Garcia's Heart (26 page)

If Patrick remembered anything about that autumn, other than the ascension of Celia García to the top rung of the school's social ladder, it was the panic he had felt.
NDG
had always been his home, and he had never wanted to live anywhere else, but now he was overwhelmed with the thought he would never leave
NDG
. Celia brought into full focus his fear that the people he admired and envied would grow and achieve and leave. If he didn't change, he would be stuck. And he couldn't tolerate that happening in front of Celia García.

Even though Patrick loved Le Dépanneur Mondial, he felt he needed to stop working there. He found Hernan in the storeroom one afternoon and stammered through the usual things about school starting and needing to devote himself to his studies, but it was tough to convince even himself. Hernan, no doubt aware of Patrick's recent restlessness around his daughter, rightly seemed to sense the impulsiveness of the decision and the reasons behind it, and offered a compromise. In the end, Patrick was dissuaded from quitting and, instead, wound up working fewer hours on selected days, able to insinuate himself into the schedule without crossing Celia's path.

His new shifts coincided with Marta's time alone in the store. At first they were quiet around each other, each attending to their own tasks and passing their time together in silence. But over that year, a sense of companionship grew. It was through Marta that he learned the nuances of chat and gossip, both foreign dialects to a sixteen-year-old boy.

Sometimes Marta would mention
the family
but never Celia by name, as though understanding the needs of someone trying to break a habit. And he liked to think that he gave
something to her in return, that he became her confidante during those shifts. She had a family, like him, but, like him, she was alone. And so it all seemed a part of that kinship when Marta admitted to him that she wished to go back to school when her children were older, or when, shocked that he had never read Melville, she pledged to get him a copy of his complete works. Patrick had been around people whose energy or good humour was infectious, but with Marta, he was surprised to find that another person's curiosity could be just as affecting. Despite being uninterested in politics, to his surprise he spent countless shifts watching the televised Iran-Contra hearings with her on the little black-and-white portable behind the counter, as she gave him a history of the politics in the region and described the roles played by the central characters. And while she never stated her political beliefs to Patrick, it was clear through her frowns and comments that she was upset with the revelations of the trial. She practically hissed when Oliver North took his oath before testifying. More revealing later for Patrick was her desire to conceal from Hernan her interest in the hearings. He became a co-conspirator, warning her when Hernan or a customer came into the store so that the television could be switched to a
novella
or another program more appropriate for the wife of a local merchant.

When he met up with old high school friends years later, they would point to that time with wonder and disbelief. “You changed,” they'd say in that way that wasn't always meant to be an accusation. He tried to explain it, always stopping short of crediting the Garcías. But he was never the same because of them. He had an awareness of the world and an idea of what role he could play, courtesy of Hernan; from
Marta he'd received unexpected friendship and the knowledge that he belonged in some way to that tribe of loners, the curious, the bored. This explanation suggested only a positive impulse, the guiding mentor, success as a result of a quest for personal improvement. But Patrick understood how much more complicated the Garcías' effect on him was, that the source of motivation in his life had been far less noble. The real legacy of those early years, measuring himself against the Garcías, suffering through disappointments with Celia, was that he felt unworthy. He understood himself to be inferior. How could you explain that to people? It was an inescapable feeling, and not one for which he blamed the Garcías, but it was something he promised himself would change.

He cloistered himself and began to read. He applied himself, viewing every book, every fact and principle as the next necessary step in the razing of an inferior intellect, a purging of ignorance. The transformation didn't go unnoticed: anyone seriously applying themselves in high school automatically becomes the object of scrutiny. He was suddenly considered different and reclusive and, by virtue of being more difficult to classify in the taxonomy of high school, vaguely threatening. There he was, lumped in with his school's queer pioneers, proto-goths, and Dungeons & Dragons players, all happily set aside from the social hierarchies of school because of their indifference to them. If this had been the world of the early twenty-first century, his sudden detour would have red-flagged him to a team of school psychologists who would then break down the door to intervene and “risk stratify” him, but it was the eighties and people were still fairly relaxed about ninety-degree turns in behaviour as long as it didn't involve drugs.

His grades, which hadn't been bad to begin with, improved dramatically, a change that perplexed his teachers for a semester until they found more important things to be perplexed about. He achieved and was grimly satisfied. And, as with any achievement that occurs within the confines of adolescence, the desire to escape replaced the fear of being trapped. His parents' house, even Le Dépanneur Mondial, all of
NDG
in fact, seemed to be a fenced-in place where he now saw people walking the grid of streets in an agitated trance. But now it had become an escapable place. It was then that he felt the desire to leave, not as panic but as a pleasurable ache in the stomach. Eighteen months later he was able to quit Le Dépanneur Mondial for more substantive reasons than hurt feelings.

 

Patrick was still sitting on the bench, eyes closed to the mid-afternoon sun, when he felt someone shake his shoulder. He prepared himself to get up, expecting to face a security guard just doing his job, but it was Celia standing in front of him.

“I saw you leave,” Patrick said.

“I needed a break.”

He was going to ask her where she'd been, tell her that he'd been looking for her, but he stopped himself. He was sore, and shifted his weight on the bench. It was different from the benches outside the courtroom, but they were equally uncomfortable, sharing a design that numbed legs and prompted movement after a certain amount of time. He was going to tell her he was leaving Den Haag. He couldn't help Hernan, he'd say, and she would just have to take it. But when he looked at her he didn't see what he'd expected, a visage held like a shield, the look of a lieutenant called upon to enforce order
in a disintegrating situation. Celia looked like a daughter contemplating loss. She sat down on the edge of the bench.

“Your mum didn't know you were coming here.”

“You spoke to my mum?”

“I run into her. Same neighbourhood. Same shops. She looks well.”

“Indestructible.”

“She talks about you a lot.”

“Oh yeah? Was she able to tell you what I do?”

“She doesn't know, really. But she's proud of you.”

Patrick's mother wouldn't speak to him for months after he told her that he wasn't intending to practise medicine. The pornography research era was another low point; this time she admitted to him that she'd begun to actively disavow any knowledge of his work, not through a sense of shame but just because it was all too complicated to explain to people. Becoming wealthy had rehabilitated him somewhat–the Caribbean cruise he'd sent her on for her birthday was more easily explained than the work that financed it.

He and his mother had grown closer in the last few years, both of them realizing how much they were a version of each other, especially in their darker moments. A wariness so often mistaken for indifference, a tendency to lose patience and hold grudges, a temper like a tire-fire, building slowly but burning hard. Now his mother left a weekly message, always at a time she knew he wasn't home, always accusing him of call-screening. He'd retaliate with calls of his own, trying to gently goad her into some red-necked declaration by discussing the latest common outrage, but she refused to be baited. And he was certain that while they were talking, she knew, they both
knew, that this amounted to a particular type of fondness and that it would do fine.

He had come to recognize that his mother was a certain kind of Montrealer. Five generations off the boat from Queenstown, two generations removed from the Irish ghettos of Griffintown, and she was officially enclaved. The neighbourhood of
NDG
had been transformed around her into one of the more cosmopolitan places in the world, a fact seen by her as little more than a series of continued assaults on her concept of what Montreal used to be. In her mind, the arrivals aggravated the departures. Friends were gone: dead, or to Toronto. The churches emptied out on her. Even the priests disappeared. Since Patrick's father died, she hadn't withered as much as crystallized into an archetype. Happily. She was unmoved by society's repeated attempts to encourage her to learn French, convert to metric, stop smoking, treat people with different pigments or religions as equals, oppose the seal hunt, recycle, get more calcium in her diet, or embrace gay rights. Decades' worth of grime had collected on the unadjusted dial of her little transistor radio, testament to her only connection to the outside world: a reactionary, staunchly Anglo-Montreal outfit that echoed her sentiments and where the morning show personalities served longer, and with more clout, than most popes.

Nothing was going to get her to change. Instead, she carried forward, buoyed by twin currents of nostalgia and paranoia (maybe this was genetic, a bequest from her immigrant ancestors), remembering the summer of 1967 as both the high point in her city's life and the moment when she first saw the slide to what it would become. It wasn't so much intolerance as indifference. She delighted in telling Patrick that if Quebec separated from Canada, she would just send her taxes to a
different place, and if they ran the gay pride parade down the street, well, she had curtains and knew how to draw 'em. She just didn't care, which she liked to remind Patrick was the most honest form of tolerance that existed.

But she was never indifferent to the Garcías. She was always, in her ironic way, wary of them, immigrants–“And what sort of immigrants from Latin America don't go to church?” she liked to ask–with their own store and strange foods and language and with a daughter distracting her son from making something of himself. Her attitude toward Celia had softened considerably in recent years. Maybe it was Marta's death, he thought. She'd even bought one of Celia's paintings. Classic.

“My mother always liked you,” Patrick said, deadpan, casting a line onto that still surface. The line tightened. She smiled a little and Patrick's legs began to tingle.

 

TWELVE

Patrick returned alone to the gallery in Courtroom Number One. None of the other spectators seemed to notice his reappearance, which made him worry that he had become a regular. The crowd had thinned out, the justices yawned more frequently and less discreetly; yes, Friday afternoon was a global concept, ratified in the tribunal. Patrick watched Roberto sit motionless in his seat two rows ahead and wondered if his eyes were closed. He scanned the crowd to see every posture slumped except for that of Elyse Brenman. As usual, Elyse was busy, ruinously vigilant.

Although Elyse had been clear in apportioning guilt, Patrick had never asked her what she really thought of Hernan. If she thought he was sick or deluded or simply another man caught up in events. He'd read that journalists who had profiled people accused of terrible crimes sometimes ended up with ambivalent feelings toward their subjects, and he wondered if searching for that redeeming quality was part of a larger protective mechanism a person needed to have in order
to spend months with a monster. Perhaps ambivalence was simply the inevitable result of creating a character complex enough to be worth writing about.

As he studied Elyse, Patrick realized that most of what he knew about Hernan García's life before 1986 hadn't come from the man himself. It had come from what Elyse had written or what Marta García had told him. And if Elyse, in her telling, could not admit Hernan having any human worth, then it was these memories of Marta that had offered redemption. Reminders of decency and warmth. An assertion of a personality beyond what had been alleged. Until recently, it was their versions of the man that Patrick had weighed, the veracity of their contradictory testimony he had been judging. Hernan rested in the prisoner's dock, and Patrick wondered what had to happen for a life to double on itself, for separate trajectories to form and diverge, and if living this lie took as great a toll as another having to discover it.