The Apartment on Calle Uruguay by Zachary Lazar

Author:Zachary Lazar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

12

My phone was on when Ana texted, saying she wanted to Skype, even though it was very late, so I logged on to see her face obscured in shadow, then asked her to turn a lamp on, then to turn it back off because of the glare. There was no sign anything was wrong until she told me she’d been digging through old boxes and found some copies of a book she’d published a long time ago, a stack of identical thin volumes she showed me now by angling her laptop toward it. The feed paused and caught up with itself in that occasional stop motion that accentuated people’s gestures, making them almost like animated renderings of themselves. Her book was about a neighborhood in Caracas, she said, 23 de Enero, and how by tracking the changes in that single place you could depict the history of Venezuela from the ’50s boom to the crisis now. She showed me the frontispiece, a photograph of huge housing blocks, interspersed with serpentine stretches of shanties and a few sprigs of green space. Her producer at the podcast didn’t really understand her story about Curtis, she told me. She wanted less about Curtis and his family and their two generations of exile and more about the medical clinic—more poor people, Ana said, more “sad,” because sad made people comfortable. It preserved their belief in otherness, their own distance and innocence, made them feel virtuous without having to do anything. She’d been a real journalist once, she said, profiling politicians and artists and celebrities, but also reporting on serious stories, like this little book about a neighborhood in Caracas that many people she knew would be afraid to even set foot in. The podcast, the diminished career, her problems with money—she told me about all these things before she told me she’d been pregnant with our child for a few weeks, until two days ago, when she miscarried.

Her gaze met the screen with less force than actual eye contact but the wavering image had the solemn quality of candlelight during a blackout.

“I was too old,” she finally said. “I mean, also I was on birth control. At least I thought so. But as soon as I found out, I knew that probably nothing would come of it. That’s why I didn’t say anything to you.”

She was trying to spare me from a loss I didn’t feel, even though I think she knew I didn’t feel it.

“It won’t sink in for a while,” she said. “Or maybe it won’t at all. I never expected to feel like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like this helpless desire to keep it alive.”

She looked at me through the screen, weathering some sort of shame, then faintly shook her head.

“It’s ridiculous, I know. I can’t really even picture it, actually. Also, there’s a difference between wanting to keep it and wanting to have it. It was barely even an embryo. Like a little cell cluster.”

“I can picture it,” I said.

“I don’t think you’d even be able to see it.

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