The Summer I Spied on the Neighbor on the Fifth Floor

Valencia in August. The heat rises from the cobblestones like a thick breath that never dissipates, even when night falls. I’ve lived in this penthouse for five summers, and the telescope still points at the sky only in name. I bought it with the excuse of Saturn, Jupiter, the full moon. The truth is that for a long time now I haven’t turned it upward.

Across from my terrace rises a narrow seven-story building, with big windows and no shutters. Tenants move out every few months, so the show renews itself. I’ve seen couples argue in silence, children painting the walls in secret, an old woman sewing on the balcony at three in the morning, a guy practicing guitar in his underwear every Monday and Wednesday.

And then, in July, she arrived.

I discovered her one Friday afternoon, when the light falls at an angle and comes through the west-facing windows as if it were passing straight through them. Fifth floor. Only one room visible from my terrace: the study, where she had the desk, the chair, and the computer.

What I saw made me spill my glass.

She was kneeling on the chair, with her back to the window, her nightgown hiked up to her waist. One hand buried between her thighs, the other braced on the backrest. The computer screen lit the curve of her back and her hair tied up in a loose bun. She moved slowly, in short circles, as if she had all the time in the world.

I pulled my eye away from the telescope. Looked again.

She was still there, exactly the same, oblivious to the fact that a stranger thirty meters away was watching her in silence.

Or so I thought.

The next day, at the same hour, I looked again. She was in the same position, in the same chair. But this time she wasn’t turned away from me.

She was facing me. Looking straight toward my terrace. Toward the telescope.

And she was touching herself.

My blood dropped to my feet and then somewhere else. My mouth went dry. I wanted to look away and couldn’t. She kept her eyes fixed on my window as if she could see through the glass, as if she knew exactly where my pupil was against the eyepiece. She bit her lower lip and drew in deep breaths. When she finished, she didn’t turn off the light. She stayed seated there, watching me.

Then she stood up, stepped to the glass, and lowered the blind.

I didn’t sleep that night.

***

The third day was the day of the first signals.

At nine I went up to the terrace with a coffee I didn’t need. Her window was open and, stuck to the glass, there was a sheet of graph paper. I had to focus twice to read it. One single word, written in black marker.

Hello.

It took me half an hour to decide what to answer. In the end I took a page from my notebook, wrote one word, and taped it to the terrace glass.

Hello.

The fourth day a schedule appeared. “23:00” written on the glass in red ink, in huge numbers.

At exactly eleven I was behind the telescope, with the terrace light off and my heart pounding in my throat. She came into frame as if she were arriving onstage. She was wearing a short ivory kimono. She opened it slowly, without theatrics, and underneath there was nothing. She sat in the chair, facing me, and spread her legs with a calm that struck me as obscene.

I lowered the zipper of my pants. Let her see me.

What happened that hour can’t be told. It has to be breathed.

***

The game settled in like a summer habit.

There were nights of black lingerie and others of an open robe. There were days when she pretended to be talking on the phone while her hand sank beneath her skirt; days when I shaved in front of the bathroom window knowing she was watching me. We learned a wordless code: a lit candle meant that night she’d take it slowly; a blind half raised, that she preferred to wait. A shirt hanging from the balcony meant “not today, but tomorrow, yes.”

Sometimes we played at not looking at each other. At ignoring each other for hours. I’d pace the terrace with a book, pretending the telescope didn’t exist. She’d sit reading in her armchair, bare feet crossed over the armrest. Neither of us gave in. The tension built up like a heat storm, and in the end it always burst: a hand, a look, an impossible position.

Once, only once, she took off her underwear without touching it with her hands. She slid it down with her legs, slowly, until it fell to the floor like a snake shedding its skin on its own. I don’t know how she did it. It took me days to get that image out of my head.

Another night, I masturbated under the shower knowing she was watching me through the frosted glass. When I came out, wrapped in a towel, I found a new word on her window.

More.

Every night ended with the same emptiness: someone else’s skin, the same distance, and the feeling of having drunk without ever quenching my thirst.

***

One Sunday in August, I finally decided.

I wrote on a white piece of cardboard in big letters and taped it to the glass before dark.

What if we go downstairs?

There was no answer that night. Nor the next morning. Her window stayed shut for two full days. I thought I’d scared her. I thought she’d moved. I thought about going down to the lobby, crossing the street, standing under her building with any excuse at all, but I didn’t dare.

On the third day, just as I was about to take down my cardboard, she appeared. She was wearing a short black dress and holding a glass of wine. She smiled, but not with her eyes. She stuck her note to the glass with a sharp, almost violent gesture.

No.

And she crossed her legs like someone closing a door.

***

Summer went on. I respected the rule. I never suggested anything again. She came back to the game as if nothing had happened, and I learned that this wasn’t the prelude to something else: this was the thing itself.

There was a week of fever. Another of rain, the only rain in August, in which she kept staring at the wet glass with a sadness that reached me through the telescope like a hand. There was one night when she fell asleep in the chair, with the lamp on and the laptop open between her thighs. I covered her with my gaze until dawn.

And then came the last night.

***

It was late September. The temperature had dropped just enough to open the terrace without the air feeling heavy. I was at my post: naked from the waist up, behind the telescope, waiting.

She didn’t undress.

She appeared wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, her shoulders bare. Her hair was loose for the first time. She switched on the desk lamp and sat in the chair, not taking her eyes off me. Then she picked up her phone and started typing.

One minute later, she projected something onto the wall of her study. A large, sharp image, made so that I would see it.

It was a photo. Taken from her window toward mine. My terrace could be seen, the telescope, the open curtain, my silhouette bent over the eyepiece. There I was, my body exposed, my routine, my ritual. She had been photographing me for weeks.

But that wasn’t what pinned me to the floor.

In the foreground, inside the photo, next to the sill of her window, there was an empty wheelchair.

Below the image, written in white on the projected wall, a sentence in her handwriting.

Up here we play too. But you don’t go down.

It took me a while to understand. Then it took me a while to breathe. Then it took me a while to look again.

She was still seated in the desk chair, unmoving. The same chair I had imagined for weeks as a throne, as a pose, as a whim. The same chair in which she knelt for me, in which she opened herself for me, in which she slept with the laptop between her thighs. That chair.

I straightened up, not knowing what to do with my hands. I thought about writing something. About raising a sign. About closing the curtain and never looking again. About crossing the street, ringing the intercom, going upstairs, and sending her rules, her “no,” the distance, the whole summer, to hell.

I did none of that.

I sat on the terrace floor, my back against the glass, and let the telescope keep pointing at her. I heard her light a cigarette. I watched her exhale the smoke into the yellow lamplight. I lowered my pants very slowly, as if I had all the time in the world, and began to touch myself with my eyes open.

Up here, we play. Down there, you don’t go down.

I understood it that night, and I understood it every night of the following winter, when I returned to the terrace and to her window, and she was still there, and we were still two bodies thirty meters apart, burning in silence, never touching each other once.