The Secret of My Mother and Her Lifelong Friend
I have an aunt named Renata, although she isn’t really my aunt. There’s no blood relation between us: we call her that because of the deep friendship that ties her to my family. She’s been my mother’s soulmate since they were teenagers, I think since school, maybe even before. To me she was always part of the scenery of my home.
She comes over for dinner once a week, without anyone formally inviting her. Both my little sister and I call her aunt, and we love her with a devotion that’s hard to explain. She looked after us countless times when my parents couldn’t, she was allowed to pick us up from school, and my mother would stake her life on her without blinking.
Renata lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment a few blocks from our house. She has no known family, at least to us, and we never knew her to have a partner. According to what my mother told me, she was briefly married to a man and they separated, but that happened before I was born. Every time I asked about that subject, the answer was cut off immediately, as if there were a door nobody wanted to open.
She’s the same age as my mother, though she looks a little older, maybe because of how fair-skinned she is. Rounded face, soft cheeks speckled with freckles, large light-green eyes that catch your attention the moment you look at her. She wears her brown hair straight, almost always loose, and has an easy smile that disarms you.
She isn’t a thin woman. She has wide hips, generous thighs, full arms, and a barely defined waist. But what defines her most is her enormous, prominent chest, which she insists on hiding under loose T-shirts. It was as if she had spent her whole life trying to go unnoticed while carrying a body that would not let her.
As a teenager I invited classmates over several times, and she was usually around. Except for one, who one afternoon undressed her with his eyes when he noticed the bust hidden beneath her clothes, the rest ignored her completely. Most of them were left dazed by my mother, who had another kind of beauty, more obvious, more sought after.
The few times I noticed Renata attracting male attention was on vacation, at the beach. She wore plain one-piece swimsuits, I suppose embarrassed by her curves, but even that fabric couldn’t hide such a chest. With that white skin and those green eyes, anyone would have said she’d have a line of suitors. Instead, she avoided them all.
Once in Florianópolis, a man approached her to chat with the best of manners, and she brushed him off with a cold elegance that allowed no argument. At dinner that night we laughed about the episode for an hour. Renata laughed with us, but there was something in her laugh that I would only understand many years later.
***
A few years ago, my father asked me to load some songs onto his phone because he’s an absolute disaster with technology. In the middle of copying files, I took it upon myself to back up the phone. It was full of family photos, and it seemed a shame for them to be lost because of his clumsiness with any device that had a screen.
That habit repeated itself several times; in fact, I still do it every so often. On one of those backups I accidentally came across a home video of my parents having sex. I won’t go into details: let’s just say it was explicit, that it ended in a pretty raw way, and that I heard a conversation I wish I had never heard.
On another review of the backup, photos appeared. My mother naked, kneeling, tongue out, her breasts exposed. My mother doing things with my father that no daughter should see. I was young, I’m not proud of having invaded their privacy, I know perfectly well I was wrong. But I never showed it to anyone. I carried the secret in silence and tried to forget it.
The problem was the day I found a folder. It had a very short name, just one letter: R. What I saw inside changed the way I looked at the two most important women in my life.
There were about twenty photos and a video.
I opened the first images and instantly recognized my parents’ bedroom. The bedspread, the bedside lamp, the crooked picture on the wall. I started flipping through the photos and something sank in my chest. It was Renata. Renata sitting on my parents’ marital bed, with a smile I had never seen on her face.
I almost started crying. The first thing I thought was the worst: that son of a bitch of my father is cheating on my mother with her soul friend, they’re both pieces of shit. With trembling hands I kept going through them. Renata took off her T-shirt, stayed in her bra, showed her belly and that enormous chest she had hidden all her life.
In the following images she grabbed her breasts, squeezed them, laughed alone in front of the camera. Then she appeared on all fours on the bed, with thick legs and unflattering underwear that, for some reason, in that context was even more provocative. By then the tears were already falling on their own and I was thinking about how I was going to gather the courage to tell my mother what her husband was up to.
Then I went to the next photo and couldn’t believe it.
In the next image was Liliana. My mother.
She was also in a bra, one of lace that showed the swell of her breasts, not as large as Renata’s, but just as beautiful. In the photos that followed they were together: my mother touched Renata’s breasts, Renata did the same with hers, both laughing like two girls sharing a private joke.
Then they appeared without their bras. If my mother’s breasts were glorious, Renata’s belonged to another world. Despite her age they had a perfect droop, a very white skin, nipples such a pale pink they almost blended into the areola. I suddenly understood why she hid them: it wasn’t shame, it was guarding something she reserved for very few.
I was completely confused. My mother, in an intimate scene with another woman whom I considered a second mother.
***
Although, if I thought about it calmly, it wasn’t exactly a sexual scene. I myself, with my college friends, had stayed in my underwear so many times, we had touched each other’s breasts as a joke, we’d give each other kisses on the cheek and even on the lips without it meaning anything. It was a way of showing affection, of having fun, of trusting one another.
If I touched my friends’ tits and they touched mine without anything weird happening, why should my mother doing the same with her lifelong friend be a crime? I clung to that idea to shake off the shock. There was nothing inherently wrong in what I was seeing. And yet something in my body told me this was different.
It was different because of the looks. Because of the way they sought each other out. Because of how one woman’s fingers lingered on the other’s skin a second longer than any innocent game would allow. There was an intimacy there that I knew, because I had felt it once, and that did not resemble two friends making jokes.
As I’m an incurable snoop, I kept looking, but I didn’t find anything more explicit. Just the two of them topless on the bed, embraced, laughing their asses off, happy in a way that hurt to recognize. Finally, I decided to open the video. It could have ended very badly for my head, but I double-clicked it anyway.
It was about thirty seconds long. Renata and my mother appeared in bras, clearly filming and taking pictures at the same time. Both of them removed the garment and were left bare-chested. They laughed, touched each other as if discovering something, looked into each other’s eyes, and gave each other a short kiss, just a brush of lips.
Then they laughed again and really kissed. A kiss of about five seconds, no tongue, but with a surrender that left no room for doubt. And when I thought the video couldn’t surprise me anymore, my father’s voice came from behind the camera, hoarse, satisfied, saying:
—You two are so beautiful.
The video cut off right there. I never knew what happened after that, and even today I don’t know whether I want to know.
***
It took me a couple of weeks to be able to look the three of them in the face again. Every family dinner became an acting exercise. My mother serving the food as always, Renata bringing the dessert she had made herself, my father making bad jokes. And me there, keeping a secret that weighed more than any of the previous ones.
In time, I let it go. I remembered that I also did similar things with my friends, I decided it wasn’t my place to judge, and I pushed the memory into a corner of my mind where it wouldn’t bother me. I didn’t think about it again until now, when I sat down to write it.
To close this story, I have to tell something that happened later. A couple of years afterward, already into her mid-forties, Renata got pregnant. We never knew who the father was. She always said it was through assisted reproduction, but I had my suspicions from day one and, after what I had seen in that folder, those suspicions took on a shape I’d rather not name.
With the pregnancy, her body transformed in an incredible way. Her chest, which was already enormous, became even more imposing, and when her daughter was born she seemed to grow ten years younger overnight. She bought a larger apartment shortly after giving birth, left that studio behind, and we went from having an aunt to also having a cousin.
Renata still comes to dinner every week. My mother still looks at her the way she looked in those photos, though now I know how to read that look. Sometimes, when they laugh together in the kitchen, I watch them from the corner of my eye and wonder how many things they must have shared over so many years, what kind of love that is that doesn’t need a name in order to exist.
I never found photos like that again, but I never looked for them again either. I decided that the best thing for me, and for everyone, was to stop prying into other people’s intimacy. They’re good parents, she’s a good aunt, my cousin is beautiful. I don’t need to know any more. And yet, every time I see them exchange that complicit look across the table, a part of me smiles at the secret I share without them knowing.
