I’m the Neighbor Who Spies on You When You Think You’re Alone

It’s me.

Don’t you recognize me?

I’m your neighbor. The one who asks you about your daughter’s civil-service exams, the ones she’s racking her brains over to get a job as a hospital attendant. Or perhaps I’m your brother-in-law, the one you can’t stand because he always proves you wrong and takes the last piece of cod at Christmas Eve dinner.

Maybe I’m the father you exchange two halfhearted sentences with every morning, when you happen to be taking your children to school at the same time. Or the butcher who cuts the chops your mother-in-law will serve you on Sunday.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll be driving the bus that takes your wife to the office. Maybe I’ll be sweating beside you on the stationary bike at the gym.

I could be anyone.

Why do I do it? Only one person has ever asked me that in my entire life, and finding an honest answer wasn’t easy. Nor was finding a trace of remorse.

Why do some people knowingly poison their lungs until they die gasping? Why do so many waste half their lives in front of a screen that teaches them to hate, desire, and, above all, buy? Why do you buy a cell phone for a twelve-year-old for the sole purpose of letting you eat in peace?

What I do, done properly, needn’t hurt anyone. I make sure of that. I take great care. It is the first and holiest of my priorities.

Because years ago, when I discovered that I wasn’t a monster, that I didn’t need years of pills or a straitjacket, when I understood that I liked it and that this was who I was, I sat down and wrote a ten-point code. The code that would keep me from humiliating, hurting, or shedding a single tear.

One: I never intervene.

Two: I always remain hidden.

Three: I never touch a woman who isn’t mine.

Four: nothing is recorded.

Five: nothing is discussed.

Six: if there are coincidences, they never happened.

Seven: nothing is put in writing.

Eight: no judgment.

Nine: no humiliation.

Ten: no profit.

My name is… It doesn’t matter. No matter how much I explain why I do what I do, you’ll find it impossible to understand. At least publicly. Because many of you don’t have the guts to admit, in front of your families and friends, that what I practice arouses the same curiosity in you that it aroused in me before I decided it was worth it.

***

It is difficult to explain what drives a man like me, well-off, barely a drinker and someone who has never tried an amphetamine, to hide at three-thirty in the morning on a sweltering August eighth, behind a bush planted in the middle of the most nondescript vacant lot, on the outskirts of the city where I sweat and pay a mortgage.

This place is big. Monstrously big. And there are millions of us. An advantage that makes it almost impossible to run into the same people twice, in the same place, for the same purpose. And if it happens, we refer to the sixth commandment.

I’m not sleepy. I don’t even yawn. After so many years of unconfessable habits, I must have turned into something like a vampire. I control the circumstances; I know how to find the privileged positions, the ones where you can see and are very difficult to see.

I know the mayor makes every club close at three sharp. I know it’s barely fifteen minutes from the nightlife district to the vacant lot. I know that any moment now, crossing the strip of asphalt that begins at the San Andrés sports center, pairs of headlights will start appearing, sweeping along a road that is usually deserted at this hour.

There are more of us who take part in this theater. I know it, and they know it. We avoid one another with admirable solidarity.

Did you think I was crazy? A loner? A mental-case freak? Tonight, I calculate, there will be three of us hiding. Perhaps four, if the young man who is discovering himself managed to get gas for his motorcycle. We respect one another’s square footage. We avoid meeting; we avoid hearing one another.

We despise those who try to be like us and lose all class the moment they pull out a phone to record, masturbate shamelessly, or let themselves be seen at the worst possible moment to satisfy some much murkier inclination.

***

From my lookout I watch the road become dotted with lights that zigzag, tremble, advance. One, two, three… twenty vehicles. Twenty people with passion to spare and not enough money to pay for a hotel room where they can let off steam. A lack that favors my desires.

My position is chosen by a metallic-gray German sports car. I hear it roar as it makes the final push and pulls up directly in front of my bush. Seeing it so close, I wonder what drove its owner, a man able to pay sixty thousand euros for a car, to a place normally reserved for dented student runabouts.

He brakes hard, shuts off the engine, turns off the lights, and sits motionless beneath an insultingly full moon, amid the purring of the crickets. The passenger switches on the interior light, as if wanting to assess what she is about to devour.

One thing stands out about her: her face. A round, lively face, with enormous thick-rimmed glasses that, far from making her unattractive, enhance her beauty. She isn’t a red-carpet stunner, but she gives off a carnal scent, sexy without trying to be, sexy perhaps without knowing it. The kind of woman who solves logarithms in the morning and looks at you at night as if she knew exactly what cock she wanted to suck.

He is older. Older than her and older than me. Bald, shaved right down, with a belly that bulges when he sits but that he manages to conceal when standing. Fifty-five, sixty at a stretch. Beneath the blue linen shirt, open and unbuttoned, is a man who thinks he’s above everyone in every circumstance, the sort who reminds you that a platinum card is waiting in his wallet.

I’m close. Barely five meters separate me from the license plate. My scalp is sweating, and the sweat slides slowly and unpleasantly downward, obeying the laws of physics. I don’t blink.

He talks, she listens, pretending to be shy in a way she doesn’t even believe herself. He kisses her first on the cheek, then on the lips. Beneath those sturdy glasses, she closes her eyes and responds. The sweetness of the first contact fades, accelerated by desire, until they both open their mouths and become tangled in a slobbering kiss, thick tongues and shared saliva without restraint.

He begins to slump when she places her hand against his cheek and quickly lowers it to his neck, where she squeezes, restrains, dominates. The gesture reveals carefully tended nails painted an intense navy blue, proof that in this contest, despite the age difference and the car owner’s arrogance, she is the one who will get her way.

His thick hands feel beneath her dress and tug at her bra until they free her breasts. He pinches her nipples, squeezes them as if trying to wring juice from them, and she arches against the seatback. Small, white tits crowned by two pink areolas that harden beneath his fingertips. A brief moan, clear and heavenly, slips above the crickets’ chirping.

“Are you sensitive, you little slut?” he asks, twisting one nipple with calibrated cruelty.

“Suck them,” she pants. “Suck them, asshole, they’re swollen.”

He lowers his head and engulfs one entire breast, his tongue working her nipple with the voracity of a hungry child. Marina buries her fingers in his bare skull and presses him against her, forcing him to suck harder, even to bite. When he releases her tit with a wet smack, the nipple is shiny, swollen, darkened.

She slides her hand down his chest, at a torturous speed, to the point where I can no longer see it. But I hear. I hear the buckle jingling, the zipper humming as it descends, the whisper of fabric being moved aside. And then his deep, animal panting when those navy-nailed fingers close around his cock and begin to masturbate him with leisurely skill, squeezing the base, moving up to the glans, spreading pre-cum over the entire tip.

I know, I understand, I imagine. I possess a powerful imagination, and all it takes is one look at the lucky man’s face to know what is happening beneath the steering wheel. She bends down. The bulge of her nape bobs rhythmically over Andrés’s lap. I hear her swallow, suck, slurp. An obscene, saliva-slick, deep-throated gurgle, which Marina herself feeds with little guttural moans, as if sucking that cock were turning her on more than him.

I look at my watch. Ten minutes and she’s already eating it to the root. He seems to relax, but it’s a false signal. His chest draws breath faster and faster, his teeth clench, his sausage-thick fingers grip the steering wheel and then descend to tangle in her hair, setting the rhythm, pushing her head against his groin.

“Keep going, Marina… keep going, suck me like that… ah, fuck… swallow all of me,” he pants.

Good. Her name is Marina. All information is retained, but never released. Information is an aphrodisiac as effective as it is dangerous. I’ve discovered pregnancies before their owners, reconciled divorces built on lies, secrets no one would suspect. Information provides power. Power and erections.

I hear Marina pull away for a second, spit saliva onto the glans, slap it gently against her cheek and then against her outstretched tongue. The little slut knows he’s watching her, and she knows I might be watching too. She swallows it again. This time until her throat protests, until tears escape, until her glasses fog up.

Sometimes I feel tempted to approach, to tighten the cord and see with my own eyes what I only imagine. But I still haven’t reached the point where my curiosity forces me to take that risk. Suspicion is more exciting than confirmation. Catching a glimpse, more than certifying.

Something tells me Marina won’t let him finish in her mouth. She’ll lead him right to the edge of the point of no return, that frontier where any man would sell his mother for a little more. And indeed, she sits up when she feels his cock become rock-hard between her lips, throbbing, seconds from release. She gives him a few seconds, leaning against the glass, wiping the threads of saliva and pre-ejaculate from her hand, panting, her lipstick smeared and a satisfied-whore smile on her face.

“Do you have condoms?” he asks, his voice hoarse, making a gesture toward opening the glove compartment.

“No,” she stops him. “Latex doesn’t go in my pussy. I fuck bareback or I don’t fuck.”

She smiles, opens the door, and walks around to stand in front of the hood, her back to me. She is so close I can make out the freckles between her shoulder blades. She hikes her dress up to her waist, revealing a round, white ass split by a tiny black thong. She lowers it slowly, swaying her hips, until it drops onto the dirt. She picks it up, sniffs it with a mischievous expression, and throws it onto the windshield.

“You really are a bastard,” she whispers. “All yours. All my pussy for you.”

He gets out of the car with his cock bare, stiff, pointing at her. It’s a thick, short, dark shaft crowned by a shiny glans polished by Marina’s saliva. He picks up the garment, smells it deeply, rubs it over his face, and stuffs it into his pocket like a trophy.

“I’ll buy you a dozen,” he says, approaching, kissing her, sitting her on the hood. “The most expensive ones. Any you ask for, my slut.”

She settles with her legs open, so wide that from my bush I can see Marina’s entire pussy, illuminated by the car’s interior light: shaved, pink, swollen, with thick inner lips showing and already soaked. Her heels rest on the bumper. He kneels quickly, without preliminaries, and buries his entire face against her vulva. He licks her from top to bottom with his tongue extended, insistent and noisy, as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

“That’s it, bastard, that’s it… suck my clit… put it inside me, your tongue, put it in,” Marina orders, gripping him by the ears.

He obeys, drives his tongue into the entrance of her pussy, moves it, sucks, pulls it out smeared with fluid, and climbs again to her swollen clitoris. He tangles two thick fingers inside her, crooking them, while his mouth sucks greedily at her bud. Marina’s round face forms a grimace of pleasure born not only from watching herself being devoured, but from having him there, prostrate, kneeling at her feet, eating her pussy like a lapdog despite the platinum card in his wallet.

And then, while he pleases her, she looks straight ahead. Right at me.

And I tremble.

It isn’t the first time I’ve felt discovered. There are three or four seconds in which your heart races through your entire body and you feel tempted to run. Seconds in which experience matters and you have to show composure, holding your position without blinking once.

Because I’ve come to suspect that some people know I’m watching and continue, aroused by the idea of fucking with witnesses. No threesomes. Just being seen. From the way Marina peers through the undergrowth behind her fogged glasses, something tells me she is one of those. And worse: from the way she begins moaning louder, saying filthier things, I suspect the little slut knows perfectly well that there are eyes there, and that thinking about it makes her come harder.

“Suck me more, bastard, you’re getting me so hot… that’s it, that’s it, don’t stop, goddammit, don’t stop…”

Her laugh is almost malicious. She digs her fingers into his bald head, squeezes his neck between her thighs, and directs the rhythm and pressure until, wet, she begins to tremble in the legs, pant in great gulps, and release a long, high moan that silences the crickets. Her flat stomach tenses, her thighs seize, and she finally throws her head back, crying out her pleasure without restraint, coming over Andrés’s mouth in a gush of fluid that bathes his chin and neck. The crickets seem to resume their chorus beneath the merciless heat.

“Put it in me,” she orders, allowing no reply. “Put it in me now, all the way, I want to feel it inside. Now.”

The man drops all pretense. He can’t believe his luck and is afraid of losing it. He gets up hurriedly, his cock hard and shining with saliva and pussy, his trousers around his ankles, and awkwardly positions himself between those open thighs. He grips his cock, rubs it over Marina’s inner lips, lines it up, and thrusts in with a single stroke.

She receives him with an animal growl, surprised more by its hardness than its size, as though she hadn’t expected such vigor from someone two steps from retirement.

“Oh, bastard, you fuck so well… put it all in, right up to your balls, that’s it, that’s it…”

The thrusts are dry, fast, merciless. The German sports car’s hood begins to bounce with every thrust, a carnal splashing mingling with Marina’s continuous moans. She receives him with cries she tries to stifle by biting the fabric of his shirt, but they escape anyway, obscene and shrill.

“Harder, bastard, harder, split my pussy… that’s it, that’s it… oh, your cock, fuck, your cock…”

He grabs her legs below the knees and lifts them, folding them against her chest, bending her double over the hood. Now he penetrates her from above, dropping all his weight, and from my bush I can clearly see the cock entering and leaving her soaked pussy, gleaming, dragging Marina’s whitish fluid over her thighs, belly, and abdominal skin. His groin hair is flattened against her inner lips with every thrust, splashing obscenely.

“Don’t come inside… no, wait… don’t come…” Marina pants, but without conviction, her legs open like doors and her hands clinging to his buttocks to make him thrust deeper.

Until they reach the place where there is neither turning back nor middle ground. He speeds up, she loses herself, clinging to his shoulder with one hand and the hood with the other. She is no longer laughing. She is only trying to release what assails her. Her small tits bounce with every blow, nipples stiff and pointing skyward. Her face contorts behind the glasses, her mouth open in a silent O, and suddenly she breaks into a long, raspy orgasm, a yowling cat-in-heat shriek that bounces off the car’s metal.

“Come, bastard, come inside, fill me up… now, now, now…”

With a hoarse cry, he sinks as deeply as he can between Marina’s white thighs and, in a dozen convulsions, empties himself. I see his back tense, his pale ass tightening with every spurt, his belly trembling against hers. Marina closes her legs around his hips to keep him inside, squeezing out every last drop of semen, moaning with satisfaction each time she feels another hot release rising through her pussy.

For a couple of minutes, their panting blends with the crickets and the frantic beating of my heart. When he finally pulls out, his cock emerges limp, shiny, dripping, followed by a thick strand of semen that runs down Marina’s cleft until it falls, drop by drop, onto the hood’s hot metal.

I sweat. And it isn’t because of the heat.

***

The affair has lasted only a short while, but neither he apologizes nor does she seem displeased. On the contrary: satisfaction fills Marina’s face. She has come twice, intensely. She climbs down from the hood on trembling legs, runs two fingers over her pussy to collect the semen escaping her, and brings them to her mouth without taking her eyes off him, sucking them slowly, with the calculated shamelessness of someone who knows exactly what effect she produces. She plants her bare feet on the dirt and composes herself with a speed he cannot imitate.

“Come on, get dressed,” she orders, with the expression of a she-wolf taking pity on a stray sheep. “Come on, Andrés, you’ll get cold. And keep my thong somewhere safe, bastard, because if your wife finds it, you’re dead.”

The fellow called Andrés pulls up his trousers, buttons them, and tries to wipe the sweat from his bald head and the traces of fluid from his chin. As he does, he rediscover the gleam of the ring on his finger. His eyes are no longer assessing the woman before him; now they are searching for an excuse to justify arriving home at four in the morning smelling of someone else’s pussy.

They both get into the car. He starts it, reverses sharply, and accelerates as soon as he reaches the asphalt. He is eager to get rid of the evidence. He is afraid of losing everything—house, children, football season tickets, his friends’ respect—over one summer-night lapse.

On the desolate hill, only the settling dust and I remain. I’m aroused, I’m erect, painfully erect, my fly stretched tight, but I don’t masturbate. I never do. I’m excessively cautious, and that caution has spared me more than one problem with the authorities. I leave only when I feel completely safe, and that sometimes adds a couple of hours.

***

I walk beneath the moon to the hiding place where an old secondhand motorcycle is waiting for me, with barely any power, easy to conceal near the locations I frequent. It is very late and I worked until exhaustion yesterday, but I’m not sleepy. Those of us who suffer from my particular pathology are, without exception, insomniacs.

I have never regretted opening this breach. I redirected my peculiarity until I managed to ensure that no one found out and, therefore, no one was offended. I don’t want to humiliate anyone. I don’t want to cause pain.

I felt it for the first time at twenty-five, through the unshuttered window overlooking the inner courtyard of the working-class building where I lived. My neighbor didn’t hang curtains because she couldn’t stand the darkness, and that afternoon in 1992 her phobia shook me unexpectedly. The woman, already past fifty, was riding the young man who delivered her groceries from the store on Mendoza Street. Her sagging tits bounced against the boy’s hairless chest; she impaled herself on his cock to the hilt, her face contorted, and rubbed her clitoris with her free hand as though she owed it to the entire world. She took less pleasure from the boy’s clumsy performance than from the novelty of fresh flesh, from feeling that young, hard cock inside her after years of a mattress weary of snores and boredom. When she came, she screamed so loudly that even the pigeons in the courtyard took flight.

Doña Amparo is now a trembling octogenarian, a widow who greets me with a sly expression in the elevator and complains endlessly about nonexistent noises. But Doña Amparo had a past. And I know it.

So did my uncle Ricardo. One night I recognized his license plate in a back street and discovered that one true love does not exist: in secret, he had never stopped adoring the girl at university who had revealed the secret of real sex to him. The woman’s tits were an ode to decline, long and soft, with nipples pointing at the ground, but he devoured them like a devotee, took them whole into his mouth, and rubbed his hard cock between them until he came in jets over the woman’s wrinkled neck. She licked the semen from her cleavage with the satisfied smile of someone who had known for thirty years that she was superior to the official wife. My aunt was neither deaf nor stupid; one day she put his walking papers on the table, and that youthful love faded the moment Ricardo appeared at her door with hope in his heart and a suitcase full of belongings.

I know secluded, poorly lit parking lots, far from every camera, as tempting to a thief as to a passionate couple. I know the daughter of a magistrate who sucks a different man every week, never allowing herself to be the one penetrated, slapping any lover who dares look away from her face while he fucks. I have seen her kneeling on the gravel, her tits outside a white lace bra, swallowing other men’s cocks down her throat, taking their loads on her outstretched tongue, smiling with semen-whitened lips before spitting it onto the asphalt and wiping her chin with two fingers. Then, at neighborhood events, I watch her cross herself with rosary and mantilla, gazing at the plaster statue with the same wounded expression as the boy who, four hours earlier, had finished in her mouth.

***

I climb on foot to my sixth-floor apartment. I rarely use the elevator: climbing those ninety steps keeps me fit and lets me catch the faintest sound on every landing. Renata lives in 4A, a Brazilian woman in her early thirties who works like a mule at the public pool café and still has enough energy to blow off steam now and then with one of the university students she hires for the summer. Her fucks would be imperceptible were it not for the epilogue: deep, prolonged, guttural orgasms, a voice so powerful it rises through the stairwell and frightens the septuagenarian women in the entrance hall, whom she greets with sincere kindness the next day. I have heard her shout in Portuguese, “Put it in deeper, pau, put it in deeper,” with a rawness that even raises gooseflesh on me.

It is a quiet neighborhood. The kind that hides no threats among the shadows.

I don’t seek to strip naked or to be the good specimen myself. I’m passive. Or active, very active, but in my own way. I have always craved reality, not sex involving perfect bodies and oversized cocks, which is nothing more than copulatory science fiction. I seek situations of feeling, guilty pleasure, bad conscience: eyes that reveal what the body enjoys and the soul reproaches. To lie down, without touching them, with those I later greet in the street, knowing where they hurt, where they hide their trauma, knowing how they moan when they come, knowing what filthy word spills from their mouths when their pussy or mouth is blown apart. That is the greatest aphrodisiac.

That, and another. The greatest of all. The one that even someone like me away from all sanity. One of those things no one ever confesses.

I open the door. I try not to make a sound. I take off my boots in the hallway. Only when the familiar smell of home reaches me—chocolate candles, sheets that smell bodily of you—do I feel exhaustion drop heavily onto my shoulders. I put on the threadbare T-shirt from an old concert I attended in London, back when I still believed in certain things. I lie down. I breathe deeply.

Beside me, she moves, embraces me, and kisses my poorly shaven chin in greeting. She smells of freshly rinsed soap, clean pussy, and someone else’s semen hurriedly washed off beneath the shower before getting into bed.

“Good night, my love,” she murmurs in that tender, half-asleep voice.

“Good night, Marina.”