Lía’s Descent Down the White Staircase

It happened six years ago, at that age when time still weighs differently and an afternoon with no one at home can last as long as a secret. I was finishing my last year of school and living with my parents and my older brother in a four-story building, one of those old ones, with concrete stairs and a central shaft through which the light crept in. That Saturday everyone had gone out. I repeated it to myself three times before I believed it: I was alone.

Or not quite. Because when I was alone, someone else woke up inside me. I called her Lía, and I’d spent months learning to let her out when no one could see her.

My mother’s wardrobe was a territory I knew better than she did. I knew which drawer held the sheer stockings, which shelf housed the dresses for the occasions that almost never came. But that afternoon I went straight to a garment I had seen only once and could not forget: a white lace babydoll with tiny flowers embroidered over the chest. Hanging among the dark clothes, it seemed to have a light of its own.

I took it down with the care of someone holding something borrowed and forbidden at the same time. The lace was rougher than I had imagined, and at once more tender, as if each embroidered flower kept a promise. I undressed in the hallway, in front of the full-length mirror, and slipped it over my head.

The fabric fell over my slender body and fitted itself to my waist. I felt the cool brush of lace sliding down my back, grazing my thighs, and something inside me finally settled into place. The skinny boy I saw every morning brushing my teeth had vanished. In the mirror there was a new silhouette, a curve where before there had been only a straight line. I took a deep breath and my own reflection met my gaze as if it recognized me.

This is really me, I thought.

Nerves ran up my spine like an electric current, vertebra by vertebra. It wasn’t pure fear; it was that exact edge between fear and desire, the place where one decides whether to stay on the shore or go into the water. I decided to go in.

The white lace asked for more white. I went back to the wardrobe and rummaged until I found a pair of platform sandals my mother wore in summer, with wide straps and high soles. I put them on sitting on the edge of the bed, fastening the buckles with clumsy fingers. When I stood up, the world had changed height.

I walked down the hallway listening to the dull thud of the platforms against the floor. Click, click, click. Every step was a statement. I stopped in front of the mirror again and turned slowly, measuring myself in profile, lifting my chin. My legs looked longer. The fall of the lace, more feminine. Lía was complete, and Lía did not want to stay locked away.

The four walls of my room began to close in. It wasn’t enough to see myself; I wanted to exist beyond the mirror’s glass. I went up first, to the roof, because it seemed the safest place: nobody goes up to a roof on a Saturday afternoon.

***

The wind greeted me at the top with an unexpected caress. It stroked my bare arms, slipped under the lace, lifted the fabric slightly against my thighs. I closed my eyes. For a second I was no longer a boy playing at hiding in his mother’s clothes, but a woman walking a secret catwalk, suspended between the city’s rooftops. The sky was beginning to turn orange and I felt part of the landscape, not hidden from it.

I took a few steps to the edge, with the railing at a safe distance, and let the air do whatever it wanted with the fabric. I had never felt so exposed and so free at the same time. My skin prickled with every gust, and each raised hair was a tiny confirmation that this, whatever it was, was real.

Then I looked toward the stairwell door, open, and the idea came to me that would change the afternoon.

What if I go down?

Not the roof. The stairs. The entire building, hollow and silent, waiting. I had never gone down more than three steps dressed as Lía, and always with my heart in my throat, ready to run back at the first sound. That afternoon, however, the idea of descending all the way to the bottom, to the street, took hold of me with an almost painful clarity.

I began the descent from the fourth floor. Click. The sound of the platform against the cement echoed in the stairwell shaft and seemed enormous to me, as if the whole building could hear it. Click. Second step. I gripped the cold handrail with one hand and went down with the other extended, measuring each foothold. Click. Third step. The lace swayed with the movement, brushing my thighs with every step.

I reached the landing on the third floor. That was usually my limit. I stopped and listened. Silence. Only my breathing and my heartbeat pounding against my ribs as if it wanted out. I smiled, proud of myself, and moved on toward the next flight.

Suddenly, the silence broke.

A key turning in a lock. The third-floor door, a meter from me, began to open.

Time thickened, taking on that slow texture of dreams from which one cannot wake. I had no time to run. No time for anything. The door opened all the way and a man stepped out of it.

***

He looked to be about thirty. Freshly showered, with still-damp hair and a gray T-shirt clinging to his body. He came out looking at his phone, distracted, with his keys jingling in the other hand. And then he looked up.

Our eyes met and the world stopped.

In those seconds that lasted forever, he saw me. He didn’t just glance past me, didn’t mistake me for a neighbor. His eyes took in the whole sight: they climbed from the white platforms, traveled up my bare legs, paused on the lace falling over my thighs, on the flower-embroidered neckline, and finally returned to my face. I saw the exact instant he understood what he was seeing. I saw how the secret I was trying to hide and show at the same time stood exposed between us.

He said nothing. I couldn’t either. My throat had closed and my legs had turned into something that no longer obeyed me. My heart was pounding so hard I was sure he could hear it from where he stood.

And then I felt the heat. A warm, unavoidable wetness spreading through my underwear beneath the lace. Fear and desire had mixed into a single electric current running through my whole body, and it betrayed me in the most intimate way possible. I stood frozen and burning at once, not knowing whether I wanted the earth to swallow me or that man to take one more step toward me.

He narrowed his eyes for a second, just a second. Something crossed his face that was neither mockery nor disgust. It was something else. Curiosity, maybe. Or recognition. He opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, and I held my breath waiting for the word that never came.

Because then he turned, put the key back in his door to lock it, and went down the other flight of stairs without looking at me again. His footsteps faded toward the ground floor. I heard the building entrance open and close. And I was left alone on the landing, trembling, with the lace damp and my heart racing.

***

I went up the stairs two at a time, stumbling in the platforms, clutching the handrail like a lifeline. I got into the apartment, locked the door with the double turn of the key, and collapsed against it, sliding down to the floor. It took me several minutes to get my breath back.

When I did, I stripped quickly, as if undoing a spell before the magic could turn against me. I took off the sandals, folded the babydoll carefully, and ran my hands one last time over the embroidered flowers before putting it back on its exact shelf. I erased every trace. I hid Lía in the bottom drawer, under my notebooks, where no one would look.

That night, at dinner, my mother talked about the heat and my brother complained about some match. I nodded and ate in silence, replaying that look in the stairwell over and over. Shame burned, yes, but beneath the shame there was something else that would take years to name: for the first time, someone had seen Lía. Someone had looked her up and down and she had not disappeared. The world had not ended. I was still here.

***

Today I’m twenty-three, and fate has a sense of humor. Through one of those twists life takes, I ended up renting in the very same building again. Not on the fourth floor, where I grew up, but on the third. On the same floor that man came out of. Sometimes, when I get home from work, I stop on that landing and recognize the exact place where I stood, with the lace brushing my thighs and my heart about to burst out of my chest.

I don’t hide Lía in a drawer anymore. It’s been a long time since she stopped being a secret that only came out when the house was empty. The clothes I wear are mine, bought with my money, chosen in front of a mirror that no longer asks me for explanations. But there is one descent I never finished.

That afternoon I reached the third floor and turned back. I never set foot on the street dressed the way I felt inside. I stayed halfway down the stairs, between the safety of the closet and the freedom of the open air, and there I stayed frozen for years.

Sometimes I look down toward the flight I still have left, and I remember the glint of that white babydoll. The desire to go down the last step, to cross the entrance and walk along the sidewalk without hiding, is still there, intact, beating just like it did that windy afternoon.

Maybe it’s time. Maybe this very week I’ll go down slowly, step by step, listening to the click of my heels against the cement, and finally finish the descent Lía began six years ago. This time, if someone opens a door and looks at me, I’m not going to run.