“I don’t need to see her naked to imagine...”
His eyebrows arched menacingly and I shut my mouth with a nervous cough. What would happen to any man who dared lay a finger on Lydia Tudó de Candau? I thought. Rue the day, sir. Sr. Candau, the dog-strangler, had the temper of a man who built an empire from scrap metal and mules.
“Honestly, Sr. Candau, you are a very lucky man.”
“What does luck have to do with anything, goddamnit?” Sr. Candau spit his words out as if they were embers burning his tongue. “She’s mine because I bought her from her sniveling good-for-nothing father. The rat sold her like a piece of prime real estate. But she’s my property now and I stick my flag into it every chance I get,” he said. “Now I want you, son, to learn the lay of the land.”
“I–I-I’m not sure I understand. Um. Sir.”
“I want to find a way for you to see her, shall we say, in all her glory.”
“With all due respect, sir, I think it’s better if I don’t. You know, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife and all that. These things always go wrong.”
“For the love of God, shut up and stop sniveling, you sound like a parish priest. We can get away with it just fine. Go into her boudoir before she arrives and hide behind the screen there. Then when I come in, I’ll send her into the bathroom for something and you can sneak back out. She’ll never be the wiser.”
It was the vulgar idea of a man no longer in control of himself. I knew it would lead to no good and I stated it as many times as he would hear me. But Sr. Candau would not hear me. And how could I say no? After all, he owned me too.
That’s how I found myself crouched like an animal behind a wicker screen in a beautiful woman’s bedroom on a sweltering day in June. Lydia was holding the black lily between her perfectly truculent, pointed little breasts. And when Sr. Candau walked into the room, and saw her like that, lying in the bed like a dead woman, everything went horribly awry.
“So you think you’re funny? Eh, puta?” He grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her toward him at the edge of the bed. She yelped at the sudden violence of his gesture.
“Stop it! You’re hurting me. The mirrors are cutting my skin.”
He was breathing hard through flared, taurine nostrils, his mouth a corrugated scowl. He brought his arm back as though he was going to hit her.
“After everything I’ve given you, this is how you repay me? Would you prefer to be dead, then? Because it can be arranged, you know.”
“Please, Marcelo. It blossomed just last night under the new moon. I undressed before I thought to look for a vase, and fell asleep. Here, take off your shirt and relax, let me rub your shoulders.”
He let her leg go, turned around, and sat on the edge of the bed, removing his shirt and pants. A grin replaced the grimace, but then it grew into a smirk, and finally a full sneer the moment his eyes found mine behind the wicker screen. He nodded at me in furtive recognition and his eyes went black as coal.
Lydia kneeled behind him and began massaging his hairy white shoulders, letting her nipples brush lightly against his neck and arms, trying to appease his anger. Sr. Candau reached up and fondled one of her breasts, turned his head, and sucked at it. Then he pinched it hard enough that she let out a whimper.
Everything hurt. I had been crouching for so long my feet had gone numb. My wrists ached from holding myself up and I desperately needed to move. Only a primitive old goat like Sr. Candau could come up with something as shabby as this. He kept staring at me, as if this was some act of collusion between us. My throat was dry and stung with bile, which I tried to swallow away to no avail.
Suddenly he turned and grabbed Lydia by the hair and pulled her down to the floor in front of the screen.
“Stand up.”
“Marcelo, what has gotten into you today? What are you doing? You’re hurting me.”
“Look at me and bend over.”
“Marcelo, please. Stop it.”
“I said, bend over, Lydia, or I will bend you over myself and I promise you, it will be a lot worse.”
So she stood up in front of him, her back to the wicker screen, and bent over. He pulled off his underwear and grabbed the offending flower from where it lay on the bed. He began to caress his lifeless penis, hitting her lightly in the face with the lily, poking at her lips with the long black stamen.
“We’re going to change the menu today.”
“That’s not part of our understanding,” she growled.
“There’s a new understanding now.”
He grabbed her chin and brushed her hair to one side. Then he placed his palm at the back of her head and forced her face into his crotch, the whole time keeping his eyes locked on me through the slit in the screen. When she finally gave in and closed her mouth around him, he let his head fall back with a gasp, his eyes fluttering half-shut. His cracked tongue lolled over yellow teeth, poking out from time to time to suck the edges of his wrinkled lips, covering them in flecks of dry white spittle. His breath came in short gasps. He grabbed the lily again and slid the black stamen down her back. He smacked her with it a few times, moving it in and out of her thighs, which were scratched in various places and speckled with drops of blood where the mirrors had broken the surface of her white skin.
And then it happened. He threw the black flower hard at the screen, nearly toppling it, and stood up. He bent over her slowly, following the contour of her back and hips with his hands. Then he reached down and placed a hand on either side of her buttocks and pried them apart, his fingers squeezing and kneading her flesh like worms trying to burrow into the meat of a ripe peach. He let out a wild, guttural sound and spread her buttocks wider and wider still; he stretched and he patted and he slapped and he squeezed the velvety folds, opened her up like a pomegranate with great force as he picked her up off the floor, his face contorted into a frenzy of madness and idiot glee.
A thousand tiny spiders of panic crawled over my skin. His beautiful wife opened up in front of me like a pig. I was shocked and sickened at the violence of the scene, but I was also mesmerized by the sight of it; the primordial oceanscape of pinks and browns, the puckered maelstrom, the scalloped anemone unfolding from around a tiny coral button. I couldn’t not watch. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I watched as he split her open wider. And all I wanted to do was touch. And I grew harder despite my loathing him, despite the violence, and I ached somewhere so deep I couldn’t begin to tell you where, some place, some hole inside of me opened just a little bit wider and I throbbed, my own groin set afire, my whole body in a fever-frenzy of titillation and lament. And I touched it, myself, while I watched. I touched it because it pinched and throbbed, I touched it because it hurt, because it wanted me to touch it, because I had to, because I couldn’t not do anything else. I distinguished a tiny crimson birthmark at the point where her whitest skin turned pink; it bore the shape of a crescent moon. I glimpsed the ghostly mark only for a few seconds before the clouds of his fingers covered it again, yet the vision seared itself into my mind as if I had opened my eyes to the midday sun.
When he finally put her down, he spun her around and mounted her from behind to finish himself off like a wheezing, rickety dog. I was spent, but he was still grunting and jerking, and by now her face was no more than a few inches from the wicker screen. The pendant with herb-of-grace dangled between her breasts and marked the rhythm of his charges. His beady black eyes were open again, staring straight at me. But I turned mine exclusively to her. She kept her jaw raised high, but her eyes brimmed with tears and there were signs of distress cracking her once defiant expression. Not a single sound, not a single movement did she make on her own. She just looked straight ahead, eyes staring, fixed upon nothing I could see. Toc, toc, toc... the amulet played out the rhythm of an ancient lullaby against her chest, hypnotizing the universe into slow-motion.