Guadalupe Nettel - Natural Histories - Stories

“Look at those bags under your eyes,” she said, laughing. “You received a letter from Princeton, not a death sentence.”

I told her what was going on. She listened to my reasoning and sobbing without saying a word and, once I’d stopped talking, recommended that I take all the time I needed before deciding what to do.

“Move forward with the formal procedure, take care of the requirements, and maybe things will be more clear as the date approaches. It’s no easy thing to make this kind of decision,” she added respectfully, though I knew perfectly well what deep down she expected me to do. Before I left her office she handed me a piece of paper with her gynecologist’s information.

“Should you decide, call his cell phone and tell him I sent you.”

After that everything sped up. If in the previous two weeks Greta and I were on the same lethargic rhythm, going from the bed to the couch and back, from then on we began to move around in different directions at different speeds. While Greta walked cautiously and ran to hide every time the phone or doorbell rang, enjoying her pregnancy and the intoxicating effect of the hormones, I battled with my own symptoms, investing all my energy in collecting signatures and visiting professors who could help me. I’d make Greta a rich meal and then as soon as I walked out of the kitchen I’d search the Internet for articles and all the information I could find on abortion, which was still illegal in that city in those days. I read testimonials, I researched the different ways to perform one, from the morning-after pill — not a viable option at my late stage — to homemade teas, suction, scraping.

One afternoon I mustered the courage to call my advisor’s gynecologist. I explained the situation and asked for an appointment. The doctor was very kind and saw me that same day, fitting me in between patients. I remember that his office was on the fourteenth floor of a skyscraper that didn’t have a thirteenth floor. Everything was white and obsessively antiseptic. The relaxing melody of the background music only worsened my nerves. It was a struggle to wait my turn and not run into the street, but I managed. Once inside I let the nurse put me through the routine exam: height, weight, blood pressure. Afterward the doctor I’d spoken to on the phone came in. A man of about fifty who reminded me, god knows why — maybe for the white coat or because my advisor had recommended him as well — of Greta’s veterinarian. With a smile on his lips and that paternal sweetness those in his profession often possess, he explained the procedure to me. And at the end he added:

“You have to come on an empty stomach and with someone who can take you back to your house. Even though I don’t use general anesthesia, you’ll be drowsy and weak.”

As I listened to him I thought of Greta, who at that time must have been lying on the armchair in the living room, soaking up the afternoon sun. I wordlessly nodded a few times, including when the gynecologist took out his appointment book and suggested a date for the procedure. I paid for the visit and went out to face the most desolate evening of my entire life, an evening of sweltering heat, and no matter where I was it was hard to breathe.

When I got home, Greta was there at the door, expecting her normal session of cuddling. This time she let me rub her belly, already considerably swollen. As I did I asked myself if I also had some mission in life. I didn’t come up with an answer.

That night I tried calling my advisor to tell her about the visit to her doctor and that, despite his friendless and general kind disposition, I had decided to forgo his services. I would not be going to Princeton. I also decided not to go forward with the paperwork for the grant or worry about anything besides my pregnancy. Later, maybe in September, I’d start working on a doctorate. But here, at the same university in which I was currently enrolled. However, that night Marisa’s phone rang again and again with no answer. I had no choice but to leave a message asking her to call me back.

On Friday Greta woke up a little sick. Her eyes were sad and her ears flat. She curled up in the drawer I’d prepared for her kittens and didn’t move from there except to use the litter box. I did the math: it was still about three weeks until she was due, so that couldn’t have been the reason for her lack of energy. She wasn’t better by evening so I decided to bring her to the vet. I hadn’t done so earlier out of disdain for the man I could see as nothing but an animal sterilizer. It was past six o’clock. The vet was going to close in forty minutes so I called a taxi and put Greta in her cage as fast as possible. It was essentially a fool’s errand; the place was a few miles from my apartment and anyone who knows Friday rush-hour traffic in this deranged city would have given up. But I needed to know that Greta was all right. I grabbed her cage, she, mewing the whole time in protest at being taken from the apartment, and ran down the stairs not thinking about the risks, not even about the steps, which were against me that day. I tripped on one of them and bounced on my hips a few times. As I fell, I took Greta’s cage in both hands so it wouldn’t crash to the ground. It was a scare but the accident had no further consequences. I was fine. Despite my prediction, we made it to the veterinarian just before they closed the clinic. After giving her a physical examination and listening to her heart, the doctor congratulated us both; mother and kittens were doing marvelously. The only thing ailing Greta was an extreme, though normal, exhaustion.

I was in the taxi on my way home when I started to feel the pain in my waist and muscles. Later I learned that in such situations adrenaline acts as an anesthetic and it isn’t until the scare is over that you feel the effects of a hard hit. As I got undressed in my bedroom that night I saw I’d started bleeding. I didn’t want to wait until the next day to call the doctor. I took advantage of having his cell number and called him to find out how I could save the baby. Marisa’s gynecologist seemed worried at first, but he quickly recovered his paternal demeanor and told me, delicately, that it would be difficult to do something. He told me to be patient and come in the next morning for a thorough examination. Some people swear there is no such thing as an accident. I don’t fully agree with that. But still, I can’t say if my fall that evening was an accident or a Freudian slip. I am sure that it was not at all intentional. A team of scientists I met a few months later at Princeton University claim that if they put all our genetic information, education, and the most significant events in our lives into a computer and give us a hundred different dilemmas and make us choose for each one, the machine would figure out our responses before we could think them. In reality — so they say — we don’t make decisions. All of our choices are preconditioned. Anyway, in that instant I didn’t get to make a decision, and I don’t know if I would have wanted to know what such a computer would say about it.

The next day I went to the doctor’s office first thing, neglecting no small number of prior commitments. The gynecologist examined me as he’d said he would and confirmed the prognosis he’d given me the night before. Nothing could be done.

“You’re lucky it happened so early on,” he said with an incomprehensible optimism. “We won’t have to scrape your uterus to expel the residue.”

I left bereaved, as if I hadn’t had any doubts about the pregnancy. Rather than improving after that, my mood grew increasingly worse. It seemed like reality was a black hole where there was no room for exciting opportunities to come. My thesis advisor, who was so supportive, assured me more than once that my inconsolable sadness came from a violent change in my hormone production. That could very well be, but knowing it didn’t help. At the end of the day, whether I liked it or not, I was also an animal and my body and my mind alike reacted to the loss of my offspring just as Greta’s would have had she lost her kittens. It’s true that I was no longer as stressed as before, when the course of things was mine to direct, but the buildup of earlier pressures, added to the sadness I felt, submerged me in a state of depression in which it wasn’t even possible for me to return to what had been my basic routine. I stopped showering and eating and, of course, thinking of my studies.