The Afternoon Don Alberto Made Me Feel Complete

I was Mateo when I arrived in that city. Sixteen years old, narrow face, big eyes, straight hair falling over my shoulders because my godmother never pushed too hard for me to cut it. I came from a small town with just enough grades to have failed two subjects in a row, and that’s why my godmother spoke with Don Alberto, a retired math teacher who lived alone in a spacious apartment downtown and who agreed to give me private lessons in exchange for helping him with the shopping and a few errands. It was a practical solution for everyone. For me, it turned out to be something completely different.

The first afternoon I saw him in his doorway and didn’t know what to say. He was tall, broad-shouldered, his body slightly stooped by time, with large hands and a voice that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his throat. He studied me for a moment without speaking. He had that way of looking that didn’t judge, but simply recorded, as if taking note of what he saw without rushing to do anything with that information. Then he stepped aside and let me in.

Something hot rose through my chest and I didn’t understand where it was coming from.

The first few weeks were all lessons and silence. Algebra, geometry, fractions. He explained slowly, without losing patience, and sometimes he’d lean over my shoulder to point out an error in the notebook, and I could smell his cologne, something woody and dry that I didn’t forget for the rest of the day. I sat at the desk in front of his solved exercises and thought about the shape of his hands. About how he paused before speaking, as if choosing each word. I didn’t talk about it with anyone. I wouldn’t have known how.

At night, in the room he lent me, I let my mind go wherever it wanted. I thought about his gestures, the weight of his voice when he said my name to call my attention to an error. I turned over in bed, restless, my body lit up in a way I didn’t recognize as simple nervousness. One night, without thinking too much about it, I closed my eyes and lost myself in that image. It was quick, clumsy, and it left me with more questions than before.

Afterward I lay still, staring at the ceiling. What came next wasn’t shame but a different kind of curiosity, more intimate. I turned onto my stomach and explored something that still didn’t have a clear name for me. First with one finger, with saliva and care, then with two, biting into the pillow, imagining those hands weren’t mine but his. The next day we had breakfast together as if nothing had happened. He read the newspaper. I watched his hands around the coffee cup and thought about things I wouldn’t tell anyone.

***

The dynamic changed after three weeks, or maybe it was me who changed.

I started noticing that Don Alberto wasn’t entirely indifferent. That when I crossed my legs in a certain way, he took a second too long to look away. That his corrections got slower, his hand resting on my shoulder longer than necessary. That sometimes he would pause in the middle of an explanation and look at me in a way that wasn’t exactly the way a teacher studies his student. On a Tuesday afternoon he asked if I wanted to stay for dinner. I said yes before I thought about it.

After dinner we sat on the sofa with the television on but not really watching it. We talked about nothing for a while: the weather forecast, a news story he’d seen that morning, a book he had on the side table. At some point his hand settled on my knee and neither of us moved it. We stayed like that for several minutes. The pressure of his fingers was barely perceptible, but I felt it all over my body, radiating upward and outward like heat.

—Are you afraid? —he asked without looking at me.

—No —I lied.

He turned his head and studied me with that calm of his that was sometimes unbearable.

—You don’t have to lie to me, Mateo.

—I’m nervous —I corrected—. That’s not the same as being afraid.

He stood up. I thought he was walking away, but he went to the sideboard, switched off the main lamp, and came back. The only light was from the television, bluish and dim. He sat closer this time. His thigh brushed mine and neither of us moved to fix it.

—How long have you been thinking about this? —he asked.

I didn’t know how to answer right away. How could I explain that it wasn’t weeks, but something deeper, older, something that had been there before and I’d been ignoring because I didn’t know there was anything to ignore?

—Since I got here —I admitted at last.

He nodded slowly. Then he kissed me. His mouth was warm and firm, unhurried, and his tongue came in with a calm that undid me more than any urgency could have. I put my hand on his chest without really knowing what to do with it, and he covered it with his own and left it there, still.

When he pulled back, his eyes stayed closed for a moment. Then he opened them.

—Shall we keep going? —he asked.

I nodded.

***

He took me to the bedroom with one hand on the small of my back, unhurried. He switched on the bedside lamp, casting a warm low light over the white sheets. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me from there, his arms resting on his knees.

—Take your clothes off yourself —he said—. No rush.

My fingers trembled on the buttons of my shirt. He waited. He didn’t help or speed anything up. When I was down to my underwear he kept looking at me with that same calm and I had to remind myself to breathe. There was something different about being looked at like that: it wasn’t the scrutiny I feared from the world, but something I recognized as genuine attention. As if what he saw mattered to him.

—Come here.

I sat beside him. He kissed me again, longer this time, and his hands started to roam over me: the nape of my neck, my shoulders, my ribs. When he reached my hip he paused and asked in my ear what I wanted him to do to me. It took me a while to answer. Words were difficult. But I said them, quietly, directly, and he nodded without comment, as if they were the most natural answer in the world.

He laid me face down with a gentleness I hadn’t expected. I heard the bedside drawer open. Then his hands came back, cool with lubricant, and he began.

One finger first. Slowly. He pressed until the muscle gave way and let him in, and the initial burning turned into something more complicated, denser, not entirely discomfort. I moaned into the pillow when he went deeper and found a spot that made me close my eyes and clench my fists in the sheet.

—There —he said softly, as if taking notes.

—Yes —I answered, though he hadn’t asked anything.

Second finger. He spread me slowly and the burn intensified, mixed with something that was starting to feel like pleasure. He pressed that spot again and my legs trembled. I was sweating. The sheet beneath me was already damp and I didn’t care. My body was doing things without my telling it to, and instead of frightening me, that felt like the most honest thing I’d felt in years.

Third finger. I wasn’t thinking about anything concrete anymore. Only the pressure, the opening, that heat climbing up my spine every time he brushed the exact place. The sound that came out of my throat I didn’t recognize as mine at first. Then I did recognize it. It was mine. It was the only completely honest sound I’d made in a long time.

Don Alberto withdrew his fingers. There was a pause, the sound of the lubricant, then the weight of his body on mine and his breathing at the nape of my neck.

—If at any point you want me to stop, you tell me —he said.

—I won’t want to stop.

He pressed in. The muscle protested, tightened, gave way. The pain was sharp and real and I bit my lip to hold back a cry. He stopped and waited, without moving, until my breathing was regular again. He advanced slowly, a centimeter at a time, stopping every time he felt me tense, always waiting. It was a sensation without a name, on the edge of pain and something deeper beginning to take shape underneath it. His hips met mine and he stopped there, completely inside me, still.

—How are you feeling? —he asked.

—Full —I said without thinking.

There was a brief pause. I think he smiled, though I couldn’t see it.

He started to move. Slowly at first, very carefully, letting my body find the rhythm. The friction was intense and sometimes it brushed that spot I already knew from before, and when it did an involuntary sound came out of my throat. The rhythm gradually changed. The thrusts grew firmer, more direct, and I stopped trying to hold anything back. I stopped thinking, period. Only that movement existed, that heat, that pressure building something inside me from a place I hadn’t known I had.

When I reached the edge it came from inside, from a depth I didn’t recognize. My legs convulsed, my hands clenched in the sheet, and a long broken sound tore out of me as my whole body shook uncontrollably. Don Alberto kept moving, slower now, holding that moment through to the end. A little later he growled and stopped with his hips pressed to mine, still, breathing hard against my neck.

Neither of us spoke for a long while.

***

When I got up to go to the bathroom, I looked at myself in the sink mirror. The face looking back at me was the same as always, but something in it had changed. I couldn’t explain it with precise words. It was as if something that had been behind a fogged-over pane was now on the other side, looking straight at me for the first time. As if there was finally something in that reflection that was real.

I let my hair down. It fell over my shoulders as always, but at that moment, in that light, it suited me.

Don Alberto appeared in the doorway, wearing a dark robe.

—Are you all right? —he asked.

—Yes —I said. And it was completely true—. How does my hair look like this?

He looked at me for a moment. Then he answered without drama:

—Good. It suits you.

That was all I needed to hear that night.

***

That happened many years ago. Don Alberto died of a heart condition when I was twenty-three, and I couldn’t go to the wake because no one in his family knew who I was to him. I found out from a brief notice in the local paper, at a friend’s house, and excused myself for a moment to go to the bathroom and cry without anyone asking me anything. It wasn’t only sadness. It was gratitude too, and the two together are hard to carry in silence.

I keep very little of him: a black-and-white photo we took with his analog camera one winter afternoon, where we both look straight ahead with the same serious expression of people who don’t quite know how to pose. And a memory that doesn’t need a photo because it’s engraved in another kind of memory, the kind that time doesn’t erase but settles in, becoming part of who you are.

I’m not one of those who believe one person changes you. What Don Alberto did was simply be the space where I could finally see clearly something that had existed long before. Valentina existed long before that afternoon. She just needed a place to look at herself head-on without having to look away.

My name has been Valentina since I was nineteen. I’ve worn my hair however I want since I was sixteen.

That began that afternoon too.