Garcia's Heart (21 page)

“You can manage?” Hernan said to Marta. He was leaning into the trunk of the car, pulling intently at something.

“I can manage, Roberto will be here. And Madame Lefebvre,” she replied. Hernan looked at Patrick, and said, “You're coming.”

Even though he didn't understand what was going on, Patrick gave himself credit for intuiting the curbside dynamics that were at play on that late-August morning in 1986–he looked over at Marta García for her permission. She thrust her head toward the car.

“Go. Roberto doesn't want to.”

Patrick got in the car. It was perhaps a measure of just how bored he was with his life–or how much he trusted Hernan–that he would get in the car like that without asking where they were going. But he bounded into the back seat like a golden retriever. Then, to Patrick's surprise and undying gratitude, Celia came out of the store carrying a cooler and sat in the front seat beside her father. It was four days since she had smiled at Patrick at dinner and the memory had been mentally replayed to the point where he wondered if it had been his invention in the first place.

As they drove toward the Mercier Bridge, Hernan addressed Patrick, intermittently meeting his eyes in the rear-view mirror.

“You're not curious where we're going?” Hernan asked, and Patrick shrugged, meaning it in the best possible way. “Have you ever met anyone from Mexico?” he continued.

“Sure, I mean
you
guys are Mexicans, aren't you?”

Hernan and Celia looked at each other. Hernan shook his head and Celia laughed.

“But, besides
us
, Patrick, have you met any?”

“No.”

“Then today is a big day for you.”

They drove through fields quilted in crops, navigating progressively smaller roads, until they approached the American border. Hernan turned off on a side road and followed it until it led them to a field within sight of the Adirondacks. They pulled into a parking lot beside a very large building with a curved roof that looked like corrugated tin cut lengthwise and turned on its side, something Hernan told him later was a Quonset hut. In front of the hut sat a large rock painted with
the words “Viva Mexico,” and a flagpole from which a Mexican flag hung limply. Two broken-down-looking school buses were parked beside the hut.

“What's this?” Patrick asked, leaning forward, trying to get a better look and using the opportunity to smell Celia's hair.

“It's work,” Hernan said, bringing the car to a stop beside one of the buses. “Let's go.”

Patrick helped unload groceries from the trunk of the car and brought them into the hut, his eyes aching and blinded as they adjusted from the brightness outside. He could barely make out Hernan in front of him and had to concentrate on his ghostly, shifting image as he was led to a makeshift kitchen. It was brighter there, and for the first time Patrick could see that he had been led through a dormitory of more than a hundred empty cots arranged in rows. Several cots at the far end of the building were occupied by sleeping men. They were met by an older man who had obviously been waiting for Hernan. He had a weathered face and a small, compact body. The man did not appear pleased. He and Hernan shook hands and spoke for a short time in Spanish. After that the man helped Celia and Patrick load the perishables into the refrigerator. More than just being allowed to tag along, Patrick was pleased to help. Charitable acts were, at that time, still a novelty to him–and to do all of this with Celia, to have the chance to bond with her in such a wholesome, magnanimous, asexual way, was producing a kind of mid-morning euphoria in him, but all of this was held in check by his impression of the dour stranger. By this time Patrick liked to think he was familiar with the expats who gathered around the coffee counter at Le Dépanneur Mondial. He was accustomed to the rhythms of their speech, even in Spanish; he was certain he
could fish out the emotion in the voices of people enjoying each other's company or tell when a conversation became contentious. So when Hernan and this man spoke, even Patrick sensed there was something less than unconditional gratitude being expressed. This unease was compounded by what Patrick swore were flickers of resentfulness beneath the man's mask of stoic resolve. He didn't know what to make of it. Years later, he would learn that humans are wired for faces: a nice little portion of the parietal lobes were committed to parsing facial expressions, decoding the slightest nascent snarl or elevation of a brow. Then, it was only ominous to Patrick. He reasoned it was a territorial thing, a man who didn't want an outsider like Hernan bringing in provisions. Maybe this was how a man having to accept a gift of food looked.

While the two men continued to talk, Patrick helped Celia put the rest of the groceries away in the kitchen. She worked without enthusiasm and sulked whenever Hernan asked anything else of her. When Patrick told her she looked bored, she denied it, admitting only to being upset at having to come out to this place. She had never liked it and this was her third visit with Hernan in the last six weeks. Her mother couldn't go because of the store. Roberto always refused and Nina was too young. At that moment, Patrick heard Hernan's voice again, raised, clashing with the voice of the other man.

“Who is this guy?” Patrick asked.

His name was Aguirre, Celia explained. He was from Guatemala. And although he supervised the fieldwork, Hernan had told her he was much more than a foreman. He was in charge of arranging everything: the hiring in Mexico, obtaining the temporary work visas, the lodging and food.

Until that moment, Patrick had been unaware of the foreigners crouching in farmers' fields at certain times of the summer for different harvests. But Celia had been out with Hernan before, and she knew who did what: Sikhs for lettuce, Haitians for green beans, the Mexicans arriving in August to harvest sweet corn. The school buses would drop the workers off at the fields before dawn and bring them back to the dormitory at nightfall. In a couple of weeks they would decamp and move on to another harvest, other fields.

“What's your dad got to do with it?”

“He says he's helping them,” Celia said quietly, but loudly enough that Patrick could detect some shame in her voice.

From the kitchen, they listened as the argument between Hernan and Aguirre continued. Celia whispered to Patrick that the delivery man who brought plantains to Le Dépanneur Mondial had told her father that there had been a dispute over whether the cost of food was included in the contract that Aguirre had negotiated, and while this was being settled, the workers were caught between jurisdictions, and, without anyone to represent them, they were going hungry. The church was organizing a food drive, Celia said, but Hernan said it was crazy to rely on the church, a case of canned chickpeas or cling peaches that would arrive in September. Hernan said they needed something fresh, now. Celia was worried because this was an unannounced visit to bring provisions–and clearly Aguirre wasn't pleased. Hernan suddenly came into the kitchen to find the two of them finished their work and listening to his conversation. He told Celia to take Patrick out back while he finished speaking with Señor Aguirre, and as they left, Patrick heard Hernan close and lock the dock behind them.

The morning, which had been uncomfortably hot, now seemed a faint, fresh memory. Heat lines swayed like a distant crop over the asphalt of the parking lot. It had been a dry summer, a fact a person could forget in the city. Here, the world was divided into places with water and places without. The grass around the compound grew in sparse yellow tufts and the ground was hard packed and lined by thin fissures. Fields of green corduroy stretched out into a vast, distant country, unimaginably fertile, veined by irrigation pipes, worked by another nation. At the edge of the parking lot, faced by a wall of cornstalks, Celia took off her shoes, putting her bare feet into the lush grass that rimmed the cornfield. Patrick tried not to look at them.

“It's nice out here,” he said, turning to find her staring intently at a leaf that she held in her hand, pulling it apart along the parallel yellow-ridged veins, slowly, as if she was unzipping the plant. Then she gave a surprisingly forceful tug that shook the stalk and shuddered loose an ear of corn.

“It's okay,” Celia García replied, starting on another leaf.

He wished he could remember that their conversation was deep and witty and soulful, that he told her everything about himself, how he thought she was beautiful and that he loved her, but none of that happened. He pretended to be as bored as she obviously was. They just stood there and talked about nothing and slowly destroyed a cornstalk or two.

Hernan had told them to be back at the dormitory by noon, the time when the buses that picked up the field crews were due to return. Patrick and Celia went back to the dormitory to find sixty or so men milling around the entrance to the building waiting for the front door to be unlocked. A couple of the men stepped out of the crowd to look more closely
through one of the dormitory's front windows. Another knocked on the door, to no reply. Finally, Aguirre unlocked the door and came out with a folding chair held flat under his arm. He put the chair down, opened it, and took a step up onto the seat. Patrick and Celia stood among the workers, watching Aguirre, his head barely above the crowd, balancing on the chair. He addressed the crowd, speaking slowly, solemnly, and even in Spanish Patrick could understand that this was an oration of sorts, he was making an appeal to the crowd. Patrick asked Celia what Aguirre was saying.

“Trying to save his ass.”

At one point, the crowd emitted a collective groan, and as the workers turned to each other even Patrick could pick up on a sense of grievance only partially redressed. Aguirre lifted his hand to silence the crowd and the gesture succeeded. He was working hard and it was paying off, he was beginning to earn scattered clusters of applause. Apparently heartened by this, Aguirre's voice rose in pitch and he became more animated as he finished his speech. Then he got off the chair to lead everyone in for lunch and everybody clapped.

The men sat down to eat in the dining hall of the dormitory building, an area partitioned from the sleeping quarters. They started eating with what seemed to Patrick was less a sense of pleasure than relief. For ten minutes the building was voiceless. Patrick sat on a bench with Hernan and Celia, and from their end of the table he watched the rows of men eating, shoulder to shoulder, heads bobbing as food was scooped up. Hernan could see Patrick observing the men, and leaned over to him to explain that the workers were chosen exclusively from the area around Mexico City–all married men with families who wired home their wages and caused no trouble.
In a low voice, Hernan listed the indignities suffered by the workers: a wage that would insult a teenager, harsh bosses and ceaseless haggling about the details of the contract, plus not the rumour of a benefit even though they paid into unemployment insurance and pension plans and, still, if you asked them, Hernan said, they would reply to a man that this was good work and they felt lucky to be here. He offered no explanation about Aguirre, and Patrick was confused whether the man worked for the growers or the workers or himself. He thought about Hernan and Aguirre behind the locked door of the dormitory and wondered if the reason for the locked door had been some sort of confrontation between Aguirre and Hernan. Whatever the case, Hernan was not about to share the details with his daughter or his employee.

The workers finished eating and filed back onto the buses, which disappeared in their own dust storm. After the clatter of lunch, the main room was quiet again, empty except for a few men who remained, lying on cots in the dormitory building. Hernan looked over at them and then turned to Patrick. “Come,” he said.

With a nod to Aguirre, Hernan led Patrick to a room in the back of the dormitory. Aside from the kitchen and some showers and washrooms at the back of the building, this seemed to be the only truly private space. Hernan placed on the table the small black bag he'd been carrying. The leather was worn and the bag's hinged opening was permanently splayed, wide enough for Patrick to see it held a tangle of medical instruments. Celia hesitated by the doorway, watching her father.

A migrant worker, a young man in work clothes with his arm in a sling, appeared and Hernan waved him in. Celia gave
a snort of disgust and left without explanation. Hernan untied the knot of the rudimentary sling–made up of plaid material that looked like it came from the remnants of another work shirt–and spoke to the young man in Spanish, then summarized for Patrick.

“He dislocated it a week ago, but it seems to be doing fine,” Hernan said as he moved the man's arm through its range of motion, pausing when his patient winced. Although Hernan hadn't reacted to Celia's departure, he must have sensed Patrick's confusion: “They don't have access to medical care. Usually, it's included in the contract but this year there's been a problem. I help out from time to time.”

“And the food too?”

“The food is usually more dependable.” Hernan frowned. “But they need the work, and so they have to take the risk.” Hernan put the man's arm back in the sling, offered a professional parting smile, and sent him off with a pat on his good shoulder. “They're lucky they have the dormitory.”

Patrick stayed for the next five patients, among them a sprained ankle, a bad back, and a chronic cough for which Hernan wore a mask and made Patrick wear one too. And while Hernan was describing what he was looking for as he examined each man, Patrick found it difficult to keep his eyes on the patients. He was really watching Hernan. Patrick studied him as he performed his tasks with care and confidence. Patrick saw how the patients responded to him, how even when he had done nothing more than listen to their chests or look in their throats, they felt better. His presence had meant something, it had been enough. In the back room of that dormitory, Patrick began to appreciate that this wasn't just a job for Hernan. This
was
Hernan. He knew why Hernan
missed medicine so much, how the work and the man were not two separate things but fed off each other, and as Hernan ushered the last patient out of the room, Patrick understood why Hernan had come out in the middle of a field to tend to these people, and why he'd chosen to bring Patrick along.