Even though no one told me, it wasn’t long before I understood that sex was not only something pleasurable like chocolate; it was also a means to hurt someone, deeply and determinately. It was my childhood habit of listening through closed doors that led to this discovery. One afternoon, our neighbor from the last apartment on the fourth floor came to visit. She was the mother of two girls who lived downstairs from us in a clean and very organized apartment with enormous fish tanks that I still remember. Her daughters were beautiful Argentine girls with dark hair and intensely blue, catlike eyes. On several occasions we had crossed paths in the plaza and shared friendly but shy exchanges. It goes without saying that our building complex, with its seemingly bucolic gardens, also had a macabre and at times dangerous dimension. As I said before, our unit had housed the athletes of the ’68 Olympics. That time and those games constitute, as the whole world knows, the symbol of the worst massacre committed in Mexico and the start of the wave of repression that characterized the continent through the next decade. And yet, as paradoxical as it might seem, these buildings were full of leftist South Americans who had come to Mexico to escape being assassinated in their own fascist countries, as my mother explained to us in a solemn tone. Back to our neighbor: I remember that on this occasion she looked haggard. My mother was very sweet with her, sat her down in the living room and offered her tea, then sharply told me to go to my room. Bit by bit, between sobs and from the clipped phrases I was able to pick up from the hallway, our neighbor explained how the day before, in the same garden where I often gave my dolls baths, a janitorial worker had abused her daughter Yanina in broad daylight. I didn’t understand what had happened, but I knew the man had done something horrible and irrevocable to the girl. I also understood that despite all her pain the woman had come to tell my mother to be extra careful, to watch out so the same thing wouldn’t happen to me. When our neighbor left, I tried to coax more information out of my mother, but she changed the subject. There was no human power that could convince her to explain what had happened to the girl from downstairs. It wasn’t until nighttime, when my dad came home from the office and my parents thought my brother and I were asleep, that my mom told the story in full and I was able to pick up a few details. My dad agreed that it was best not to tell us anything, but they would accompany us to the plaza from then on. I was up all night crying and thinking about Yanina and how terrible sex could be, scared of suffering something similar. It was the first time I encountered a taboo, and I do understand why it went this way, but I would like you to tell me, Dr. Sazlavski, isn’t the effect of silence much worse on children who are used to asking and knowing about everything? Wouldn’t it have been better to tell us about the dangers lurking close-by? Or at least more pertinent than sowing confusion about things that have nothing to do with the day-to-day life of a seven-year-old? Yanina was never the same. Once a flirtatious and exceedingly feminine girl, she began to hide beneath baggy clothing and a scowl. A few months later, she cut her hair like a boy’s and started to gain weight, as if she wanted to cover the prematurely developed shape of her body with fat. A few months after that, her family moved to a smaller, safer housing complex.
Sexual freedom ended up hurting my family when my parents adopted a practice very much in fashion in the seventies: the then-famous “open relationship.” “Opening” the relationship basically meant doing away with exclusivity — a rule that seems to me fundamental to preserving a marriage. Based on a mutual agreement, of which, I stress, my brother and I were never informed, my parents had the right to go out and sleep with anyone — to ride all around town. Doctor, why didn’t they tell us? Maybe they weren’t totally convinced of the benefits of their new rule, or perhaps they realized they had already gone too far on the topic of sex with us. What they did do was introduce us to a wide variety of new friends who showed up at the house, said hello, and left almost as quickly as they came. In very little time — quickened by my habit of listening through walls — I learned about the new situation and, of course, immediately told my brother. They justified their decision to other grownups with the argument that private property was scandalous and, if they couldn’t do away with it completely, they could at least do their part by making their bodies accessible to other souls in need of affection. You may remember, there was a saying in that confused and misguided decade: “No one will be denied a glass of water or a lay.” The important thing, according to my parents, was to remain loyal by making each other participants in every extramarital encounter by dint of detailed accounts of each one. Say what they will, I’m convinced this practice ultimately created the rift between them.
Shortly after being bombarded with information about sex and its vicissitudes, a more contentious — and, from my point of view, also more anguishing — issue crept into our daily life. Using the recent divorce of a classmate’s parents as pretext, they introduced a new book into our bedtime reading routine that used illustrations to explain how one family can have two homes. Bit by bit, my capacity for deductive reasoning led me to realize their emphasis on the topic meant it was happening to us. Despite all their faults, I appreciate that at least my parents had the tact to never fight in front of us. I have no idea how bloody and insidious their arguments grew. What I can say is that they were always cordial and restrained when my brother and I were around, and a lifetime will never be enough time to thank them for it. Maybe that’s why the announcement came as something so incomprehensible to us, and so painful. For as many books as they placed in my hands, and for all the antecedent explanations, it still took me nearly a decade to understand that they were going to live apart indefinitely. One morning in late June — summer vacation had already begun — a man who worked for my dad showed up at the house under orders to take all of his books, records, and clothing from the apartment. I picked up the phone, I remember, and I called my dad to find out if these strange instructions really did come from him. I didn’t interpret what was happening as the obvious act of cowardice it was, nor did I imagine how difficult it would have been for my dad to come himself. Instead, I thought that collecting his belongings from the house mattered so little to him that he’d assigned someone else the task.
That was how my father moved out of the apartment forever. They had explained it to us many times, but still, in order to fully grasp it, I needed to find myself in front of an empty bookcase in the living room. A bookshelf where for my whole life there had been records: zarzuela, opera, jazz, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel; a collection of every issue of Life; the Larousse Encyclopedia; the complete works of Freud and Lacan, and I can’t remember how many other things that impregnated the house with my father’s eclectic and charming personality. During all the preparatory conversations I had worn the mask of the understanding daughter who reasons instead of reacts, and who would cut off a finger before aggravating her already aggravated parents. Why did I do it, Doctor? Explain it to me. What stupid reason stopped me from expressing the outrage the situation deserved? Why didn’t I tell them what I was really feeling? Why didn’t I threaten to commit suicide or to stop eating if they went through with the separation? Don’t you see — there in my defeatism, in my complacency — a foreboding of all my present pathologies? Maybe if I’d behaved accordingly I would have been able to intervene in their decision to break up our family, and above all we could have avoided the disaster that was about to crash down on us, which no one saw coming.