I Discovered the Pleasure of Spying on My Neighbor from the Balcony

We lived twenty-two years in a huge house on the outskirts of Quilpué, with a yard, a grill, and two old dogs buried out back. When the kids left to study and my husband started complaining about the two daily trips to his office, we decided to sell everything and move to an apartment right in the center, on Echaurren Street. I no longer worked: a badly healed back operation left me forbidden to make any effort, so my routine was reduced to evening walks, paperback books, and my little cigarette before bed, that vice I refuse to give up.

The apartment is small but bright, on the seventh floor. The best part is the balcony, narrow and long, with a wrought-iron railing and a potted ficus that Renato, my husband, planted the first week because he thought it would be «a green touch so we wouldn’t miss the yard so much». That ficus, without his suspecting it, would become my best accomplice.

It started on an ordinary night. Renato was asleep inside, the living room TV was flickering on its own, and I had gone out to the balcony with the last drag of the day. My phone died halfway through scrolling, so I lifted my eyes and, out of habit, started watching the park across the street. I saw a young couple kissing against the trunk of a tree, oblivious to everything, his hands under her sweatshirt. I stayed frozen there for a long while, remembering how Renato and I used to devour each other with kisses in any dim corner when we were both a kilo lighter and twenty years younger.

A sigh from me made them disappear behind the tree. Maybe they sensed me, maybe they got tired of the discomfort. So I swept my gaze across the building opposite, separated from ours by a narrow street and about fifty meters of air. Most of the windows showed the most boring domestic scenes: people having dinner in front of the news, an old woman watering plants, some guy with a tired face playing with a dog. But one window on the sixth floor, directly opposite mine and one floor below, had no curtains. Inside, a man in shorts and a bare torso was rowing on a machine set up in the middle of the living room.

I don’t know why I kept watching him. From that distance and in that light, he was only a golden silhouette moving back and forth. Thirty-something, I guessed. Well-kept body, broad shoulders, long back. He lived alone, that much was clear right away: the living room had a sofa, the rowing machine, and nothing else. Not a single painting, not a plant, not a woman in the kitchen asking him to turn the volume down.

When he stopped, he tossed a towel around his neck and crossed the bedroom to the bathroom. The bathroom window was frosted, but after a bit his silhouette appeared there, naked, already soaped up, and his outlines showed through. I felt the cigarette go out between my fingers and my face burn as if I were fifteen. One part of me thought this is wrong, stop looking. The other part was thinking something rather different.

That night I went to bed with my heart racing and I didn’t tell Renato what I had seen.

***

The next day I went downstairs early and walked along the opposite sidewalk, pretending I was going to the corner store. I wanted to measure my own balcony from below, to see how visible my silhouette was from the street. I looked up discreetly: the ficus covered almost everything. If I sat a little farther back, against the wall, not even my worst enemy would spot me. The balcony stayed in shadow and the reflection from the building’s glass wall across the way, above it, acted like a one-way mirror. It was perfect.

I went back upstairs with a new tingle in my stomach. That same afternoon I rescued from the attic the amateur telescope we had given Tomás, my youngest son, when he was eleven and had gone through an astronomy phase. It was stored in its original case, dusty, but it worked. I set it up on a little side table in the corner of the balcony, behind the ficus. I pulled the wicker chair closer. I tested the focus on the window across the street. And there he was, almost in my lap: my neighbor pouring himself a juice, his hair still damp from the shower.

That first week I watched him with the discipline of an apprentice. I learned his schedule. He got home from work around eight, changed straight into gym clothes, and rowed for exactly an hour. Then he showered. Then he ate something quick in front of a laptop. He turned the lights out around eleven-thirty. He never had visitors. He was handsome, yes, but above all he was a routine that left me waiting for him every night like a schoolgirl watching the clock before recess.

Renato didn’t notice a thing. I made him dinner, asked him about work, kissed his forehead when he dozed off in front of the TV. Then I went out to the balcony with my pack of cigarettes and plunged into my other life, the silent one, the borrowed one, the one that existed only on the other side of the telescope.

***

The Saturday everything changed, Renato had a work farewell: the owner of the print shop was turning sixty-five and retiring. My two sons had gone away with friends to Pichilemu for the long weekend. I had the entire apartment to myself.

I got ready as if I were going on a date with myself. A long shower, a blue silk pajama set I almost never wear, freshly dried hair. I took a cooler with a bottle of chilled rosé, a glass, my new pack of cigarettes, and a lighter out to the terrace. I arranged the telescope. I put on soft music inside, just loud enough to reach the balcony without drowning out the street’s silence.

The first hour was quiet. An elderly couple on the twelfth floor watching a movie. A girl brushing her hair in front of a mirror. A dog peeking out of a window. But my neighbor’s window stayed dark. That was new. On a Saturday at eleven, my neighbor should have been in the kitchen having dinner. I lit another cigarette and poured myself a second glass. Maybe he went out to eat. Maybe he’s sick. Maybe he has a date.

The idea of a date hit me harder than I wanted to admit.

At two in the morning, when I had already decided to pack everything away and crawl into bed, the sixth-floor window lit up all at once. I aimed the telescope before I even thought about it. And there they were: my neighbor and a blond girl, laughing as if they were the only awake people in the city.

She was spectacular. A short black dress that looked painted on, a deep neckline, sheer tights, sky-high heels. Straight, shiny hair down to her shoulders. He had beige trousers and a tight black shirt that showed off the torso I knew by heart. They were drunk but not sloppy. In that middle place where everything is funny and everything turns you on.

I assumed he put on music, because she started dancing around him without taking her eyes off him. He let her for a bit and then came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He kissed her neck. He slid his hands up her stomach until they rested just below her neckline, not going to her breasts yet, that pause that drives anyone crazy. I set the glass down on the little table and leaned back in the wicker chair.

She turned around without letting go of the back of his neck and kissed him open-mouthed. His hands went to her ass, lifting her dress. I could see every finger. I could see how he squeezed, how he let go, how he squeezed again. The dress ended up wrinkled at her waist, leaving a round, firm ass exposed, the kind that looks offensive. He bit her shoulder and slid one strap down. His shirt went flying somewhere across the living room.

I realized I was breathing through my mouth.

She opened his belt. Lowered the zipper. Slid her hand in. From the movement of her arm I knew exactly what she was doing, even though the fabric of his trousers hid the rest. Then she knelt. Pulled his pants down to his ankles. And then, for the first time in my life, I saw live a cock that wasn’t Renato’s. Long, completely shaved, dark against the pale skin of his thigh. She took it with both hands, looked at it for a second like someone admiring a beautiful gift she’d just been given, and took it into her mouth.

Something broke inside me. The glass was shaking in my hand. Without realizing it, I had taken my free hand to my own crotch over the pajama bottoms. I pulled it away at once, ashamed, as if Renato might be watching me from some balcony too. But inside there was no one. The street was dead. The ficus covered me. My neighbor and his girl didn’t know I existed. I put my hand back where it had been and squeezed lightly, slowly, while I kept watching through the telescope.

***

He lifted her by the arms. She jumped and wrapped her legs around his waist. Holding each other like that, they went into the bedroom. Luckily for me, the bedroom was one floor lower, which gave me an almost top-down angle over the bed. He set her down carefully and finished taking off her tights and a tiny thong that he tossed over his shoulder like a fruit peel.

Then he put his head between her legs.

I had never watched another man eat another woman. The way she threw her head back, biting her lower lip, her fingers tangled in his hair, made me close my eyes for a second. When I opened them again, I had my hand inside the pajama pants. I was soaked. I hadn’t needed anything more than to watch.

I settled into the wicker chair, legs a little apart, heels braced on the edge of the ficus planter. With my left hand I held the telescope. With my right I explored myself with a urgency I didn’t remember ever having. A couple of slow circular movements, and the first orgasm caught me by surprise. I had to bite the back of my other hand so I wouldn’t scream. The wine glass fell to the balcony floor without breaking. I didn’t even pick it up.

When I caught my breath and looked again, she was on top of him, riding him. No, not riding: bouncing. His hands held her breasts. Her head went back and forth, the blond hair covering her face. I saw her suddenly lean over his torso, go still for a few seconds, tremble. She came. She came on him, silently, and I understood her with every millimeter of my body.

I didn’t take my hand out of my pajama bottoms. I couldn’t. I was masturbating with a new rhythm, anxious, almost angry with myself. I imagined myself there, beneath him, with those big hands on my breasts instead of hers. I imagined climbing on top of him. I imagined asking him, please, not to stop. I came a second time with my forehead pressed against the telescope lens, not making a single sound.

When I focused again, she was on all fours and he was holding her by the hip, driving into her with a force you could feel all the way across the street. He pulled her hair, pushed her head down, lifted her hips. I saw his silhouette retreat and enter, retreat and enter, and for the first time I understood what the word «hypnotized» meant.

I saw him stop abruptly. Pull out of her. Grab his cock with his hand. She turned around at once, on her knees on the bed, and took him into her mouth just in time. She grabbed his hair. Let her do it. I saw his thighs tense, his back, his neck. And I saw the girl swallow without letting him go, slowly, looking up at him from below.

I don’t swallow anything with Renato. I never have. But that night, while I sank two fingers deep and used the other hand to suck my own wet thumb, I wished it was my mouth down there, taking him in. I came a third time, hidden behind the ficus, with my pajama bottoms pulled down to my thighs and my eyes full of tears I didn’t understand.

***

It was almost four in the morning when I forced myself to get up. Renato could get home any minute. I picked up the glass, the cooler, the empty pack of cigarettes. I gave the telescope one last look before dismantling it: she and he, now wrapped in a lazy sixty-nine, licking each other with the calm of people who have already gotten what they wanted. I put everything back in its case and went inside the apartment, weak in the legs.

In the hallway I took off my pajama bottoms and saw that my fluids had soaked through my panties and stained the pants as well. I laughed to myself, softly, amazed at myself. I barely washed up, put on one of Renato’s old shirts, and got into bed.

Renato came home after five, smelling of cheap whiskey and someone else’s office perfume. He lay down thinking I was asleep, but before he even put his head down, I climbed on top of him in the dark. I didn’t explain anything. I didn’t ask him anything. I kissed him like I hadn’t kissed him in years, and I did things to him I had never dared do before. We both came almost at the same time, with the sun already peeking through the living room window.

Afterward I stayed awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to him sleep. I thought about the blond girl. I thought about my neighbor. I thought about the ficus, the telescope stored away, and the empty cigarette pack. I thought that that night I had discovered something I would not be able to put back in the drawer.

On Monday afternoon, while Renato was working, I went out to buy a new pack of cigarettes. And a lighter. And, on the way, another bottle of rosé.