by Liam Durcan
There were rules, of course. The Declaration of Tokyo, which he had never known about until he became aware of Hernan’s situation, stated clearly that the physician shall not “countenance, condone or participate in the practice of torture” and then went on to state that the physician “shall not be present during any procedure during which torture or any other form of inhuman or degrading treatment is used or threatened.”
In this light, Hernan was guilty. If he wasn’t tortured as a way of coercing his participation, then his presence alone, for whatever reason, constituted a violation of the Declaration of Tokyo. All the mitigating circumstances, all the rationalizations were nothing compared to the fact that he was present in the room. And yet violating the Declaration of Tokyo was not enough to convict; for international law to be satisfied, witnesses were needed who would say that he was involved in the act.
After twenty more minutes of questioning and cross-examination, Celia stood and shuffled sideways to the aisle. Roberto glanced at her, then returned to the activities in front of him. Patrick shifted, bracing his feet against the base of the seat in front and sliding up ever so slowly, trying to avoid attracting Roberto’s attention. Always evading him. A minute passed of what seemed like a hydraulic process, his thighs aching as he finally got to his feet and slipped out of the gallery.
He expected Celia to be sitting there, crumpled and tearful just past the doors of Courtroom One, but the benches in the foyer were empty. He walked to the stairwell and leaned so far over the railing that one of the security guards adjusted his stance, giving him a bouncer vibe. But she wasn’t down there either. The hallways were quiet. She was gone.
He fought the impulse to give the guard the finger, felt the muscles in his hand tighten to stop the digit in question from extending because that was the key step, the launch code for the rest of the gesture. To lack control would be to set off another sequence of events; he would be collared and frog-marched and kicked out of the tribunal. Patrick clenched his fist and waited for the guard to turn the corner. He scanned the foyer for Celia again, but saw no one. He wanted the guard to come back, felt the need to go through the motions of self-restraint again, maybe things would come out differently. As he thought this, he found himself walking, pacing really, making zoo-lion laps of the foyer, feeling his hostility toward the guard become something larger and hotter, the shaping of an indignity. Patrick walked down the stairs to the exit and explained to the entry guards that he needed to get some air. One guard, who was younger than most at the tribunal and had seen Patrick’s comings and goings, joked that they were about to install a turnstile for him. But he needed to be outside. He decided he didn’t want to be caught waiting for Celia García. Not again. No, he’d keep moving and if she wanted to talk with him, then she’d have to catch up to him or watch him leave. He was outside now, heading toward the large reflecting pool in front of the Congress Centrum and just walking made him feel better, clearing the air of the tribunal gallery from his lungs and giving him respite from the Garcías and their complicated goddamned lives.
Patrick sat on a bench beside the reflecting pool, watching the fountain gurgle and froth. A bus stopped in front of the Congress Centrum. After a short pneumatic hiss, a door swung open and from it, a line of people debarked, heading straight for the doors of the Congress Centrum, all carrying cloth bags emblazoned with a mysterious symbol. Below the symbol, Patrick could make out the words “The Hague 2005.” Patrick wondered what sort of group would choose to have a convention in Den Haag in November, what set of chronically lowered expectations would make this place seem alluring.
The movement of the fountain spume nauseated Patrick. The energy he’d had was spent fuel now, and he felt the need to close his eyes, there, beside the fountain. What was he doing here? What did these people want from him? He’d jeopardized his company and reputation to come here, and for what? A concussion and a subpoena. Hernan was saying nothing, making no effort to defend himself. But that made no difference to Celia. Celia. Faithful, stubborn Celia could not be swayed from trying to free her father, and Patrick had done exactly what she wanted. He was nothing to her except a way to free Hernan. The thought fanned his every vindictive instinct, made him want to catch the next flight back to Boston, or tell Celia that he hadn’t called in the past seven years not because he was circumspect or lazy but because he was ashamed of them all, that they had lied to him and done terrible things and refused to face the truth. But he wouldn’t say any of it. He knew he would always do what Celia wanted him to do.
When she had shown him that painting all those years ago and he had feigned indifference, Patrick had felt a little pearl of pleasure, the type of which he’d not yet known with Celia. The look on her face–the incomprehension, the need to rethink him as a given–had been an odd new drug, potent, transforming. In her house that night, Patrick had sensed a person’s pride and understood how it needed to be fed and how it could be starved. If he had to argue it out, he’d say that it wasn’t pettiness as much as restoring the balance of power. She already had more than he, a family that may have argued and disappointed her, but a family that cared. And now, seeing the painting, it was clear that she was in possession of a technical prowess. She had talent and a vision, and in the painting it all came together.
In the years since, Patrick had come to understand that a bigger man would have put aside his disappointment and been pleased to be the first person to see such a painting, to have been in such a work, but he had not been that man. Not that night. He wanted Celia, not to be an object she worked into the scenery. She offered the painting to him, and he declined. She had been shocked by his response, he could tell. But in the end he relented and when she handed the canvas over, he had thanked her coldly and walked off into the night with it. Under the trees on that August night, he remembered smelling the pigments of the paint. It was still wet. He carried it home and put it up on the wall of his bedroom and stared at it until he fell asleep.
They didn’t speak after that. He knew that Celia had every right to be upset with him, upset with herself that she had given her painting to a simple lout who couldn’t appreciate it. He’d figured that she’d steam for a while and then get over it. It would be awkward for a few weeks, he’d have to duck around corners to avoid coming face to face with her, but it would evaporate into something that they’d laugh about later. But Celia would not talk to him, would not look at him. He was nothing. He was how the mop got manoeuvred around the floor, a noise at the back of Le Dépanneur Mondial. At first it almost made him laugh: okay, okay, the silent treatment. A bit primitive but it beat screaming. But it went on, and intensified, as if she had sealed the doors and opened the valves on the freezers until the windows frosted up and his fingertips turned a shade of deep-winter blue. He would have preferred the screaming.
But then his regular life intervened. His parents returned from their holiday and school started, odd for either to be a source of such relief. He saw Celia less frequently, an occasional evening at Le Dépanneur Mondial or passing in the hallways of school. He was happy to be back in school, and told himself that he didn’t care that she was there too, that Celia would be just another new kid in class. He was absorbed back into his circle of friends and wanted nothing more than for the months he spent working at Le Dépanneur Mondial to seem foreign and fleeting, like a summer camp suntan that would fade. He didn’t even have the satisfaction of seeing her relegated to that lowest-caste status of new-kid-at-school either. Instead, she had violated every known law of human adolescent interaction and become popular in school. This was genetic, a chromosomal charisma, Patrick was coming to understand, as Roberto García’s younger sister continued to exert a part of her personality that he had assumed didn’t exist. She was smart and had enough confidence to be cleverly disdainful of the ruling-girl cliques (a double victory in the realpolitik of high school: once defeated, this tribe was submissive, all other witnesses to regime change flock to receive the victor as a liber
ating hero). Celia had triumphed. He was being left behind. It was then that he thought about quitting.
If Patrick remembered anything about that autumn, other than the ascension of Celia García to the top rung of the school’s social ladder, it was the panic he had felt. NDG had always been his home, and he had never wanted to live anywhere else, but now he was overwhelmed with the thought he would never leave NDG. Celia brought into full focus his fear that the people he admired and envied would grow and achieve and leave. If he didn’t change, he would be stuck. And he couldn’t tolerate that happening in front of Celia García.
Even though Patrick loved Le Dépanneur Mondial, he felt he needed to stop working there. He found Hernan in the storeroom one afternoon and stammered through the usual things about school starting and needing to devote himself to his studies, but it was tough to convince even himself. Hernan, no doubt aware of Patrick’s recent restlessness around his daughter, rightly seemed to sense the impulsiveness of the decision and the reasons behind it, and offered a compromise. In the end, Patrick was dissuaded from quitting and, instead, wound up working fewer hours on selected days, able to insinuate himself into the schedule without crossing Celia’s path.
His new shifts coincided with Marta’s time alone in the store. At first they were quiet around each other, each attending to their own tasks and passing their time together in silence. But over that year, a sense of companionship grew. It was through Marta that he learned the nuances of chat and gossip, both foreign dialects to a sixteen-year-old boy.
Sometimes Marta would mention the family but never Celia by name, as though understanding the needs of someone trying to break a habit. And he liked to think that he gave something to her in return, that he became her confidante during those shifts. She had a family, like him, but, like him, she was alone. And so it all seemed a part of that kinship when Marta admitted to him that she wished to go back to school when her children were older, or when, shocked that he had never read Melville, she pledged to get him a copy of his complete works. Patrick had been around people whose energy or good humour was infectious, but with Marta, he was surprised to find that another person’s curiosity could be just as affecting. Despite being uninterested in politics, to his surprise he spent countless shifts watching the televised Iran-Contra hearings with her on the little black-and-white portable behind the counter, as she gave him a history of the politics in the region and described the roles played by the central characters. And while she never stated her political beliefs to Patrick, it was clear through her frowns and comments that she was upset with the revelations of the trial. She practically hissed when Oliver North took his oath before testifying. More revealing later for Patrick was her desire to conceal from Hernan her interest in the hearings. He became a co-conspirator, warning her when Hernan or a customer came into the store so that the television could be switched to a novella or another program more appropriate for the wife of a local merchant.
When he met up with old high school friends years later, they would point to that time with wonder and disbelief. “You changed,” they’d say in that way that wasn’t always meant to be an accusation. He tried to explain it, always stopping short of crediting the Garcías. But he was never the same because of them. He had an awareness of the world and an idea of what role he could play, courtesy of Hernan; from Marta he’d received unexpected friendship and the knowledge that he belonged in some way to that tribe of loners, the curious, the bored. This explanation suggested only a positive impulse, the guiding mentor, success as a result of a quest for personal improvement. But Patrick understood how much more complicated the Garcías’ effect on him was, that the source of motivation in his life had been far less noble. The real legacy of those early years, measuring himself against the Garcías, suffering through disappointments with Celia, was that he felt unworthy. He understood himself to be inferior. How could you explain that to people? It was an inescapable feeling, and not one for which he blamed the Garcías, but it was something he promised himself would change.
He cloistered himself and began to read. He applied himself, viewing every book, every fact and principle as the next necessary step in the razing of an inferior intellect, a purging of ignorance. The transformation didn’t go unnoticed: anyone seriously applying themselves in high school automatically becomes the object of scrutiny. He was suddenly considered different and reclusive and, by virtue of being more difficult to classify in the taxonomy of high school, vaguely threatening. There he was, lumped in with his school’s queer pioneers, proto-goths, and Dungeons & Dragons players, all happily set aside from the social hierarchies of school because of their indifference to them. If this had been the world of the early twenty-first century, his sudden detour would have red-flagged him to a team of school psychologists who would then break down the door to intervene and “risk stratify” him, but it was the eighties and people were still fairly relaxed about ninety-degree turns in behaviour as long as it didn’t involve drugs.
His grades, which hadn’t been bad to begin with, improved dramatically, a change that perplexed his teachers for a semester until they found more important things to be perplexed about. He achieved and was grimly satisfied. And, as with any achievement that occurs within the confines of adolescence, the desire to escape replaced the fear of being trapped. His parents’ house, even Le Dépanneur Mondial, all of NDG in fact, seemed to be a fenced-in place where he now saw people walking the grid of streets in an agitated trance. But now it had become an escapable place. It was then that he felt the desire to leave, not as panic but as a pleasurable ache in the stomach. Eighteen months later he was able to quit Le Dépanneur Mondial for more substantive reasons than hurt feelings.
Patrick was still sitting on the bench, eyes closed to the mid-afternoon sun, when he felt someone shake his shoulder. He prepared himself to get up, expecting to face a security guard just doing his job, but it was Celia standing in front of him.
“I saw you leave,” Patrick said.
“I needed a break.”
He was going to ask her where she’d been, tell her that he’d been looking for her, but he stopped himself. He was sore, and shifted his weight on the bench. It was different from the benches outside the courtroom, but they were equally uncomfortable, sharing a design that numbed legs and prompted movement after a certain amount of time. He was going to tell her he was leaving Den Haag. He couldn’t help Hernan, he’d say, and she would just have to take it. But when he looked at her he didn’t see what he’d expected, a visage held like a shield, the look of a lieutenant called upon to enforce order in a disintegrating situation. Celia looked like a daughter contemplating loss. She sat down on the edge of the bench.
“Your mum didn’t know you were coming here.”
“You spoke to my mum?”
“I run into her. Same neighbourhood. Same shops. She looks well.”
“Indestructible.”
“She talks about you a lot.”
“Oh yeah? Was she able to tell you what I do?”
“She doesn’t know, really. But she’s proud of you.”
Patrick’s mother wouldn’t speak to him for months after he told her that he wasn’t intending to practise medicine. The pornography research era was another low point; this time she admitted to him that she’d begun to actively disavow any knowledge of his work, not through a sense of shame but just because it was all too complicated to explain to people. Becoming wealthy had rehabilitated him somewhat–the Caribbean cruise he’d sent her on for her birthday was more easily explained than the work that financed it.
He and his mother had grown closer in the last few years, both of them realizing how much they were a version of each other, especially in their darker moments. A wariness so often mistaken for indifference, a tendency to lose patience and hold grudges, a temper like a tire-fire, building slowly but burning hard. Now his mother left a weekly message, always at a time she knew he wasn’t home, always accusing him of call-screening. He’d retal
iate with calls of his own, trying to gently goad her into some red-necked declaration by discussing the latest common outrage, but she refused to be baited. And he was certain that while they were talking, she knew, they both knew, that this amounted to a particular type of fondness and that it would do fine.
He had come to recognize that his mother was a certain kind of Montrealer. Five generations off the boat from Queenstown, two generations removed from the Irish ghettos of Griffintown, and she was officially enclaved. The neighbourhood of NDG had been transformed around her into one of the more cosmopolitan places in the world, a fact seen by her as little more than a series of continued assaults on her concept of what Montreal used to be. In her mind, the arrivals aggravated the departures. Friends were gone: dead, or to Toronto. The churches emptied out on her. Even the priests disappeared. Since Patrick’s father died, she hadn’t withered as much as crystallized into an archetype. Happily. She was unmoved by society’s repeated attempts to encourage her to learn French, convert to metric, stop smoking, treat people with different pigments or religions as equals, oppose the seal hunt, recycle, get more calcium in her diet, or embrace gay rights. Decades’ worth of grime had collected on the unadjusted dial of her little transistor radio, testament to her only connection to the outside world: a reactionary, staunchly Anglo-Montreal outfit that echoed her sentiments and where the morning show personalities served longer, and with more clout, than most popes.
Nothing was going to get her to change. Instead, she carried forward, buoyed by twin currents of nostalgia and paranoia (maybe this was genetic, a bequest from her immigrant ancestors), remembering the summer of 1967 as both the high point in her city’s life and the moment when she first saw the slide to what it would become. It wasn’t so much intolerance as indifference. She delighted in telling Patrick that if Quebec separated from Canada, she would just send her taxes to a different place, and if they ran the gay pride parade down the street, well, she had curtains and knew how to draw ’em. She just didn’t care, which she liked to remind Patrick was the most honest form of tolerance that existed.