THE SECOND VOICE
(Complete Story)
One. The Clause
The clause took up three and a half lines, in the fourth section exactly. Mara read it twice before signing.
“The translator shall attend the recording sessions and shall have the right to approve the final reading insofar as it concerns the interpretation of the text.”
“It’s about the pacing,” Nerea said from across the table. “And because the last time we made an audiobook, it sounded like a news broadcast.”
Nerea was forty-eight, with very short hair and the patience of a civil servant. She had been at Alcor for eleven years and had learned to say things twice: once to make herself understood and once to make sure they got done.
“So I’m going to spend ten afternoons shut inside a studio.”
“Ten afternoons, five to eight. In Lavapiés. You’re paid separately for attending, I already told you that. And the audiobook sells.”
“And what if I don’t like the way he reads?”
“That’s what the clause is for.”
Mara signed.
She was thirty-four, had been translating from French since she was twenty-three, and had long suspected something uncomfortable about herself: books didn’t turn her on. Books interested her, entertained her, made her think, kept her company on the subway. But they didn’t turn her on.
What turned her on was listening.
There was a formative episode, as there is in every story of this kind, and hers was a summer at her Aunt Pilar’s house, with a battery-powered radio and a late-night announcer who read serialized novels. Mara was fourteen, didn’t understand half of what happened in those stories, and stayed awake until two anyway, with the radio pressed to her ear and the light off. The first time she touched herself, she was listening to a stranger read a sentence about a woman coming down a staircase. She couldn’t remember the sentence. She remembered the announcer’s breath before he said it.
Later, as an adult, she’d had a boyfriend who read to her in bed. Two years of him reading to her in bed. And when they broke up, what she missed wasn’t the sex, or the house, or the conversations. It was that there was no longer anyone to read anything to her.
So when Nerea put the contract for The Slow Hours in front of her—a new translation from the French of Solange Berthier, complete with an audiobook and an approval clause—Mara didn’t hesitate for even twenty seconds. It seemed like an assignment made to measure. She just didn’t know what the measure was yet.
Solange Berthier had been born in Nice in 1911, published nine stories in 1953, and died in 1974 without ever giving an interview. The nine stories were the entire book, and the entire book was her complete body of work.
In Spain, it had been translated only once, in 1961, by a woman from Bilbao about whom nothing was known except her name. The edition had a two-page foreword and a note at the end warning readers that certain passages “might be considered indecent.” Certain passages. In a book where half the pages took place in beds.
Mara had read that version at twenty, in her neighborhood library, and it had taken her another ten years to understand why she’d found it so bland. The woman from Bilbao hadn’t translated Berthier: she’d combed her hair. Dressed her. Taken the words Berthier had chosen deliberately right out of her hands and replaced them with the words respectable households used in 1961.
“I’m going to do the opposite,” Mara said.
“Of what?”
“What the woman from Bilbao did. She softened everything she possibly could.”
“Then soften less and charge the same.”
The studio was on the first floor of a building without an elevator, behind a padded door and a sign reading SILENCE, RECORDING, to which someone had added “seriously” in pen. Inside was a narrow hallway, a control room with a mixing console, two small monitors, and one good chair; and at the far end, separated by double-pane glass, the booth. Six feet by six feet. A large microphone hanging from a boom, a stool, a reading stand, a gray rug. And on the booth’s table, a glass of water and a red button.
The glow of that button was the first thing you saw when you entered. When it was on, the world shut off.
“Here,” Nerea said, pointing to the control-room chair. “You sit here with headphones on, and you don’t talk while he’s recording. If something doesn’t sound right, make a note and bring it up at the end. There’s no rush. We have ten sessions.”
“And him?”
“He gets here at five. His name’s Damián. He does dubbing and commercials. He’s spent twenty years inside recording booths. He’s good.”
Damián arrived ten minutes before five. He was tall without being big, his hair already gray at the temples, wearing a light-colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His face didn’t match his voice, and it took Mara a while to realize that accepting the mismatch was the first thing she would have to do to work with him. It was the voice of lottery commercials in December. Of French movies shown on television at three in the afternoon. A voice people recognized without knowing whose it was, the one kind of fame that was good for nothing.
“Mara,” he said, offering his hand. “Nice to meet you. I’ve read your translation.”
“And?”
“And I’ve underlined forty-seven things.”
Mara laughed. He didn’t.
He went into the booth, sat down, put on his headphones, and took off his shoes. He placed them neatly beside the stool and rested his bare feet on the gray rug.
“Barefoot?” Mara asked over the control-room microphone.
“I read better. If my feet are cold, I read worse.”
It was ridiculous. Mara decided it was ridiculous and didn’t think about it again until the third session; after that, she thought about it for seven weeks straight.
In the first session he read the entire first story, “The Borrowed Dress,” and he read it well. Very well. Mara had translated it with a care that, hearing it now, struck her as almost obscene. He respected the pauses she had put in. Every one of them. When he reached the sentence that had taken Mara two hours—a long sentence with three subordinate clauses about a woman removing a dress that isn’t hers in front of a man who isn’t hers—he delivered it straight through, without embellishment, and the sentence worked. It worked exactly the way Mara had imagined it in her room at two in the morning.
When he finished, the red light stayed on four seconds longer than necessary. Mara realized she’d been holding her breath.
That night she got home and reread the entire story. And, despite herself, she read it in his voice.
Two. The Cup
The second session was on a Wednesday, and it brought the cup.
Mara arrived before he did, sat down in the control room, took out her notebook and the forty-seven notes she had decided to rank by importance. She ranked them by importance. Then by length. Then she ranked them by importance again, because ranking them by length was ridiculous.
When Damián came in, he was carrying coffee from the machine downstairs in a paper cup. He set it on the mixing console beside the monitors.
The studio had a very particular kind of silence. It wasn’t the silence of an empty house or a library: it was manufactured silence, made of padded walls, carpet, and insulation, silence with the temperature turned up. When he paused between paragraphs, the silence wasn’t an absence of sound. It was a substance. It took Mara two sessions to understand that you could be inside it.
“Sorry, do you mind?”
“No.”
He went into the booth, sat down, took off his shoes, and lined them up. They started recording the second story, “The Upstairs Room,” the shortest in the book and the one with the least sex and the most waiting. Every day a man goes upstairs to bring dinner to a woman whose identity he doesn’t know. Eighteen pages. In the end, the woman leaves, and the man keeps climbing the stairs for another two months, carrying the tray to an empty room.
Mara had translated it in January after making a decision she hadn’t told anyone about: she had removed every word with which the original hinted at something and left only what happened. Berthier wrote “he desired her,” and Mara had written “he climbed the stairs.” Where the woman from Bilbao would have written “he desired her ardently,” Mara had put a man with a tray.
They started recording at five past five.
Mara followed along with the text in front of her, marking it with her pen. Ten minutes in, she stopped marking. He was doing something she hadn’t anticipated: he made the pauses longer than they were written. He stretched them a fraction, just a fraction, and that fraction held everything Mara had wanted to say and hadn’t written. A man climbs a staircase. Pause. And the pause was desire. Exactly that.
He read with his body still. That was the second thing Mara noticed, after his voice: he didn’t move. No swaying, no hands gesturing in the air. Only his mouth and, every so often, the fingers turning a page. A man who reads without moving forces the person watching him to watch his mouth, and Mara spent twenty minutes watching his mouth through the glass before realizing she was watching his mouth.
An hour and twenty minutes in, Mara realized she hadn’t breathed through her mouth for half an hour and that both her hands were braced on the edge of the mixing console, her fingers digging in as if the chair might move.
Halfway through the story, Mara got thirsty. Her water was in her backpack at the other end of the room, and his cup was within a hand’s breadth. Instead of getting up, she drank from his cup.
It tasted like coffee with too much sugar. She put it back in exactly the same place, in exactly the same position. He hadn’t seen her: he was reading, his eyes fixed on the stand.
Three minutes later, he paused, reached out without looking, picked up the cup, and drank. Then he set it down exactly where it had been.
That was all. Nothing else happened. But for the remaining forty-five minutes, Mara kept thinking about a two-euro paper cup with a lip mark that was no longer visible, and about the fact that he’d drunk without looking, from the same place, in the same position, as if he knew.
Mara wrote three things in her notebook during the second session. The first was a translation note. The second was a question about page sixty-two. And the third, which had nothing to do with the book: “it took him four seconds to pick up the cup.”
What she was thinking, specifically, was this: sharing a cup is the smallest thing two people can share and the one thing that can’t be faked. You can pretend you don’t like someone. You can’t pretend to drink deliberately from their cup.
When the session ended, the red light went off and he looked up from the stand. Mara had her hand resting on the mixing console beside the cup, and she moved it away.
“Are we leaving page sixty-two as it is?” he asked over the microphone.
“Yes,” Mara replied, and her voice came out worse than she expected.
When she left the studio at five past eight, he was already gone. Mara stood for a moment in the empty control room, the lights still on and the paper cup on the console. She didn’t throw it away. She left it there, in the same place, so it would still be there the next day.
She walked home. Forty minutes along Gran Vía and Princesa, notebook in her backpack and mind somewhere else. Somewhere between Callao and Plaza de España, she realized that she’d been repeating the sentence about the tray in her head, over and over, and that she was repeating it in his voice.
That night she ate dinner standing up and drank water from a glass of her own. As she set it on the table, she thought that somewhere in Madrid there was another glass, with a different mark, and that the two glasses were in two kitchens four kilometers apart, and that this, at that moment, was the most important thing Mara knew about her life.
Three. Again
The third session brought the feet and the throat.
She already knew about the feet. But this session Mara really started looking at them: the toes against the rug, the instep, the heel lifting slightly when he stressed a phrase. A forty-one-year-old man’s bare foot in a six-foot booth, with his shoe beside it, is one of those things that means nothing until it means everything.
That day, between takes, Mara began watching his feet through the glass instead of looking at the page. When he finished the chapter, she had no idea what he’d read.
And the throat. He swallowed before every long paragraph. A tiny movement, twice, and then he began reading. The fourth time Mara saw it, she started waiting for it. By the tenth, she was waiting for it the way you wait for a blow.
At the end of the session, when the red light went out, Damián looked up and looked at her through the glass. Really looked at her, for three seconds, without saying anything, his headphones still on. Then he spoke into the microphone:
“Shall we continue tomorrow?”
“We will.”
She left the studio with a new feeling that took her a while to identify: she had done a bad job. She had done her work, corrected four things, written down two. But at some point she had stopped being the translator and become the audience.
In the fourth session, the word appeared.
The word had been there since the first day, in his mouth, and it was a technical instruction. Again. He said it to himself whenever a paragraph didn’t come out right: he stopped, took a breath, said “again,” and started over. An ordinary, professional habit for an actor.
But in the fourth session, when she heard it, Mara perceived it differently. And he must have noticed, because he repeated it three more times, unnecessarily, after paragraphs he had delivered perfectly.
“Again,” he said, and read the same passage twice.
“That was fine,” Mara pointed out over the microphone.
“I know. Again.”
And he read it five times. Mara was counting. By the fifth, it was no longer a passage from the book: it was a stretch of twenty words repeated in precisely the same intonation, like a formula. When he finished, Mara discovered she had been gripping the pen in her left hand, its cap leaving a mark in her finger.
From then on, she began using “again” herself. At first in the technical sense; an hour later, she was saying it over the work channel, the talkback, in a voice he would hear an inch from his ear. An “again” spoken that way isn’t a correction: it’s a hand on the shoulder.
Fifth session. Mara asked for the big headphones. Until then she’d been using the control-room pair, which sounded reasonable enough; she asked for the broad-headband pair with a cable, because “you can hear the air better.” It was a technical excuse, and half true.
The big headphones have one virtue: they isolate you. Put them on and the room disappears, leaving only the channel. The live channel from the booth.
That was how she discovered the second voice.
The booth microphone has two outputs. One is what gets recorded: clean, dry, with just the right amount of reverberation, the public voice that will exist for everyone. The other is the talkback: the communication channel between the booth and the control room, compressed, with a little noise and the breathing very close. That is the voice for one person alone.
The recorded voice was beautiful. The talkback voice was something else. Closer, dirtier, without polish. It was the voice an inch from her ear, with the click of his mouth before the words. The voice of a man speaking to you and no one else.
“Can you hear me okay?” he asked over the channel, and Mara felt it all the way down her spine.
“I can hear you,” she answered.
From that day on, Mara wore the big headphones and listened through the work channel to everything he said between takes. Instructions spoken into the air, his “agains,” his coughs, his sighs of annoyance, the “okays” he said to himself. Things that weren’t recorded and existed only in her ears.
She came to know more about him through the work channel than through everything they said to each other afterward. She knew he cleared his throat twice before a difficult paragraph. She knew he said “okay” when a take went well and fell silent when it went badly. She knew that after seven his breathing changed and he shortened his sentences. And she knew there was a moment, always the same, around seven fifteen, when he took a deep breath and remained silent for three seconds before continuing. She never asked him why.
There was a side effect she hadn’t foreseen: hearing him so close, she could no longer look at him. For three sessions straight Mara worked with her eyes fixed on her notebook, because every time she lifted her head and saw the man producing that voice, the distance between the two became unbearable.
At the end of the fifth session, Mara wrote on the glass with her finger.
The glass was cold from the air conditioning. Mara approached on the pretext of checking a page and pressed a finger against it, leaving a trail. She wrote a word in the fog of her own breath: good.
He read it backward from the booth, tilted his head, and took four seconds to decipher it. Then he nodded. He said nothing. By the time he came out, the word had disappeared.
That night, at home, Mara put on her headphones and searched YouTube for a lottery commercial from six years earlier. She found it. It was him. She listened four times in a row, lying on the couch with the light off, and in the end she touched herself thinking about a man whose face didn’t do much for her but whose voice did, which struck her as a deeply unserious way to live.
She fell asleep late. Before she did, she made a calculation that seemed ridiculous and that she committed to memory anyway: forty-seven notes, ten sessions, three weeks. If every session was three hours and every hour sixty minutes, she still had nine hundred minutes of his voice ahead of her.
Four. The Argument
The sixth session was the one with the argument, and the argument was over a word.
The story was the seventh, “The Man Who Read,” and it contained a sentence near the beginning of its third section: Il la prit par la taille et elle le laissa faire. Mara had translated it as “He took her by the waist and fucked her. And she let him,” a deliberate departure from the original that she knew would cause an argument.
And it did.
“Page ninety-one,” Damián said, without looking up from the stand. “‘He took her by the waist and fucked her. And she let him.’”
“Yes.”
“In French, all it says is that he took her by the waist.”
“It’s the same sentence.”
“No, it isn’t. In French, it says par la taille. He held her by the waist. La prit, he took her. What’s there is taking hold of someone, and you’ve put fucked, which is something else.”
“Then what am I supposed to put?”
“He took her by the waist.”
“In Madrid, la cogió sounds like he grabbed her by the arm.”
“Of course it sounds like that, because that’s what it is. It’s a gesture. He’s climbing a staircase and takes her by the waist. He isn’t fucking her on the stairs.”
Mara wrote the word in her notebook and didn’t change it. The next day she called Nerea, who sided with propriety and suggested a third solution, worse than either of the others:
“Put ‘he possessed her.’”
“‘He possessed her’ is from the fifties.”
“It’s a translation of a book from the fifties.”
“It’s a new translation. If the new one is the same as the old one, why are we doing it?”
“Put ‘he possessed her’ and stop arguing with me.”
“Nerea, here’s the sentence: a man is going up a staircase with a woman and puts his hand on her waist. And the woman lets him. That’s all. And in French they say it with prendre, which means to take and to hold and, for two hundred years, all the other things as well. And in Spanish there’s no one word that does all three.”
Nerea was right about one thing, and Mara knew it: “he possessed her” was faithful to the tone of the 1961 edition, and that edition was the reason they were making the translation. If Mara translated Berthier in the language of 2026, the book lost its period atmosphere; if she used the language of 1961, it lost its meaning. And there was no third option.
Mara included both. She left “He took her by the waist and possessed her. And she let him” in the approved text, and saved “He took her by the waist and fucked her. And she let him” in a separate file, in the margin, to try it out loud.
In the seventh session, they tried it.
“Page ninety-one. Again,” Damián said, and read: “‘He took her by the waist and possessed her. And she let him.’”
“No. Not like that.”
“Then how?”
“‘He took her by the waist and fucked her. And she let him.’”
Damián read it. And when Mara heard it through the big headphones, over the work channel, her face grew hot and the skin on her arms prickled.
“Fuck,” he said over the talkback, not realizing the channel was open.
After that, there was no going back.
The session continued for another forty minutes, and neither of them mentioned the sentence again. But it hung in the air the whole time, like an object left on a table that both people can see. When they finished, Damián put on his shoes slowly, his feet resting on the rug, and Mara waited for him to finish before getting up. There was no reason to wait. She did it anyway.
That night, Mara wrote a single line in her notebook, on the last page reserved for personal things: the word that doesn’t exist.
Five. The Call
It was that night.
Mara got home at nine thirty, ate dinner standing up, and at eleven opened the document and found page ninety-one. Then she looked up the studio’s phone number, printed in the top corner of the contract. She dialed at eleven twenty.
Before doing so, she performed three little actions: she washed her face, took off the top of her winter pajamas and put on a T-shirt, because those pajamas seemed too carefully chosen for the occasion. She left a glass of water on her nightstand, just in case. In case of what, she didn’t know.
It took him four rings to answer.
“Hello?”
She could hear the studio. The reverberation of the empty room, that short, dry echo of padded spaces, and the low hum of the air conditioning. The place where she had spent the afternoon.
Mara knew that sound; it came from the place where she’d felt more alive than she had in the past two years. Hearing it over the phone, from her bed, was like hearing someone breathe in their sleep: something that isn’t meant for you and for that very reason belongs to you.
“Hi. It’s Mara. I just can’t sleep with that on my mind.”
“Of course.” Mara thought she could hear a smile.
“Are you at the studio?”
“I was tidying up.”
“Okay. Then read me the third section.”
He read. He read the entire section, two pages, in his work voice, the talkback voice, compressed and without polish, sounding an inch from her ear. Mara lay down in the dark with the phone pressed against her ear and her eyes closed, without interrupting.
He finished the section and went on to the next. And the next.
Mara was no longer counting sections, but the seconds it took him to begin each one. At first two, then four. On the fourth, he took seven seconds to decide whether to continue, and she knew with absolute certainty that if he stopped, she would get up, drink some water, and go to sleep.
Halfway through that section, Mara already had her hand inside her pajama pants, and he had no idea.
“Are you still there?” he asked when he finished.
“Keep going.”
A single command. And he obeyed without asking anything else.
From that point on, the call changed its nature. It stopped being a conversation and became something else: he read and she breathed. The arrangement was simple: one read, the other touched herself, and the only bridge between them was the sound of a mouth at one end and breath at the other.
He read another section, deliberately more slowly. She noticed; he noticed that she noticed. Mara had two fingers inside herself, her wrist bent and the phone slipping against her ear, thinking about the coffee cup, his bare feet, and his throat.
At one point she moved the phone to her other ear because the heat was burning her skin. When she did, he asked “Hello?” with a faint note of alarm, and she answered “I’m here,” in a voice she used with no one else.
“Are you wet?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since session four.”
“Fuck.”
He kept reading, and Mara did something she hadn’t planned: she pushed her pants all the way down with one hand, kicked the sheet aside, and lay with her legs bent on the mattress. She made noise on purpose. He heard it, fell silent for a second, and continued.
At some point, in some paragraph neither of them would remember, his voice changed; his breathing grew louder than his words. Mara understood that he, too, was reading out of need, to hold on, to keep from coming too soon.
So she cheated. She sped up her breathing two paragraphs before she came, and when he noticed, he matched her rhythm. When Mara exploded, he came at the same time, and both fell silent, he with his mouth open in the empty studio and she with her hand still against the mattress.
When she could speak, she realized he hadn’t hung up: she could still hear the air conditioner humming in the background, mixed with the sound of his hand rubbing against his clothes.
“He took her by the waist,” Mara said.
“And fucked her,” he replied.
“That’s it.”
“So we’ll leave it that way, then.”
“We’ll leave it that way.”
Neither hung up. They spent an entire minute listening to the background noise, until he said “I’m going home,” she answered “Okay,” he said “See you Monday,” she repeated “See you Monday,” and they hung up at the same time.
Mara had recorded the call with an app open on the pillow. It’s what anyone would do.
Before falling asleep, she realized something that kept her awake another hour: during the call they hadn’t touched each other. They were still separated by an entire city, connected by a wire, with a distance between them that was precisely what turned them on.
And they had three sessions left.
Six. Eleven Seconds
On Monday, neither of them mentioned the call.
That was the worst part. Mara sat down at five to five, and when he came in and greeted her with perfect ease, she understood that they had both decided, in silence, that the phone didn’t count. That they were still coworkers.
On Monday he arrived with two coffees. He placed them on the console side by side, and each took their own. For three hours the cups stayed in their places, observing a truce with insulting punctuality.
Which was absurd, because the studio air already held seven sessions’ worth of physical tension.
The eighth session began with the coffee. They drank, read the eighth story—the most explicit in the book—and Damián performed it with bare feet and a dry throat while Mara listened through the big headphones.
As they were leaving, in the street doorway, he asked an unexpected question:
“Are you staying for dinner?”
Mara said yes. They ate at a bar on Calle Ave María, standing up, with two small draft beers and a plate of patatas bravas, talking about the book like two coworkers. They didn’t touch at all, but both were thinking about the same thing without daring to name it.
In the ninth session they reached the staircase scene. The one on page ninety-one.
“Shall we read it?” he asked.
“Read it.”
He read it. “He took her by the waist and fucked her. And she let him. His open hand rested in the hollow of her back, and she climbed one step, and then another, and he guided her upward with his hand, without hurrying, until he had her against the wall on the landing. She said nothing. Neither did he. All they could hear was the building.”
Damián stopped. The red light remained on. The silence lasted eleven seconds.
Mara counted them. Eleven seconds with the red light on, two people separated by a sheet of glass and a tiny space, neither pressing a button. In that interval, three certainties fit inside Mara’s head: he was six feet away; the booth door was within reach; and he hadn’t turned off the light.
At eleven seconds, Mara stood. She approached the glass and drew an arrow with her finger in the mist, pointing to his mouth.
He read it. Instead of replying into the microphone, he stood facing her on the other side of the glass, a foot from her face, with his headphones on and the cable hanging down.
They remained like that. Mara could see his throat beneath his chin, the movement of swallowing she’d been waiting for since the third session. His hands were still at his sides.
Another eleven seconds standing there, looking at each other without touching. That was what Mara would remember most vividly: their faces so close and the restraint.
Then he went back to his seat, adjusted his headphones, and said:
“Let’s continue.”
They continued. And only one session remained.
Seven. The Last Session
The tenth session was the last, and it was one worth talking about slowly.
Mara arrived at a quarter to five, sat down, and took out her notebook with cold hands. She had prepared it out of sheer habit; in eleven years in the profession she had learned that half the job consists of having something to do with your hands while you think.
The last story was “The Intruder,” the one she had chosen months earlier to close the book. It was about a woman who enters a room where a man is reading aloud, sits down silently, and waits for him to finish. At the end, they both fall asleep.
Now she understood why she had chosen it. Without knowing it, Berthier had written the script for what would happen to a translator in Madrid seventy years later.
Damián came in at five. He took off his shoes, lined them up, asked if she was ready, and put his finger on the button.
“Wait,” Mara interrupted.
“What?”
“Read the whole thing. In one go. Without stopping.”
“That’s about thirty-five minutes.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
He read it in one go. Mara had heard him hundreds of times, but during that reading she noticed that he was going more slowly than necessary, though no one had asked him to.
At twenty-five minutes, she took off the big headphones and put on the control-room pair. It was a deliberate change: through the big ones, the talkback voice was overwhelming, and she needed a little distance to hear the text instead of the man.
He read the last four pages without a single stumble. He pronounced the final sentence—and she came in, and she said nothing, and he went on reading—then fell silent, and the red light stayed on.
Mara opened the booth door.
She didn’t think the decision through. She crossed the six feet with her notebook in her hand, the control-room headphones dangling after getting tangled around the back of her chair. She reached the threshold with her heart in her throat.
Eight. The Booth
There was no plan. Mara crossed the room, opened the door, and went inside. The booth air was hot, smelled of headphone plastic and carpet; they shared a single square yard of floor.
Damián didn’t stop reading. He had his finger on the stand, on the last sentence, and kept murmuring it under his breath, without the microphone, to himself, as she closed the door.
The door shutting cut off the hum outside and reduced their surroundings to the intimate echo of the booth, with the red light glowing a foot away.
“You’re recording,” she said.
“I know.”
“The take is still running.”
“I know.”
Mara stopped between the door and the stool. He looked at her from his seat, his bare feet resting on the gray rug.
“If I turn the button off, it’s over,” he told her. “The book is over.”
“Then don’t turn it off.”
He stood up without removing his headphones, dragging the cable, and stopped a hand’s breadth away, his hands still at his sides. Waiting.
Three or four seconds passed with nothing to stand between them: no glass, no cables, no phone calls.
Mara put her hand on his waist.
He gripped her hip firmly and lifted her slightly. When his crotch brushed hers through their clothes, both went still for an instant, as if there were still room to make another choice. But there wasn’t.
She pulled her pants aside. He lifted her onto his lap, and Mara wrapped her legs around him, gripping the edge of the reading stand to keep from falling.
She was soaking wet; he entered her in one sudden movement, and her breath escaped against his shoulder.
Then they stopped. He held her motionless above him, with his cock inside her, and rested his mouth against her throat without quite kissing her, holding back the rhythm. Mara understood: he wanted to hear her breathe, wanted to prolong the moment.
The cold glass of the control room pressed against Mara’s back while the air conditioning hummed and the red indicator light illuminated the scene.
He began moving slowly, awkwardly because of their position, braced on his heels, and Mara didn’t care. His bare feet were entwined with hers, and she clung to the back of his neck, murmuring into his ear:
“More.”
And there was more.
Then he lowered her, pressed her back against the glass, and the angle changed. Mara gripped the doorframe with one hand and the back of his neck with the other; he supported her by the thighs until he lifted her off the floor, and she let out a stifled laugh into his ear when she realized they were reenacting the staircase scene from the book exactly.
Later he sat down again on the stool with her on top of him; there, with their hands free, the rhythm grew deeper. They got tangled in the headphone cables, and in one clumsy movement one of Damián’s shoes fell to the floor with a sharp thud that made them laugh in the middle of their urgency.
He came first, warning her too late, and Mara kept moving until she came half a minute later, her face buried in his hair and her mouth open, holding back the sound out of the booth’s ingrained discipline.
After the blaze of it, the silence lasted almost a minute. They stood there, their clothes disheveled, the cold glass against her shoulder blades and the take timer running uselessly on the panel.
“The take is still running,” Mara whispered against his shoulder.
“Forty-two minutes and eleven seconds.”
“We know because of the timer.”
“We know.”
He reached out and turned off the red light.
They left at nine fifteen. They had dinner at the same bar on Calle Ave María, standing up, and this time there was contact: a hand on an arm to explain something, another on a back as they went through the door. Small gestures that encompassed everything.
Nine. The Two Files
The audiobook came out in November. Nine stories, eleven hours and twenty minutes, read by Damián Serra, with Mara credited as the translator.
Nerea made the decision about the final track, without knowing what had happened. The good take lasted forty-two minutes and eleven seconds; at minute forty-one, the story had already ended, but background sounds had bled through: a door, the air conditioning, a quiet laugh, a shoe hitting the floor. Nerea suggested cutting it.
Mara objected. Part of her wanted everything neat, for no one to know what had happened in that booth; the other part, the one that had spent months translating Berthier, demanded the opposite. The latter won. Berthier wrote about what happens after desire, and what had happened in the booth was, precisely, a shoe falling to the floor.
“Don’t cut it,” Mara asked. “You can hear the studio.”
“You can hear everything.”
“You can hear the studio. Leave it.”
And it stayed. Now, when the story ends, the narrator’s voice falls silent and thirty-one seconds of air conditioning and an anonymous laugh follow.
Mara listened to it one night in December, on the couch, with headphones on and the light off. When it ended, she opened the other file.
She had kept it on her phone since October, titled simply call. Fifty-two minutes of background hum, Damián’s voice reading, and her own breathing cheating before she gave in.
She played both recordings over each other: the audiobook volume low, the call volume high. She lay down to listen to a man reading two books at once in the same room.
In the first, the public voice was clean and distant. In the call, the other one. The working voice. The compressed one, the one that sounded an inch from her skin. The second voice.
Mara chose that one. And she fell asleep with her headphones on, fulfilling the destiny of the story she’d translated in March without fully understanding why.
That month, when she translated the last sentence without knowing anything about what was coming, she had written a line in the margin of her draft and later erased it: this can’t be translated, it has to be done.
