by Liam Durcan
Even so, there had been contact in the last five years, but perhaps Celia didn’t know about the worn-out, annotated copy of Moby-Dick that Hernan had sent to him weeks after the funeral, Marta’s copy, the margins festooned with notes. Along with the book, Hernan had included a letter–perfunctory, not a word about the accusations he was facing–saying that Marta wanted him to have this particular book. No other explanation. It was an act, an object, that mystified Patrick at the time.
It was a failure of belief, he eventually thought. His belief. If he truly had faith in Hernan, that would have trumped any accusation. But that wasn’t fair; after all, Hernan was the one who taught him to objectively assess the world and to consider the evidence, who taught him that dispassion was more worthy of an educated man than blind loyalty, and it became a mantra to him that he repeated over and over again as he made up his mind about the new life of Hernan García. Evidence was stronger than faith. He didn’t call. But still, he could have called–Celia was right about that. He could have called even if he doubted Hernan’s story (Hernan’s story? Hernan offered no story, he offered silence). And if he had called Hernan? Or Celia, for that matter? Well, what he would have said was another issue altogether. He could imagine the agony of silences in that conversation. How did a person make up small talk about accusations of torture? Of murder?
The sad fact was that one of the reasons he refused to give Elyse Brenman an interview was that everything he had to say about the situation sounded simplistic and false. He could go on the record and say Hernan was “a good man” or that Hernan had “the highest ethical standards” but he had nothing that could convince anyone that Hernan was innocent in the face of accusations and witnesses and mounting evidence. Good character was no longer a defence against such charges. People had grown accustomed to normal, apparently healthy minds committing depraved acts, inured to the recurring televised puzzlement of neighbours and friends as a backyard gravesite was dug up and another monster in their midst was revealed.
Elyse probably wouldn’t have believed it if Patrick had told her how much he had learned in a week of working with Hernan, about honest effort and consideration, about how to do a job for the sake of it, the beauty of it, even if it were only moving plantains on a dolly. He assumed she wouldn’t understand the feeling he had in the store, how Marta García’s fretful gaze dissolved after that first day, becoming a smile that was modestly held in check for the most part, brought to full bloom when her children or Hernan appeared. By week’s end Patrick had earned her smile–how important that was to him, how he felt like an ass for the way he had behaved to her, to anyone behind a counter, minding their business in every sense. How could he explain to anyone what the Garcías would come to mean to him, the friendship they showed a person who had tried to cause them harm? He thought at first that they were afraid of him in some way, that they considered him another bewildering item in the cost of their admission to this country, that they accepted him because of some weakness they sensed in themselves. But they were so unlike anyone he had met. They were so happy together. They weren’t weak and they didn’t need anyone, certainly not Patrick. He needed them.
Patrick could have told Elyse about the men and women who came to the store for Hernan’s advice and opinions, people who didn’t care that he wasn’t a doctor any more. Hernan tended to them when no one else did. Would anyone know how heroic that was to the teenager who witnessed it? It was too difficult to explain how complicated heroism was, how the same act became something new when it was viewed later.
Elyse wouldn’t have been interested in the effort the Garcías put into Le Dépanneur Mondial. Details about Hernan being up at five o’clock to receive the day’s fresh bread, or the Mozart that he always made sure could be heard throughout the store, or the fact that Le Dépanneur Mondial would not sell alcohol or cigarettes or lottery tickets–the economic cornerstone of the dépanneur industry, those details would only confuse her readers. Her readers weren’t told of the irony of his discovery that day in Le Dépanneur Mondial, that Hernan had been found out because he’d refused to sell lottery tickets. Because of principle and the willingness to defend his principle, Hernan was in Den Haag. Elyse’s readers wouldn’t appreciate the irony of the lottery ticket that never existed. Her readers would know only that a former victim came face to face with a man he regarded as his torturer. Indignation needed to be carefully crafted and could not admit such things as irony. There was so much Patrick couldn’t tell her.
SEVEN
At the end of his week of work, Patrick sat down with Hernan and they went over what Hernan felt he was owed and the value of the jobs Patrick had done around the store. Calculations complete, Hernan said they were even and smiled, holding out his hand to shake as a way to seal their contract. Patrick told him then and there how much he had enjoyed working at Le Dépanneur Mondial and if Hernan would allow it, he wanted to be kept on. The only jobs he had had before were delivering newspapers and a couple of purgatorial shifts bussing tables at one of the interchangeable franchise restaurants down by the highway. Up to that point, work had been nothing more than the soul-crushing exchange of time and effort for money, something his father and others disappeared to do every morning, something foreign and vaguely risible. But that had changed for him in one week at Le Dépanneur Mondial. He couldn’t explain it to Hernan or years later to Celia, and so he surely couldn’t expect Elyse to understand–but he found himself invested in his work, feeling for the first time in his life the impulse to do something for more than just the money. He immediately recognized the oddity of it, the simple, almost hokey conviction that mopping the floor of a dépanneur had meaning in and of itself. At first, there were the satisfactions of extra money and, if he was honest, a chance to see Celia. But it was also about working with Hernan García. He didn’t fully understand it until years later, when he was taking a course in psychology and saw the standard stock photo of ducklings following in a line behind the Austrian psychologist Konrad Lorenz. The photo was the standard accompaniment to a discussion of imprinting, the explanation for intense attachment that occurred in the wild (in Lorenz’s case the ducks became attached to his bright yellow rubber boots). Aside from the stimulus of the yellow boots, imprinting required an animal to be in a “critical period,” a time when the neural connections that led to attachment could be made. The attachment hadn’t been about the place alone, it had been about Patrick. He had been ready for it. Business at Le Dépanneur Mondial was good, but it clearly wasn’t so busy that they required another person around the store, and Patrick suspected that the decision to keep him on may have ended up costing Hernan. But Hernan never hesitated. Patrick was hired as Le Dépanneur Mondial’s first stock boy, and aside from Madame Lefebvre, who handled the evening cash for ninety minutes every night so the Garcías could all sit down to dinner together, and Jimmy Padopoulos, who did odd jobs around the store, he was the only other outsider at the start.
And so Patrick continued his summer as Hernan García’s shadow, following him from the first dawn deliveries and watching as he and the other Garcías negotiated the day through to its end. He would have his jobs to do, the menial tasks that, during the course of a day, would bring him into moments of contact with Marta or Roberto or Celia, but he worked with Hernan, it was Hernan to whom he looked for direction and example. Patrick had never known how many details needed to be attended to in the running of a typical grocery store–he’d assumed that the busiest part of the day was hassling teenage customers like himself or attempting to close the overstuffed cash register tray–and the truth shamed him for the way he had treated people behind the counters. Hernan was in motion for eighteen hours a day, never rushing, never seeming to exert himself, and it became clear that without his continual interventions the appearance of a well-run store would quickly dissolve into that of a listing ship, taking on water and bound for a reef. By watching him, Patrick became aware of how much expertise and practice went into making work look e
ffortless.
Patrick had never seen anyone who wore such utter competence so lightly. Among the people he knew, any partial aptitude–car repair, sports trivia, the ability to operate a hash pipe under even mildly adverse conditions–was an occasion for sustained bragging and the basis for a reputation. But Hernan did his job quietly, almost secretly, it seemed. But at all times, he had the command of a general in the field, able to keep a running tally of inventory, expiry dates, and deliveries, as well as knowing how to troubleshoot the ventilation or the electrical or the refrigeration system–all without arrogance or impatience, especially when dealing with an employee who lacked any of these skills. Hernan did things the right way. The windows were washed and the floors were megawatt bright and no one could ever recall seeing a burned-out bulb in Le Dépanneur Mondial. Patrick remembered the inordinate, adolescent pride he had in the place. It was the cleanest, best-stocked, best-run store in NDG; not as much a dépanneur as a full-service specialty grocery store at a time when that kind of store was rare in Montreal. In every way, the store reflected Hernan. But it was more than that. He was good to his customers, honest enough to tell them when the mangoes were a little off or taking them seriously when they came back with a product that failed the test of coming from Le Dépanneur Mondial. It was fairness, not fairness as some policy plastered on the wall to keep the customers unaware that they were being more systematically cheated. It was simply a person being fair, and it must have had a cost, a cost that could be balanced against the benefits of customer loyalty, but Patrick felt that it was a calculation that Hernan chose not to make. To a teenage boy, this was decent and heroic. Patrick tried to explain it to his friends only to see them roll their eyes as they reacted to one of their own extolling the virtues of hard work like some babbling Junior Achievement convert, happy in his newfound nirvana of buckets and pails and fresh produce.
Because Hernan knew the ins and outs of running a store and managing an inventory so thoroughly, Patrick simply assumed that the García family had been grocers for generations before coming to Canada. This was their lifeblood, he thought, nonetheless impressed at the success that the Garcías had in bringing something new and good to his neighbourhood. Which is why it came as such a shock to Patrick to learn from one of the customers that Hernan had been a doctor before coming to Montreal. It was Marta who finally confirmed it after Patrick started asking questions about the clientele who cornered Hernan in the back aisles of the store. Patrick would watch, pretending to stock items on a nearby shelf as a whispered conversation would take place and someone would invariably point to an affected area. The Hispanic population of NDG had already become devoted patrons of Le Dépanneur Mondial, but now families would show up with plastic bags full of their undecipherable medications, asking Hernan for advice, what should be taken, what could be thrown out. Hernan could have dismissed them with a wave of his hand but he listened and looked through their medications before telling them to ask their doctor about this pill or that pill. He wasn’t a doctor any more, he would say, as a way of giving them a chance to turn and leave. They always stayed.
Memories of a summer twenty years before disappeared as he turned on the light in his bathroom. Not really a doctor any more, he had that much in common with Hernan. Patrick took a Tylenol, the contents of a couple of those little bottles in the minibar, and followed it up with a Valium. He lay down on the bed. His antidepressant could wait until morning. The phone on his bedside table pulsed with a red light that signalled awaiting voice mail, but the prospect of having to listen to his partners’ messages, their grievances made more urgent, more authentic for having been weighted with the inflections of a human voice (plaintive, pleading, reproachful, all, he knew, calculated for maximal effect) was enough to scare him off. Beyond that his only other thought, strangely enough, was of Heather. It was the confusion of seeing Celia again–memories of tenderness and old emotions complicated by her obvious lack of regard for him–that made him think of someone who hated him less. He had never told Heather about Celia per se. What he felt for Celia had been merged into the more general sentiment he had for the García family–memories recounted warmly, but infrequently. But any mention of the Garcías had been a mistake, allowing Heather enough material to psychoanalyze his need for another family–for lionizing the Garcías, as she put it–when he already had a perfectly good family.
And while his affection for the Garcías was enough to make Heather suspect he’d had a Dickensian upbringing of gruel and periodic beatings, this wasn’t true at all. The reason he wasn’t especially close to his own family was, paradoxically, biological. Patrick Lazerenko was, as people tended to say in that era, a surprise. His mother was forty-two when he was born and his father forty-five, and although he felt they loved him and tried to communicate that love, he could never get over the feeling that to them he was the equivalent of a second mortgage taken out very much against their will. Things were better now. He spoke to his mother and was on good terms with his two much older sisters–both mortally embarrassed teenagers when their mother became visibly pregnant in the spring of 1970. He was aware of situations like this where the “surprise” anomaly baby rejuvenated the aging parents and was doted on by older siblings, but Patrick supposed he would have found a way to chafe against that too.
Roger and Veronica. Hard-working people who probably deserved better than some smart-ass son entering puberty as they were thinking about winding down their working lives. And while they never said anything, he knew. He was what was keeping them from a Florida condo or tooling around the hillbillier parts of America in some apocalyptically big motorhome. He was loved, but he was on the clock. It was different at the Garcías’.
That first summer at Le Dépanneur Mondial he saw the Garcías’ clientele grow and began to recognize the cycles of patronage: daily shoppers seeking fresh produce, others doing their weekly marketing, and the monthly shoppers–pensioners or young women with strollers holding one too many babies–appearing in the days after the cheques arrived. Hernan would get him to bag and deliver these monthly orders; any tips were to be refused, a general policy of Le Dépanneur Mondial. It was a sum Hernan promised he would make up later. And for those who couldn’t afford it, Patrick would soon learn that Le Dépanneur Mondial was more than a store. Through the years, more than one neighbour of Le Dépanneur Mondial would compliment Hernan on the cleanliness and general lack of stink in the alley behind the store, not knowing that the stink usually came from dumpsters full of food thrown out and left to rot. The dumpsters behind Le Dépanneur Mondial rarely saw food, unless it was spoiled on delivery, and this was because Hernan combed the store every night before closing, culling items he knew would not sell before they spoiled, creating parcels of food–day-old bread, cartons of milk skidding toward their expiry dates, canned goods shunted to the back of the shelves–all of which Patrick or Roberto or Celia would deliver to addresses Hernan wrote down on the back of an envelope. The instructions were explicit. Leave the parcel outside the door. Knock once. Leave immediately. He began to understand as he rode through the alleys of NDG during the nights of that first summer, heading to the next delivery, that Hernan García was different.
The rudiments of cleaning and stocking the store came easily, and with time he became more familiar with the names and shapes of products. But most of the time, he watched the Garcías. They were newcomers without extended family or any Honduran community to soften their landing in Montreal. All they had was each other and they knew that to be the central fact of their existence. Night after night in Le Dépanneur Mondial, he watched as the Garcías passed time in the store. Celia would get out a sketchbook and sit at the small counter they had near the front window, watching the scene on the sidewalk, imagining what she would later draw. He remembered Nina playing behind the counter. Marta García would turn often to check on them, a gesture that was for the most part unnecessary except to continually restate that claim they all had in each other. Then Roberto would b
urst in and every face would brighten and they would all speak at once–shout–in Spanish, as if his enthusiasm ignited them. It was natural that Roberto, with his fearlessness and gregarious nature, had become their source of reconnaissance in the neighbourhood. It was his job to scout out the swimming pool or the playgrounds and ensure they were safe for his sisters. It was likely along those lines that he felt it necessary to pin Patrick on his back against a shipment of potatoes in the storage room. They wrestled for the second or two it took Roberto to flip Patrick around and pretzel him into a more painful hold.
“Don’t look at my sister, perrito,” Roberto said with an authority known to those who had the truth and a definite physical advantage on their side. Patrick, his face wedged between sacks of potatoes, was in no position to deny the charge. “Just a warning. My dad doesn’t see these things.” Roberto leaned against him, the twisting force of the headlock now more painful than the accusation. “I do.” Then Roberto loosened his grip, allowing Patrick to struggle free. He offered Patrick a hand. This was ignored as Patrick made a show of getting to his feet under his own steam.
In the weeks since he’d started at the store, Patrick hadn’t said a word to Celia outside of conversation made necessary by working in the same place. But he watched her. Felt the excitement as the store opened and another day in which he might see her began. He loved her and it must have showed–Roberto knew, any teenage boy would know. That summer Patrick found himself wondering whether Celia understood English, as she seemed so completely inured to his presence in the store. Undaunted, he attempted sonnets and learned rudimentary Spanish just at the thought of one day being better able to express himself to her. He refused to think about her when he masturbated, and, in the bizarre, emblematic way of sixteen-year-old boys, that was love. He lingered around her whenever possible, making sure she knew how hard he was working for her father, for her, and with time Patrick imagined she noticed him as someone notices the arrival of good weather, the gradual acknowledgement that something surprising and pleasant has happened and could be counted on to happen again. Patrick did all of this only to overhear her speak on the phone, in perfect English, with a new friend, and say that she was in the store and had to be alert as she was alone with “the vandal.”