The Lady Who Rode Naked Through the Town

The morning Doña Beatriz de Lara rode through Villanueva without a stitch on, the sun shone with the same indifference as always. It was late August, that dry heat that flattens even the shadows, and the town had been silent for weeks, like someone holding their breath before plunging under.

Don Hernán de Montalvo, lord of Villanueva and the surrounding lands, had imposed a new grain tax that very summer. The third in four years. The peasants sold whatever they had left to pay it, and even so it wasn’t enough. The children fell asleep on empty stomachs. Old men died before their time, their backs permanently bent from stooping to gather what was no longer theirs.

Doña Beatriz knew it. She saw it every time she went down to the market, in the women’s hollow eyes, in the way the men looked at the ground when they passed her. She was still young, thirty years old exactly, and beautiful in that quiet way that needed neither adornment nor explanation. Her husband loved her—or had learned to love her, which was sometimes the same thing and sometimes not.

When she begged him for the fourth time to lift the tax, Don Hernán had had enough.

—If you really care so much about that village full of wretches—he said, without raising his eyes from the document he was signing—then ride naked down the main street at noon. With your tits out and your cunt on display before God and everyone. Simple as that. And I’ll cancel the tax.

He said it to hurt her. To make her fall silent once and for all. He did not expect her to accept.

—All right—Doña Beatriz replied, and added nothing more.

***

The town received the news in stunned silence. The constable explained the conditions: no one was to look. Doors shut, windows shut, eyes shut. The lady’s sacrifice was to be respected. Anyone who looked would break the pact, and the tax would fall on everyone again without exception.

For two days, Villanueva talked of nothing else. The women sewed thick cloths to cover the windows. The men argued in the tavern over whether the lady would really do it, and more than one of them, when no one was listening, imagined the lady’s tits in the sunlight and got his cock hard thinking about it. The children listened from the corners without really understanding what was happening, only that something momentous was about to occur.

Marcos was a carpenter. He was forty-two, with a wife, three children, and a reputation as a quiet, hardworking man of which he himself was proud. His workshop faced the main street, exactly at the center of the stretch the procession would pass through. It offered the best view of the entire route.

The night before the appointed noon, Marcos did not sleep. He lay staring at the wooden ceiling while his wife snored beside him, thinking that he was a decent man. That he had worked all his life without hurting anyone. That he knew Doña Beatriz only by sight; he had seen her once in the square when she blessed the harvest, and she was a beautiful woman, yes, but he was not the kind of man who took pleasure in what belonged to others. Not even with his own wife did he allow himself to imagine too much: he fucked her twice a month, she wearing her shirt and he keeping his eyes closed, and that was how it had always been.

He repeated this to himself until two in the morning. And yet, with the cold shame of someone discovering something about himself, he noticed that his cock was stiff beneath the blankets simply from thinking about the following noon.

Then he got up, went to the workshop, opened the tool drawer, took out a thin nail, and bored an almost invisible hole in the thickest board of the shutter. No bigger than a thumbnail. Just large enough for one eye.

He told himself he would do it for only a moment. That it was simple curiosity. That he wasn’t hurting anyone.

***

Noon arrived punctually, as always.

All of Villanueva held its breath. The streets were empty and strangely silent, like the moment before a storm. Marcos had locked the workshop, the hole was exactly level with his eye, and his heart was beating so hard that it throbbed in his temples and between his legs.

First he heard it.

The slow, rhythmic beat of hooves on the cobblestones. One. Two. Three. Four. The cadence of a calm animal led by someone in no hurry.

Marcos approached the wood and pressed his eye to the hole.

The midday light was brutal, almost whitish. It took him a second to adjust his vision.

And then he saw her.

Doña Beatriz de Lara was riding a dapple-gray horse, the reins held in both hands, her back straight, her chin raised. Completely naked.

Excitement was not what Marcos felt in that first instant. It was something closer to vertigo, the sensation of standing at the edge of something very high and looking down without being able to move his feet. But the excitement came at once, brutal and filthy, rising through his groin like a fever.

Her skin was darker than he had imagined. The Castilian summer sun had bronzed her arms and neck, and there was a line where the tan stopped, across her shoulders, making the soft whiteness of the rest more evident. It was apparently flawless skin, smooth and firm, the skin of a woman who slept without anxiety and ate without going hungry.

Her tits were medium-sized and round, with a natural, gentle droop that the horse’s movement accentuated. They were not the tits of a statue, but those of a living woman. With every step the animal took, they swayed slightly, a minimal, constant motion that was more honest and more disturbing than any exaggeration. Her nipples, dark and small, stood erect from the air and exposure, two precise points Marcos could not stop looking at. His cock went hard at once, so hard his trousers hurt. Without thinking, he undid the laces with his free hand and pulled it out, hot and throbbing, squeezing it against his sweaty palm.

Her belly was smooth, with a slight curve that grew more pronounced just above her navel. Her hips were broad and real, the kind of hips that bore children and years and asked no one’s permission to exist. The dark hair between her thighs was thick and kinky, a tight black triangle that barely allowed him to guess at the cleft of her cunt beneath it. With each sway of the horse, her thighs opened a finger’s width, then another, and Marcos saw—or thought he saw—the wet glimmer of her inner lips, the pink flesh pressed against the animal’s mane. A moan escaped his closed mouth. He began stroking his cock slowly, his eye still pressed to the hole, swearing to himself that he would stop at any moment.

Her legs fell along either side of the horse, long and firm. The muscles in her thighs tightened and relaxed with every movement of the animal. Her feet were bare, resting in the stirrups, her toes slightly curled downward. Without wanting to imagine it, Marcos imagined those thighs opening over him, that hairy cunt lowering onto his face, and he jerked himself faster.

But what Marcos would remember most, what would return without his being able to control it for years, was not any specific detail of her body. It was the expression on her face.

Doña Beatriz looked straight ahead. Not down, not to either side, but directly ahead, as though she were alone in the street, in the town, in the entire world. As though the closed walls and the eyes that were supposedly not looking were invisible to her. There was no shame in that face. Nor arrogance or defiance. There was something harder to name, something like the concentration of someone doing a very difficult thing and knowing exactly what it cost her.

And that face, that serious, clear face while the rest of her body was obscenely exposed, was what finally broke him. Marcos clenched his teeth, stroked his cock three, four more times, and came against the inside of the wooden board. A thick, hot spurt stained his knuckles and dripped down the shutter to the workshop floor. He did not move his eye away. He couldn’t. He came watching her and kept watching her, his cock still hard and throbbing in his sticky hand, unable to miss a single step more.

Her hair fell loose, long to her waist, dark brown with coppery highlights the sun picked out in strands. It moved in the wind created by the horse’s advance, sometimes brushing her tits, sometimes blowing back to reveal the perfect line of her spine and the curve of her buttocks as they flattened and parted with the rhythm of the trot. Between cheek and cheek, Marcos saw the dark cleft of her ass and, lower down, the wetness of her cunt pressed against the saddle. Every time the horse took a step, the flesh trembled minutely, and it was impossible not to imagine the mane rubbing against her vulva, the sweat, the smell of woman and beast mingling beneath the sun.

The horse moved slowly down the entire street. Marcos never took his eye from the hole. He did not even blink, though his eyes burned. He saw her from the front, in profile, and when the horse turned at the end of the route, he caught sight of her entire back, her spine a perfect line, and her large white ass swaying over the animal’s back, and then the corner swallowed her.

The sound of the hooves faded away. The silence became total once more.

***

Marcos pulled away from the shutter and stood in the middle of the dark workshop. His hands were trembling. His mouth was dry and the semen was cooling on his knuckles. He sat on the workbench because his legs could barely support him. His cock was still hard, obscene, pointing upward from his open trousers, as though one orgasm had not been enough.

He expected guilt. It came, yes, but it was different from what he had imagined. It was not a lightning strike or an inner voice scolding him. It was something colder, more permanent. A silent certainty: he had broken something that could not be repaired. He wiped the semen away with a sawdust rag and tucked away his still-throbbing cock with a trembling hand.

Outside, shortly afterward, came the sound of doors opening and windows being unlatched. The murmurs of people emerging into the street without really knowing what had happened, waiting for confirmation that the sacrifice had worked.

And it had. That very afternoon, Don Hernán’s constable walked the streets announcing the abolition of the tax. The town erupted in joy, which Marcos heard from his workshop, the door still locked and the hole in the shutter watching him from the gloom.

He did not go out to celebrate.

***

The following days were the strangest of his adult life.

Everything still appeared the same. He got up, ate breakfast, opened the workshop, cut wood, hammered, sawed, measured. His wife asked him if he was all right. He said yes. Customers came, and he served them with the same courtesy as always.

But there was something he could not control.

The image returned without warning. Sometimes while he was eating, sometimes while he was working with his hands. The sway of Doña Beatriz’s tits to the rhythm of the horse. The black triangle of hair between her thighs spread over the saddle. The line of her back, the white cleft of her ass. The expression on her face as she looked ahead, as if the entire world belonged to her and she knew it. It came with a precision that unsettled him, vivid and exact as though he had seen it five minutes earlier instead of days ago.

He got hard without permission. In the middle of the street, talking to a customer, a plank in his hands. He had to turn away, pretend nothing was wrong, find an excuse to go to the back of the workshop. There, with the door bolted, he would open his trousers and stroke his cock while thinking of her. Of the hairy cunt pressed against the animal’s mane. Of how her thighs opened with every step. Of what it would be like to grab her tits from behind and fuck her while she kept staring straight ahead with that concentrated expression, not deigning to acknowledge him, not deigning to say a word. He came quickly, furiously, against the sawdust on the floor, and afterward felt worse than before.

His wife noticed that something had changed. One night, without saying a word, she put her hand on him. Marcos tore off her nightgown and fucked her with a fury he had never felt before, biting her neck, driving into her from behind, his eyes closed and Doña Beatriz’s face lodged behind his eyelids. He came inside her thinking of another woman, and when he opened his eyes and saw his wife sweaty and smiling, delighted to have finally gotten him back, he felt as if something icy had been driven into his chest.

And the worst part was not the image. The worst part was that the image always came accompanied by that serious, concentrated face, and in that context the excitement became mixed with something closer to shame. Because she had not been there to be looked at, desired, or masturbated over. She had been there to save her people. And he had turned that act into a private show for his own cock.

One afternoon at the tavern, without having said anything to anyone, a man at the next table mentioned his name.

—Marcos the carpenter, now there’s a man you can trust—someone said amid laughter and clinking glasses. —The only one with a workshop right on the main street, and it never even occurred to him to look. A man of integrity, I’m telling you.

Marcos drank his wine slowly without replying.

—He’s the kind who keeps his word even when no one’s watching—another added.

He left before they served the second round.

***

The months passed. Villanueva prospered without the tax. People ate better, children ran through the streets, and the market filled up again on Tuesdays. Doña Beatriz appeared in the square from time to time, always dressed, always carrying herself with the same calm poise of someone who knew what she had done and needed no one to remind her. Marcos saw her from a distance and looked away, his cock throbbing beneath his carpenter’s apron like a half-trained animal.

Not because he desired her, though there was some of that—far more than he wanted to admit. But because he could not look her in the face without feeling that she knew. Without feeling that somewhere in those serene eyes was an exact record of everyone who had looked, everyone who had masturbated behind a shutter, and everyone who had kept their word.

He had bored the wood with his own hands. He had put his eye to the hole. He had seen. And he had come watching her.

No one had taken that from him. The town still called him a man of integrity. His wife loved him. His children grew up healthy. Everything continued to work, except for that part of him that knew the truth and had no one to talk to about it.

Over the years he wondered whether the punishment in the legends—the one where the offender was struck blind—might not have been more merciful. Blindness would have been something simple and visible, something the world could see and understand. But this, this permanent clarity, this image that returned with the punctuality of an executioner and hardened his cock at sixty as it had hardened it at forty-two, was a sentence with no name and no possible explanation.

Marcos grew old in Villanueva. He remained a carpenter. He remained, to everyone, a decent man who kept his word.

And he went on seeing, with less guilt and more resignation each time, Doña Beatriz de Lara riding naked down an empty street, her tits bare and her cunt pressed against the saddle, looking straight ahead as though she knew exactly where she was going and what every step was worth.