The Mature Neighbor Who Wanted to Get Back on Camera

I moved to the Los Robles condominium at the beginning of March, when I was still studying for the entrance exam and my only plan for the summer was to spend the afternoons locked away with my books. My parents left me alone in the house on the corner, the smallest one in the gated neighborhood, while they finished selling the apartment in the south. Nineteen years old, a bicycle, and a long street of identical houses with absurdly perfect gardens. I never imagined those houses were hiding what they were hiding.

The women in the condominium were something else. Mature, married, bored with husbands who came home late and fell asleep in front of the television. I watched them walking toward the club, with those bodies honed by gym sessions and dead hours, and I understood very quickly that none of them looked at me like I was a child. They looked at me the way you look at something you still haven’t decided whether you’re going to try.

The one who intrigued me most was Mariela. She lived three houses down, married to Bustos, a dry, severe man who ran a religious group downtown and prayed out loud before every meal. She was blonde, with full lips and blue eyes that seemed to apologize in advance. She had the biggest breasts I had ever seen in my life and the kind of way of moving that was restrained, like someone who had learned to hide her body after once showing it too much.

I found out by chance one afternoon when I helped her unload the bags from her car.

“Do you know I used to work in film?” she said, out of nowhere, while looking for her keys.

“An actress?”

“Something like that.” She smiled to one side. “A long time ago. Another life.”

That night I looked up her real name online and found nothing. I tried nicknames, stage names, and on the third try I found her twenty years younger, on the covers of films nobody rented anymore. Mariela Rebolledo had not been just any actress. She had been the actress, for a short, fierce season, before marrying Bustos and disappearing from the map forever.

I didn’t tell her anything. But something changed in the way she greeted me, as if she also knew that I already knew.

Over the following weeks, the game became a habit. She would lend me a book and leave her fingers a second too long on mine. She would ask me about the entrance exam in a voice too soft for just any neighbor. One afternoon I ran into her at the club pool, wearing a one-piece black swimsuit that covered everything and suggested more than any bikini ever could, and she held my gaze until I was the one who had to look away. Bustos was waiting for her on a lounge chair, reading the Bible, never lifting his eyes even once. I understood that for years he had stopped looking at her, and that that neglect was a door standing wide open.

***

The heat arrived all at once at the end of November. One of those mornings when the asphalt trembled before eleven, I took Duque, the old Labrador I looked after for the neighbors at the back, and brought him to the park that surrounded the church, at the edge of the condominium. At that hour there was nobody around. I let go of the leash and the dog went off sniffing the tree roots while I sat on a bench in the shade, fanning myself with the black T-shirt that was already sticking to my back.

“I thought you’d gone farther.”

Mariela sat down beside me without leaving any space between us. She was wearing a light summer dress and a pale scarf draped across her shoulders. She smelled sweet and expensive.

“Your husband will miss you,” I said.

“I told him I was going to the corner shop. I don’t have much time.”

I looked around. The street was empty, mass hadn’t ended yet, the park was ours. I rested my hand on her thigh, almost to test how far the boldness would go, and she didn’t take it away. She only lowered her eyes to my hand and then lifted them to mine.

“I know who you were,” I said at last.

Mariela let out her breath slowly. She didn’t seem surprised. More than anything, relieved, like someone setting down a heavy bag they’d carried for too many years.

“I knew the day you helped me with the bags. The way you looked at me.” She laughed softly. “It’s been a long time since anyone looked at me like that. Bustos hasn’t looked at me in fifteen years.”

“And you miss it?”

“I miss something else.” She bit her lip. “I miss feeling desired and not guilty for it.”

I stood up and took her by the wrist. She let herself be led, stumbling a little, to the biggest tree, the one that shielded us from the street with its broad shadow. I leaned my back against the trunk and looked at her. Mariela shook her head in disbelief, a new smile opening on her face, and lowered herself to her knees in the grass without me asking her to.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What I came to do.” She looked up. “Are you going to keep this?”

I took out my phone and aimed it at her. Not for any particular reason; I did it because I felt she wanted it, that she needed a camera in front of her to become who she had been again.

“I’m not one of those anymore,” she said, looking straight into the lens, with a smile that contradicted every word.

“One of what?”

“The kind who gets recorded.”

“Well, today you seem to be.”

Her fingers went straight to the zipper of my pants. She lowered it slowly, with a skill that can’t be improvised, a memory the body keeps even when the mind promises to forget. When she freed me, her eyes widened and for a second she stopped performing. A real sigh escaped her.

“Twenty years,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Twenty years praying before eating.”

“Suck,” I told her, giving her cheek a soft tap.

She nodded quickly, like a diligent student, and took me into her mouth in one go. The heat of that mouth shot up my back and I had to brace myself against the trunk. She held the base firmly while her head moved in circles, slowly, savoring it, her eyes closed at first and then open, fixed once more on the camera, as if there were millions of people on the other side and not just me and the Labrador sleeping a few meters away.

“Slowly,” I asked, and she obeyed.

She pulled me out of her mouth with a wet sound, wiped the corner of her lips with the back of her hand, and took a breath. Her cheeks were flushed and her neat hairstyle was beginning to come undone.

“You have no idea how much I missed this,” she said. “Bustos thinks the body is something to be ashamed of. I married believing the same thing. I spent fifteen years believing it.”

“And now?”

“Now I knelt in a park to suck your cock in broad daylight.” She gave a hoarse laugh. “Something broke, it seems.”

She lowered her head again. This time it was deeper, more surrendered, a technique only years and a talent that marriage hadn’t quite managed to extinguish can give. The blonde who had filled magazine covers twenty years earlier was still there, under the preacher’s wife, waiting for someone to open the door. I only had to hold her hair and let her do the rest.

“Look at me,” I said, and she lifted her eyes without stopping.

Her blue eyes held mine while the rest continued its course. There was something almost sad in that surrender, and at the same time something triumphant, as if she were reclaiming all at once everything she had kept locked away. I felt her moan with her mouth full, a purr rising from her chest, and I knew she was no longer performing for anyone. She was doing it for herself.

“I’m not going to last much longer,” I warned her.

She nodded with her eyes. She didn’t pull away. She tightened her lips and sped up, and when I reached the edge she held me steady, not letting go, taking everything with the calm of a professional who hadn’t practiced in two decades. Only at the end did she close her eyelids and let the rest spill onto her cheek and the curve of her neck, barely staining the edge of the pale scarf.

“Cut,” I said, breathless, lowering the phone.

Mariela laughed. A clean, long laugh, one that didn’t seem to have escaped her in years. She stayed on her knees for a moment, running a finger across her cheek, looking at her hand like someone recognizing a lost object.

“God,” she murmured. “It’s been so long.”

***

She fixed her hair with the front camera on her own phone, straightened her dress, and took off the stained scarf to tuck it into her purse. In less than three minutes she was once again the discreet woman of Los Robles condominium, the wife of the man who prayed before eating. Only her eyes were different now, more alive.

“Are you going to upload it anywhere?” I asked, half joking.

“I don’t know.” She looked at me sidelong, mischievous. “I have an old account, no name, no face. No one would know it’s me.” She bit her lip. “Would that bother you?”

“I think it’d be a waste for something like that to be seen by only the two of us.”

I sat on the bench while she recovered and looked at her with different eyes. She wasn’t the submissive wife who greeted people with a gesture from the gate, nor the woman who lowered her gaze when her husband raised his voice. She was someone who had had an entire life before Bustos, a body celebrated by thousands of strangers, and who for twenty years had convinced herself that was a sin to be purged. Watching her laugh like that, disheveled and stained under the sun, was like watching a woman emerge from a long confinement and breathe for the first time.

Her eyes shone. She was a woman of nearly forty who had just been handed back something she thought was buried, and the idea of an invisible audience excited her more than anything else. I understood, at that moment, that I had not given her anything she didn’t already have. I had only kept the door open long enough for her to dare to step through it.

“My husband comes back at eight,” she said, standing up and brushing the grass from her knees. “Will you walk the dog at the same time tomorrow?”

“Every day.”

“Good.” She gave me a short kiss at the corner of my mouth, almost chaste compared with everything before. “Maybe next time I’ll bring a friend. Carla is bored too. And she likes to watch.”

I watched her walk away along the path toward the houses, her stride composed again, the stained scarf safe in her purse, waving to a neighbor watering the garden. Duque woke up, stretched, and trotted back to me. I sat down again on the bench, still feeling the phone warm in my hand, and I understood that I was not going to spend that summer locked away with my books.

The heat had only just begun, and the Los Robles condominium had many identical houses, with too-perfect gardens, and behind each door a woman who had spent far too long waiting for someone to look at her the way I had looked at Mariela.