THE SIN OF THE SHADOWS (Sinful Stories #4)

This short story is part of SINFUL STORIES, a collection by Rebecca Brand.

(Complete Story)

The Lamp

The floor lamp in the hallway had had a crooked shade since the first year, and neither of them straightened it, because straightening it would have required one of those marital conversations that lead nowhere. It stood in the hallway, between the living room and the bedroom, with its twenty-watt bulb and its honey-colored fabric shade, and it had been switched on every night at the same hour for twelve years. It was the last light to go out in the house. It cast the two long shadows onto the back wall — Tomás’s and Elena’s — always together, always still, moving only when they moved, as it should be.

Elena was thirty-five and her hands were covered in small calluses, from varnish and from the chisel. She restored furniture in the garage turned workshop, and lately she restored more pieces than she sold, because slow work calmed her. Tomás was thirty-eight and taught history at a high school on the outskirts: he spoke loud and clear in front of thirty teenagers and then came home and ran out of words, as if he’d spent them all along the way. They’d been married twelve years. They loved each other. That had never been in doubt. What was in doubt, without either of them saying it out loud, was since when they had stopped wanting each other.

One afternoon, Elena came up from the workshop with a small restored wooden box. She had spent three days working on it, stripping off layers of paint, recovering the original hinges, and bringing the walnut back to a shine. She showed it to Tomás while he was grading exams on the sofa. Tomás looked up, said it had come out beautiful, and went back to the notebook. Elena left the box on the table. She wasn’t angry. She knew he had a lot of work and had to hand in grades the next day. What bothered her was realizing that she hadn’t even expected a different reaction. Before, he would have opened the box, examined the hinges, and asked her how long she’d spent on it. That afternoon he didn’t look at it again. The next day, Elena took the box back down to the workshop without Tomás noticing it was gone.

There was a yellow blanket folded over the back of the sofa. They’d bought it for the baby — Elena was sure it was a girl — and the baby never came. Four years now. The blanket stayed there, folded, never used, and neither of them put it away in a closet because putting it away would have meant accepting something they didn’t want to accept.

Some nights, when Tomás sat on the sofa, he moved the blanket aside carefully so as not to wrinkle it. Other times he found it fallen on the seat and put it back over the backrest. He never asked why it was still there. Elena watched those small gestures without commenting on them. Both had learned to live with the memory of what had happened, but also to avoid any conversation that could take them back to the hospital. Over time, that silence had spread to other things. They no longer talked about what hurt them, but neither about what they missed.

On the low table lay a green hardcover notebook they used for the shopping list. Elena wrote down what was missing in the kitchen and Tomás added below what he needed for school. It was one of the few things they still did together, though they almost never coincided in front of it. Those domestic pages would end up full of rules. The notebook had started as a shopping list and would end as a contract.

The first night the shadows moved on their own was a Tuesday in October, at eleven twenty, with the hallway lamp on and the TV off.

Elena was sitting on the sofa with a glass of water in her hand and Tomás in the armchair, opposite, reading a book he wasn’t reading. The back wall was right behind Elena, so Tomás’s shadow fell on the plaster at her height, long and still. Elena looked at the wall for no reason, and saw that Tomás’s shadow had a hand raised, open, resting on the air as if it were holding something. Tomás had both hands on the book.

For a moment she thought she’d confused the shadow with one of the stains on the plaster. The lamp shade had been crooked for years, and a slight vibration was enough to make the light seem to shift position. Still, that hand had five perfectly drawn fingers. Elena looked again at Tomás’s hands, motionless on the open pages. Then she looked at the wall again.

Elena blinked. The shadow lowered its hand.

— Tomás — she said.

— What?

— Nothing.

They went on. Ten minutes later, Tomás’s shadow moved again: this time it turned its head toward Elena’s shadow, slowly, and leaned in. Tomás kept his eyes on the book. Elena stayed staring at the wall with the glass halfway to her mouth and felt, in her stomach, something she hadn’t felt in four years: the exact sensation of being in front of something she didn’t control.

— Tomás, look at the wall.

He looked. And the shadow, as if it knew it was being watched, straightened up and went back to its place, at his feet, still, proper.

— What’s wrong with the wall?

— Your shadow moved on its own.

Tomás laughed. Elena didn’t. He set the book on the table, raised an arm, and watched his shadow reproduce the movement. He lowered it, turned his head, leaned forward. Everything worked exactly as it should. He checked the lamp shade, looked for some draft, and sat back down. Elena didn’t argue with his explanations. She herself wanted to believe them, but she kept remembering that raised hand while her husband’s two hands held the book. That night they stayed up until two in the morning sitting on the sofa, both staring at the back wall, waiting, like two children in front of an aquarium. And the shadow did it again. And this time Elena’s did too.

Elena’s was the worst. Elena’s shadow separated from her feet, stretched along the plaster, and came up to Tomás’s, and put a hand on its chest, and Tomás — the flesh one — brought his hand to his chest at the same time, as if he had really been touched.

They looked at each other. Tomás had his hand over his heart and looked as bewildered as she did. Elena was about to ask him what he’d felt, but she held back. She didn’t want her answer to condition his. Tomás didn’t ask anything either. They stayed silent for a few minutes, alert to any movement on the wall. Then he turned off the lamp and they both watched the silhouettes disappear. When he turned it back on, they were in their place again, motionless. They repeated the test several times, without getting any different result.

That night they didn’t sleep. The next morning Elena opened the green notebook to a blank page and wrote, with a marker:

1. Don’t look at it head-on.

Tomás read the rule, picked up the marker, and wrote below, in his small teacher’s handwriting:

2. Don’t touch it with your hands.

And those were the first two rules. The next ones would come later, when they discovered that his shadow, if they let it, started doing things Tomás didn’t do.

The First Time

It took them three days to touch.

On Wednesday, Tomás stopped reading as soon as it began to get dark. On Thursday, Elena came up from the workshop earlier than usual. Neither confessed that they were watching for the time the lamp was turned on. During dinner they avoided looking toward the hallway; afterward, each found an excuse to stay a few more minutes in the living room. What they’d seen on Tuesday hadn’t given them an answer. It had given them something to wait for.

It was Friday. Elena had come back from the workshop at eight, with rough hands and the smell of beeswax, and Tomás was in the kitchen with his shirt sleeves rolled up, frying something, and when she came in they both knew that tonight it was going to happen. They didn’t make dinner. They left the pan and went to the bedroom.

They had gone almost five months without sleeping together. They had slept together, of course, sometimes, but the kind of times you do so it’s on record, with the light off and T-shirts on, each on their own side, both finishing in a polite hurry. Five months of not looking at each other. And that night, on the bedroom threshold, with the hallway lamp on and the two shadows already cast on the bedroom wall, Elena realized she was afraid of Tomás for the first time in twelve years.

It wasn’t fear that he wanted to hurt her. It was fear of discovering that they no longer knew how to approach each other. Elena had spent years learning to guess what Tomás needed and to hide what she needed. Now, faced with the possibility of getting it wrong, she discovered she didn’t know how to approach her husband without falling back on the habits that had separated them.

He started. He put his hand on her waist, over the sweater, and waited. She nodded. Then he kissed her, and the kiss was clumsy, like a first kiss between people who don’t know each other, and for that very reason it gave Elena goosebumps on her arms.

They lay down on the bed dressed. The hallway lamp was on and the door open, and on the bedroom wall, right above the headboard, the shadow of the two of them fell, stretched by the yellow, dirty light. Elena looked at the wall over Tomás’s shoulder and saw that the two shadows were already doing something they weren’t doing yet: his shadow had its hand under the clothes of her shadow, pushing her sweater up along her side, and hers had its head thrown back.

— They’re starting without us — said Elena.

— Let them.

Tomás really pushed her sweater up. He ran his hand over her belly, slowly, with his thumb, and Elena felt everything inside her clench, because no one had touched her belly calmly in months. He stopped at the navel. Then he went up to the bra and unhooked it in front, clumsily, with one hand, without taking off the sweater, and pulled her tits out from under the fabric and looked at them as if he didn’t know them.

— Don’t look at me so much — she said.

— Let me.

He sucked one nipple and Elena closed her eyes. On the wall, his shadow did the same with its mouth open, exaggerated, hungrier than the real Tomás, and Elena’s shadow grabbed its head with both hands and pressed it against its chest. Elena opened her eyes and looked at the wall again, and a moan escaped her that wasn’t for what Tomás was doing to her, but for what she was seeing.

Tomás noticed.

— Are you looking at the wall?

— Yes.

— Me too.

They laughed, both of them, with their mouths pressed together, and then they stopped laughing. They undressed completely, badly, yanking at clothes, and when Tomás got on top of her Elena grabbed his ass with both hands and pulled him down, and he understood. He put it in her in one go, all the way, without warming her up, and she screamed a little because she’d been closed for five months and he wasn’t small, and he stayed still inside her, breathing into her neck, waiting.

— Move — she said.

And he moved. And it was fast and messy and with no choreography, the way they hadn’t fucked since before the hospital. Tomás lifted one of her legs and put it on his shoulder and pushed deeper, and Elena grabbed the bedspread with both hands and started raising her hips to meet him, and on the wall the two shadows did the same, but the other way around, hers on top and his underneath, and Elena no longer knew which of the two things was giving her the pleasure, Tomás’s body or the wall.

She came first, with his hand on her clit, pressing, and she came with a long cry that had been stored up for four years, and Tomás came two thrusts later, inside her, grabbing her hair with one hand the way he hadn’t grabbed her hair since the night of the tie.

Then they stayed still, him on top, her below, both looking at the wall over his shoulder. The shadows kept going. They no longer copied anything: Tomás’s shadow was kneeling behind Elena’s shadow and had both hands on its hips, and Elena’s shadow had its face pressed to the plaster. The two real bodies lay still and quiet, and the shadows kept fucking on the wall, alone, at their own pace.

— How long are they going to keep going? — asked Tomás.

— I don’t know.

Elena wanted to check whether those figures were still being projected in the right direction. She looked for the edge of the light, the position of the lamp, and the wrinkles in the bedspread. Nothing helped. Tomás’s shadow could have been a trick of perspective; hers, seen from where they were, didn’t even seem to keep the same proportions as her body. She wondered what someone walking in at that moment would see. She didn’t want to find out. It was enough for her to know that Tomás was watching too.

They kept going until three. They fell asleep first, and in the morning the shadows were in their place, still, proper, as if nothing.

In the morning, Tomás made the coffee and Elena took out two cups. For a few minutes they talked about the workshop, the school, and the rain the radio announced. It was a way of checking that things were still in place. When they looked at each other, both stopped pretending. Elena brought the green notebook over and opened it to a blank page. They hadn’t found an explanation, but maybe they could agree on how to observe without getting scared.

In the notebook, that week, they added two more rules, the third in Elena’s handwriting and the fourth in Tomás’s, and neither of them quite knew why they were writing them:

3. Don’t talk to it.

4. Don’t let it see us watching.

The Hand

The scene neither of them could explain was the following Wednesday, and it was silent, and it was through the clothes.

In the days after Friday, they had gone back to their usual schedules. Elena went down to the workshop, Tomás went to school, and they both ate dinner at the usual time. But something had changed. When they coincided in the living room, their gazes ended up drifting toward the wall, even if neither wanted to admit it. They’d stopped arguing about what they saw. Not because they were convinced it was real, but because any explanation seemed more absurd than the phenomenon itself. Sometimes Elena suspected that Tomás was pretending not to have seen certain movements. Other times she wondered if she wasn’t the one imagining things that he accepted so as not to contradict her. It had never been so hard to know what her husband was thinking.

Elena had come from the workshop with her back wrecked from bending over a sideboard from the last century. She lay down on the sofa face down, dressed, with her skirt and blouse on, and stayed like that, her face in the cushion. Tomás was in the armchair, opposite, with a notebook of exams on his lap and the red pen in his mouth. The hallway lamp was on, as always. And on the back wall, behind the sofa, Elena’s shadow fell, lying down, and next to it Tomás’s, sitting.

Elena felt the hand before she saw it.

It came to her along her back, over the blouse, from shoulder to waist, with the exact weight of a large hand, and it stayed there, flat, warm. Elena opened her eyes. Tomás still had the pen in his mouth, in the armchair, three meters away. Tomás’s shadow, on the wall, had its arm stretched out and its hand resting on the back of Elena’s shadow.

Elena said nothing. Obeying the rule, she didn’t look head-on. She stayed still, face down, and let it happen.

The shadow’s hand went up her back, over the blouse, to the nape of her neck, and moved her hair away from her neck. Elena felt her hair move. Then the hand went down, slowly, along her spine, vertebra by vertebra, and stopped in the hollow of her waist, and Elena felt a warmth that went down to her groin and stayed there, throbbing.

Tomás was watching her. The pen had fallen. He had both hands free on his lap and wasn’t moving them. Elena looked him in the eyes, silently, and he held her gaze, and neither spoke.

Elena wanted to ask him if he had seen what she had. She knew an affirmative answer would reassure her, even if it proved nothing. She also wanted to get up, go to the wall, and check whether that figure had any relation to the position of the lamp. She did neither. She looked at Tomás’s hands, motionless on his knees, and remembered the pressure she was still feeling on her back. She wondered if the exhaustion from the workshop could be causing that sensation. Then she noticed that Tomás had stopped looking at the wall and was watching her face with an attention he hadn’t given her in years.

The shadow’s hand pushed up her skirt. Over, not under: it lifted the hem of the skirt, slowly, up to her hip, and left her thigh bare, and then put its whole palm on the back of her thigh, and pressed. Elena felt the exact pressure of five fingers on her skin, and Tomás’s hand — the real one — hadn’t touched her in days.

Then Elena did what she had never done in front of him. She put her hand under her skirt.

She touched herself over her panties, with two fingers, slowly, barely moving, face down on the cushion, her face turned toward the wall so as not to look head-on. And on the wall, Tomás’s shadow unzipped its fly and pulled out its cock and started jerking off looking at her.

Elena ran out of air.

Because that was it. Her husband’s shadow was pulling it out and jerking it against the wall, with its fist closed and a long rhythm, and the real Tomás stayed in the armchair with his hands still on his lap, watching her, not touching himself, not touching her, obeying his own rule. And Elena was on the sofa, with her hand between her legs, soaked, touching herself in front of him like a teenager, and neither of them said a word.

It was long. It was a quarter of an hour of silence, with the whole house quiet and only the small sound of Elena’s hand under her skirt and, on the wall, the movement of Tomás’s shadow, jerking off with its face turned toward her and its mouth a little open.

Elena came with her eyes fixed on his shadow, not on him. She came biting the cushion so as not to scream, with her thighs clenched around her own hand, and at the last moment she looked at Tomás’s face and Tomás was looking at her, and Elena saw on her husband’s face something she had never seen on it: hunger. Pure, animal hunger, of watching and not being able to touch.

Tomás’s shadow came two seconds later, against the wall, and stained the plaster with something that wasn’t liquid but that to Elena seemed it was. And the real Tomás, in the armchair, also came inside his pants, barely having touched himself, just from watching her, and you could see the shudder in his shoulders and then the stain on the fabric.

No one spoke. Elena lowered her skirt. Tomás got up and went to the kitchen and came back with two glasses of water. He drank his standing, one in front of the other, and then went to bed, and in the notebook, the next morning, they added a fifth rule that they no longer knew if it was a rule or a surrender:

5. You can look, if it’s at the face.

Elena read the sentence several times. She wasn’t sure it was a rule for the shadows. Maybe it was a rule for them, a way of forcing themselves to do what they had avoided for too long. Tomás didn’t want to argue about it either. He closed the notebook and left it on the table, next to the school notebooks. Then he looked at the wall. The lamp was off and only the morning light came in. The shadows had disappeared from that spot and were now cast on the floor, small and ordinary. Elena watched them for a moment before leaving for the workshop. She was surprised to feel relieved.

What She Dreamed

The dream happened to Elena alone, on a Thursday, and it was the only time Tomás wasn’t there.

That afternoon, Elena had spent hours working on a wardrobe whose doors didn’t fit. At first she attributed it to swollen wood; then she discovered that the frame had been warped for decades. The difference was barely visible, but it prevented the piece from closing. As she adjusted it, she thought of the tilted lamp shade, of the things that could be wrong without anyone knowing exactly since when. She was about to tell Tomás that association, and ended up asking him if there was bread left for breakfast. He said yes. She didn’t know why such an ordinary question suddenly produced in her a sadness that had nothing to do with the wardrobe.

She fell asleep early, with the hallway lamp on and the door ajar, and dreamed she was in the workshop. In the dream there was sawdust on the floor and the smell of varnish and light came in through the garage window in an orange strip, and she was bent over the workbench, with both hands resting on the wood, and behind her there was someone she couldn’t see.

She knew it was a shadow. She knew it the way things are known in dreams, without explanation. And the shadow lifted the hem of her apron skirt and pulled her panties down to her knees and put both hands on her hips, and put its fingers in from behind, between her ass cheeks, greased with something, and Elena in the dream opened herself up on her own.

It put in one finger, then two, and Elena moaned against the wood, and then the shadow put it in her from behind, in her ass, slowly, and Elena felt in the dream the exact stretch, the full pressure, and it didn’t hurt, and she hadn’t done that with Tomás in years.

The shadow fucked her from behind the way Elena liked to be fucked and had never told anyone. Long, deep, with its hands on her hips pulling her back toward it, and in the dream the table creaked and sawdust got into her knees and Elena came with her face pressed to the wood, and just as she came, the shadow put its mouth on her nape and said her name in Tomás’s voice.

She woke up with a start, in bed, face down, her ass still clenched and her panties soaked.

She stayed still, her eyes open in the dark, and the first thing she thought was that Tomás had taken her from behind that night. She looked at Tomás, who was sleeping on his back beside her, with the sheet up to his waist. She looked at the wall. Tomás’s shadow was in its place, still. The hallway lamp was still on.

It took her several minutes to recognize the room. The workshop in the dream had seemed sharper than the real bedroom: she could remember the grain of the table, the smell of sawdust, and a crack next to the window that didn’t exist in her garage. She told herself that dreams borrowed details from anywhere and that the body could react as if things had happened. Nevertheless, she avoided turning on the light. She was afraid of finding something that would confirm her suspicion and perhaps even more of finding everything exactly as she had left it. Tomás was breathing steadily. Elena listened to that familiar breathing and wondered why she had decided not to wake him.

Elena put her hand behind her, between her ass cheeks, and touched her ass with a finger, and it was wet, and she didn’t know if it was from the dream or if someone had really touched her. She stayed like that, with her finger there, thinking, and in the morning she didn’t say anything to Tomás. But in the notebook, on the page of rules, she added with the marker, her hand trembling a little:

6. You can dream, but you have to tell it.

And she didn’t tell it until the interpreter.

Over the following days she watched Tomás with an attention he ended up noticing. She wanted to ask him if he had ever dreamed of the shadows, but every time she found the occasion a trivial occupation came up: an order from the workshop, some pending grades, a neighbor knocking at the door. She even wrote a question on another page of the notebook and erased it so hard she almost tore the paper. At times she believed the secret was protecting something delicate between them; at times, that she was repeating exactly the silence they had begun to come out of. She didn’t know that that contradiction would end up taking them back to the living room, in front of the wall.

The Interpreter

It was three ten in the morning and neither of them was pretending to sleep anymore. Elena was sitting on the edge of the sofa, with the yellow blanket over her knees although it was hot, and Tomás watched her from the armchair with his hands crossed between his legs, like a boy being punished. The floor lamp in the hallway was still on, the only light in the house, and it cast the two long shadows on the back wall, his and hers, separated by a hand’s breadth of plaster.

They had made love two hours earlier — or something like it — and since then they hadn’t spoken. The notebook was on the low table, open to the page of rules, Elena’s small handwriting above and Tomás’s below, each in its own ink. The first rule was hers and said: don’t look at the shadow head-on. The second was his: don’t touch it with your hands. The third, written later, with a less steady pulse: don’t talk to it.

They had spent the afternoon trying to treat each other normally. Elena had cut vegetables while Tomás talked about a student who refused to hand in work, and they had both laughed when the knife slipped on a carrot. But each silence carried another silence inside it, older. Tomás had seen the new rule in the notebook and hadn’t asked where it came from. Elena had watched him read it, waiting for him to say something. Now, sitting facing each other, they seemed to be repeating that scene: the possibility of asking suspended between them, almost visible. The yellow blanket weighed on Elena’s knees, though it was too thin to give warmth.

Elena looked at the wall. Tomás’s shadow wasn’t still. It had its hands where Tomás had his, between his legs, but its head tilted toward her, toward her shadow, and its neck bent at an angle the flesh Tomás never used.

— What if I talk to it? — said Elena, in a low voice, without taking her eyes off the plaster.

Tomás opened his mouth to answer. He wasn’t given time.

The shadow moved. Not the way shadows move, when the body drags them. It moved first. It peeled one finger off the wall, then two, then the whole arm, and the head turned all the way toward Elena’s shadow, and then Tomás’s mouth — his mouth, the real one, the one sitting in the armchair a meter away from her — opened on its own and spoke.

— I’ve been afraid of touching you since you came back from the hospital — it said.

Elena ran out of air.

Elena instinctively looked at his lips. The voice had come from there, that she couldn’t dispute. What she didn’t know was why Tomás seemed as surprised as she did. For a second she thought he was playing a bad joke, an extravagant way of saying something he couldn’t say any other way. She would have preferred to be angry with him for that. But she saw him bring his fingers to his mouth, like someone checking it still belonged to him, and she wasn’t able to laugh or protest. The only thing she wanted was to hear the next sentence, whoever was pronouncing it.

It wasn’t Tomás’s voice. It was his voice, the same throat, the same hoarse teacher’s timbre, but with another rhythm, slower, as if each word had been kept in a drawer for years and had trouble coming out. Tomás brought his hand to his mouth and covered it. The shadow moved his hand away from the wall. He lowered it.

— I don’t touch you because I think I’m going to break you — the voice went on —. Since the thing with the baby. Before, I grabbed your hair and pushed you against the wall and you laughed. The night of the tie, remember? I was wearing it from work, I tied your hands with it, you laughed and said it was silly, and then you stopped laughing. That’s what I want. And since the hospital I touch you as if you were made of glass and you stay quiet, and I don’t know if you stay quiet because you like it or because you don’t like anything anymore.

Elena felt her throat close. She looked at Tomás. Tomás had his eyes fixed on the floor, his ears red, his jaw clenched. He wanted to speak and couldn’t: the mouth belonged to someone else.

— I cried too — said the shadow —. In the hospital parking lot, in the car, when you were already asleep. Forty minutes with the engine off, and then I went up and told you I was fine. I’ve never told you. The shadow knows, because the shadow was there and didn’t have to be strong in front of anyone.

Elena remembered the parking lot, the cold light between the columns, and the cup of coffee Tomás had left untouched that afternoon. She remembered having fallen asleep in the passenger seat on the way back, exhausted from the hours at the hospital. She couldn’t know if he had cried afterward: no one had told her. Maybe that confession came from her husband and the strangeness of the voice was nothing but exhaustion; maybe she was completing with her imagination what they had never dared to speak. Either way, for the first time she understood that she had confused Tomás’s silence with an absence of pain for years. The idea embarrassed her more than everything that had happened that night.

— Tomás — said Elena.

— Don’t call me, you cut me off — said the shadow, and Tomás, with the borrowed mouth, smiled without wanting to —. Let me finish, I’ve been looking for the moment for twelve years.

The shadow got up off the wall, whole, and came along the plaster to Elena’s. It knelt in front of her. It put its hands on the knees of Elena’s shadow, and Elena felt, on her real knees, a weight that wasn’t there.

— I smell your nape when you’re in the kitchen — it said —. You stand on tiptoe to reach the top cabinet, your shirt rides up, and I stay looking at that piece of your back like an idiot, with the coffee in my hand. Then you ask me what I’m looking at and I say nothing. I’m looking at that. I’ve been looking at that since I met you.

Elena passed her tongue over her lip. Her arms were prickling and her groin was hot and she hadn’t touched herself once during the whole conversation.

— And at night — the voice went on, lower —, when you fall asleep before me, I pull it out thinking about the first time. In the car, in the back seat, with your skirt up. I pull it out like a twenty-year-old kid, and then I’m ashamed to tell you, because at thirty-eight you’re supposed to stop doing those things.

Tomás made a choked noise, between a cough and a laugh, and managed to move his own tongue for half a second.

— That’s enough — he said, in his normal voice.

— It’s not enough — said the shadow, giving him back his mouth —. What I want to do to you is missing. And what you dreamed is missing.

Elena turned abruptly toward the wall. Tomás’s shadow was pointing, with a finger, at the notebook open on the table.

— Rule six — it said —. You wrote it. You have to tell it.

Elena swallowed. And she told it, looking at the plaster, not at Tomás. She told the dream of the workshop, the table, the sawdust, the hands on her hips, the finger, the cock from behind, and Tomás’s voice on her nape. She told it with the words she never used in front of him. And while she told it, Tomás’s shadow moved along the wall until it stood behind Elena’s shadow, and put its hands on its hips, exactly where they had been in the dream, and Elena felt it.

— I want to do that to you — said the shadow, now with Tomás’s mouth, very low —. And he does too. And he’s gone four years without telling you because he thinks you don’t feel like it since the thing with the baby.

— I do feel like it — said Elena, and she said it to the wall, but Tomás heard it.

Tomás closed his eyes. He knew what was coming. He had gone twelve years without saying it, and the shadow said it for him without any shame:

— I want to put you on top of me, I want you to grab my face with both hands and force me to look at you, and I want you to tell me what I do to you, all of it, without summarizing. I want to hear you. Twelve years of hearing you stay quiet in bed and I want to hear you.

The shadow fell silent. It went slowly back to the wall, stuck to Tomás’s feet, recovered its Tomás shape, and the mouth stopped belonging to someone else.

The silence lasted as long as a lamp takes to warm up.

— It’s true — said Tomás, out loud, in his voice, looking at the floor —. All of it. It’s true.

Tomás rubbed his eyes and breathed with difficulty, as if coming out of a conversation that was too long. Elena wanted to ask him to repeat the parking lot confession in his own voice, without the wall in front, without the lamp on. She didn’t do it yet. She was afraid he would deny having said those things, but also that he would confirm them and turn into a shared memory something that had been his alone for four years. She reached her hand toward the notebook to close it. She stopped when she discovered a mark she didn’t remember having seen before.

Elena looked at the notebook open on the table. The third rule, the one about not talking to it, had a line through it. Elena didn’t remember having drawn it, and Tomás shook his head when she looked at him. For a moment it seemed to her that the shadow had crossed it out from inside the paper.

— Come here — said Elena.

Tomás got up very slowly. Before coming closer, he looked one last time at the wall and then at his own hands, as if he had lost the thread of an explanation he had almost found. Elena moved the blanket off her knees and left it folded on the arm of the sofa, not on the usual backrest. That small gesture produced an unexpected sensation in her: she could move things out of place without anything breaking. When he sat down beside her, she hugged him without asking who had spoken first. They knew no more than at the beginning of the night. However, they were no longer avoiding the same conversation.

And Tomás went.

Sixty-Nine

They didn’t go up to the bedroom. They stayed in the living room, with the lamp on and the back wall in front, because both already knew that the wall was part of the thing, and neither wanted to give it up.

Elena pulled Tomás’s shirt off in one yank, without buttons, and he unzipped her pants and pulled them off by the ankles, and she stood in panties and T-shirt, with the yellow blanket on the floor and her shadow stretching along the plaster. Then she lay down on the sofa, her back to the backrest, her head hanging a little over the arm, and pulled Tomás by the wrist.

— Come.

He understood. He got on top of her the other way around, with his knees on either side of her head and his cock in front of her mouth, and Elena put it in her mouth in one go, all the way, to the base, and he let out a grunt and dug his elbows into her thighs.

They had gone twelve years without doing this. They had done it at the beginning, when they were young and flexible and nothing hurt, and then they had gradually let it go, the way you let go of the good things in a marriage, for no reason, out of tiredness. And now Elena had her mouth full of her husband’s cock and her tongue working the underside, and Tomás had his face buried between his wife’s thighs, with her panties still on, and he sucked the fabric before pulling them down.

On the wall, the shadows were also in sixty-nine, and for the first time they were doing exactly the same as them, at the same rhythm, without getting ahead. As if the shadows had understood that they no longer needed to lead the way.

Tomás yanked her panties down to her knees and put his whole mouth on her pussy, without warning, and Elena arched and bit his cock without meaning to, and he moaned against her clit, and the vibration made Elena’s eyes water. He sucked her clit with his flat tongue, slowly, and then sucked it with his lips, and put two fingers in her and curled them upward, looking for her spot, and he found it, because he had been finding it for twelve years and had never forgotten it.

Elena sucked him with the same hunger, her hand at the base, her mouth going up and down, her eyes closed, and every time he gave her a strong suck she swallowed him to the base, and so they took each other, pulling pleasure out of each other in turns, until they both knew they were close and neither wanted to come before the other.

It was Elena who broke. She let his cock out of her mouth and said, in a broken voice:

— Not like this, not like this, I want to see you.

Tomás turned, got on his knees between her legs, his face shining from her and his cock shining from her mouth, and looked at her. And Elena grabbed his face with both hands, exactly as the shadow had said, and forced him to look her in the eyes.

— Fuck me — she said —. And look at me. And don’t stay quiet.

Tomás put it in her. And he didn’t stay quiet.

He told her what he was doing to her. He told her she was soaked, that he liked how she sucked him, that he had spent five months thinking about her folding rags in the workshop, that he loved her, that he loved her, that he loved her. And Elena answered him, in a loud voice, without shame, telling him what she felt, where, how much, and for the first time in four years the house filled with both voices at once, over the noise of skin.

They came almost together, Elena first, squeezing his face with both hands and looking him in the eyes as she came, and Tomás afterward, two seconds later, with a long, surprised moan, inside her, without pulling out, looking at her too, without closing his eyes until the last moment.

And on the wall, the two shadows came at the same time as them and stayed still, embracing, one on top of the other, without separating, while the real bodies were left panting on the sofa and the shadows no longer moved.

Elena looked at the wall over Tomás’s shoulder. His shadow had its face buried in the neck of hers.

— Look — she said.

— I see it.

And that night, for the first time, they didn’t take refuge each on their own side of the bed. They slept pressed together, and the hallway lamp stayed on all night, and neither of them got up to turn it off.

The One Who Chooses

Until then they had always had a provisional explanation for what they did: curiosity, the game, the desire to make up for lost time. But that morning Elena understood that she was waiting for something different. She didn’t want the wall to decide for her every time a doubt came up. Nor did she want Tomás to take refuge again in what his shadow seemed to ask of him. The word choose had been circling her head since the night of the interpreter. It was an ordinary word and, nevertheless, it had become hard to pronounce in that house. Elena opened the notebook while Tomás was still asleep and wondered how much of what they had done lately was her own decision.

One thing was missing, and both knew it, and neither dared to say it.

The notebook had six rules and five crossed out. Some they had crossed out themselves during the previous nights, without ceremony; another kept that line whose origin neither quite explained. One remained uncrossed, the fourth, the one Tomás had written after their first night together: Don’t let it see us watching. And one morning, a Sunday, Elena got up, went to the table, opened the notebook, and wrote below the fourth, with a new marker:

7. Let her choose.

Tomás read the rule at breakfast, with the toast halfway to his mouth, and read it twice, and then looked at Elena and Elena looked at him, and neither asked anything, because both knew that the rule wasn’t about the two of them’s shadows. It was about her shadow.

Tomás didn’t comment on the seventh rule during breakfast. At school, however, he was surprised to find himself thinking about it while explaining to his students that a historical decision rarely has a single cause. He interrupted himself, wrote a date on the board, and continued the class. On the way out he called Elena, something he almost never did at that hour. He asked if she needed him to buy anything. Elena said no. They stayed a moment listening to each other’s breathing over the phone. They didn’t mention the wall. It was enough for both to know that tonight they would be able to talk, even if neither knew what he was going to say.

That night they left the lamp on and sat on the floor, their backs to the sofa, side by side, without touching, hands on knees, looking at the back wall like someone waiting for the moon to come out.

It took a while. At first the shadows only moved a little, looked for each other, brushed against each other. Then Tomás’s shadow did the usual: it got up and went toward Elena’s. And then the new thing happened. Elena’s shadow raised a hand, without turning around, and stopped it. Tomás’s shadow stayed still where it was, a hand’s breadth away, waiting.

Elena glanced at Tomás out of the corner of her eye. He had his hands open on his knees and was still breathing normally, but he was pressing his lips. For the first time, she wasn’t sure she wanted the shadows to show them an answer. What if the figure on the wall chose nothing? What if it stayed still, obeying the exact shape of their bodies? The mere possibility caused her disappointment, and that unsettled her: she had begun to need that strangeness to make decisions that had once seemed simple. She looked away for a moment. When she looked again, the separation between the silhouettes seemed greater to her, though she wouldn’t have known how to say if either had moved.

Elena’s shadow got up on its own.

It stretched along the plaster, slowly, whole, until it stood up, and it grew along the wall with the lamp’s light, very long, almost to the ceiling, and Tomás, beside her on the floor, ran out of air seeing it. Then Elena’s shadow turned its head, looked at Tomás’s shadow waiting, and held out its hand.

— Choose — said Elena, out loud, and she didn’t know if she was saying it to the wall or to Tomás.

Tomás’s shadow took Elena’s shadow’s hand. And then it did something it had never done: it knelt. The whole shadow, big, long, knelt in front of Elena’s, and put its hands on its hips, and waited, head bowed, for her to decide.

Elena, on the floor, felt her legs buckle. She got up. Tomás got up with her. And without saying anything to each other, without planning it, the two real bodies did the same as the shadows: Elena stood in front of Tomás, he really knelt in front of her, with his hands on her hips, his head bowed, waiting.

— You choose — said Tomás, in a hoarse voice, looking at the floor —. Whatever you want. However you want. And I’ll do it.

Elena put a hand on his head. She ran her fingers through his hair, slowly, and then pulled it up a little so he would look at her.

— Standing — she said —. Against the wall.

They both got up. Tomás stood with his back to the back wall, palms open against the plaster, and Elena stood in front of him, pulled down his pajama pants and pulled out his already hard cock, and put it in herself, sitting down on it, looking him in the eyes a hand’s breadth away. She put it in without touching herself with anything else, slowly, to the base, and then leaned with her hands on Tomás’s chest and started moving on top of him, standing, her legs trembling, and Tomás grabbed her ass with both hands and held her and lifted her and let her fall onto his cock as if she weighed nothing.

Behind them, on the wall, the two shadows merged into a single long blot moved at the same rhythm, and Elena, looking over Tomás’s shoulder, saw that the shadows were no longer two. They were one. Hers and his, stuck together by the wall, the same blot, the same movement, without a seam.

— Tomás — she said —, look.

He looked, with his back against the plaster and her on top, and saw the single blot, and something broke inside him, something that had been holding on for four years without crying, and his eyes filled with water and he kept moving and didn’t stay quiet.

— I love you — he said —. I’ve loved you since the first day. And I’m afraid you’ll forget it.

— I won’t forget it.

They came like that, standing, against the wall, with the single shadow moving behind them like a single thing, and when they both finished they stayed standing, embracing, stuck to the plaster, without separating, breathing into each other’s neck.

The shadow, on the wall, no longer moved. It was still, whole, single, and it had the exact shape of the two real bodies, embracing, as if at last the shadow and the body had stopped being different things.

Neither of them tried to repeat the movement. They stayed together until the reflection of a car crossed the ceiling and disappeared again. Tomás wondered if the single blot was just the natural result of having the bodies stuck together under a single light. He had studied enough maps and old photographs to know that perspective could turn two things into one. Even so, he didn’t tell Elena. She didn’t ask either. They had spent too long asking words to explain what they felt and that night, for once, they could accept that some questions remained open.

The Lamp, Again

The next morning, Monday, Elena got up early and went to the hallway. The floor lamp was still there, with the crooked shade, with the twenty-watt bulb.

She had looked at it from the breakfast table, just like every morning, but this time she noticed the crooked edge of the shade. Her first reaction was to look for Tomás to ask if she could touch it. Then she realized the absurdity of the impulse. She had left it like that for twelve years; she didn’t even remember if they had ever argued about it. She thought of the restored box she had taken down to the workshop, the blanket on the sofa, the notebook and its rules. They were objects that had ended up making decisions for them by dint of not moving them. She didn’t need to decide what they had seen on the wall to know what she wanted to do that morning.

She put her hand on it.

And for the first time in twelve years, she straightened it.

It wasn’t a big deal. It was turning the shade half a centimeter to the right, until it was straight. And the light changed a little, and the shadows on the back wall moved, and settled somewhere else, shorter, closer together.

Tomás appeared in the hallway with his hair messy and his T-shirt inside out, and stood looking at Elena with her hand on the shade.

— You straightened it — he said.

— It was about time.

He came closer, stood beside her, and looked at the back wall, where the two new shadows, short and close together, waited still, like two polite strangers. They both stayed like that for a while, looking at them.

Elena watched the light. By changing the tilt of the shade, some of the stains they knew had disappeared, but others were still there, discreet, almost indistinguishable from the irregularities of the plaster. She searched with her eyes for the silhouette of her hand and moved her fingers. The shadow followed them without delay or initiative. Tomás did the same, and they both laughed, surprised to have expected something else. It looked like the usual wall. It also looked different. Elena knew that, if they tried to prove which of the two impressions was the true one, they could spend another whole night arguing in front of that light.

— Do you think they’ve finished? — asked Tomás.

— I don’t know.

— What if they come back?

Elena turned and grabbed his face with both hands, like the night before, like the shadow had said, and forced him to look her in the eyes.

— Then let them come back — she said —. Let them always come back.

And on the wall, in the new, straight light of the hallway lamp, the two shadows, short and close together, held hands.