Garcia's Heart (33 page)

 

Fernandez, José-Maria: Lazerenko, M. Patrick and, 230, 231, 252–54

 

Patrick imagined Elyse's interest being piqued when she found out that Hernan had influenced another young man after he left Honduras, just as he could see her falling to her knees in thanks when she discovered that the young man had gone on to become a doctor. Ah, the protegé other than the diary or sheaves of indiscriminately written correspondence, was there a more generous, unexpected gift to the biographer? The protegé as defender, as betrayer, as surrogate. Universal foil. Elyse, even he would admit, did fantastically well with this biographical device, strapping it on for a headlong rush into a psychological inquiry of the entire García clan. In her analysis, Patrick, simply put, was a project of Hernan's repentance, his way of making amends for what he realized he had done to Fernandez, little more than a child, a colleague in the making, his most personal violation of an oath. The mere facts of Patrick's life–that he worked for and befriended the Garcías, that he had fallen in love with Celia, that he had decided to become a doctor–were all preordained, according to Elyse, all Hernan's doing.

It was ingenious and psychologically nuanced and it made for compelling reading, but in this equation Patrick was nothing more than a pawn. With her formulation, Elyse
Brenman had cast doubt on many of the happier moments and relationships of his life, essentially challenging his role in it. He knew he shouldn't care. Happy is happy, and if a person had a few days, never mind a few years of happiness, it was more than several billion other people got.

Growing up disengaged from his parents, Patrick had been prone to the common childhood fantasy of imagining he'd secretly been adopted; he understood the attraction of creating an alternative life story. How it could frighten and invigorate at the same time. But it was different to have a biography imposed on you. Elyse had done that. What started out as second-rate psychologizing began to make sense to Patrick; the dead man's story had credence and soon it was part of him, inside him and declaring itself like a sore leg that still needed to be used for walking. It was enough to keep Patrick awake at night, running through an inventory of memories for examples of kindness that were now something else entirely.

I was Fernandez
: it was the thought that complicated everything for Patrick. It cast doubt on Hernan's motives at the same time it explained his actions. A monster seeking forgiveness. Every act of generosity became a repayment of a debt, and Patrick was nothing in this equation except a vehicle of possible redemption, a walk-on playing the ghost of Fernandez.

Was it there, in the alley behind Le Dépanneur Mondial, that Hernan first saw the possibility in him? On that May night, was it the darkness and the threat of violence, the startled face of a boy that made Fernandez come to mind, the recognition of the debt owed? Or was it when he saw the boy was eager and impressionable, and would be deeply affected by his stories of the nobility of a life in medicine? Patrick wondered if he'd disappointed Hernan, been less of a
student than Fernandez, failed in those ways expected when one is measured against a ghost. He put the book back on the bedside table.

The weekend. Two full days with no tribunal. Respite was elusive. He had wanted a break and now that it had come, the thought of not having the comfort of other people around him made him count the hours to the start of the next session. The room was silent. The entire hotel would be quiet. The Metropole was a business hotel, and once the work week was over it would be abandoned except for a skeleton staff and castaways like him. On occasions like this, without a companion or family to defuse the aura of the stranded traveller, he had been treated by the staff with particular kindness, almost solicitude, which he attributed to either their need to keep busy or his inability to disguise his loneliness. Patrick had the feeling the Metropole was different, and that except for Edwin and his deputies searching him out, he could have stayed in his room, in bed, all weekend without inquiries. He rolled onto his side and sat up.

It would be hours before North America woke up, before Sanjay would think to send him data, so he didn't bother with his computer. He didn't want to listen to music, and the television, well, the television never helped. So he dressed, poking his still tender head out of his sweater with all the élan of a drugged tortoise. Then the rest of his clothes, scattered on the ground in random hillocks after last night, none of them any less daunting than the sweater, each an affront to his desire to just lie back down and sleep. But there was a possibility that some of the Garcías were waiting for him, and so he got ready, and by the time he was out in the hallway he
felt almost normal again. He should be happy. He was going to the beach.

Those first months after reading Elyse's book, he wondered why Hernan needed
him
, why he couldn't have used Roberto to fulfill his debt to Fernandez. But it was impossible to reinvent your own son for such a purpose, a burden worse than calling him junior, a feat that needed twelve disciples and some spare lumber and nails. No, it needed someone new. Patrick realized this, that he may have been nothing more than in the right place at the right time, the opportunity for Hernan to redeem himself.

But being a surrogate for José-Maria Fernandez didn't explain everything. It couldn't. Celia had loved him. Yes, Elyse had made the case that Hernan's actions could be explained by Fernandez, but not Celia's. She was his daughter, and she deferred to him, but it was crazy to think that Hernan could exert that type of influence over her, to convince her that she felt that way about Patrick. Patrick refused the thought, but it crept up on him in the darkness sometimes, abetted by a lingering sense of inferiority that shadowed every memory from adolescence. What was Celia doing there in his bedroom that night? Why did she come to him? Patrick remembered the shocking ease with which he allowed himself to forget what was going on downstairs at his father's wake, how quickly he said that he loved her. The next thought was amazement that grief could be so capsized, and that any emotion could be so beyond his control. She could kill me like this, he thought, even at the time. She could walk away and he would return to being unhappy. They lay in his bed and held each other and nothing else existed. But since Elyse's book, every memory of
the Garcías had been revised, and what troubled Patrick, as much as thoughts of Hernan's motives, as much as Fernandez stalking every memory, was the memory of Celia appearing that night, appearing in his room like a second-rate adolescent fantasy. What had made her come up to his room? He wanted to believe it had been her desire that made her climb the stairs, but he was no longer sure. There had been two of them alone in a room, and everything that came from that–contact, a confession, and the explicit understanding of power–now had the possibility of meaning something else.

He and Celia had spent a few weeks that autumn meeting secretly at places downtown; he told himself they were enjoying the novelty of each other, that it was fair to keep it to themselves. But he knew they both sensed the delicacy of the situation. They talked for hours in the protective shell of public spaces. In a coffee shop on Park Avenue Celia told him how she had liked him since he had come to their house that first time for dinner, but that he'd always seemed so unhappy, an observation that stung him at first–who in their right mind would want to be with anyone they perceived as
unhappy
?–but which he took with the good humour of a man of newly reformed moods. In the library of the medical school he admitted to her that school bored him and that he didn't know if he'd made the right choice. From cafés and restaurants, they graduated to sneaking into his bedroom when his mother was out at Catholic Women's League meetings. After a month, Celia finally suggested that he come to dinner. Her parents needed to know.

He had spent three years avoiding the family and Le Dépanneur Mondial, and now he was prepared for a certain amount of wariness, even hostility
from the Garcías, especially from Hernan. It was normal. No longer the stock boy. No more Mopito. Someone else entirely. The fathers of any of the other girls he'd dated might profess indifference or resignation, but they always looked upon a boyfriend as a particular species of thief. He expected no different with Hernan.

But, in the end, he felt more welcomed in the García house than before. Hernan beamed that first time Celia brought Patrick for dinner. Marta looked happy and as in command of her family as she was of the pots that steamed in the kitchen. Nina held his hand and smiled at him. He had missed them. Even Roberto seemed to declare a truce, as though acknowledging Patrick had outlasted the statute of limitations on brotherly hostility. It was almost too easy. If they had concerns about his intentions toward Celia–and they had every right to; along with being in love with her, he was deeply committed to trying to get her into bed as often as possible–they kept these concerns to themselves. No one was
that
likeable or trustworthy. He certainly wasn't.

All this was complicated by the fact of his father's death, as Patrick felt the need to recommit himself to his mother, thinking that his presence in the house, and her life, would now be vital. He imagined the house would take on an air of permanent grief, where he'd be made to feel his presence was never more than a partial, always inadequate patronage. But he was wrong. His mother proved remarkably resilient, no tears or recriminations, with a social schedule far busier than before and the Catholic Women's League and its surprisingly fractious membership eating up her time. Patrick's sisters were around more, and their children, now teenagers, one of whom could invariably be found sprawled on the couch, gave the house on Hingston the feel more of a hostel than a funeral
home. In those first months, he even heard her talk of travel–the usual Irish Catholic tourist hot spots: the Vatican, Lourdes, maybe even Ireland, but they had drugs and crime and everyone was crazy with mobile phones, she said, and that would have put her in a mood. No, she was fine, he had to admit. Grief counsellors dispatched by the parish were given tea and cookies and sent on their way.

So Patrick reasoned that introducing Celia to her as his girlfriend, which he had avoided doing for months, would be far less fraught than he first considered. His mother would accept–no, embrace–this change in his life with her newfound equanimity. This was, of course, another miscalculation–he now understood that the more difficult moments in the first thirty-five years of his life were best chalked up to an unremitting dyslexia for women's moods; more proof in the look on his mother's face that first night with Celia at dinner–flickers of pained acceptance amid a larger motif of stoic resolve–suggesting that her only recourse to the appearance of this young woman, who was going to distract her son and ruin his chances, was to convene another wake.

He found respite at the Garcías. Hernan seemed to take genuine pleasure in overseeing his studies, leafing through the textbooks when Patrick wasn't using them, excited and at the same time a little depressed that medicine was continuing to advance without him in its ranks. It didn't take long for Patrick to realize that their relationship had changed in a fundamental way; they now shared an experience, and their conversations began falling into a routine of shop talk and collegial teasing that came to exclude the rest of the family. Patrick felt able to speak freely about his frustrations–he
was deep into January of his first year, mired in notes about metabolic pathways and genetic disorders, and his motivations for choosing medicine seemed vague and half-hearted–and Hernan would manage to say something that reassured him. And with every admission of doubt or uncertainty, Patrick sensed he was drawing Hernan into thinking about the life he'd left behind. Maybe it was that detachment, the fact that Hernan was no longer a physician, that allowed him to speak about medicine in a way that Patrick had never heard from anyone else. His words were too modest to be a sermon, too influenced by experience and loss to be a platitude. Medicine gave you a way into someone's life with the sole purpose of doing good, and there weren't many opportunities in life to do that, Hernan would say. Immersed in a community of doctors and students, it was easy for Patrick to consider medicine as nothing more than a vast mountain of knowledge to be scaled or as a job that simultaneously challenged and frustrated, but listening to Hernan talk about it was to hear a man who espoused no religion talk about righteousness, pragmatic and applied. But he'd also discovered that having this relationship with Hernan was more complicated. There were occasions, usually when discussing a topic that had undergone major change in the years since Hernan left medicine, when Patrick happened to correct Hernan. Patrick would do it innocently, offhandedly contradicting something Hernan had said, and he found that Hernan's tone would change. Hernan would become unusually argumentative, quizzing Patrick with an uncharacteristic vigour. Then came silence. At first, Patrick didn't think of these sulks as anything more than flashes of bad mood in an otherwise stalwart
character; nevertheless, he still found himself doing everything to avoid these moments, not understanding his own unease at seeing this new side to Hernan.

Down the elevator and past the sentry at the desk–not Edwin this time, someone Patrick didn't recognize–then the lobby full of echoes to the more definite assault of the outside world's noises and lights. He squinted against the daylight, glad he had only one eye that needed squeezing shut. It was cooler than the previous days, but still unseasonably warm and the sky was blue and cloudless. He worried it was just the sort of day to send the Dutch flocking to the beaches at Scheveningen.

It had been Hernan who had shown him how to examine someone, that the examination began long before the patient entered the room. Watch the way they rise from their seat, the way they carry themselves, he would say, watch how it reveals. Hernan was the one who taught him how to look in ears and hold a reflex hammer. The first heart he'd listened to after unwrapping his stethoscope was Hernan's. Hernan had told Patrick to put the earpieces in and–after twisting his hand to indicate that his protegé had put them in backwards–he took the head of the stethoscope between his two fingers and plunged it down under his shirt. “Listen,” he said, his arm deep inside the shirt, his hand nearing his armpit. “The mitral valve.” And Patrick heard it, the dull sound of two doors closing, the first a fraction louder. A guided tour then began, with Hernan occasionally listening himself to ensure he was in the right position before handing the earpieces back to Patrick. “Close your eyes,” he said, “and try to imagine the blood moving.” He tried, but the sounds were all the same, still only of doors closing. The tricuspid valve came next before Hernan moved the head of the stethoscope to an area
at the base of his neck. “Now,” he said, “the aortic valve.” Patrick tried to look interested for Hernan's sake, as he was clearly enjoying himself. Patrick listened: lub-dub, lub-dub. Indistinguishable from the heart sounds heard elsewhere. Then, Hernan lifted a finger and mouthed the word “Listen.” He clamped his lips shut and then strained forcefully, his colour changing as seconds passed. He looked at Patrick expectantly. Patrick didn't know what to make of it until he heard something different, two things really, the second heart sound become fainter, an echo of its previous self, and a whooshing sound, a low rumble that rose in pitch and intensity as though it was a truck barrelling past on the highway. He looked up at Hernan to find him pale, a shade that even then he knew meant a person was in danger of passing out. Hernan almost fell forward into him before righting himself. He slumped back into his chair, hyperventilating, his colour now returning, his forehead wet with perspiration. Hernan smiled as if he'd just performed a magic trick and took the head of the stethoscope out from under his shirt. Patrick remembered being mystified at the whole spectacle and embarrassed that he didn't understand the point of the demonstration.