Garcia's Heart (24 page)

Roberto lasted an hour before he announced he was leaving. He had a new girl and was in his Outremont phase now–methodically working his way through the districts of his new city like a census taker with only one question on his mind–and that night he had a party to go to. Celia threatened to call the restaurant, and even Patrick recognized the futility in the gesture. Roberto smiled and walked out as she held the phone receiver poised by her ear. He wasn't stopping. Still, she put the phone down only when he was out of sight.

Usually Patrick would have gone home at nine, but he stayed that night until Le Dépanneur Mondial closed. He was bored, his parents were only coming back at the end of the week, and he had nowhere in particular to go. The thought of an evening with Celia, even with her mood soured with anger at her brother, was still promising.

Less than a week had passed since they'd spent that afternoon together with Hernan at the migrant workers' dormitory, and in that time, neither of them had spoken of it. It was understandable for Celia, he reasoned–the visits bored her and she had been visibly angry at her father. But it was different for
him. He had arrived home stunned from all that he had seen, fully expecting he would have nightmares, the terror of the sick man's moment of death replayed endlessly. But he had awoken the next morning after a night of sound sleep with an unquestionable sense of well-being. Eventually, he understood that he didn't feel this way in spite of what he'd been through, but because of it. That day with Hernan–tending to the workers, watching him argue with Aguirre so that the food they brought would be accepted–had been an immersion in the adult world. His first real test. Hernan had trusted him enough to bring him along, and when Hernan had tended to a dying man, he'd seen that. Patrick had been there and seen a man die. A body completely still, one arm hanging off the edge of the cot. That initial sense of shock at what he'd seen became something else; it was the wisdom of life and death. And Hernan had allowed it to happen. And now, Patrick walked the aisles of Le Dépanneur Mondial a different person, a man really, revelling in the glow of the newly initiated.

He thought it was impossible that Celia wouldn't see the change in him too, and perhaps it was that sense of confidence that gave him the courage to speak to her. They talked about music or movies or the start of school–she was starting at the same school as Patrick that fall. It was meaningless talk, talk as a way of not saying anything. These conversations–conducted in the purest dialect of adolescence: halting, punctuated with his grunts of feigned indifference–were about nothing, and yet he would go home and replay the transcript of all that was said, cringe at every idiot phrase, relish every joke that made her laugh. But that night, after Roberto's mutiny, she was in no mood to talk. She stood behind the cash–where he detected a new Celia vibe, one of
delicious glowering–and refused to even acknowledge the boy with the mop in front of her. They had closed up the store and were standing on the sidewalk outside Le Dépanneur Mondial when she spoke to him, seemingly for the first time since Roberto left.

“Walk me home?”

He tried not to nod too avidly, hoping a show of concern for her safety getting home would mask any sign of euphoria. Very likely, it was a beautiful night, moonlight sifting through the canopy of trees, but Patrick was blind as he walked beside her, forcing himself to relax but feeling as nonchalant as a one-man band. At her front door, her only words were “Wait here.”

She disappeared into her house and left him there. Wait for what? A tip? A sign from God?

After a short lifetime of fuming and confusion, Patrick saw Mrs. Robitaille come to the door. She waved to Celia and picked her way carefully down the front stairs. Reflexively, Patrick stepped behind a tree until Mrs. Robitaille was past.

Another lifetime, longer, before Celia appeared at the doorway, waving him in.

He smelled sex. He was doused and set on fire by the very act of her
waving
. She could have waved him over a cliff and he would have zombie-walked into thin air. Marshalling all his restraint so as not to bound up the front stairs of Celia García's house, he followed. Inside, the duplex was quiet, lights lowered, empty except for the two of them and Nina who slept in a back bedroom. Celia held her finger to her mouth, as though he needed a reminder. Down a darkened hallway, he heard the whoosh and thud of a clothes washer filling.

They walked through the kitchen, past the table where they sat two weeks before and she had smiled at him. I'll be quiet,
he promised, I'll be very quiet. His brief restaurant career finally came to good use and he was instantly aware of how much time they had until her parents returned, able to calculate with
NASA
-like precision the minute-by-minute timeline of an average couple in their forties out to dinner. Seating, menus, and ordering: twelve to fifteen minutes. Appetizers: fifteen to twenty minutes. Main course: forty-five to sixty minutes. Dessert and coffee: twenty to thirty minutes. Final bill: fifteen minutes. French restaurant: add one half hour. Anniversary: tack on another thirty minutes. They should already be home by now, but if they made arrangements for a sitter maybe they would stay out a bit later.

He was a small-scale seismic event of adrenalin and testosterone. If she had known, she would have run and locked the door behind her, but she kept walking, now past the kitchen and down the other hallway that led to the back of the house. She was in front of him. Total Celia immersion. He saw and smelled her, heard her footsteps. He imagined her bra and panties, the inventory of first sightings. They'd have to be quiet. They reached the end of the back hallway and the door that he assumed led to her bedroom. He wanted touch. He wanted taste. But she opened the door to the back balcony, turned on the outside light, and stepped outside. He couldn't wait. He reached out, touching her shoulder. She turned.

“Yes?” she said, looking at Patrick as though he'd just tapped her on the shoulder to return a glove she had unknowingly dropped. He didn't understand. It was stark disappointment, like someone had turned on the lights to reveal a cinderblock room. She smiled and tilted her head toward something sitting in the corner of the balcony.

“I have to paint out here. Nina has asthma,” she said, and lifted a canvas up, surveying it before turning it around for him.

Patrick was speechless, presented with the canvas and the utter obliviousness of its artist. His first impulse was to pitch the canvas into the leafy darkness below the Garcías' back balcony and walk out the door. But he didn't. He held the picture in his hands and tried to keep from shaking. To defuse his anger at the injustice of the moment, he reminded himself how a little sensitivity and self-control demonstrated now could reap rewards in the future. This didn't work–he still felt like a car in a skid–and so he imagined Hernan and Marta arriving and the competent beating from Roberto that he had probably avoided, and these thoughts helped him regain his composure.

Above, shadflies were engaged in mad, barrelling flight around the balcony's light bulb. Yellow light fell like sprinkler mist. It was hard to appreciate the colours of the painting. The first details he made out were the vertical lines and a figure among them. The figure's hands were lifted to chest level, separating and pushing away stalks of corn. The figure was him.

“Can I take this inside?” he asked.

He heard the clack of the frame as she put the picture flat on the kitchen table and switched on the overhead light. The canvas came alive with colour. It was beautiful. The densely green fields, the detail of his hands. But what he examined most closely was how she had painted his face. There, before him, emerging from the cornstalks, wearing his clothes and inhabiting his body, was a face that he didn't want to recognize. He scanned the other details but returned to his face, finding again that it showed a person he didn't want to be. It portrayed him as a child. An expression of petulance. That was how she
saw him. He was a child to her, a cranky boy in a field. Redemption came in the thought that he was not this boy she could capture so easily.
This was before
, he told himself, painted before he'd witnessed the man in the dormitory. Now everything was different.

Celia was watching him, waiting for the first words of praise, he thought. Patrick knew he could have reacted in many ways. Years later, he felt ashamed for not being more magnanimous and telling her he was honoured to hold a thing of such beauty, that he was without words, impressed at her skill and creativity. It was true, after all. But he could not say these things. She thought he was a child, she had shown him that, and what followed seemed natural, inevitable. He had shrugged and handed the painting back to her.

“I have to go,” he said, and he left.

 

Patrick followed Celia into the public gallery of the courtroom where they parted, mumbling like a couple of teenagers about him sitting over here and her sitting toward the front with Roberto. The tribunal reconvening, Patrick was now able to recognize the players. Lindbergh and McKenzie sat across from Marcello and Ing Song Park, the only lawyer of the group he hadn't met (so far, but the day was still young). A court official entered and Hernan followed, in steps easy enough to convince Patrick that Hernan's legs were not shackled. He'd somehow expected this, as though the tribunal would be less than credible without leg irons. Hernan wore his plain blue shirt, and Patrick wondered whether that was tribunal issue as well or just a habit of the accused. Hernan stepped into the small glass cage and settled himself in the chair, briefly glancing down, appearing to be thinking
or praying, and then dispelling any doubts by lifting the fiddly little earpiece and plugging it into the side of his head. Why did he need to listen, or even be here, if he wasn't going to speak in his own defence? Why did he need translation at all? Patrick supposed Hernan was like anyone, occupying himself. Trying to get through days that presented him with a schedule divided between boredom and vilification.

A man in his forties took the stand, stated his name, and the questioning began. He was a professor at
UC
Davis. He had been a student at the National Autonomous University when he was arrested two decades before. It was explained to him after the arrest that they were looking for his cousin, who was suspected of being a Communist. When he told the two officers he didn't know where his cousin was or anything he was involved with, one of the officers hit him in the face with enough force to knock him over. He described his vision being blurred, the stinging pain and then the metallic taste in his mouth. The witness remembered pursing his lips to breathe out and seeing a red mist. With his hands secured behind his back, he could not staunch the flow of blood from his broken nose. The front of his shirt turned red.

McKenzie asked him if he'd been alone when he'd been arrested and he said yes. But during his days at Lepaterique, he'd seen glimpses of others as he was moved from one interrogation room to another. McKenzie asked him the names of those he'd recognized but the witness said he couldn't recall. During his confinement he'd seen many faces, but wasn't sure whose were hallucinations.

The witness then reported how the interrogation intensified. New people appeared in the room. He was blindfolded but could hear smatterings of English being spoken. The university
professor told the court that the beatings were made worse by the regime used between interrogations. Prisoners were kept awake for days on end, or forced to stand for hours with the rubber mask, the
capucha
, on their heads and made to endure near-asphyxiation. Not sleeping was the worst, the university professor said plainly, as though he were describing a food he once used to dislike.

When he could not give his captors any useful information, they moved on to other means involving a different team. He remembered only the electrodes being placed and, at first, the mildest of the shocks. The rest was pain and fear and movement of people around him. McKenzie asked if this was where the university professor first encountered the doctor, and the university professor said yes. Is this man in the room with us now? McKenzie asked. Yes, he is, the man responded. Indicate for the court. The university professor raised his hand, as if indicating directions to a fellow traveller who had become lost, and said, “Hernan García de la Cruz.” He pointed directly at Hernan in the glass dock. It made Patrick want to cry. Pointing was a vector, a directional force, a hurricane heading ashore or a hawk bearing down on its prey. Words, even accusatory ones, were scalar. Words floated in the air. The pointing was unnecessary, but there is an undeniable hunger for it, an act that accomplished what all those words fell short of. The university professor lowered his hand, away from Hernan. After this pistol shot, Patrick imagined a spider-web fracture pattern in the fronting glass panel of Hernan's cage. But it remained smooth, the bottom of a well from which Hernan stared, unflinching.

Instead it was Celia who responded. Throughout all of this, Patrick's attention had been split between Celia and Hernan.
Hernan was a sphinx behind the glass; Celia, a repertoire of gestures as coping mechanisms: a hand brought to the brow was denial; intent scribbling as sublimation; a rare despairing glance in Patrick's direction (another vector, emotive force to be determined). She put her elbows on her knees and held her head in her hands.

McKenzie asked the witness how he knew that the accused was a physician, and the university professor replied that Hernan had tended to him. When asked to elaborate, the university professor said that when he awoke it was Hernan over him, involved in some hurried activity that he presumed to be medically related. Once, he awoke with an intravenous line in his arm and the accused was tending to that. The witness reported that initially he thought Hernan was helping him. But each awakening became a resurfacing into pain, and after a day of torture, after repeatedly awakening from unconsciousness to find Hernan hovering above him, the doctor became inseparable from the pain. He remembered asking Hernan to stop hurting him. He remembered getting no response.