The Summer I Wanted My Brother’s Wife
The first thing I remember about that summer of 2010 is Aldo Brenner’s hands. Broad, pink hands, furrowed with white lines of dry skin and old calluses. After that I remember Mara’s eyes, shining beneath the black fringe that fell over her face. I wish I could tell this only in images like that, scattered, out of order. But you can’t, so somewhere I have to call it the beginning.
Shortly after my older brother, Mateo, married Soraya, they took me with them to a retreat in the mountains. The two of them liked the thin air up high, the cold that rose from the lake at dawn, and the good tiredness of long hikes through the undergrowth. I hated all of it. But I knew it was important to Mateo to have me close.
After the wedding, he was going to devote himself to his wife, and even so he still wanted me by his side. He felt responsible for me. I’m not and won’t be like Dad, he always told me, like a vow. And there was Soraya too, who was beautiful, and I still hadn’t fully come to terms with what I felt when I looked at her.
The three of us got into the car, crossed dusty hills for hours, and arrived at a strip of forest that looked drawn in. It was the cleanest sky I had ever seen, open from side to side, and it was duplicated completely in the enormous lake. Between the woods and the water there was a clearing with half a dozen cabins arranged in a circle.
As soon as we shut the doors and unloaded the suitcases, Aldo Brenner came out to greet Mateo and Soraya. He didn’t even look at me. He was wearing a plaid shirt open over his chest, sleeves rolled up, and his clothes and skin were stained with oil from a generator that was fighting to start. He spoke decent Spanish but rough, as if chewed up.
His skin, weathered by damp and labor, was an almost fuchsia color, like that of foreigners who get burned on the beach. But on him it wasn’t from vacation: it was the color of someone who hasn’t spent a single day of his life under a roof. He must have been in his forties, tall and broad-shouldered. His trimmed beard, already streaked with gray, climbed up his neck to his sideburns like the bristled fur of an animal.
Brenner’s wife was a woman in her early thirties, blonde, small and sturdy. It took a while to realize she was pregnant. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember hearing her say a single word all week.
Brenner and she showed us around the place. For me, who has always disliked nature, the width of the lake beneath the mass of the mountains took my breath away. While I was thinking about that, almost pleased to have made the trip, Soraya walked slowly, playing with the little silver ring she wore on her left hand. Maybe I only liked the place because she looked happy.
Mateo, meanwhile, was asking questions about the retreat and its owner. Brenner’s uncle—an outsider, of course—had arrived years earlier as a missionary and left him that land in the mountains in his will, where the retreat was built. There politicians, companies, and religious groups tightened their bonds beneath the affectionate canopy of the trees.
Judging by the wooden chapels on the sides and by the number of Christs and Virgins in each cabin, Brenner was not a Protestant like his uncle. Or maybe those signs were just decoration for the clients he expected. I never really knew.
When we had finished settling in, someone knocked on the cabin door. It was a slim, dark-haired girl with long black bangs that covered half her gaze. I don’t remember at what point I learned her name was Mara, but it doesn’t matter: in my memory that name has been with her since I first saw her. She told us dinner was ready and left. I stayed there looking at how well her denim pants fit her.
The dining room had a high ceiling and six empty tables. It seemed as if no one else was staying at the retreat. Mara served soup and a plate of chickpeas. On the wall, a bleeding wooden Christ watched us eat.
Mateo spoke in sparkling phrases, trying to win Brenner over with his wit. Brenner slurped his soup with his head bowed and, with each spoonful, raised his eyes to Soraya. I tried to follow the conversation and hide the fact that I was looking at Mara, who, after serving us all, had sat down next to Brenner, on the opposite side of the table. But Soraya noticed it—she notices those things—and smiled at me knowingly.
Who was Mara? I had a vague idea that Brenner had said at some point that she was his adopted daughter. Though they paid each other the slightest attention. Brenner looked at Soraya, and Mara looked at nothing.
***
That first night there was a full moon. I know because I couldn’t sleep in the cabin.
Mateo can’t hold himself back when he’s with his wife. His eyes go to her body, and behind his eyes, his hands, and often he forgets where he is or who is nearby. The truth is, I don’t judge him. Soraya is tall and brown-haired; in her straight, soft hair the hazelnut scent of her perfume mixes with the salty taste of skin. She has narrow eyes, with long lashes that flutter coquettishly when she blinks.
She likes jackets and loose dress pants. But I had seen her in shorts and a blouse, in the comfort of Sundays at Mateo’s house, and I knew that beneath those jackets there were two firm breasts, and beneath those pants two strong, round, fleshy buttocks. So I don’t blame my brother for not being able to control himself.
That first night I was awakened by the sound of two heavy breaths. Little by little, hers became a moan. He must have been touching her in the dark, I’m not sure how. In time I thought I heard Soraya whisper.
—Touch me all over… kiss them, kiss them… Don’t you want to give the nipples a little bite? Like that, between your lips… Oh, Mateo, Mateo.
First, trying to make as little noise as possible, I started masturbating. A few seconds later I felt guilty. I cleared my throat. They stopped for an instant and pretended to be asleep. I threw a thick jacket over myself and left the cabin, ready to let them finish.
I didn’t know whether I was happy for Mateo or whether I hated his happiness. It seemed to me that the dawn air had been clouded with a smell of salt, like Soraya’s skin. That smell finally chased the last remnants of sleep from my eyes.
Breathing out mist in the cold, I started walking to warm up and kill time before going back. It wasn’t that I wanted to go into the woods, but there was barely any room to walk without venturing at least a little among the crowded trees and their winding paths.
When I had been away from the cabins for about fifteen minutes, I heard it. It was the same noise I had heard so many times at Mateo’s house. The same one I had wanted to hear a little earlier in the cabin. It was the noise of a man’s pelvis slamming against a woman’s buttocks. The rhythm was continuous, like a metronome, and it suggested a man thrusting with more force and depth than speed.
I didn’t know what I expected to find. Maybe I expected to see Soraya. Maybe I thought my brother and his wife had left the cabin, or that the echo was reaching me from far away, or that I was simply imagining it. Whatever it was, I moved toward the sound, hard as a log.
The undergrowth scratched the backs of my hands as I passed. The cold air scraped my lungs and mosquitoes were beginning to gather around me. At some point I no longer wanted to keep going and retraced my steps. But I got lost.
While I was looking for the path, something struck my eye. It was unmistakably Brenner’s hands, less than four meters away. They clung tightly to the narrow ridges of a hip. The rest of the woman was hidden from me by the branches of the tree behind which I had crouched.
Brenner was not taking the woman from behind by moving back and forth like a dog. No: he pulled her hip away to withdraw his cock and then drew her back toward him to impale her again, over and over, with a calm that was more frightening than haste.
He wasn’t my brother, so there was no guilt to bear. I pulled out my cock and started stroking it slowly. If only I could see the woman’s face, I thought. At that moment Brenner stopped and growled.
—I’m going to cum.
The girl said nothing. She knelt in front of him and took his cock into her mouth. Just as he had used her hips as he pleased, he took her by the nape and imposed a rhythm on her. The poor thing coughed a little. Then Brenner pulled his cock out and came in Mara’s face.
I stayed frozen behind the tree, my hand still on my cock and a disgust rising up from my stomach. Mara didn’t cry. She wiped herself with the back of her wrist, unhurriedly, like someone making a gesture repeated a thousand times, and looked for an instant toward the trees. Toward me. I swear her eyes, beneath the fringe, fixed exactly where I was hidden.
I don’t know if she saw me. I’ll never know. Brenner pulled up his pants and walked away toward the chapels without saying a word to her, and she stayed there alone, still kneeling, in that moonlit clearing. I backed away as best I could, stumbling over roots, and by a miracle found the path back.
***
When I got to the cabin, Mateo and Soraya were asleep in each other’s arms, peaceful, oblivious to everything. I climbed into my freezing bed and stayed staring at the wooden ceiling until daylight came. Soraya’s silver ring gleamed on the nightstand, where she had left it before going to bed. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
We spent six more days at that retreat. We walked beside the lake, ate under the gaze of the wooden Christs, listened to Mateo tell his jokes and to Brenner laugh with his animal laugh. The blonde pregnant wife kept not saying a word. Soraya kept playing with her ring and smiling at me with that complicity that made me feel, at once, loved and miserable.
And Mara kept serving the meals. Every time she came into the dining room I lowered my eyes, my heart in my throat, hoping she wouldn’t remember, or praying she would. Only once, while taking my plate away, did she lean very close to my ear and whisper, in a voice I had never heard from her before.
—The mountain sees everything, boy. Even what you think you hide.
Then she straightened up and went on as if nothing had happened, with her fringe falling over her eyes. We never spoke again. On the last day we loaded the suitcases into the car, Brenner shook Mateo’s hand, Soraya put on her ring, and we left crossing the dusty hills in the opposite direction.
What I was left with from that summer were the scattered images I mentioned at the start. Aldo Brenner’s pink hands. Mara’s eyes beneath her fringe. Soraya’s ring turning between her fingers. And the certainty, which has stayed with me ever since, that the darkest desire is not what we feel, but what we discover by spying on what we believed was the silence of others.