When we arrived, however, the only apartment that was occupied was the one directly above ours. Doña Eulalia’s three daughters were unmarried and lived with their mother downstairs. The son, Pepe, who was the youngest, was the only one who had married, and he lived above us with his wife, Lupita. They were our closest neighbors during that time.
There’s not much more I can say about Doña Eulalia. She was a strong-willed woman who’d been lucky in life, and she may not have been a very nice person. I scarcely knew her daughters. They were what used to be known, in those long-gone years, as old maids, and they endured their fate with all the grace they could muster, which is to say not very much; at best they gave off a dingy kind of resignation, which stained the things around them or the way I remember those things now that they’ve all disappeared. The daughters were rarely to be seen, or at least I didn’t see them much; they watched soap operas and gossiped spitefully about the other women in the neighborhood, whom they saw at the grocer’s or in the dark entrance way where a skeletal Indian woman sold nixtamal tortillas.
Pepe and his wife, Lupita, were different.
My mother and father, who were three or four years younger than I am now, made friends with them almost right away. I was interested in Pepe. In the neighborhood all the boys my age called him “The Pilot” because he flew for the Mexican Air Force. Lupita was a housewife. Before getting married she had worked as a secretary or a clerk in a government office. Both of them were friendly and hospitable, or tried to be. Sometimes my parents would go up to their apartment and stay there a while, listening to records and drinking. My parents were older than Pepe and Lupita, but they were Chilean, and at the time Chileans saw themselves as the acme of modernity, at least in Latin America. The age gap was offset by the markedly youthful spirit of my progenitors.
On a few occasions I went up to their apartment too. The living room (which we called a living) was relatively modern, and Pepe had a record player that seemed to be a recent acquisition. On the walls and the sideboards in the dining room there were photos of him and Lupita, and photos of the airplanes he flew, which were what interested me the most; but he preferred not to talk about his work, as if he were always protecting some military secret. Classified information, as they said in the North American TV shows. The secrets of the Mexican Air Force, which, frankly, no one was losing any sleep over, except for Pepe with his somewhat extravagant sense of duty and responsibility.
Little by little, from conversations at the dinner table or overheard while I was studying, I began to get a sense of what our neighbors’ life was really like. They’d been married for five years and still didn’t have any children. There were frequent visits to the gynecologist. According to the doctors, Lupita was perfectly capable of having children. And the tests showed that Pepe was the same. The problem was mental, the doctors said. As the years went by, Pepe’s mother began to resent the fact that Lupita hadn’t provided her with grandchildren. Lupita once confessed to my mother that the problem was the apartment, and being so close to her mother-in-law. If they went somewhere else, she said, she’d probably be able to get pregnant right away.
I think Lupita was right.
Another thing: Pepe and Lupita were short. I was taller than Pepe and I was seventeen at the time. So I guess Pepe can’t have been more than five foot nine, and Lupita would have been about five foot two at the most. Pepe was dark, with very black hair, and a thoughtful expression, as if there was always something on his mind. Every morning he went to work wearing his air force officer’s uniform. He was always impeccably turned out, except on the weekend, when he put on a sweatshirt and jeans and didn’t shave. Lupita had fair skin, dyed-blonde hair, and a more or less permanent perm, which she used to get done at the hairdresser’s, or did herself, using a little kit containing all a woman’s hair needs, which Pepe brought back from the United States. She used to smile when she said hello. Sometimes from my room I could hear them having sex. This was around the time I started getting serious about writing and I used to stay up very late. My life seemed pretty dull to me. In fact I was dissatisfied with everything about it. I used to write until two or three in the morning, and that was when the groans would suddenly begin in the apartment upstairs.
At first it all seemed normal. If Pepe and Lupita wanted to have a child they had to fuck. But then I asked myself, Why were they starting so late at night? Why couldn’t I hear any voices before the groans began? Needless to say, my knowledge of sex at the time was limited to what I’d been able to glean from movies and porn magazines. In other words, it was minimal. But I knew enough to sense that something strange was happening in the apartment upstairs. In my imagination, I began to embellish Pepe and Lupita’s sex life with incomprehensible gestures, as if sadomasochistic scenes were being played out upstairs, scenes that I couldn’t completely visualize, that weren’t built around actions intended to produce pain or pleasure, but around dramatized movements that Pepe and Lupita were executing in spite of themselves, movements that were gradually unhinging them.
None of this was obvious from the outside. And in fact I soon reached the smug conclusion that nobody else had noticed. My mother, who was, in a way, Lupita’s friend and confidante, thought that all the couple’s problems would be solved by moving away. My father had no opinion on the matter. Freshly arrived in Mexico, we were too busy taking in all the new things that dazzled us every day to puzzle over the secret life of our neighbors. When I think back to that time, I see my parents and my sister, and then I see myself, and the little group we compose looks overwhelmingly desolate.
Six blocks from our house there was a Gigante supermarket where we went on Saturdays to shop for the whole week. That’s something I can remember in elaborate detail. I also remember that I was sent to an Opus Dei high school, although in defense of my parents I should point out that they had never heard of Opus Dei. It took me more than a year myself to realize what a diabolical place it was. My Ethics teacher was a self-confessed Nazi, which was weird, because he was a little guy from Chiapas with indigenous features, who’d studied in Italy on a scholarship — a nice, dumb guy, basically, who would have been gassed by the real Nazis without a second thought — and my Logic teacher believed in the heroic will of José Antonio (many years later, in Spain, I ended up living on an avenue named after José Antonio). But, at the beginning, like my parents, I had no idea what was going on at that school.
Pepe and Lupita were the only people who interested me. And a friend of Pepe’s, his only friend, actually, a fair-haired guy, the best pilot in his year at the academy, a tall thin guy who’d been injured in an accident when his fighter crashed and would never be able to fly again. He turned up at the house almost every weekend, and after saying hello to Pepe’s mother and his sisters, who adored him, he went up to his friend’s apartment and stayed there drinking and watching TV while Lupita made dinner. Sometimes he came during the week, and then he would be wearing his uniform, a uniform I have trouble visualizing now; I would have said it was blue, but I could be wrong, and if I shut my eyes and try to conjure up the image of Pepe and his fair-haired friend, I see them wearing green uniforms, light green, a dashing pair of pilots, alongside Lupita, who’s wearing a white blouse and a blue skirt (she’s the one wearing blue).