Garcia's Heart (25 page)

Marcello's questions centred on acts. It was not a crime against humanity to make sure that someone was well-hydrated, he argued. The witness described duress and lapses of consciousness, was this an adequate state of mind to facilitate recall of remote events? How could anyone know what Hernan did to this man except for others in the room at that time? Can we trust those accused torturers, men trained and committed to acts of violence? Hernan was there, true. Presence alone did not necessarily make a doctor into a torturer.

More than most, Patrick was aware that people in his profession had been known to do some very bad things. But
then again, if a group had an ethical code dating back twenty-five centuries, it probably meant that it had been necessary for at least that long. In these past seven years, he had become a student of those moments when doctors transgressed in the most abhorrent ways. He tried to keep this interest to himself, sparing his acquaintances, who he doubted, even with their worldliness and anthropological detachment from evil, could have stomached the material. But Heather had discovered the books eventually. Having her find the books stowed away in a cabinet had been the worst possible outcome, making the cache all the more illicit in her mind and multiplying her disgust. She told him what she thought of the books and let him infer her revised opinion of him.

The history of doctors and torture was voluminous and detailed and he had read it all cloaked in twin moods of horror and fascination. Of all the seismic events in the moral imagination, Auschwitz still made the ground shake most profoundly. And there, as at other times, he found it was the doctors who epitomized the descent; the most highly educated and respected group of a technologically advanced, previously civilized society effectively renouncing its oath and devouring itself. It was the doctors who were the experimenters and selectors at the camps, who performed their tasks under the mantles of science and healing. And among the more easily understood monsters described in the death camps, Patrick had been kept awake nights pondering the disturbing story of Ernst B., an Auschwitz physician commended by prisoners for his kindness and humanity in the camps, while at the same time being fully committed to the ideology that led to their creation. Ernst B. had been a gentleman, a man capable of committing heinous acts and inspiring warm sentiment
from his victims, fully able to live two lives, of proving to Patrick that something like this could be done, had been done.

And while Auschwitz was the standard for his profession's depravity, it was not the sole appearance. The doctors were there, on hand for Japanese atrocities in China. They were there in Cambodia, sweating like masons behind a wall of stacked skulls. They were there in the Soviet Union, establishing their own little gulag of a psychiatric system, because any difference became more explicable, more acceptable, as a pathology. (Ironically, Marcello wanted him to do something similar for Hernan, except that the diagnosis would come with an extended day pass.) And with each instance, the commonalities became clear: physicians caught up in the swell of a larger impulse, a mass movement or sentiment or state of emergency that made all the old rules seem obsolete. Expertise was divorced from morality, honing itself in predictable, terrible ways. Even more predictable were the ways in which perpetrators dealt with the accusations when they were called to account for their crimes years later; they would explain themselves in one of three ways: they were simply acting on orders, implying that war or civil emergency suspended their ethical responsibilities; others spoke of their experience as though it had been a dream, one they could not yet comprehend. The last group killed themselves. Whether they had come to a fuller understanding was debatable.

It would be reassuring to think of these horrific moments as nothing more than past chapters in the history of medicine, like surgery before anaesthesia or antisepsis. But they became persistent, dogged reminders, footnotes appending themselves and forcing Patrick to look down at the smaller print.

The first pictures Patrick saw of the broadcast of a captured Saddam Hussein–the surprised, tousled look of a bus terminal indigent–were not of him simply sitting there; they were of his medical exam. The tyrant opened his mouth, and instead of defiance streaming out, a tongue depressor poked in.
Say ahh, Satan.
Of course it was more than a medical exam; the edge of the tongue depressor scraped the inside of the mouth, capturing a fine layer of the monster for a definitive identification.

It was startling because it was familiar. It was a quaint act of submission, captured on tape and disseminated worldwide. No one Patrick knew had any response to this exhibition other than glee that the monster had been caught, and while Patrick would deny a finer moral sensitivity (if a tongue depressor shoved into his gob was as bad as Hussein got, he'd be infinitely better off than the luckiest of his victims), he couldn't keep his eyes off the doctor performing the exam. Performing the exam, that was the word. Who was this guy with the tongue depressor? Patrick knew that if he tried to talk to his more liberal acquaintances about this being an abuse of power, that the broadcast of a simple medical exam was a gross breach of ethics, they would smile at him indulgently and think that he should get a life. And it wasn't that far a drive in a pickup truck to find others who would return such talk with a look of wordless revulsion reserved for a blood enemy. No, Patrick kept quiet. He didn't need to be called naive or sanctimonious or just dismissed as an
ACLU
headcase who should care more about the troops in harm's way than about some clapped-out despot getting a free army physical. But the broadcast of Hussein being examined bothered him
because either no one was thinking about it or somebody was thinking about it, very hard, and allowed the exam to be broadcast anyway.

There were rules, of course. The Declaration of Tokyo, which he had never known about until he became aware of Hernan's situation, stated clearly that the physician shall not “countenance, condone or participate in the practice of torture” and then went on to state that the physician “shall not be present during any procedure during which torture or any other form of inhuman or degrading treatment is used or threatened.”

In this light, Hernan was guilty. If he wasn't tortured as a way of coercing his participation, then his presence alone, for whatever reason, constituted a violation of the Declaration of Tokyo. All the mitigating circumstances, all the rationalizations were nothing compared to the fact that he was present in the room. And yet violating the Declaration of Tokyo was not enough to convict; for international law to be satisfied, witnesses were needed who would say that he was involved in the act.

After twenty more minutes of questioning and cross-examination, Celia stood and shuffled sideways to the aisle. Roberto glanced at her, then returned to the activities in front of him. Patrick shifted, bracing his feet against the base of the seat in front and sliding up ever so slowly, trying to avoid attracting Roberto's attention. Always evading him. A minute passed of what seemed like a hydraulic process, his thighs aching as he finally got to his feet and slipped out of the gallery.

He expected Celia to be sitting there, crumpled and tearful just past the doors of Courtroom One, but the benches in the foyer were empty. He walked to the stairwell and leaned so far
over the railing that one of the security guards adjusted his stance, giving him a bouncer vibe. But she wasn't down there either. The hallways were quiet. She was gone.

He fought the impulse to give the guard the finger, felt the muscles in his hand tighten to stop the digit in question from extending because that was the key step, the launch code for the rest of the gesture. To lack control would be to set off another sequence of events; he would be collared and frog-marched and kicked out of the tribunal. Patrick clenched his fist and waited for the guard to turn the corner. He scanned the foyer for Celia again, but saw no one. He wanted the guard to come back, felt the need to go through the motions of self-restraint again, maybe things would come out differently. As he thought this, he found himself walking, pacing really, making zoo-lion laps of the foyer, feeling his hostility toward the guard become something larger and hotter, the shaping of an indignity. Patrick walked down the stairs to the exit and explained to the entry guards that he needed to get some air. One guard, who was younger than most at the tribunal and had seen Patrick's comings and goings, joked that they were about to install a turnstile for him. But he needed to be outside. He decided he didn't want to be caught waiting for Celia García. Not again. No, he'd keep moving and if she wanted to talk with him, then she'd have to catch up to him or watch him leave. He was outside now, heading toward the large reflecting pool in front of the Congress Centrum and just walking made him feel better, clearing the air of the tribunal gallery from his lungs and giving him respite from the Garcías and their complicated goddamned lives.

Patrick sat on a bench beside the reflecting pool, watching the fountain gurgle and froth. A bus stopped in front of the
Congress Centrum. After a short pneumatic hiss, a door swung open and from it, a line of people debarked, heading straight for the doors of the Congress Centrum, all carrying cloth bags emblazoned with a mysterious symbol. Below the symbol, Patrick could make out the words “The Hague 2005.” Patrick wondered what sort of group would choose to have a convention in Den Haag in November, what set of chronically lowered expectations would make this place seem alluring.

The movement of the fountain spume nauseated Patrick. The energy he'd had was spent fuel now, and he felt the need to close his eyes, there, beside the fountain. What was he doing here? What did these people want from him? He'd jeopardized his company and reputation to come here, and for what? A concussion and a subpoena. Hernan was saying nothing, making no effort to defend himself. But that made no difference to Celia. Celia. Faithful, stubborn Celia could not be swayed from trying to free her father, and Patrick had done exactly what she wanted. He was nothing to her except a way to free Hernan. The thought fanned his every vindictive instinct, made him want to catch the next flight back to Boston, or tell Celia that he hadn't called in the past seven years not because he was circumspect or lazy but because he was ashamed of them all, that they had lied to him and done terrible things and refused to face the truth. But he wouldn't say any of it. He knew he would always do what Celia wanted him to do.

When she had shown him that painting all those years ago and he had feigned indifference, Patrick had felt a little pearl of pleasure, the type of which he'd not yet known with Celia. The look on her face–the incomprehension, the need to rethink him as a given–had been an odd new drug, potent,
transforming. In her house that night, Patrick had sensed a person's pride and understood how it needed to be fed and how it could be starved. If he had to argue it out, he'd say that it wasn't pettiness as much as restoring the balance of power. She already had more than he, a family that may have argued and disappointed her, but a family that cared. And now, seeing the painting, it was clear that she was in possession of a technical prowess. She had talent and a vision, and in the painting it all came together.

In the years since, Patrick had come to understand that a bigger man would have put aside his disappointment and been pleased to be the first person to see such a painting, to have been in such a work, but he had not been that man. Not that night. He wanted Celia, not to be an object she worked into the scenery. She offered the painting to him, and he declined. She had been shocked by his response, he could tell. But in the end he relented and when she handed the canvas over, he had thanked her coldly and walked off into the night with it. Under the trees on that August night, he remembered smelling the pigments of the paint. It was still wet. He carried it home and put it up on the wall of his bedroom and stared at it until he fell asleep.

They didn't speak after that. He knew that Celia had every right to be upset with him, upset with herself that she had given her painting to a simple lout who couldn't appreciate it. He'd figured that she'd steam for a while and then get over it. It would be awkward for a few weeks, he'd have to duck around corners to avoid coming face to face with her, but it would evaporate into something that they'd laugh about later. But Celia would not talk to him, would not look at him. He was nothing. He was how the mop got manoeuvred around
the floor, a noise at the back of Le Dépanneur Mondial. At first it almost made him laugh: okay, okay, the silent treatment. A bit primitive but it beat screaming. But it went on, and intensified, as if she had sealed the doors and opened the valves on the freezers until the windows frosted up and his fingertips turned a shade of deep-winter blue. He would have preferred the screaming.

But then his regular life intervened. His parents returned from their holiday and school started, odd for either to be a source of such relief. He saw Celia less frequently, an occasional evening at Le Dépanneur Mondial or passing in the hallways of school. He was happy to be back in school, and told himself that he didn't care that she was there too, that Celia would be just another new kid in class. He was absorbed back into his circle of friends and wanted nothing more than for the months he spent working at Le Dépanneur Mondial to seem foreign and fleeting, like a summer camp suntan that would fade. He didn't even have the satisfaction of seeing her relegated to that lowest-caste status of new-kid-at-school either. Instead, she had violated every known law of human adolescent interaction and become popular in school. This was genetic, a chromosomal charisma, Patrick was coming to understand, as Roberto García's younger sister continued to exert a part of her personality that he had assumed didn't exist. She was smart and had enough confidence to be cleverly disdainful of the ruling-girl cliques (a double victory in the
realpolitik
of high school: once defeated, this tribe was submissive, all other witnesses to regime change flock to receive the victor as a liberating hero). Celia had triumphed. He was being left behind. It was then that he thought about quitting.