Garcia's Heart: A Novel - Hardcover

Durcan, Liam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312367082 ISBN 13: 9780312367084

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007

Synopsis

In this searing debut novel, neurologist Patrick Lazerenko travels to The Hague to witness the war crimes trial of his mentor, Hernan García, a Honduran doctor accused of involvement in torture. Discovered in Montreal years later, García has been extradited to the famous criminal court, supported only by his family and an advocacy group whose motives seem questionable at best.

At the trial, Patrick encounters the ambitious journalist who has built her career on the case. She is convinced that Patrick knows more than he is admitting and won’t stop until she finds out what it is. The defense attorney has his own ideas for Patrick as well, hoping to persuade him to use his latest neurological research to vindicate García. The only one who has asked nothing of Patrick is García himself. After entering a plea of not guilty, García has refused to say a word to anyone.

As García’s supposed crimes are revealed, Patrick wrestles with what truth there may be behind the accusations, haunted as he is by his own youthful memories of the man and his family. He must also contend with seeing García’s daughter, Celia, his former lover. Their relationship ended years before, but he is consumed by his memories of his love for her.

But it isn’t until García’s shocking intentions come to light that Patrick begins to realize that however sophisticated his knowledge of the brain may be, it will take more for him to understand the human heart.

About this title

About the Author

Liam Durcan’s first book, the story collection A Short Journey by Car, was chosen by Canada’s Globe & Mail as one of the Top 100 Books of 2004. His fiction has been published in The Fiddlehead, Zoetrope, The Antigonish Review, and Maisoneuve. García’s Heart is his first novel. Durcan is a neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Hospital and an assistant professor at McGill University. He lives in Montreal with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Garcia's Heart
ONE"Going to see the Angel?" the cab driver said, and smiled like a man who knew for certain he'd won a bet.All Patrick Lazerenko had done was get into the cab and ask to go to the tribunal building at Churchillplein. The real destination was obvious to the cab driver. At this time of year, with the hotels catering almost exclusively to dark-suited people on official business, Patrick had the look of a tourist. Standing among a group of businessmen in the lobby of the Hotel Metropole and watching them disperse into the Den Haag drizzle, he had already begun to feel conspicuous, almost wishing he could pick up a briefcase and join their ranks for a day of bloodless regulatory triumph. Other than business, there wasn't much reason to be in Den Haag in November. What was left of the tulips had been interred for weeks, and the jazz festival was a memory of someone else's summer. Patrick wasn't surprised by what the cab driver said. The only public spectacle was taking place at the War Crimes Tribunal building where a man who had come to be known as the Angel of Lepaterique was on trial. It annoyed him to be so easily gauged, and he almost leaned forward to tell the cabbie to mind his own business, but instead he just nodded and said "Yes" in a squeaky voice, a bubble of last night's sleep still clinging to a vocal cord.Patrick didn't enjoy travelling and this trip hadn't begun well. He'dslept poorly on the flight from Logan--sometimes extra legroom isn't the issue--and the attentions of the first-class stewardesses, which he thought he'd gotten used to, felt like the clumsy interventions of a special-needs teacher. There had been delays with the trains from Schiphol, saddling him with an extra hour to study the fairly limited palate of greys offered by the skies around Amsterdam. He'd assumed it was raining but hadn't bothered to go up to the window to check. By early evening he had arrived in Den Haag and a half-hour later found himself propped up against the reservations counter of the Hotel Metropole, trying to stay awake through the surprisingly elaborate process of check-in, craving the chance to close his eyes, hallucinatory bursts of REM sleep intruding and almost tripping him up as he concentrated to sign his name. Hours later, he awoke in a dark, compact room, got up to undress and then went back to bed, returning to a dream where everything seemed to slowly spin. He awoke again, coming to the surface of sleep's muddy pond for a breath of air that was really the voice of his wake-up call. It was past ten when he finally got out of bed.As if obliged to point out that Den Haag had more to offer than genocidal criminals, the taxi driver mentioned a few local landmarks worth seeing as they stopped and started through traffic. "The old city," the driver said for clarification, taking pains to make eye contact with Patrick in the rear-view mirror. Patrick thought he must have seen some of this already--cobbled streets and a foreign style of architecture, the theme-park reassurances of European cities--details glimpsed on the ride from the train station. But maybe that was Amsterdam. Or Brussels, from last year. Here, along Johan de Wittlaan Boulevard, the taxi driver explained that it was mostly hotels. Many looked nicer than the Metropole.The traffic was made up almost entirely of trucks, other taxis, and what appeared to be a scattered fleet of black S-class Mercedes. Every time he looked through the windows into the back seats of other cars, he saw people talking into their mobile phones. He could remember when the sight of all these people talking on their phones would have seemed sophisticated, but that was another time. Now the world was filled with people for whom the choice of ring tone wasthe truest declaration of personality. Even his mother--every digital clock in her house perpetually blinking 12:00, the Greenwich Mean Time of the technologically impaired--had a phone. Now, seeing someone just sitting in a back seat doing nothing made him wonder what was wrong, if they'd lost their phone or had no one to talk to.A light rain began to fall and the brake lights of the taxis ahead blurred between swipes of the wiper blades. He wondered whether all roads leading to the courthouse were similarly crammed, full of taxis ferrying people with purpose, pouring toward a place where the truth was wrung out. In Boston, he spent almost all his time at work, where he had become used to being the most focused person in the room, the most highly trained, with the most declared competency, so travelling north on Johan de Wittlaan he felt detached, a guest species accidentally transported into the midst of a bustling, exotic ecosystem. If not for the circumstances, it would have been refreshing.The cab manoeuvred to an outer lane and without warning pulled into a parking lot. A tall, black iron fence with a gateway stood in front of them."This is it?"The taxi driver tilted his head and pulled his shoulders up into a shrug that acknowledged the anticlimax of arrival."You'll need your passport."Patrick fished some new Euros out of his wallet. He got out of the cab and thanked the driver, who said, "Good luck in there" in a tone bleached of any sarcasm or sympathy. The rain had stopped and Patrick took his first good look around. He faced a fence of wrought-iron bars, a cartoonish accessory to the moment, lacking only the clang of a cellblock door being slammed.To his left across a plaza, in a spot the gods had obviously chosen to take a great jagged crap, the Congress Centrum loomed like a postmodern mother ship. A huge fountain fronted it, its pool duly reflecting the Congress Centrum's facade and another oblong swatch of grey Dutch sky hanging at an awkward angle. It reminded him of a Zeppelin crashing to earth.He turned around and looked through the iron fence again. Had he not been dropped off in front of it, he would have passed the tribunalbuilding without a second thought. It was smaller than he imagined it would be; three storeys of neo-classical granite, a design Albert Speer's mother would be proud of, without any marking to indicate what went on inside. He had read that the tribunal building once belonged to an insurance company, which now, looking at it, made complete aesthetic sense. Once past the gate, he was ushered into a guardhouse a short distance from the entrance. There, he presented his Canadian passport to a UN official in a kiosk and received a blue ticket stamped with the date.He was a physician--at the tribunal that designation alone would make people assume a professional interest in forensics, which he would deny--and as such, he was entitled to a special tribunal pass, a pink ticket, instead of the blue one. But it wasn't as though a pink-ticket holder was granted any special privileges, no all-access pass to go behind the scenes and meet the star of the show. All the pink ticket meant was having to fill out forms and list credentials, so he'd decided to skip it.It satisfied him to come to the tribunal that morning as a nameless citizen, happy to be mistaken for another tourist cruising through the zoo to see what monsters had been let out for display. He wanted to be a nobody in the gallery, as anonymous as a person can be after showing his passport and declaring an interest in such proceedings. He cleared security--a series of metal detectors and several stern questions as he emptied his pockets and took off his belt; an elaborate exercise, but nothing more strenuous than boarding an overseas flight--and after presenting his passport and the blue ticket again, he was finally free to climb the stairs to the visitors' gallery.Patrick eyed the small radio receivers used for simultaneous translation of court proceedings that sat in a rack just outside the entrance to the gallery. He picked one up and, for the first time since leaving Boston twenty hours before, felt an uneasiness that until that moment had been suppressed by the details of travel. He paused and then went in.Patrick braced himself to see his friend sitting there, unspeaking, dressed in that plain blue shirt that the world had seen him wear in the television coverage, but to his relief the booth where the accusedwould be seated was empty. There were sixty or so spectators in the gallery, and he found a place, dividing the big plush pout of the folded auditorium seat. He put on the earphones and waited to hear that detached form of language known as translator-talk, a cousin dialect to Dutch taximan-speak, but there was only a faint staticky hissing. Below the gallery, a man who looked to be in his fifties was on the witness stand, motionless and silent. Beside the witness, three justices dressed in black robes were reviewing documents. Patrick had memorized their names and was trying to match them with the faces he saw. The prosecution and defence teams were also intently flipping through large black binders. No one was saying anything and it looked to Patrick like a study group of honour students. He recognized one of Hernan's appointed lawyers, Marcello di Costini, staring down through a pair of dauntingly stylish glasses at the pages before him. Patrick had come across the lawyer's photo on the tribunal's Web site, where he'd spent hours reviewing Hernan's case information sheet, but it didn't do the man justice. Even in a moment like this, as the lawyer joined his colleague in a search through another binder, Patrick could see that di Costini was one of those for whom charisma was just another dominant trait, like his height, or his wit, or his wind-blown hair that had likely been styled by a ride through the countryside in an Alfa Romeo convertible. He would have been jealous if not for the fact that he had spoken several times to di Costini and found him interesting and good-humoured in the face of his client's recent turn in behaviour. Hernan García de la Cruz, after entering a plea of not guilty, was refusing to speak to anyone, including Marcello.Hernan's silence--a stance interpreted in various media outlets as either principled, canny, or arrogant--had become the big, inexplicable development of the proceedings. After the initial incredulity and tactical regrouping, Marcello seemed to have taken his client's vow of silence in stride: "He is the first client I am certain will not perjure himself," he had said to Patrick about a month before, during one of their first telephone conversations.This was not to say that Hernan had disengaged from the trial. On most days that the tribunal was in session, the television camera showedhim seated in the defendant's bulletproof glass kiosk, scribbling the occasional note that he allowed no one, not his family, not the judges, not di Costini, to see. To Patrick, watching from the safety of an overdesigned living room in Boston, Hernan's recent appearances on the evening news revealed a man who had undergone a radical physical change--a deterioration accompanied his silence, causing alarm and adding urgency to Patrick's thoughts of going to Den Haag. The man had aged. When he was shown being moved into and out of the courtroom, Hernan walked like a man crossing an icy road. The features of his face were traced deeper, as if by concession to the demands of public villainy, making every expression more severe.The lawyers sat at tables arranged into a triangle. They continued to speak quietly among themselves, until one of the justices found the transcript of previous testimony they had all been looking for. Each of the participants kicked into sudden motion, as if the line of text was a power cord restoring current.A lawyer for the prosecution approached the witness--number C-129 according to the updated docket--and asked him in English how long the electrical shocks had been applied to his feet. There was a pause as the man, weathered skin drawn over broad Indian facial features, listened to the translation. He spoke, another brief silence followed, and then an English translation skipped along after his Spanish reply. "I don't know how long it took, but it was more than fifty times. I lost consciousness a few times."The witness sat impassively as he was asked to recount his experiences of internment and interrogation just outside the town of Lepaterique during the months of January and February 1982. He described the details of the cruelty he endured in the same way that Patrick had often heard the details of a traffic accident related. A clinical description: what happened, when, and how. Throughout, the witness referred to "the doctor" and when asked for a clarification, García's full name was pronounced. The details. Facts without any reaction. Patrick was used to this, the facts shouldn't have affected him--his job demanded a fairly strict detachment--but the lack of anger in witness C-129's voice, the absence of tears on those cheeks, only amplified the effect of his testimony. Patrick hadn't expectedthat he could just sit down and start hearing details like this. He'd thought it would be different, more dramatic; maybe it was the diet of television where adults felt free to cry on camera if they'd so much as been denied an upgrade on a flight to the Caribbean. More likely, Patrick thought, he needed some indiscriminate outpouring of emotion to undermine the witness's testimony, to make it attributable to the embellishments of some campesino with a grudge and a faulty memory. There were no windows in the tribunal chamber or in the gallery--a security decision, he thought--and this added to the room feeling sealed and increasingly airless. He became aware of the faintly ridiculous sound of himself panting and made the effort to breathe more deeply, only to revert minutes later to shallow, almost gulping breaths. It was a mistake to come here.Patrick removed his earphones and looked around the courtroom in dismay. He'd spent five years hoping it wouldn't come to this, as though the accusations against Hernan were some sort of illness with a prognosis vague enough to offer hope. But as time passed, the possibilities narrowed until the trial became real and then inevitable. The day had arrived and the arraignment had been set and this place was the only logical conclusion for Hernan García's story.And yet there were moments when he still felt inclined to root for him, the Angel of Lepaterique, a man with a history that had led to the death of his wife and had come to haunt his children. Patrick had not seen Hernan in more than ten years, and since then only on television surrounded by police or immigration officials or captioned by some news channel feed as a war criminal. A real war criminal. In a media cycle gorged with every form of criminality, Patrick could understand how a war crimes trial could seem reassuring, almost nostalgic. Balkan field marshals and Hutu warlords had been publicly tried in the very building in which he sat, the details of their genocidal acts transcribed and deliberated over and a judgment rendered. In the emporium of modern atrocity--airplanes piercing the perfect glass skin of American buildings, the videotaped farewell speech of the most recent suicide bomber--images of war criminals had become a relief, a rare example of evil being called to account for itself and where good was considered to have triumphed.And now, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, Patrick was reduced to hoping tortured Hondurans would reveal themselves as less-than-credible witnesses. But the facts of the case were clear. Indians from the mountainous northern regions, university professors, activists from Tegucigalp...

Edition details

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0312367082
• ISBN 13: 9780312367084
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304