What Happened to Remedios Coming Down from the Hermitage

They called me Pilar all my life and I never married. In the village they said my train had already gone, that I was one of those women left to dress saints. They said it with that Andalusian pity that is half affection and half gossip. They knew nothing. They knew nothing until the day I buried Remedios and showed up at the cemetery with a bracelet of colored threads around my wrist.

But I’m going to tell it from the beginning.

Remedios and I were born the same year, on the same street, at the top of the village. One house pressed against the next, with the whitewash peeling in winter and the red geraniums hanging from the balcony in August. We played in the cobbled street, stole figs from the priest’s orchard, bathed in the stream in secret because our mothers didn’t want us to. She had honey-colored eyes and I always knew those eyes were going to be the problem of my life.

At seventeen they introduced me to a man named Antonio, son of the vineyard family. A good match, they said. I let him hold my hand twice, and the third time he asked me to go to the hayloft. There I understood that wasn’t for me. I wanted nothing to do with the weight of a man on top of me, or his wine-breath, or his dry hands on my skin, or the hard cock pressing against my thigh over his trousers. I came out of the hayloft like a cat dropped into a tub of water, and the next day I told my mother there would be no wedding. She cried. My father didn’t speak to me for a month. And I stayed home looking after the two of them until they were gone, one after the other.

Meanwhile, Remedios married José. A good man, old-school. The kind who worked from sunup to sundown, went to the casino on Sunday afternoons, and didn’t ask too many questions. She gave him three children: two boys and a girl. I went to the weddings, the baptisms, the first communions. I made the birthday cakes. I watched her from the far end of the table and learned to smile without letting anything show.

Once, only once in all those years, she said something to me. We were both in her kitchen, she kneading bread and me sitting on a cane chair. She had flour on her forearms, up to the elbows. She looked at me without lifting her head and said, “Pilar, there are things one knows and keeps quiet about.” I didn’t answer. I poured her another coffee. But that night, in my bed, I touched myself thinking about her for the first time. I was thirty-four and I had never touched myself thinking about anyone. I pulled my nightgown up to my waist and slipped my hand between my legs. I found my cunt soaked, dripping, wetter than it had ever been in my life. I rubbed my clit with two fingers thinking of Remedios’ mouth, of her tits swaying under her robe while she kneaded, of what it would be like to slip my tongue between her thighs and drink whatever came out of her. I pushed my fingers into my cunt and drew them out shining with thick slick. I put them back in, deeper this time, fucking myself alone in anger, pressing my other fist against my mouth so the neighbor wouldn’t hear me. I came biting the pillow, with spasms that shook my whole hips and legs and left me trembling under the blanket. I stayed there crying until dawn, half shame and half relief.

***

The years passed the way they do in villages, without hurry. The vineyards were sold, the children went off to the city. José died of a heart attack, without warning, one August afternoon while watering the courtyard. Remedios was widowed at fifty-eight and the house became far too big for one woman alone.

She started climbing up to the hermitage. The hermitage was up on the hill, twenty minutes on foot, and from there you could see the whole valley all the way to the sea. She went to mass every Sunday and, on weekdays, she climbed up alone to sit on the stone bench in the courtyard. I saw her pass by my door at nine in the morning.

One day she said to me, “Pilar, will you come up to the hermitage with me?” So I went. And the next day she asked again. And I went. And after a few months she didn’t ask anymore: we went together and that was that.

We walked arm in arm. Both of us in black, her because she was a widow and me because I had always been in mourning for no one knew whom. We walked slowly, at the same pace, without speaking. Her hip brushed mine with every step. Fifty years after meeting, her hip brushed mine and my heart raced as if I were fifteen.

***

The afternoon what had to happen happened was a Sunday in October. We had come down from mass, it started raining all at once, and the street emptied out. Her house was closer to the slope and we went in both of us to dry off. I took off my headscarf. She took off her jacket. Her white hair was gathered in a low bun, loosened by the rain. Strands were falling down the back of her neck.

“I’m going to make coffee,” she said.

“Wait,” I said.

I don’t know where my voice came from. I grabbed her wrist, turned her toward me, and kissed her on the mouth. I had been waiting for that moment since I was seven years old. She didn’t move. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t kiss me back at first. And then she did.

She came over me as if she weighed half what she weighed. She put her hands on my face, drew me back against the hallway wall, and kissed me the way I had kissed myself in dreams a hundred times. Her lips were trembling. Her neck smelled of glycerin soap and dried rosemary. I took the hairpins out of her bun one by one and her white hair spilled over her shoulders. I pushed my tongue deep into her mouth and she sucked on it with a sixty-year hunger, moaning into me. I grabbed one breast over the black dress and felt the hard nipple beneath the fabric, asking for trouble. I pinched the other and she let out a low cry. She hiked up my skirt with a hurry no old woman’s, slid her hand under my panties, and found my cunt already soaked, swollen, waiting. She touched me there for the first time standing up, against the hallway wall, while I bit her shoulder so I wouldn’t scream. Her fingers were dry and rough from kneading bread all her life and they scraped my clit in a way no one had ever scraped it, sending a shock down my back all the way to my nape.

“You’re dripping, Pilar,” she whispered in my ear. “You’re all wet.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been like this for fifty years.”

“Upstairs,” she said in my ear.

We went up to the bedroom that had been hers and José’s. She locked the door even though there was no one else in the house. She sat on the edge of the bed and slowly unbuttoned the black dress, looking me in the eyes. I saw her breasts for the first time in sixty years of knowing her. Sagging, soft, crossed by blue veins like those of women who have nursed. They seemed to me the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. The nipples, dark and large as ripe figs, already hard with desire. She slid her black panties out from under the dress and kicked them to the floor. She lay back and spread her legs over the spread without an ounce of shame, her gray, hairy cunt on display, shining with how wet she was.

“Come here,” she said. “Come here, I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.”

I undressed too. I took off my dress, my slip, my stockings, my panties. At fifty-eight years old I stood in front of her for the first time with everything I had. She looked me up and down slowly, her mouth slightly open.

“My God, Pilar,” she said. “My God, how beautiful you are.”

I knelt in front of her. I kissed her navel, her wide hips, the cesarean scar from the third child. I bit the inside of her thighs, first one then the other, working my way up slowly until I heard her moan softly, like someone afraid the neighbors might hear even though the neighbors were a hundred feet away. I opened the lips of her cunt with my fingers and saw her clit swollen, red, pulsing among the gray hair. I buried my face between her thighs and dragged my whole tongue from bottom to top, tasting her for the first time. She gave a long cry and grabbed my head with both hands. She had a thick, gray pussy and a taste of iron and salt and freshly wet earth. I sucked her clit slowly, like someone savoring a ripe fruit, and then with stronger, faster licks, until she started panting. I slipped my tongue inside her cunt and felt her tightening, clenching, her thick juice dripping over my chin. I pushed two fingers into her while still sucking her clit and she began to move against my face, fucking my mouth shamelessly, panting harder.

“Oh, Pilar, like that, don’t stop, like that, my love.”

I stayed there until her knees gave way and she pulled my hair to make me come up and kiss her. She came with a shudder that shook her whole soft belly and old legs, pressing my head against her cunt while I kept licking the orgasm pouring out in spurts, swallowing it, not wanting to lose a single drop.

“Pilar,” she said with a broken voice, still panting, “Pilar, I’ve been waiting my whole life.”

“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”

I climbed onto the bed and lay beside her with my mouth still wet with her. She recovered for a moment, her white chest rising and falling. Then she turned on her side, looked at me, wiped with her thumb the juice of hers that was dripping from the corner of my mouth, and put it in her mouth.

“Now you,” she said.

She ran her hand over my belly, scratched my nipples slowly, pinched them until they were hard as stones. She went down to my cunt and opened my legs with her knee. She slipped her fingers in slowly, looking at my face so she wouldn’t miss a single expression. One finger first. Then two. She filled my cunt and started fucking me with her hand, unhurried, in and out, searching for a spot inside me I didn’t even know I had. With her thumb she rubbed my clit at the same time, making slow circles. I gripped the sheet with both hands and began to move my hips against her hand, picking up the pace for her, begging wordlessly for her to give me more, harder.

“More,” I said at last. “More, Remedios, for God’s sake.”

She understood. She pushed three fingers in to the hilt and drove them into me like a cock, the heel of her hand slapping my pubis with every thrust. I came in her hand with a cry that was half laugh, half sob. My cunt clenched around her fingers, squeezing them, throbbing and throbbing for what seemed like endless minutes, soaking her wrist with slick all the way to the elbow. When she finally pulled her fingers out, she put them in my mouth and I sucked them clean, tasting myself for the first time.

Then I returned the favor slowly. I laid her on her back and licked her sagging breasts one after the other, sucked her dark nipples until she moaned, ran my tongue over her neck and her armpits still salty from the walk. I went back down to her cunt and slipped three fingers inside while I sought the same spot she had sought in me. With my other hand I kept rubbing her clit in circles. She bit the sheet so she wouldn’t scream and dug her nails into my shoulder. She came twice more like that, one after the other, soaking my whole hand and the white sheet beneath her ass. Afterward we lay there, naked, sweaty, staring at the ceiling, without speaking, our hands clasped like two girls.

“Do you know how many afternoons I dreamed of this?” she said after a while.

“The same as me,” I said.

I went down to my house at dusk with my legs still trembling and my panties soaked in my bag. The cat was waiting at the door. I poured her milk, sat in the armchair, and began to cry with happiness. I was fifty-eight years old. At last my life had begun.

***

For twelve years we were what we had never been able to be. Nobody knew anything. In the village we were still José’s widow and the old maid from High Street. We climbed up to the hermitage together, came down to mass together, knitted bibs for the grandchildren in the afternoon at her little table. And at night, when the grandchildren went back to Málaga, she slid the bolt and I stayed.

We learned to fuck slowly, the way only old women can. No hurry. With the light on because there was nothing left to hide. I kissed the wrinkles on her forehead, her tired breasts, her sun-spotted hands. I opened her legs and spent hours sucking her cunt until she came three or four times in a row, exhausted, laughing with pleasure, telling me to stop and keep going at the same time. She put her fingers deep inside me while she sucked my tits, or I sat on her face and made her mouth carry me to orgasm over her lips, or we both lay on our sides, one leg of each between the other’s, and rubbed our cunts against each other until we came together, mouth to mouth, swallowing our moans. We learned to eat each other’s ass too, with slow licks that made us tremble with shame and delight. We learned to finger each other from behind while the other sucked the clit. We left nothing untried in twelve years. Everything the two of us had dreamed alone over fifty years we did until we wore it out. She bit my shoulder when she came and I covered her mouth with mine so she wouldn’t be heard through the open window.

Sometimes, afterward, we would stay up talking until dawn. She told me things about José she had never told anyone: that he never touched her, that he came in two minutes and fell asleep, that she had given birth three times without knowing what a real orgasm was until that October afternoon in the bedroom. I told her things about the hayloft, about Antonio, about the fear I had at seventeen, about the lonely nights when I touched myself thinking of her. We promised that in the next life we would live it together from day one. We both knew we were lying. But what a beautiful lie, held together.

***

The ailments came as they had to come. To Remedios first. The heart, the kidneys, one leg that stopped obeying her completely. The afternoons in bed stopped being about pleasure and became about care. I put on her compression stockings, gave her the pills, took her to the bathroom. I did it happily. It was everything I had always wanted to do and no one had ever let me.

One November evening, after dinner of two soft-boiled eggs, she took my hand over the oilcloth.

“Pilar.”

“Yes?”

“Have I ever told you what I want?”

“Every morning you open your eyes, darling.”

“That’s why.”

Night fell. I gave her the pills, fluffed her pillow, sat in the wing chair beside her. The cat climbed onto her feet. I watched her sleep and watched her face, her hands, her white hair over the white pillowcase. I closed my eyes for a moment and, when I opened them, dawn had already broken. Remedios was not breathing.

***

The funeral was on Tuesday. The eldest granddaughter, the one most like her, was crying in silence, clinging to her mother’s arm. Her brothers carried the coffin. I walked behind them, alone, dressed all in black as I had always done. On my right wrist, beneath the cuff of my blouse, I wore a bracelet of colored threads. A rainbow. Remedios had put it on me the day we completed five years together. “Someday,” she told me then, “someday I’d like you to show it.”

At the cemetery, before the coffin was closed, I went up. I kissed her forehead in front of everyone. No one said a word. It was Tía Pilar, the lifelong friend. But when I raised my arm to make the sign of the cross, my blouse cuff rode up and the bracelet was left bare. I saw the eldest granddaughter looking at it. I saw her understand. I saw her face break in a pain different from the one she already had. And then, slowly, I saw her smile through the tears and nod.

That night, when she came back to her grandmother’s house to collect the things she wanted to keep, she knocked on my door. She hugged me for a long time, without saying a word. And before she left, she whispered in my ear: “Tía Pilar, I’ll see you soon.”

“Yes, my girl,” I said. “Soon.”

And here I am. Waiting.