The Peeping Tom Who Spied on the Naked Lady

Count Bertrand was a man whose heart had shriveled until it became a stone of greed. His taxes fell upon Albengar like hail on a harvest, leaving the peasants chewing the varnish off their tables and mothers staring shamefacedly at their children’s empty plates. Lady Isolde, his wife, could not sleep. Every lament that rose to the castle windows was another nail driven into her chest.

—Have mercy on them, my husband —she pleaded night after night.

—I will have mercy —Bertrand finally replied one afternoon, weary of her insistence, with the crooked smile he wore only when preparing some cruelty—. Ride through Albengar on horseback, naked and in broad daylight, and I will abolish every coin I demand from them.

He said it believing that modesty would seal his wife’s mouth forever. But Isolde inclined her head, looked at him with those blue eyes like deep waters, and replied:

—Tomorrow, then.

The whole village knew of the pact before nightfall. And at a spontaneous assembly, they swore through their tears that they would not profane their lady’s sacrifice. Every door would be barred, every shutter secured with nails, every window covered with cloth. No one would look. No one would even breathe beside the glass. Let the lady cross the streets as sacred wind crosses an empty temple.

***

Roderic the tailor lived in a plank house pressed against the main street, right at the stretch where the cobblestones turned to climb toward the square. He was a thin man with long hands, possessed of the nervous stillness of one who had spent his life measuring cloth. He was not cruel. He was not envious. But he had a curiosity that lodged in his throat like a fishhook, and that morning, while the rest of the village closed their shutters with prayers, he remained staring at the dark wood of his workshop and felt his heart pounding against his ribs. And lower down, in his groin, he felt his cock begin to stir on its own inside his breeches, as if the animal knew before he did what was about to happen.

Just a moment. No one will ever know.

He searched the drawer for the finest drill he owned, a watchmaker’s tool a customer had paid him with in better times. He pressed its tip against the shutter, exactly level with his right eye, and began to turn it. Shavings fell onto his shoes. His hands trembled. When at last the tool pierced the wood and emerged on the other side, Roderic pulled his face away, panting as if he had just committed murder. The hole was no larger than a pea. It would be enough.

***

Silence fell over Albengar like a damp blanket. No bird sang. No child cried. No dog barked. It was as though the entire village had stopped breathing.

Roderic brought his eye to the hole and waited. He had untied the cord of his breeches before approaching, almost without thinking, and now his cock was out, hard as an elm branch, throbbing against the palm of his right hand. He braced his left against the wood so he would not lose his balance.

First came the sound. A slow, solemn rhythm, almost liturgical. Hooves on stone. Each blow was a heartbeat. Each heartbeat was a sin. The tailor clenched his fists at his sides and held his breath.

And then she appeared.

The steed was white, dazzlingly white, its mane so clean it seemed to have been combed strand by strand. It advanced without haste, head held high, as though it knew it carried a goddess on its back. And astride it rode her.

Lady Isolde was not a shamed woman. She was not hunched over, nor trying to cover herself with her hands, nor looking down. She rode upright, her back straight, the reins held in firm fingers, her face turned forward like a saint crossing the desert. And she was completely, brutally naked.

The midday light rested on her skin and turned it golden, like ivory polished by a thousand summers. Every inch of her body seemed sculpted with the patience of one who shapes a miracle. Roderic, pressed against the wood and breathing in short gasps, felt the drill hole open until it became an entire cathedral. Without realizing it, he began moving his hand over his cock in that same slow, solemn rhythm as the horse’s hooves. One stroke for every step. One restrained gasp for every blow.

Her shoulders were narrow but firm, and her hair hung from them. Nature’s first trap laid in favor of modesty: a thick, living golden tide that fell over her back and down her sides to her hips, rippling with every step of the horse. At times her hair covered one breast. At times it shifted away and left it exposed. The lady did nothing to arrange it. She trusted the wind as she trusted the village, and the wind, according to its whim, dressed and undressed Isolde’s golden skin.

Roderic looked at her tits and felt his throat go dry. They were not promises but certainties. Full, round, heavy without sagging, held up with a silent arrogance granted only by youth and good health. Her nipples, an intense pink verging on red, stood taut and alive, like two small, hard embers amid that perfect geometry. The tits of a woman who had given birth and suckled a child, he thought—tits to seize with both hands and bury his face between until he suffocated. He imagined his closed mouth over one of those nipples, sucking it, biting it until the lady moaned, and his hand tightened around his cock so hard it hurt.

And they moved. That was the part that nearly took the tailor’s legs from under him. With every step of the horse, her breasts swayed in a slow, hypnotic undulation, a dance no wedding celebration could imitate. They rose and fell. They brushed against each other. They traced arcs through the golden midday air. It was the mechanics of desire made visible, and a thick drop escaped the tip of Roderic’s cock, sliding between his fingers.

His gaze traveled down her flat, soft belly, crossed by a subtle line descending from her navel until it vanished into a triangle of fine, dark hair. That hair hid nothing. Rather, like a goldsmith framing a precious stone, it outlined the closed crease of the lady’s cunt. Between her thighs, spread by the saddle, Roderic saw the pink line of those lips, the shadow where they met, and thought he could even make out the wet sheen of midday sweat on her mound. A countess’s cunt, a cunt that probably no common villain would ever see in his life—and he was looking at it with one eye pressed to a plank, jerking his cock like an animal in heat. He felt warmth rise through his chest to his face. He also felt pleasure beginning to climb his legs and draw his balls tight against his body.

Her hips were broad and feminine, open to frame the horse’s saddle. Her thighs, long and toned, tensed and relaxed with every step of the animal in a silent symphony of strength and grace. Roderic watched them pressing against the white back and thought that same saddle leather, that wood, that horsehair were rubbing the lady’s cunt with every step, and the idea seemed so obscene, so unfair, that he moaned involuntarily. Her bent knees revealed the inner curve of her legs, that place where skin becomes thinner, more intimate, almost luminous. And her bare feet, resting in the stirrups, showed slender, arched toes like those of a dancer resting between two acts.

When the horse passed directly in front of the peephole, Roderic saw her whole profile. He saw her long neck. He saw her firm jaw. He saw the curve of her shoulder flowing into her breast, the breast into her side, the side into her hip, and the hip descending to her ass, two soft, firm hemispheres swaying on the steed’s back like two moons over a still sea. Isolde’s ass was the part that shattered Roderic’s sanity completely: round, high, almost translucent white in the midday light, with the deep line between her buttocks barely suggested by her posture. He imagined grabbing it with both hands, spreading it, burying his face in it, licking her from ass to cunt with a long, filthy tongue. His hand began moving faster against his will, sliding up and down his cock in an urgent, dirty rhythm that no longer matched the hooves.

And amid all that sacred flesh was her face. Serene. Almost beatific. Blue eyes fixed on a horizon only she could see. No shame. No fear. Only determination. The determination of a woman who knew that, in that instant, her body was worth more than all the silver in the county. Roderic imagined that serene face opening its mouth, those fine lips parting to take his cock all the way in, the countess’s tongue licking his balls while he gripped her golden hair, and his orgasm broke loose like lightning. He bit his lip until he drew blood to keep from shouting. A thick, white jet shot against the inside of the shutter. Then another. Then one more, weaker, sliding over his fingers, falling onto his breeches and the floor, while the lady continued onward, unaware, golden, sacred, head held high toward the end of the street.

***

The ride lasted as long as eternity contained within a single instant. Roderic did not blink. Not once. When Isolde finally turned the corner and vanished from his field of vision, the tailor pulled away from the hole as though the wood had been heated to red-hot. He collapsed against the wall, trembling, his legs turned to hot wax, his cock still half-hard between semen-stained fingers, his breathing broken. He wiped himself with a tailor’s rag he had at hand, a good one, fine linen he had set aside to line the inside of a doublet. It seemed only fair to ruin something good.

He waited for the lightning. He waited for blindness. He waited for the divine voice that would point him out from heaven and condemn him before all Albengar.

But nothing happened.

The village’s silence remained silence. His eyes still saw. His hands were still hands. And then he understood that the punishment would be something else, far crueler. The punishment would be clarity. The perfect memory of every inch of that golden skin, of those swaying tits, of that cunt glimpsed between her thighs, burned forever into his retina.

***

Slowly, like a body waking after a long stupor, Albengar began to move. One shutter creaked. Then another. A door opened with a timid groan. Timid voices filtered into the air. When the count’s bailiff appeared on horseback in the middle of the square and proclaimed in a powerful voice that all taxes were abolished from that moment onward, the entire village erupted in a roar of jubilation that made the roof tiles tremble.

People embraced in the mud. The old wept. The children danced. Isolde’s name passed from mouth to mouth like a prayer.

Roderic opened his shutter slowly, for the first time all day. The evening light struck his face and burned him. He saw his neighbors celebrating. He heard the baker shout that very night he would give bread to anyone who wanted it. He saw a mother kissing her thin son’s forehead as if she had just saved him from death. And he knew, with painful certainty, that he was not part of that joy. He was an impostor on his own street. A traitor wearing around his neck an invisible medal only he could see, and a dried stain in his breeches that only he could smell.

***

The next day, the carpenter came by the workshop to order a new doublet.

—Roderic —he said, clapping him on the shoulder—thanks to men like you, our lady’s sacrifice remained pure. My wife says you are the most devout of them all. She heard you praying on your knees while the lady passed.

The tailor swallowed. He nodded without speaking. He took the measurements with hands that did not tremble because he forced them not to. When the carpenter left, Roderic sat on the bench and covered his face with his palms. The people had decided to invent a virtue for him. His sin had become, in his neighbors’ mouths, his greatest sanctity. There was no worse curse.

***

Weeks became months. Albengar flourished. The fairs, musicians, and weddings returned. But Roderic sank. At night, in the darkness of his little bed, beside his sleeping wife’s back, the vision returned with unbearable clarity. He saw the sway of her tits. He saw the fine hair over her cunt. He saw her thighs tensing against the saddle. He saw the golden hair opening and closing over her perfect back like a living curtain. He saw her round ass swaying at eye level.

And with the vision came the shameful hardness beneath the blankets, and with the hardness came the hand that moved on its own, and with the hand came guilt. He jerked his cock in silence, covering the tip with his thumb so he would not drip on the sheets, biting the pillow as he imagined the countess kneeling before him, mouth open, tongue out, sucking him all the way down. He imagined fucking her from behind on that same white horse, his hands buried in her tits, biting her neck while the steed continued along the cobbled street. He imagined coming inside that countess’s cunt, filling it with a villain’s semen, leaving her with a mixed-blood child no nobleman could claim. And when at last he came, he came into his cupped hand, silently, his face turned toward the wall so his wife would not hear him panting.

Some nights, when the weight of his guilt became too much, he turned toward his sleeping wife, lifted her nightgown from behind, and sank his cock into her cunt without a word. She half-woke, moaned softly, and pressed trustingly against him. Roderic grabbed her tits beneath the nightgown, squeezed and pawed them, and felt them smaller, saggier, more human than the countess’s. He closed his eyes and fucked his wife while thinking of Isolde. He thrust hard, harder than usual, gritting his teeth, until he came inside her with a muffled grunt against the nape of the poor woman who loved him. Then he pulled away, turned onto his other side, and wept silently, his cock still dripping semen onto the sheets and the wrong name caught in his throat.

He began talking in his sleep. He murmured a name that was not his wife’s. His wife, a good woman who loved him, asked whether he was ill. Whether he had a fever. Whether he wanted her to send for the apothecary. Roderic shook his head. He could not tell her the truth. He could not tell anyone.

***

One night, unable to endure it any longer, he went out into the street and entered the harbor tavern. He ordered beer. He sat in a corner. And at the nearby table he heard a group of men talking about the lady. One of them, drunk, swore that he had looked through a crack, that he had seen the countess’s tits swinging wildly, that he had jerked his cock until he came against the door. The others silenced him with blows.

—Drunken lies —said the oldest—. Here in Albengar no one looked. If anyone had looked, he would have been struck dead. Roderic the tailor witnessed that. He says he did not hear a single profane sigh in the entire street.

The tailor set down his half-finished mug. He left the tavern on heavy legs. He walked beneath the moon to his workshop. He locked the door. He sat on the floor against the cold wood of the shutter, directly beneath the hole through which he had looked, and wept without a sound for a long time. And even while crying, he took out his cock and jerked it once more, slowly, ceremonially, like a man praying. He came on the same boards where his first orgasm had fallen, and in the darkness he could not distinguish one stain from the other.

***

Roderic lived many more years. He grew old. His back curved over the cloth, his fingers filled with spots, and cataracts clouded his eyes. But the vision remained intact inside him. Clean. Bright. Impossible to erase. Even as an old man, he still came with his trembling hand inside his breeches, thinking of those golden tits, that glimpsed cunt, that white ass swaying on the horse’s back. Whenever he passed in front of the castle and saw the portrait of Lady Isolde hanging in the main hall, he did not see a heroine dressed in blue. He saw the naked woman on the white horse, nipples hard and thighs spread over the saddle, and felt on the back of his neck the weight of blue eyes that judged no one except him.

Legend would eventually say that a curious man had been punished with blindness for looking where no one was meant to look. But the truth—the truth Roderic carried to his grave—was different. The true punishment was not losing his sight. It was keeping it. It was seeing, for the rest of his life, with a clarity impossible to extinguish, the unattainable beauty of the woman who had saved an entire village and, at the same time, unknowingly condemned one lone man forever to come in solitude thinking of her until his final day.