Garcia's Heart (9 page)

“Beer?”

“No.” She shook her head placidly, the punchline to a joke he hadn't told.

“Beer, or wine?” He pointed at his watch to remind her that he had been there before the padlocks were due to go on.

“Her-
nan!
” she shouted into a back room, and a man materialized, six foot two and athletic-looking for a guy stepping out of the back room of a dep. He crossed his arms and leaned toward the woman.

“What is it?”

“He wants beer.”

The
dépanneur
owner turned to Patrick.

“We don't have beer.”

“But you're a dep. Every dep has beer.”

“We don't carry beer.”

“You should have to put up a sign,” he said as he looked at his watch and shook his head. “Shit, now it's past eleven.
Thanks a fucking lot. I don't know where you come from, but in this country, if you don't sell beer, you put up a sign.”

This altercation, which embarrassed Patrick whenever he recalled it later in his life, was best thought of as a geopolitical conflict. The geography involved was his neighbourhood–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a district of Montreal with correspondingly high densities of
dépanneurs
and teenagers, its 160 square blocks a testing ground for new and innovative forms of dep owner abuse, the alkali flats of smart-assing. Throughout his adolescence Patrick–endowed with a temper and a taste for the darkest vocabulary–spat profanity at French Canadians and Anglos alike and generally took pleasure in browbeating men and women of all colours and creeds who dared to serve behind the cash registers of neighbourhood corner stores. Once, he had made a Korean dep man cry and shouted at his angry, more resilient wife when he returned the next day to see if he could make him cry again.

The man looked calmly at Patrick. “Are you mildly mentally retarded?” he asked.

Just “retarded” would have provoked Patrick, but the addition of
mildly mentally
knocked him off balance with its sincere curiosity, as if concern were being offered along with a rebuke. “No,” Patrick said, already cursing himself for having answered.

“How old are you?” the
dépanneur
owner asked. The lady at the cash sat motionless, letting him go to work. She looked like she had seen this show before and didn't mind it at all.

“What?”

“You are too young for beer.”

“That's none of your business.”

“It is my business, indeed. Let's see your
ID
.”

Patrick was on his way out when the dep owner said this, but he turned back.

“You can't card me if you're not selling me beer.”

“It's my store.”

“This isn't fucking Pakistan or wherever.”

The dep owner pointed to bags of rice. “It's Spanish you see all around you. We are not from Pakistan, you idiot.”

“Fuck you.”

“Good night.”

When Patrick returned later it was with a spray can and plans to redecorate for the new Pakistani grocer. He found the back of the store in the lane and felt the exhilaration that the young and angry and slightly drunk know so well, a buzz amplified by shaking a spray can, that infectious rattle tocking away as a wall is sized up and claimed. Then came the hiss of the spray and any tagger will tell you that that alone is a trip, a serpent muse calling out, even if it isn't art, just profanity dripping down a wall. It was better than art; it was you imposing yourself on a white wall. Sovereignty and revenge in one vaguely creative act.

Patrick's bliss was halted by the sudden thud of a hand clamping onto his right shoulder while another slapped his forearm, knocking the spray can to the ground. He spun away and ran, hearing footsteps pounding down the back lane behind him. It was likely the owner of the dep, making Patrick think he was home free since a city block was all anybody over forty was good for. But five strides later, he had the sick feeling that his pursuer was gaining. At the end of the lane near the corner, Patrick felt a hand on his jacket, this time pushing him forward. He flailed and lost his balance, lurching into some bags of trash but finding enough concrete to take
some skin off his forearms. The man hauled Patrick out of the garbage and he braced for a fight but found he was too tired and embarrassed to take a swing at anyone. They both just stood there, bent over, unable to speak. In the light of the streetlamps Patrick saw the man shake and sweat and try to catch his breath and for a moment he thought about bolting again, but the
dépanneur
owner was a big guy and angry as hell and even though he was breathing hard he had already run Patrick down once and could probably do it again. He looked at Patrick and muttered, “I should call the cops” over and over between breaths until Patrick finally said, “So call the fucking cops,” but the guy was already marching him around the corner, which was freaking Patrick out, thinking he was in for some rough justice right there on Monkland. He was relieved when the guy only grabbed his wallet. He assumed the man would take whatever money he had–which wasn't much–and call it even. But the man he would come to know as Hernan García just stood there, keeping Patrick collared on the sidewalk and going through his wallet. A couple of good citizens passed them and said nothing. And while it was now, all these years later, painfully clear to Patrick why Hernan had wanted to avoid contact with police at all costs, his decision that night to deal with the matter himself–perpetrator in hand, past midnight–seemed far more ominous than a brush with the law.

But back then, Hernan García let go of the younger man, gave him his wallet, and straightened him up.

“Hingston. Where's Hingston Street?” he asked.

And in keeping with the general mood of surprise and bafflement, Patrick pointed without hesitation in the direction of the street where he lived.

His parents met Hernan García on the porch of their house a few minutes later when they answered the door to his bailiff-like poundings. They had probably been awake at that hour but even so opened the door with the understandably aggrieved look that seems appropriate when some stranger is banging on your door past midnight. There was some shouting between Hernan and Patrick's father, Roger–Patrick was reminded of a nature show's classic two-bear encounter: the two rogues swiping at each other, the bark and roar before someone ambles away. Patrick's mother, Veronica, who had popped her head out like a prairie dog inspecting the air, vanished from the doorway, ostensibly to say a rosary and call the police. Then Roger–T-shirted, mountainous, and Popeye-armed, and yet causing no apparent alarm in Hernan–looked over at his son and, seeing him, obviously decided that Hernan must have had a legitimate complaint. Roger did a wonderful homage to a concerned parent as Hernan introduced himself and then described the encounter in the alley. Patrick knew that as the culprit, caught and collared there on the porch, his fate was sealed and punishment was clearly coming. And yet his father seemed to take Hernan's earnestness as a cue to pretend that he hadn't made up his mind about his son's guilt or innocence, that they'd discuss this in full because they were all enlightened people. Patrick would have preferred the standard Roger treatment: nod at the accusation, tell the accuser that he would handle it, and yell at the kid to get inside the goddamn house. But it had been different that night; there was a polite discussion, some thoughtful nodding and excessive wrinkling of the brow, as if Patrick were six and had taken somebody's Lego. Then Roger took a stage pause, looked his son in the eye (what was this, an after-school
special?), and asked Patrick if what
Mr. García
said was true and
waited
for his son's reply.
As if.
Patrick was incapable of responding in the same spirit of improvisational theatre, choosing to nod yes and then forced to say the word when finally goaded. Hernan García listened to it all, quiet enough that Patrick thought he too was going to nod, satisfied, and walk away. But Hernan wasn't finished.

“There is still the matter of the cost of damages.”

Roger, impressively, kept his composure even through this, not slamming the door or telling Hernan to piss off and call the cops already. He listened to this stranger on his porch and agreed that in lieu of immediate payment, the debt could be worked off in Hernan's store. Patrick was incredulous. It wasn't that Roger was keen on compromise or alternative forms of restitution. No, he agreed because, in Patrick's eyes, it wouldn't cost him time or effort or hard cash. It was hardly fair, but still, it was better than the cops or a back-alley curb stomping by a wronged dep guy. Both men ponied up the decorum for a solemn, friendly handshake, the last act in that night's theatre of the absurd. As he was turning to go, García had told Patrick to show up for work at seven on Saturday morning.

 

Patrick slowly turned his head and surveyed the crowd. Most were watching Hernan. This was why people came. García then leaned to one side and his right elbow flexed and although Patrick couldn't see his hands it was clear he was fishing something out of his pocket. He brought a small pump up to his mouth, an inhaler with reddish-pink liquid inside. Even from a distance, Patrick could tell it was nitrospray. García held his hand in front of his face, the thumb and forefinger pinched together around the inhaler, as though he
were taking a photo of the gallery. His face changed: a grimace, the slightest puckering of lips, and then–Patrick could swear, from sixty feet away he was certain–a look of surprise. Patrick was alarmed and suddenly became conscious of his own heart, of the pains he'd never felt before. But in a moment it was over. The inhaler disappeared and García's face returned to its default setting. Minutes passed in this way, his expression still, a placidity unimaginable outside sleep or cults. Patrick was relieved when Hernan's brow finally furrowed, followed by the slightest elevation of his gaze. Hernan was looking out at the crowd. Patrick followed, mentally crawling into Hernan's chair and scanning along with him, trying to guess what he was seeing. This process fascinated him, in a professional way; he couldn't think of any other act so intimate and yet speculative as imagining what another person saw, projecting into someone's head and then out again. Hernan scanned past the prosecution table and up three or four lower rows of seats that were never occupied. A woman sat alone but he passed over her. Up again to the sixth row and over to the right where a young man and woman sat. There. These were the faces he had sought out. It was Roberto and Celia. Patrick was certain García must see them too.

This first glimpse of them almost drew Patrick from his chair but he stayed seated, instead slowly altering his posture, a ship listing to starboard, to get a better look at García's family, at Celia specifically. Celia and Roberto stood out from the others in the gallery so clearly that he was astonished he hadn't seen them before. Roberto sat with his arms crossed, as always, as though restrained by an invisible straitjacket, his indignation barely held in check. It was immediately evident
to Patrick–after more than ten years, across an auditorium, in another country–that he'd lost weight. Celia sat beside him. She was beautiful. The words came to him, as though some independent observer had broadcast it over the
PA
in his head. Though he knew it was trite to be suddenly struck by the beauty of a person he had always considered beautiful, it was an alarming experience to see her. He saw Celia in profile, her black hair gathered into a thick ponytail. Her eyes periodically darted down from the scene in front of her to her lap, where she was writing in her notebook.

Patrick understood he was a poor witness to history. He was the sort of person who took some consolation in thinking that, human nature being what it was, during the Nuremberg trials people undoubtedly doodled in the margins of their notebooks or dozed off or daydreamed about loved ones far removed from the atrocities under discussion. But Patrick's particular disgrace came when, during the testimony of witness C-144, Celia looked over at him and they made eye contact for the first time in more than a decade. C-144 was forgotten, all the shocks and trauma and meaningless pain, lost. The words dissolved into a hum of consecutive sounds, buccal, lingual, glottal. He saw Celia. The physical reaction was as clichéd as one would expect when one's insides are hosed down with adrenalin, when every good memory is compressed and released into one moment of remembrance and all of it is coupled to the heartbeat like the repetitive slamming of a door.
I loved her.

This experience, of course, is never complete without the trough that follows the swell. He felt sweaty and shaky and for a moment the room seemed dimly cloud-covered as he remembered that this woman that he'd lived with for three
years, staring back at him now, was someone he had already disappointed and injured, someone who likely considered him to have been one of the major mistakes in her life. As an accompaniment to watching Celia, Patrick heard the testimony from C-144–“Once you regained consciousness, did you see him then?”–followed by the sound of C-144 shuffling in his seat, noises (the chair, his joints, a sigh) audible through the microphone, untranslated. Witness C-144 continued, describing what he'd seen, what he thought he'd seen when he came to in that interrogation room in Lepaterique and Patrick thought,
Yes, this is a disgrace
. But he couldn't look away–why was the brain like that? Able to slip loose of the reins of a more serious issue for a glimpse at something else?

Celia held his gaze for a moment more and in that epoch he wondered if there was a sadder statement than
I loved her
. The severance it implied. The loss and constant accounting of the loss. He'd lost her. Celia's face showed no anger, no surprise. They were little more than strangers now. She gently tilted her head toward the proceedings as if to admonish him for taking his attention away from what was important.