by Liam Durcan
Celia phoned him the next week, their last contact until he sighted her in the tribunal gallery twelve years later. She didn’t have much to say, except to let him know that Jane wasn’t well and she thought he should have guessed as much, and that she expected better from him. Then she hung up.
He squinted to screen out the glare of sunshine. From where he stood on the pier, Nina was clearly visible, still on the blanket, arms straightened out behind her. Further down, near the edge of the beach where the sand flashed a momentary sheen as each wave receded, he thought he could make out Celia and Paul. They were walking. They appeared to stop every dozen or so steps and Patrick imagined the little boy bending down for something on the sand. They were indistinct, the outline of their bodies shimmering, and with each glance it was difficult to tell if they were one or two people. His retinas were capable of discerning shapes from the quarter mile, his occipital and parietal lobes continually parsing the images and creating hypotheses that played against his visual memory. They were real. They were real. They were walking on a beach. Two people. One person. Oh, he realized, they were holding hands. They were coming back.
SEVENTEEN
For many people, Holland has always been a tolerant country. The tolerant country, modern laboratory for the newest idea: gay rights, sexual freedom, total football. It was no different for Patrick Lazerenko; Holland was famous for its tolerance even among teenagers back in NDG in the eighties, where the concept of the hassle-free bong hit was pretty much the definition of utopian society. Amsterdam. It was cool just to say the word, and impossible to keep a smile off your face as you said it. But Holland was more than just hedonism, it was asylum, the embodiment of relief and protection for those who had been harassed. No melting pot. No assimilation. People could live in peace there. Patrick had never spent any significant time in Holland before, never indulged in the café specialties of de Wallen, but Holland remained in his mind, more so since moving to America, occupying a necessary place as that reassuring, pluralistic haven.
But, according to the television, Holland was a different place tonight, with the Right Honourable Edgar van der Hoeven in the ground and his assailant arrested that morning, now being held in an Amsterdam jail. The assailant had been identified variously: as a Muslim extremist, as a North African, as an engineering student, as a Moroccan, or as a man with no history of violence. Parenthetically, he turned out to be a native-born: an allochtoon from the Rustenburg-Oostbroek district of Den Haag. The murderer’s identity confirmed what everyone had suspected. Every television channel Patrick turned to was a variation on a theme, in strident voices and clipped sentences whose meanings he was able to parse without the benefit of understanding Dutch. Heated debate had become Holland’s new national sport, adopted with a vigour proportional to its novelty.
A half-hour of television was all it took to confirm that Van der Hoeven’s death had been the necessary cathartic: now people wanted to say out loud, in front of cameras, what they had only ever privately thought. The moderator cut to a city sidewalk somewhere in the Netherlands. The bulb of a microphone breached the frame and a series of faces appeared, uttering one long indicting sentence: the immigrants are trouble and no one tries to speak Dutch, and they don’t assimilate and they fill up the jails, and isn’t the largest mosque in Europe in Rotterdam? And they have too many children and they’ll be a majority in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and Den Haag by 2010, and they don’t respect women or homosexuals, and they fill up the welfare rolls, and they have no interest in being Dutch, and they assassinate politicians in the street, and if they weren’t Muslims we would just be talking about them as Fascists, wouldn’t we?
There was only one story, and Hernan García was not that story. Hernan’s story wasn’t even a story. Even in the week before the arrest, a night hadn’t passed without a mosque being burned or defaced, and the Muslim community announced it was going to hold simultaneous demonstrations in the major Dutch cities. When their spokesman was asked what they hoped to accomplish by these demonstrations, the first word out of his mouth was “solidarity.” Watching him, Patrick got the feeling that he’d like to take the answer back, that the man already understood the multiple trajectories of the word. But by the time the spokesman had reconsidered, he was off camera and long gone.
Every night he heard the news, the details of the van der Hoeven murder and the escalating invective that trailed in its wake and yet by morning he had forgotten it. For him, Holland could well be the beach at Scheveningen, and Den Haag nothing more than the empty streets he walked through to get to the tribunal building. He saw no sign of discord, no minarets reduced to cinders, no one shaking their fist. But every night it reappeared, a bonfire of reality. It was the amnesia of the strange place, he told himself; it was normal. There was a time when he would have felt guilty about this, this touristic auto-pilot, that ten, maybe only five years ago he would have felt he owed it to himself and others to understand the issue. But he was busy with other things. His head hurt.
The dinner hour news was over and the television shut off with a flash that echoed throughout a newly, exuberantly dark room. He had said goodbye to the Garcías at the beach at around two and had spent the rest of the afternoon wandering alone through Scheveningen and Den Haag. He had spoken to Celia several times in the course of the day. Or tried. Stillborn attempts at chit-chat. By the end of the afternoon, he wished that she had been angry at him, that she’d showed any emotion, but she seemed to be interested only in maintaining a fixed distance between them. He’d come back to the Metropole and left his half-eaten meal on a plate in the restaurant. And now, with the television off, he considered whether doubling the dose of his Valium would allow him to sleep through to the next morning. He didn’t move from the bed, but in the place of sleep came sleep’s generic equivalent: a less potent mix of exhaustion and excess serotonin along with the fervent wish for genuine amnesia. Sleep would not come. When the phone rang, he answered it unhesitatingly. Welcoming it.
Her voice was different. Almost unrecognizable at first. Over the phone her voice seemed softer, synesthetic in the dark, full of flourishes and adornments. Melodious words. Floral speech. Not the Celia from the beach. He remembered this voice from years before, its tone and diction strumming instrumental memories, a hand that would be happily numbed holding the phone for an hour of listening to such a voice. The voice made no sense to him now.
“What do you want?” he said, the words stumbling down stairs in the dark.
“Are you doing anything tonight?”
Once, he would have been made happy hearing her say that, but his mood was in freefall. “No,” he said quietly into the receiver.
“I’d like it if you could meet Oliveira.”
“What? No,” Patrick mumbled and sat up, repeating “No” like the first bleat of a car alarm. The vehemence didn’t surprise him alone; there was a pause on the other end of the line.
“Please, Patrick, listen to me. I’ve tried to get this done through di Costini, but he’s dragging his heels on getting the imaging test you talked about.” Celia’s voice shed its summer clothes for something heavier. “We have to figure out how we’re going to do this.”
“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 b
ar 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.
