Denise, hidden on the other side of the door, remained alert. She was sitting cross-legged in the hallway of her rented apartment. The hallway that joined the two bedrooms and separated them from the living room. A hallway that was redundant in contemporary buildings. A hallway from an age when hallways were needed to shield the bedrooms. An age when there were more hallways than rooms. Without the mirror she’d been holding and using as a viewfinder—focusing it like a camera to get a good view of the scene in her bedroom—she had to settle for hearing the sound of the bodies. A less intense sound than the moans of desire and pain she’d heard in the past. Their movements were muffled by clothes, and the sound was the friction of cloth rather than the watery slap she usually associated with sex. Because the couple never got completely naked, though not out of shame or modesty. They left their clothes on because for them it was necessary. Denise had come to understand that. They seemed to enjoy imposing limits and obstacles on themselves. They liked not being entirely accessible to each other, liked to take detours. The times when she had perceived them to experience the most pleasure was when Juan Carlos penetrated the woman with her underwear still on. He’d move the lower part aside, keep his fingers there, and their breathing would grow agitated.

Denise closed her eyes. She rested the palm of her hand on the cold floor, waiting for what she knew would come next. The neighbor moaned again. But this moan was different from the one a few minutes before; Denise had learned to differentiate and interpret. She was sure that this specific moan was a signal for a pattern that would follow: the woman would take the bottom position so Juan Carlos’s back would be turned toward the door and Denise and there was no danger he’d see her—though in any case, he wasn’t likely to get distracted from what he was doing. Then the volume and speed of their rhythmic plaint would build until the woman displayed her climax with a spate of little cries, which he would follow, reaching his own orgasm with a combination of snorting, moaning, and cursing. Denise wouldn’t be able to see it, but she was sure Juan Carlos would grab hold of the pillows, stifling his cries as he covered his face, and that the upstairs neighbor would have her eyes tightly shut, as if she were driving a car straight into a wall.