Garcia's Heart (38 page)

“With Oliveira? Absolutely not.”

“Nina told me you felt guilty–”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You'd be doing Dad a favour by meeting with us.”

“Us?”

“He wants to meet you. I'll be there. Look, Patrick, I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important.”

Patrick tried to focus on the clock, the lines slowly coalescing into digits. “What time?”

“Wait–” She paused and he could sense her hand covering the receiver, that she was speaking to someone. Was she
with
Oliveira? Oliveira was in her room or they were in a hotel lobby somewhere. But he was next to her, listening to her whisper. “What about eight o'clock? Is eight good?”

“Sure. Where?”

“The bar at the Metropole. The one near the lobby.”

“What time is it now?”

“A little past seven.”

“Okay. Okay, I'll be there,” he mumbled, too angry at himself to hear her say “Thank you” before bringing the phone down on its cradle.

The room was familiar enough now that it was negotiable in the darkness. He was able to avoid the compact desk and the wastebasket that always huddled under it, clinging to a back leg like a nursing calf. Right turn, ninety degrees, a bare left thigh that brushed against the television console and then a stumble over a pair of shoes left on the floor. The variables that the temporal lobes hadn't registered. Four steps to the
washroom with its orange ambient night light now visible, reflected in tile and mirror to produce a modest sunrise.

He washed at the bathroom sink and searched out his razor. He hadn't shaved that morning and was impressed at how the look of the stubble and the effects of a day at the beach combined with his contusion–now featuring a livid ripe-plum red crescent under the eye–to give him the look of a man sorely down on his luck, a man who might need the shelter of a doorway. So he washed thoroughly, tenderly. The alpine curves of his swollen face took more time to negotiate with the razor, even with the lights on.

It was only a meeting, he reminded himself. For all of his visceral dislike of the Democratic Voice, he could not figure out why it had taken up Hernan's cause. Why would Oliveira want Hernan freed? It was useless to ask the question, he thought, he could just as well ask van der Hoeven's murderer
why
. He would get the same reptile stare of incredulity. They were ideologues and
why
wasn't a question that begged answering.
Why
was a given, a constant in the equation. The only variable that mattered was how. He doubted the Garcías had asked why. The Democratic Voice was a lifeline in a world of dark seas and deadly currents. Regardless of what Oliveira believed, he'd at least been there to help when the Garcías' lives began to unravel.

At that moment he imagined the man who'd been arrested for van der Hoeven's murder, the Moroccan, washing himself in a sink just like this. Even with nowhere to go and nothing to say, there were still the routines of a body, the reassurances of soapsuds and toilet flushes. Something undisputedly human. A heart beat on, lungs bellowing, a gut peristaltically wringing itself like a sodden towel. Because the body was
blameless, because the body was a drone flying over a landscape. Holland or home or hell itself; each was just a landscape to the body.

He turned on his computer and checked for the arrival of any of the Globomart data from Neuronaut or, failing that, an explanation from Sanjay, or maybe just an acknowledgement from Marc-André of his reply. No new mail. He should have mail. Any meeting with Globomart would have taken place by now, he thought. If they needed his help, they would have called. And if Sanjay had actually done it–and he had wanted him to succeed in a limited way, still flailing enough to need the guiding hand of his mentor–Patrick couldn't imagine Sanjay not exulting in the triumph. He would have said something. But there was no mail.

With television full of images of a country in crisis and his computer continuing to disappoint him in new and various ways, it was a short step for Patrick to decide to go media-free until he met with Celia and Oliveira. The options were limited. The Metropole's laminated information brochure trumpeted from a stand on the desk across the room, traditionally untouched except for the page that had the room service number.
The Angel of Lepaterique
sat on the bedside table, a clump of García kryptonite whose every annotation was already familiar to him. It was here, in a chapter he'd read repeatedly over the past few weeks, that Marta García was scrutinized most mercilessly. Hernan was still more than two years away from being summoned to Lepaterique, two years of what appeared to be a normal life back home, two years of realizing that his career was never going to amount to more than what it was at that moment. Then the call for him arrived, and while Elyse's documentation of Hernan's choices
were well known, she saved particular scorn for Marta, speculating on what she knew as the calendar inched through 1981 and her husband disappeared for days at a time. On page 97, the Garcías were back in Tegucigalpa after their adventure in Detroit.

 

They are happy and young and they have come home. Hernan is now a successful doctor with a position as professor at the university, settling with two young children and a wife who has put her academic aspirations on hold to run the household on a shady street not a block from the Swedish Embassy.

But they changed during their time in America, and despite having family and friends, Marta and Hernan find themselves missing Detroit and not adjusting to life in Tegucigalpa. Marta García's letters to her sister Ana from those years speak of a “time that was expanding before me and a space that continued shrinking,” a sentiment that, according to the letters, she appears to share with her husband. Hernan is occupied with starting his practice, and one can imagine how his expectation turns into disappointment as the months pass.

It is impossible to say what angers him more, the primitive state of equipment or the realization that the prestige of his position does not extend beyond its title to include the power to affect meaningful change. The only clue is in his correspondence with the hospital administration, which details his growing frustrations with what he terms “complete indifference to the plight of the sick of Honduras.”

Then the memo from General Álvarez is written, and nine days later Hernan García appears for the first time at the installation at Lepaterique. To all outward appearances, the family carries on through Hernan's absences. Her sister's letters inquire about her health, asking if Marta, who had struggled with post-partum depression after the birth of their daughter Nina in 1980, was having recurring problems
with her mood. She writes back to her sister that she is well, getting used to the small community of families of diplomats and university professors that live in her area. She frequently brings her children to the Galería Nacional de Arte, where her daughter Celia takes a particular liking to the paintings of Pablo Zelaya Sierra, and adopts a style, some say, similar to his when she becomes an artist years later. But Marta understands that this life is a facade, a life not only incongruent with the deepening crisis in the streets of Tegucigalpa, but at odds with the anxiety that dogs her. Gunshots are heard most nights. Her husband is called away on business. Tellingly, her correspondence with Ana ends at this point, as though some truth is acknowledged that could not bear repeating.

 

In Elyse's analysis, Marta García's ability to live through those years meant she was capable of two reactions: denial or complicity. An uncaring bystander or a Lady Macbeth, either way aware of her husband's actions, able to tolerate them, able to consent. Marta García was permitted nothing beyond that, not permitted trust in Hernan. Not permitted innocence.

Marta had followed Hernan to Detroit and back to Honduras, shared a bed and a family and a life with him for more than thirty years; it was logical to infer she must have known. Faced with a husband's sudden absences, Elyse could understandably assume a woman like Marta would have asked questions, and not settled for some ridiculous story about university business–the university had almost no business to conduct and she knew it. She would have even given him the chance to explain himself.

In her book, Elyse wrote that Hernan García left Lepaterique suddenly, after that night in June of 1983, well before Battalion 316 terminated its operations, a decision Elyse viewed not as a
repudiation on his part, of course, but rather as an acknowledgement of guilt in the death of José-Maria Fernandez. Within a year the family was in Mexico, having already shed the “de la Cruz” suffix for the shortened, less traceable version of their family name. Another year passed and they arrived in Montreal. When did he admit to her what he'd done? Was it the reason they fled for a corner grocery store in a Montreal suburb? Elyse made her case persuasively. Marta knew the truth long before it came out. Held the truth and managed their escape. A wife would know. A wife would know if she wanted to know. It was a marriage, after all, a two-person secret society. Elyse made the case for complicity: Marta was too smart and she and Hernan were too close for her to be unaware.

But Patrick would disagree.

His understanding of Marta–something not known to Elyse or Lindbergh or McKenzie–came from the summer he spent with her in Le Dépanneur Mondial and from the margins of
Moby-Dick
. Patrick thought of this as he picked up
Moby-Dick
from the side table and let it sit in his hand, a full pound of Americana. When he first opened the book, in the weeks following Marta's death, he was impressed by how the smell announced itself. It was a fairly old book, the Penguin edition from the 1970s, and the pages were predictably yellow and had the sheen and texture that came with heavy, continual use. But the smell hit him like a sweet floral slap. Redolent. A stimulus wired straight to the temporal lobes, sense-memories blossoming. What was the scent that caused it all to bloom? It was vanilla and something else, something from Marta's kitchen, or from Le Dépanneur Mondial maybe, or a scent that she perhaps shared with Celia, his memories of the two becoming confused now. Primordial memory, smells: cut grass
and baking bread and Marta, somewhere in the book. Marta.

The smell of the book always led to a memory of that summer, in 1987, the summer that he and Marta shared in the store. Marta watching the Iran-Contra trials, Patrick watching Marta. To Patrick, watching her, watching with her, Marta was not a woman weighed down with the knowledge of what Hernan had done. She was a person still deeply curious about the history of her country, still reeling from the ongoing revelations of what was being done to Honduras, amazed and utterly impressed that a society that had done this could then discuss it all in the clear light of day and interrupt the soap operas to broadcast it. Patrick later reasoned a person who had been forced to share a terrible secret with her husband about his role in such lunacy would not, in good conscience, watch with genuine shock and revulsion as the details were made public. They would have kept the television off, bundled up and hidden it in a closet. No, this was the act of a woman perhaps coming to have suspicions, coming to realize the scope of the nightmare they had left behind.

After four years of having Marta's book on his shelf like a totem, Patrick finally read
Moby-Dick
in the last year, initially as a tribute to Marta García, maybe even hoping to evoke a safe García memory, but instead found himself casting the Garcías into the book. Hernan was Ahab, of course, then Ishmael, then the whale. Then Celia and Roberto took turns in a variety of cameos. And of course there was the marginalia, the notes and annotations that Marta had left alongside the text, the parsing of Melville's words for deeper meaning. An extra book, written in the margins, at times chastising or cheering Melville, clarifications, historical or biographical annotations. It was Marta's book, undisputedly; a book that
she read and reread and wrote on until it wasn't really a book any more but a document of her life as well.

It was in the margins that Marta made sense of the world, through Melville and her own hard-won understanding. There were other notations whose significance Patrick never understood: on page 26 there was a column of numbers added with the sum–$1,129.31 underlined twice. Celia's name appeared on page 112 with the word “flowers” written beside it, a single word that for the first time he found incredibly sad. He found the phrase “ask Michael Patrick” written in the margins of page 381, next to the underlined passage musing on phrenology and describing how the whale's brain was hidden deep within its head “like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications of Quebec.”

Eventually, Patrick's gaze drifted down from the title of Chapter 117–
The Whale Watch
–to the space over the lines of the first paragraph. Below a telephone number with a Montreal area code (now out of service–he tried), Patrick found a line of letters that he'd seen a number of times before, but which now stood out, arranging themselves into initials.

JMF      JG      AO

José-Maria Fernandez, Juan Guererro, Arturo Ortega. Three of the disappeared, according to
The Angel of Lepaterique
, which he had begun to read as a companion to Marta's book, cross-referencing for names and dates, worrying the details like Marta herself. And while it felt like an accusation, like evidence being considered and admitted in the mind of a friend, it could have been anything. He chastised himself for thinking that way, for the overheated Hardy Boys sleuthing.

But there were less disputable entries. On the inside back cover, written in pencil, in Marta's clear script, and taking up most of the empty space, Patrick found a summary of the hearings they'd watched together that summer, a meticulously constructed diagram that tried to make sense of the movement of money and arms and force in central America in the early eighties, along with names of the congressmen who served on the committees and the witnesses who gave testimony. He had joined along then and learned the names of all the principals too, and fifteen years later he found these very names on the back page of her book, a roll call of the Reagan administration. At the bottom of the page, she had written the letters “
CIA
” and circled the acronym repeatedly, with multiple arrows drawn from the word, indicating her understanding of the extent and direction of the agency's involvement, a hydra of influence. The darkest arrow linked the
CIA
with the name of Álvarez, a name known to every Honduran, a name that cast the connections further, closer.