Garcia's Heart (14 page)

“They left another six boxes of plantains out front.”

Patrick said nothing, watching the girl. She had the blackest hair he had ever seen. She wore a dress with flowers on it. This was Celia García.

“Go get the plantains.”

“What are plantains?”

“They are a type of fruit. To you they would look like bananas, except for the fact that they are in boxes that look like boxes. Go.”

Patrick remembered passing Celia. He had often thought about that moment. He would have loved to be able to say that he saw his future walk out in front of him, or that he'd heard music or had goosebumps. But his first memory of her
was a solitary sensation. Synapses formed at that moment, a new circuit was created, and Celia García was fused into him. Just the sight of her in a hotel room activated a sleeper cell of memory, entraining other synapses, long dormant, now powering up. A network of Celia.

Nina ran through the television channels with Celia and Patrick watching from the corner. She settled on an English-language news channel and he saw Celia hover closer to her younger sister. The news everywhere was mostly bad and here it was worse: sirens throughout the city and word of more citizens brought in for questioning, some of them in Den Haag, all in the wake of the politician's murder in Amsterdam. Any news aside from Hernan's problem would be a diversion, he supposed, but not this. Celia, preferring not to have Paul watch Muslims marched off to police precincts or have another viewing of the politician's body covered by a sheet, took the remote and changed the channel to something else. She handed the controls to Nina and then threw up her arms in frustration as her sister promptly turned back to the news program.

“What was going on there?” Nina asked, staring at the television.

“Someone was killed by an extremist,” Celia whispered, even though Paul was rolling on the bed, oblivious.

“What for?”

Celia looked at her, obviously not wanting to explain the geopolitics of the situation in front of her son. Patrick sat down on the bed. He'd seen this montage, the stock footage of the politician, the police staring at the sheeted body, unaccustomed to this sort of thing.

“It's about head scarves,” he said. “I was watching it last night. The politician wanted to ban head scarves in school, I think.”

The covered body disappeared. Nina pressed the remote repeatedly until she found something for Paul, settling on an animated show that featured exploding underwater animals of some kind. She and Paul sat back on the bed and watched. Celia browsed through the basket of delicacies sitting on the minibar, fondling the punitively priced cashews and glancing over in his direction. He didn't have the heart to tell her to take what she wanted, that Neuronaut had a corporate account with the hotel chain that made cashews seem like nothing more than, well, cashews. She took a bottle of water from the basket and sat down by the window with that view of Den Haag.

“How's your father been holding up?”

“He's all right, I guess. It's been difficult for us, his silence.”

“I thought he'd at least talk to you.”

“Not to us, or di Costini. Certainly not to the tribunal.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.”

“I saw him use some medication.” Patrick made the gesture, pinching the empty air before his slightly open mouth, the internationally recognized sign for someone using a medication inhaler.

“He's doing all right,” she said dismissively.

Nina and Paul had turned up the volume enough that he could fire a pistol without much notice. Patrick grimaced and leaned in to speak to Celia.

“Jesus, Celia, could you give it a rest? It's me.”

“Not a word from you. Seven years since this started, not a word.”

“I'm here now. That should mean something.”

Celia's face drew tight. “I had to get di Costini involved to get you here. It's been seven years for my father”–she made a sweeping gesture with her hand, as if blaming all of coastal Holland, blaming the tides–“and in all that time, no calls from you. Nothing.”

One of the characters on the television screamed, and the room filled with the shrieking, metallic sound of a circular saw and Paul's laughter. Celia leaned in this time: “You've already made up your mind.”

He said no but it didn't matter; she'd already turned to look out the window.

The ring tone of a cell phone, difficult to discern at first but rearranging itself into a tinny digital chorus of “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” sprinkled onto the noise coming from the television. Celia and Patrick turned to see Nina stand up from the bed, rummaging through her purse. She flipped open a phone.

“
Oui, âllo
?” Nina said, as she plugged her free ear for a moment and then, grimacing with the insufficiency of the action, reached for the remote control and muted the room into a vacuum of deep-space silence. As Patrick watched from across the room, Nina aged ten years. She spoke, and it was evident that she wasn't talking to a friend or even an acquaintance. Chiding and hectoring, she spat out a termination to the conversation and snapped the phone shut. She barely had time to glower when the phone rang again. The tone of her voice changed; maybe this time she was
speaking as the superior to the poor slave-wager she had just finished haranguing. In thirty seconds, frank disgust, incredulity, bemusement, and then ironic concern found a way onto her face. It was a wonder to Patrick the way the facial muscles arranged themselves in the same way even though the conversation involved someone who had no way to appreciate it. Even her free hand gestured to the back wall of the hotel room, culminating in what could plausibly be the sign-language equivalent to “You'll never work in this town again.”

With a discreet beep, she closed the phone again, looking like someone who very much missed the satisfactions of an era when a phone could be slammed into its cradle.
Our little girl is all grown up
, Patrick thought.

“We'll be getting our produce from Laurendeau. As. Of. Today,” she said in a way that would sound perfectly natural coming from the mouth of a pharaoh. As if to acknowledge that the news meant nothing to either Patrick or Celia, Nina turned away: “Excuse me, I have to make a few more calls.”

“Wow. So she
is
running the store.”

“Since last year.”

“And Roberto?”

“There were some problems. He's still at the store. But Nina's the boss.”

Six phone calls later, a contract was agreed to and a
GPS
-tracked truck carrying crates of iceberg lettuce and California seedless grapes had been diverted to Montreal. Someone at the store would be there to accept the delivery that night at eleven. The next morning there would be fresh produce available at Le Dépanneur Mondial.

“Jesus, she should be on Hernan's defence team.”

“Di Costini won't take her calls. It drives him crazy that some Garcías talk so much while others won't talk at all.”

Nina put the phone away and sat back down on the bed. She yawned and patted the bed for Paul to come over and sit with her.

“Do you believe he's guilty?”

“He's pleaded not guilty,” Celia said.

“That's not an answer.”

“Did you speak with di Costini?”

“Yes. A lot.”

“And?” Celia said, turning up the volume on the television again so Paul would be distracted.

“It's not like an insanity defence. There isn't precedence for it in trials like this. It's hard to argue Hernan has an abnormal brain when he's shown excellent moral reason and judgment all his life except for the six weeks in question.”

He said this matter-of-factly; it was an argument he'd repeated to di Costini over and over again. But looking at Celia, her lips pursing into a grimace, it must have been her last, faint hope. She fixed him with her red-rimmed eyes.

“Do
you
think he's guilty?”

Patrick paused. “I think he did the things they say he did.” Celia put her head in her hands. She glanced over to Nina and Paul, both in another time zone of thought. Patrick touched her shoulder and leaned over: “But he could have been coerced, he could have been tortured himself. Nobody knows. Did he ever say anything?”

“Nothing.”

“And he won't see you?”

Celia lifted her head and said, “No.”

He was afraid that she would start crying then and there, but she maintained herself, likely because Paul and Nina were only five feet away. Patrick noticed the vermilion of her lower lip blanch, and the muscle near the angle of her jaw flicker, and understood he was seeing a person accustomed to maintaining composure through pure will.

Celia rose and told Paul he needed to go to bed. He had been staying up later since they got to Den Haag, she explained. Patrick offered to walk them back to their
pension
or to call a cab but they declined. Celia collected Paul and shepherded him toward the door, but little Paul's head was still turned and eyes fixed on the screen. Patrick turned off the squalling television and said goodnight, watching the three of them pad down the hallway. He was ashamed of the relief he felt once the door was closed. The room was quiet with the television off, and he spent fifteen minutes examining himself in the mirror. His right eye, visible only when he tenderly separated the swollen lids, was bloodshot. But he could still see from it. The cheekbone was red and tight with the bruising and shouted out disapproval as he tried to wash it.

He thought it was unfair of Celia to chastise him about not calling; it wasn't as though he hadn't agonized about speaking to Hernan most days for the last seven years. The urge to call had been, of course, strongest right at the start–yes, he
had
wanted to declare solidarity with him, to express his incredulity at the charges. But he hadn't called. And then, of course, Marta had died and it was as if her death was a more explicable disaster, one for which he had a ready-made response. He wrote to Hernan, yes, he had contacted him
then, but how could he raise the issue of the allegations as his friend was burying his wife?

Even so, there
had
been contact in the last five years, but perhaps Celia didn't know about the worn-out, annotated copy of
Moby-Dick
that Hernan had sent to him weeks after the funeral, Marta's copy, the margins festooned with notes. Along with the book, Hernan had included a letter–perfunctory, not a word about the accusations he was facing–saying that Marta wanted him to have this particular book. No other explanation. It was an act, an object, that mystified Patrick at the time.

It was a failure of belief, he eventually thought. His belief. If he truly had faith in Hernan, that would have trumped any accusation. But that wasn't fair; after all, Hernan was the one who taught him to objectively assess the world and to consider the evidence, who taught him that dispassion was more worthy of an educated man than blind loyalty, and it became a mantra to him that he repeated over and over again as he made up his mind about the new life of Hernan García. Evidence was stronger than faith. He didn't call. But still, he could have called–Celia was right about that. He could have called even if he doubted Hernan's story (
Hernan's
story?
Hernan
offered no story, he offered silence). And if he had called Hernan? Or Celia, for that matter? Well, what he would have said was another issue altogether. He could imagine the agony of silences in that conversation. How did a person make up small talk about accusations of torture? Of murder?

The sad fact was that one of the reasons he refused to give Elyse Brenman an interview was that everything he had to say about the situation sounded simplistic and false. He could go on the record and say Hernan was “a good man” or that
Hernan had “the highest ethical standards” but he had nothing that could convince anyone that Hernan was innocent in the face of accusations and witnesses and mounting evidence. Good character was no longer a defence against such charges. People had grown accustomed to normal, apparently healthy minds committing depraved acts, inured to the recurring televised puzzlement of neighbours and friends as a backyard gravesite was dug up and another monster in their midst was revealed.

Elyse probably wouldn't have believed it if Patrick had told her how much he had learned in a week of working with Hernan, about honest effort and consideration, about how to do a job for the sake of it, the beauty of it, even if it were only moving plantains on a dolly. He assumed she wouldn't understand the feeling he had in the store, how Marta García's fretful gaze dissolved after that first day, becoming a smile that was modestly held in check for the most part, brought to full bloom when her children or Hernan appeared. By week's end Patrick had earned her smile–how important that was to him, how he felt like an ass for the way he had behaved to her, to anyone behind a counter, minding their business in every sense. How could he explain to anyone what the Garcías would come to mean to him, the friendship they showed a person who had tried to cause them harm? He thought at first that they were afraid of him in some way, that they considered him another bewildering item in the cost of their admission to this country, that they accepted him because of some weakness they sensed in themselves. But they were so unlike anyone he had met. They were so happy together. They weren't weak and they didn't need anyone, certainly not Patrick. He needed them.

Patrick could have told Elyse about the men and women who came to the store for Hernan's advice and opinions, people who didn't care that he wasn't a doctor any more. Hernan tended to them when no one else did. Would anyone know how heroic that was to the teenager who witnessed it? It was too difficult to explain how complicated heroism was, how the same act became something new when it was viewed later.

Elyse wouldn't have been interested in the effort the Garcías put into Le Dépanneur Mondial. Details about Hernan being up at five o'clock to receive the day's fresh bread, or the Mozart that he always made sure could be heard throughout the store, or the fact that Le Dépanneur Mondial would not sell alcohol or cigarettes or lottery tickets–the economic cornerstone of the dépanneur industry, those details would only confuse her readers. Her readers weren't told of the irony of his discovery that day in Le Dépanneur Mondial, that Hernan had been found out because he'd refused to sell lottery tickets. Because of principle and the willingness to defend his principle, Hernan was in Den Haag. Elyse's readers wouldn't appreciate the irony of the lottery ticket that never existed. Her readers would know only that a former victim came face to face with a man he regarded as his torturer. Indignation needed to be carefully crafted and could not admit such things as irony. There was so much Patrick couldn't tell her.