Somehow, she found me

When friends visit my apartment for the first time, there’s nothing I enjoy quite as much as pointing to the paintings on the walls and saying “Isa did that.” Her glorious rendition of Venezuelan painter Cesar Rengifo’s Them and the city, with its dramatic Caracas skyline, is always a crowd pleaser. As is the copy of Mexican cartoonist Miguel Covarubias’ image of 1930s lindy-hoppers. The untrained eye is unlikely to notice her ceramics in our kitchen, the home-made lamps in the living room, the couch pillows she quilted herself.

Such an artistic streak often leaves people surprises that she’s also an electronic engineer. Perhaps nobody is quite as surprised as Isa herself.

I used to ask her about the profession when we first started dating, hoping to elicit the long nerdy conversations about computers I’d have with my brothers or my dot com era Seattle friends. She would respond with quizzical glances and a sort of shy discomfort that eventually led me to avoid the subject. She wasn’t crazy about her career and was glad to escape into a graphic design degree the moment she had a chance. For years I knew little about her university life apart from the fact that her degree was tough on her and took a while to get through.

I’m not sure how it began, but it all came flooding out of her in a breathless late-night conversation on a weeknight around four years ago. She had wanted to study architecture, she told me, but it was an expensive career that her family didn’t have money for. Also an impractical one, they had told her - she needed something that would get her a job, and leaned on her to enroll in an engineering program at a nearby university. Her uncle worked out a scholarship for her.

The classes didn’t make sense to her, she felt like she was always the last to catch on, and she knew her heart was in another place. But she kept at it because it was the only way she could finish a career and be able to strike out on her own. She failed calculus four times until she had memorized it, with the stroke of luck that somehow the scholarship never caught on. She stood for an hour and a half under the scorching Barquisimeto sun every morning and every afternoon waiting for the city’s horrid public transportation to take her to and from class. She battled for months through her thesis, and even had it shot down at one point because of a computer glitch. I wasn’t around for any of it, but somehow I know she did the whole thing with a smile on her face despite the struggle that it meant for her.

She graduated and moved to Caracas, where she got a job doing tech support at an import-export firm and rented a room at in a shared apartment, where the owner would rent out the other rooms to foreigners that passed through for a few months at time. She lived a modest and yet fulfilled life, happy to work during the day and watch movies or news on a small TV in her room at night while she ate the arepas or beans and rice that she made for herself. Until one night, in the kitchen of that apartment, she stumbled across an overgrown college kid posing a reporter who was visiting an English teacher that rented a room down the hall.

The rest, as they like to say, is history.

The story is still compelling to me because I can’t imagine having the courage or persistence to do what she did. It’s all the more meaningful that she kept the saga quiet, almost secret, unlike so many people I’ve known who wear their suffering on their sleeve or are rattling off tales of how hard things were for them and how much they overcame.

But it’s most compelling because somehow I’m convinced, ten years after we first met in the kitchen of that Sebucan apartment and seven years after we tied the knot, that she put up with all of that so she could find me. Because if she hadn’t I never would have found her.

Gracias, Isabel, por estos siete años, y las décadas que nos quedan por delante.