The Peeping Tom Who Spied on the Naked Lady

Count Bertrand was a man whose heart had shrunk until it had turned into a stone of greed. His taxes fell upon Albengar like hail at harvest time, leaving the peasants chewing the varnish off their tables and the mothers looking in shame at their children’s empty plates. Lady Isolda, his wife, could not sleep. Every lament that rose to the castle windows was a new nail in her chest.

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

—I shall have pity —Bertrand finally replied one afternoon, sick of her insistence, with that crooked smile he only showed when he was preparing some cruelty—. Ride through Albengar on horseback, naked and at full noon, and I will abolish every coin I demand from them.

He said it believing modesty would close his wife’s mouth forever. But Isolda bowed her head, looked at him with those blue eyes like deep waters, and answered:

—Tomorrow, then.

The whole village knew of the pact before nightfall. And in a spontaneous assembly, they swore through 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 near the glass. Let the lady cross the streets as a sacred wind crosses an empty temple.

***

Roderic, the tailor, lived in a plank house set against the main street, right at the stretch where the cobbles turned to climb toward the square. He was a lean man, with long hands, with that nervous stillness of someone who had spent his life measuring fabric. He was not cruel. He was not envious. But he had a curiosity that stuck in his throat like a hook, and that morning, while the rest of the village shut their shutters with prayers, he kept 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 beginning to stir of its own accord inside his hose, as if the animal knew before he did what was about to happen.

Just an instant. No one will know.

He searched the drawer for the finest drill he had, a watchmaker’s tool a client had paid him with in better times. He set the tip against the shutter, just at the height of his right eye, and began to turn. The shavings fell onto his shoes. His hands trembled. When at last the tool broke through the wood and peered out the other side, Roderic pulled his face away, gasping, as if he had just committed a murder. The hole was no bigger than a pea. It was enough.

***

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

Roderic brought his eye to the hole and waited. He had loosened the cord of his hose before getting close, almost without thinking, and now his cock was out, hard as an elm stick, throbbing against the palm of his right hand. His left hand rested on the wood so he would not lose his balance.

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

And then she appeared.

The stallion was white, blindingly white, with a mane so clean it looked as if it had been combed strand by strand. It moved without haste, head high, as though it knew it carried a goddess on its back. And atop it rode her.

Lady Isolda was not a woman ashamed. She did not ride hunched in on herself, nor with her hands trying to cover her, nor with her gaze lowered. She rode upright, 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 settled on her skin and made it golden, like ivory polished by a thousand summers. Every inch of her body seemed sculpted with the patience of someone shaping a miracle. Roderic, pressed to the wood with shallow breaths, felt the drill hole widen until it became an entire cathedral. Without even realizing it, he began moving his hand over his cock to that same slow, solemn rhythm as the horse’s hooves. One tug for every step. One held-back gasp for every blow.

Her shoulders were narrow but firm, and from them hung her hair. That was the first trap nature had laid in favor of modesty: a golden tide, thick, alive, spilling down her back and over her sides to her hips, rippling with each step of the horse. At times the hair covered a breast. At times it shifted and left it exposed. The lady did nothing to arrange it. She trusted the wind as she trusted the village, and the wind, as it pleased, dressed and undressed Isolda’s golden skin.

Roderic looked at her breasts and felt his throat go dry. They were not promises, they were certainties. Full, round, heavy without sagging, held with a silent arrogance only young years and clean health can give. The nipples, an intense pink almost reddish, stood taut, alive, like two little hard embers in the middle of that perfect geometry. Breasts of a woman who had borne children and nursed them, he thought, breasts to seize with both hands and bury his face between until he suffocated. He imagined closing his mouth over one of those nipples, sucking it, biting it until the lady moaned, and his hand tightened of its own accord around his cock so hard it hurt.

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

He lowered his gaze along the belly, flat and smooth, crossed by a subtle line descending from the navel and disappearing into a triangle of fine dark hair. That hair hid nothing. Rather, it framed, like a goldsmith frames a precious stone, the closed fold of the lady’s cunt. Between the thighs opened by the horse’s 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 the pubis. A countess’s cunt, a cunt no peasant would probably ever see in his life, and he was looking at it with one eye pressed to a plank, jerking his cock like a rutting animal. He felt a heat rise from his chest to his face. He also felt pleasure climbing up his legs and squeezing his balls against his body.

The hips were broad, feminine, open to frame the horse’s saddle. The thighs, long and toned, tensed and relaxed with each 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 against the lady’s cunt with every step, and the idea seemed so obscene, so unfair, that he groaned despite himself. The bent knees showed the inner curve of her legs, that zone where the skin grows thinner, more intimate, almost luminous. And the bare feet, resting in the stirrups, showed slender toes, arched like those of a dancer resting between two acts.

When the horse passed right before the peephole, Roderic saw her full profile. He saw the long neck. He saw the firm jaw. He saw the curve of the shoulder continuing into the breast, the breast into the flank, the flank into the hip, and the hip dropping to the ass, two soft, firm hemispheres rocking on the stallion’s back like two moons on a still sea. Isolda’s ass was the part that shattered Roderic’s sanity completely: round, high, almost transparent white in the midday light, with the deep line between the cheeks only barely suggested by her posture. He imagined grabbing it with both hands, spreading it, burying his face in it, licking from her ass to her 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 no longer matched to the hoofbeats.

And in the middle of all that sacred flesh, there was her face. Serene. Almost beatific. Blue eyes looking toward a horizon only she could see. Without shame. Without fear. Only determination. The determination of a woman who knew her body, in that instant, was worth more than all the silver in the county. Roderic imagined that serene face opening its mouth, those thin lips parting to take his cock to the hilt, the countess’s tongue licking his balls while he held her golden hair, and he came like lightning. He bit his lip until it bled so he would not cry out. A thick white jet shot against the inside of the shutter. Then another. Then another, weaker one, sliding over his fingers, dripping onto his hose, onto the floor, while the lady kept riding on, unaware, golden, sacred, her head high toward the end of the street.

***

The ride lasted as long as an eternity locked inside an instant. Roderic did not blink. Not once. When at last Isolda turned the corner and vanished from his field of vision, the tailor pulled away from the hole as if the wood had gone red-hot. He collapsed against the wall, trembling, his legs turned to hot wax, his cock still half-hard between semen-smeared fingers and his breathing broken. He wiped himself with a tailor’s rag he had at hand, a good one, fine linen he had reserved for lining the inside of a doublet. It seemed fair to destroy something good.

He waited for lightning. He waited for blindness. He waited for the divine voice to point him out from the sky 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 another one, far crueler. The punishment would be clarity. The perfect memory of every inch of that golden skin, of those swaying breasts, of that cunt glimpsed between the thighs, branded into his retina forever.

***

Slowly, like a body waking after a long torpor, Albengar began to move. One shutter creaked open. Then another. A door opened with a timid scrape. Timid voices seeped 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 on, the whole village burst into a roar of joy that made the roof tiles tremble.

People embraced in the mud. The old cried. Children danced. Isolda’s name ran from mouth to mouth like a prayer.

Roderic opened his shutter, slowly, for the first time all day. The evening light hit his face and burned. He saw his neighbors celebrating. He heard the baker shouting that that very night he would give bread to anyone who wanted it. He saw a mother kissing the brow of her thin child as if she had just saved him from death. And he knew, with painful certainty, that he was no part of that joy. He was an impostor on his own street. A traitor wearing an invisible medal around his neck that only he could see, and a dried stain in his hose that only he could smell.

***

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

—Roderic —he said, patting his shoulder—, thanks to men like you, our lady’s sacrifice was pure. My wife says you are the most devout of 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 tremble. When the carpenter left, Roderic sat on the bench and covered his face with his palms. People had decided to invent a virtue for him. His sin had been transformed, in the mouths of the neighbors, into his greatest holiness. There was no worse curse.

***

The weeks became months. Albengar flourished. Fairs, musicians, weddings returned. But Roderic sank. At night, in the darkness of his small bed beside his sleeping wife’s back, the vision returned with unbearable clarity. He saw the sway of the breasts. He saw the fine hair over the cunt. He saw the thighs tensing against the horse’s saddle. He saw the golden hair opening and closing over the perfect back like a living curtain. He saw the round ass rocking at the level of his eyes.

And with the vision came the shameful hardness beneath the blankets, and with the hardness the hand that moved on its own, and with the hand the guilt. He jerked his cock in silence, his thumb covering the tip so he would not drip onto the sheets, biting the pillow while he imagined the countess kneeling before him, mouth open, tongue out, sucking him to the root. He imagined taking her from behind on that same white horse, his hands buried in her breasts, biting her neck while the stallion kept walking through the cobbled street. He imagined coming inside that countess’s cunt, filling it with peasant seed, leaving her a mixed-blood child no nobleman could ever claim. And when he finally came, he came into the cupped hand, silently, his face turned to the wall so his wife would not hear him gasping.

Some nights, when the weight of guilt became too much, he would turn toward his sleeping wife, lift her nightgown from behind, and drive his cock into her cunt without speaking. She would wake halfway, moan softly, press herself trustingly against him. Roderic would seize her breasts beneath the nightgown, squeeze them, fondle them, and feel them smaller, more slumped, more human than the countess’s. He would close his eyes and fuck his wife thinking of Isolda. He would thrust hard, harder than usual, clenching his teeth, until he came inside her with a muffled growl against the nape of the poor woman who loved him. Then he would pull away, turn to the other side, and cry silently, his cock still dripping semen onto the sheets and the wrong name trapped in his throat.

He began talking in his sleep. He would murmur 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 she should call the apothecary. Roderic shook his head. He could not tell her the truth. He could not tell anyone.

***

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

—Drunkard’s lies —said the oldest man—. Here in Albengar no one looked. If anyone had looked, they would have dropped dead on the spot. Roderic the tailor was a witness to that. He says he did not hear even a whisper of profanation on the whole street.

The tailor set down his mug half-finished. He left the tavern with heavy legs. He walked under the moon to his workshop. He locked the door. He sat on the floor, against the cold wood of the shutter, right beneath the hole through which he had looked, and he cried without making a sound for a long time. And even crying, he pulled out his cock and jerked it once more, slowly, ceremonially, like someone at prayer. He came onto the same boards where his first load had fallen, and in the dark he could not tell one stain from the other.

***

Roderic lived many more years. He grew old. His back bent over the fabrics, his fingers became spotted, his eyes clouded with cataracts. But the vision remained intact inside him. Clean. Bright. Impossible to erase. He still came, even as an old man, with a trembling hand inside his hose, thinking of those golden breasts, of that glimpsed cunt, of that white ass rocking on the horse’s back. Every time he passed the castle and saw Lady Isolda’s portrait hanging in the great hall, he did not see a heroine dressed in blue. He saw the naked woman on the white horse, with hard nipples and thighs parted over the saddle, and felt on the back of his neck the weight of blue eyes that judged no one except him.

The legend would end by saying that a curious man was punished with blindness for having looked where no one should look. But the truth, the truth Roderic took to the grave, was another. The real punishment was not losing his sight. It was keeping it. It was seeing, for the rest of his life, with an impossible clarity that could never be extinguished, the unreachable beauty of that woman who had saved an entire village and who, at the same time, without knowing it, had condemned one single man forever to come alone, thinking of her, until his last day.