s poses as best I could. Standing, one hand on my hip. Back turned, looking over my shoulder. On all fours on the sofa, just like her. I would have to start my own album. The last ones, the ones she took with her lover, I left for another occasion. For when I had company too.

And then, alone in front of the mirror, I let fantasy take over.

The simple idea of resembling her aroused me. Of having pressed against my skin the same fabric she had taken off a century earlier, the one she had worn for friends and lovers. Her sensuality, revived so much later, seemed to be possessing me, returning my body to an ancient heat, to sex in its purest state.

My hand lost itself beneath the muslin, searching for the opening in the panties. I found it, and my fingers slid straight over the wet lips of my sex, with no fabric between, no obstacle at all. I closed my eyes. Inside my eyelids I could see the photographs: Casilda on all fours, the other woman’s red hair falling over her belly, the two mouths meeting.

I wanted more. I remembered the dark wood.

I picked up the ebony cock and slowly ran it over my nipples, which rose above the half-cup of the corset, hard and sensitive. I lowered the carved glans down the center of my body, rubbed it against the lips of my vulva until it was wet, and let it force its way inside. What had been inside Casilda’s body was now inside mine. The same piece, the same journey, separated by a hundred years and by nothing.

Her sex was mine. It was her fingers moving through me, her tongue I imagined between my thighs, her red-curled lover leaning over me in the half-light. With my other hand I pinched a nipple compressed by the corset and arched my back, my ass lifted just as in the photos, the same pose, the same gesture. Two bodies blurred across time.

My mouth was searching for hers. I kissed the air, licked my fingers that wanted to touch a skin lost to the past, a skin that now existed only in glass plates and in my imagination. I didn’t know whether I wanted to make love to Casilda or become her. I didn’t know whether I desired the woman in the portrait or the one with the curls. It didn’t matter. I let myself be swept away by both at once.

I pushed the wood deeper, setting a rhythm that wasn’t mine, that seemed dictated by those lines written in ink and by the images on paper. The muslin whispered with every movement, the corset forced me to breathe in short gasps, and another woman’s lingerie, from another era, took me to an orgasm in which fantasy took the reins completely. I came biting my lip so I wouldn’t cry out in an empty house, with Casilda’s cock inside me and her red lock shining on the table.

When I caught my breath, I was still dressed in her silks, stretched out on the same sofa from the album. The diary waited a hand’s breadth away, and the letters, tied with their ribbon. I was going to read them all, page by page, name by name. I wanted to know who the woman with red curls was, what Casilda wrote to her, how they had managed to love each other against the current of their century.

But that night I already knew the most important thing. That trunk had not left me an inheritance of furniture or old books. It had left me her. And, without meaning to, it had given me back a desire that had spent far too long folded away and stored under mothballs, waiting for someone to finally bring it into the light.