by Liam Durcan
He had spent three years avoiding the family and Le Dépanneur Mondial, and now he was prepared for a certain amount of wariness, even hostility from the Garcías, especially from Hernan. It was normal. No longer the stock boy. No more Mopito. Someone else entirely. The fathers of any of the other girls he’d dated might profess indifference or resignation, but they always looked upon a boyfriend as a particular species of thief. He expected no different with Hernan.
But, in the end, he felt more welcomed in the García house than before. Hernan beamed that first time Celia brought Patrick for dinner. Marta looked happy and as in command of her family as she was of the pots that steamed in the kitchen. Nina held his hand and smiled at him. He had missed them. Even Roberto seemed to declare a truce, as though acknowledging Patrick had outlasted the statute of limitations on brotherly hostility. It was almost too easy. If they had concerns about his intentions toward Celia–and they had every right to; along with being in love with her, he was deeply committed to trying to get her into bed as often as possible–they kept these concerns to themselves. No one was that likeable or trustworthy. He certainly wasn’t.
All this was complicated by the fact of his father’s death, as Patrick felt the need to recommit himself to his mother, thinking that his presence in the house, and her life, would now be vital. He imagined the house would take on an air of permanent grief, where he’d be made to feel his presence was never more than a partial, always inadequate patronage. But he was wrong. His mother proved remarkably resilient, no tears or recriminations, with a social schedule far busier than before and the Catholic Women’s League and its surprisingly fractious membership eating up her time. Patrick’s sisters were around more, and their children, now teenagers, one of whom could invariably be found sprawled on the couch, gave the house on Hingston the feel more of a hostel than a funeral home. In those first months, he even heard her talk of travel–the usual Irish Catholic tourist hot spots: the Vatican, Lourdes, maybe even Ireland, but they had drugs and crime and everyone was crazy with mobile phones, she said, and that would have put her in a mood. No, she was fine, he had to admit. Grief counsellors dispatched by the parish were given tea and cookies and sent on their way.
So Patrick reasoned that introducing Celia to her as his girlfriend, which he had avoided doing for months, would be far less fraught than he first considered. His mother would accept–no, embrace–this change in his life with her newfound equanimity. This was, of course, another miscalculation–he now understood that the more difficult moments in the first thirty-five years of his life were best chalked up to an unremitting dyslexia for women’s moods; more proof in the look on his mother’s face that first night with Celia at dinner–flickers of pained acceptance amid a larger motif of stoic resolve–suggesting that her only recourse to the appearance of this young woman, who was going to distract her son and ruin his chances, was to convene another wake.
He found respite at the Garcías. Hernan seemed to take genuine pleasure in overseeing his studies, leafing through the textbooks when Patrick wasn’t using them, excited and at the same time a little depressed that medicine was continuing to advance without him in its ranks. It didn’t take long for Patrick to realize that their relationship had changed in a fundamental way; they now shared an experience, and their conversations began falling into a routine of shop talk and collegial teasing that came to exclude the rest of the family. Patrick felt able to speak freely about his frustrations–he was deep into January of his first year, mired in notes about metabolic pathways and genetic disorders, and his motivations for choosing medicine seemed vague and half-hearted–and Hernan would manage to say something that reassured him. And with every admission of doubt or uncertainty, Patrick sensed he was drawing Hernan into thinking about the life he’d left behind. Maybe it was that detachment, the fact that Hernan was no longer a physician, that allowed him to speak about medicine in a way that Patrick had never heard from anyone else. His words were too modest to be a sermon, too influenced by experience and loss to be a platitude. Medicine gave you a way into someone’s life with the sole purpose of doing good, and there weren’t many opportunities in life to do that, Hernan would say. Immersed in a community of doctors and students, it was easy for Patrick to consider medicine as nothing more than a vast mountain of knowledge to be scaled or as a job that simultaneously challenged and frustrated, but listening to Hernan talk about it was to hear a man who espoused no religion talk about righteousness, pragmatic and applied. But he’d also discovered that having this relationship with Hernan was more complicated. There were occasions, usually when discussing a topic that had undergone major change in the years since Hernan left medicine, when Patrick happened to correct Hernan. Patrick would do it innocently, offhandedly contradicting something Hernan had said, and he found that Hernan’s tone would change. Hernan would become unusually argumentative, quizzing Patrick with an uncharacteristic vigour. Then came silence. At first, Patrick didn’t think of these sulks as anything more than flashes of bad mood in an otherwise stalwart character; nevertheless, he still found himself doing everything to avoid these moments, not understanding his own unease at seeing this new side to Hernan.
Down the elevator and past the sentry at the desk–not Edwin this time, someone Patrick didn’t recognize–then the lobby full of echoes to the more definite assault of the outside world’s noises and lights. He squinted against the daylight, glad he had only one eye that needed squeezing shut. It was cooler than the previous days, but still unseasonably warm and the sky was blue and cloudless. He worried it was just the sort of day to send the Dutch flocking to the beaches at Scheveningen.
It had been Hernan who had shown him how to examine someone, that the examination began long before the patient entered the room. Watch the way they rise from their seat, the way they carry themselves, he would say, watch how it reveals. Hernan was the one who taught him how to look in ears and hold a reflex hammer. The first heart he’d listened to after unwrapping his stethoscope was Hernan’s. Hernan had told Patrick to put the earpieces in and–after twisting his hand to indicate that his protegé had put them in backwards–he took the head of the stethoscope between his two fingers and plunged it down under his shirt. “Listen,” he said, his arm deep inside the shirt, his hand nearing his armpit. “The mitral valve.” And Patrick heard it, the dull sound of two doors closing, the first a fraction louder. A guided tour then began, with Hernan occasionally listening himself to ensure he was in the right position before handing the earpieces back to Patrick. “Close your eyes,” he said, “and try to imagine the blood moving.” He tried, but the sounds were all the same, still only of doors closing. The tricuspid valve came next before Hernan moved the head of the stethoscope to an area at the base of his neck. “Now,” he said, “the aortic valve.” Patrick tried to look interested for Hernan’s sake, as he was clearly enjoying himself. Patrick listened: lub-dub, lub-dub. Indistinguishable from the heart sounds heard elsewhere. Then, Hernan lifted a finger and mouthed the word “Listen.” He clamped his lips shut and then strained forcefully, his colour changing as seconds passed. He looked at Patrick expectantly. Patrick didn’t know what to make of it until he heard something different, two things really, the second heart sound become fainter, an echo of its previous self, and a whooshing sound, a low rumble that rose in pitch and intensity as though it was a truck barrelling past on the highway. He looked up at Hernan to find him pale, a shade that even then he knew meant a person was in danger of passing out. Hernan almost fell forward into him before righting himself. He slumped back into his chair, hyperventilating, his colour now returning, his forehead wet with perspiration. Hernan smiled as if he’d just performed a magic trick and took the head of the stethoscope out from under his shirt. Patrick remembered being mystified at the whole spectacle and embarrassed that he didn’t understand the point of the demonstration.
In all the time he had known the Garcías, Patrick had tried, unsuccessfully, to get any of them to tell him
what their life had been like before Le Dépanneur Mondial. No one spoke of Honduras, and other than Marta’s reminiscences of Detroit, none of the Garcías had spoken about Hernan’s work. And so Patrick was left to wonder why Hernan García left Tegucigalpa and his life as a doctor. He had gathered a rough understanding of the politics of the region, and he’d learned enough to know that it was just the sort of place that people were forced to leave in the middle of the night. In that context, it wasn’t difficult to imagine Hernan as a hero. A dedicated man forced to leave the job he loved for speaking out against an injustice or because he’d rubbed some generalissimo the wrong way. And so he had to leave, to protect his family, filing away a career, a vocation, as though it were just another job experience. That was why nobody spoke of it, he decided. His family understood the injustice.
In other ways, Patrick had become Hernan’s confidant. As a medical student, he had reopened a world for Hernan, offering access to all that Hernan had lost. Patrick reintroduced medical textbooks to the García household, unwittingly restarted conversations that had gone silent years before. He and Hernan were now colleagues, and as someone partially indoctrinated into medical life, Patrick felt he could understand Hernan in a way that no one else could. That spring, Hernan began to tell Patrick about the people who had continued to come to Le Dépanneur Mondial looking for a medical opinion. These were snippets of conversation at first, offered with hesitation, as though testing Patrick to see how they would be received. It didn’t take long for Hernan to realize that he had an eager audience. They were usually illegal immigrants, Salvadorans and Peruvians mostly, people who had heard that he could help and who would wait until the store was empty before approaching him at the cash. He related the stories to Patrick, listing the details that led him to a diagnosis as the person spoke to him from across the counter or beside the canned vegetables. He was proud, Patrick could tell, but it wasn’t pride as simple boastfulness at having made a diagnosis (without any diagnostic equipment or tests), but rather something that seemed at first to be selfless: a pride in being part of people’s lives, a pride in his ability to help.
The streets were movie-set empty, not even a stray Den Haagenar to add some colour as an extra. Patrick checked his watch: he was late, but there wasn’t a cab in sight and to jog would be to pull the pin on what he knew would be a grenade of a headache. An empty tram glided down Johan de Wittlaan, and he thought of Birgita again, wondering how she had got back home. He thought she’d stay the night, not because he’d had any expectations of her, but because she’d fallen asleep. He’d got up in the dark to use the washroom and found her still there, sleeping beside him. He tried not to wake her. He remembered stepping over her bra on the floor, his foot brushing against the underwire. She was sleeping, breathing shallowly. He got under the covers and felt her shiver as he moved close to her. He thought she’d be there in the morning and couldn’t imagine her getting up in the middle of the night to leave.
Another tram passed in the opposite direction, bound for the city centre with four or five passengers aboard. All staring straight ahead.
In reacquainting himself with the Garcías, Patrick had begun to understand the scope of Hernan’s practice, how it extended beyond the aisles of the store. There had been times in those years when Patrick was at the Garcías’ and someone would knock on the door, asking for Hernan by name or just requesting to see “el doctor.” Patrick would invariably be studying, books splayed out over the kitchen table, and he fixed his eyes on whatever page of the textbook he was reading as he tried to follow what was going on down the hallway. Then Hernan would lead them–a man or a couple, sometimes an entire family–to one of the back bedrooms and the door would close and stay shut for twenty minutes. Any other García in the house would carry on as though nothing unusual was happening, not even pausing to acknowledge the family of four traipsing through their kitchen as the visitors were led out.
And although he admired Hernan, he also had begun to feel a growing uneasiness that his mentor was acting as a doctor to these people. This was benevolence, Patrick tried to remind himself as another frightened man was ushered into a back room for a quick exam. These people have nothing. Hernan was the only one who cared. This was heroic, this was the righteousness that Hernan had expressed to him, the sentiment that helped Patrick through that first year of medical school. And yet, it was wrong, so clearly wrong, even to a student like Patrick.
In hindsight, Patrick’s concern was understandable. With each year Patrick gained confidence in his own skills and judgment, and as he began to work with other doctors, Hernan’s actions seemed increasingly questionable. Irresponsible. The argument was still there–these people needed help, but why hadn’t Hernan just recertified as a doctor? It would have taken years, and even if he passed all the exams and qualified, the government would likely have assigned him to a rural practice. But still, he would have been able to help more fully, more honestly than a man practising out of a back room. Of course, he hadn’t known then the reasons for Hernan’s secrecy, that for Hernan, the back room was the safest place, the only place.
As terrible as all the accusations of Lepaterique were, Patrick was just as troubled by the secret practice that had taken place all those years ago in the Garcías’ duplex on Harvard Street. Why had he been allowed in on that secret? What had Hernan really wanted him to see? A man doing good? A man, though he couldn’t have known it, trying to make amends? Patrick, in fact, came to see Hernan not just as a person with formidable skills or heroic intentions, but as a man capable of disregarding the law and, more ominously, as someone whose life as a doctor seemed centred on need, a need as much his as his patients’. Was it a test of Patrick’s loyalty? Did he think Patrick would understand?
Despite his misgivings, Patrick had never told Hernan to stop. Never warned him it was wrong and dangerous. He said nothing and Hernan trusted him. Now, all Patrick felt was anger that Hernan had not shielded him from this secret life. A friend, a true colleague, would have spared a novice. But Patrick had not been spared, and in this, Hernan had made him complicit. In a way, Hernan had already tried to make Patrick choose sides.
He walked down Johan de Wittlaan, cool in the mid-morning hotel-fed shadows. He was late and had made a mistake not taking a cab, but he continued with a pace unchanged until he reached Geestbrugweg. There, on the corner, he lifted his hand to shield his face, caught in a rare half-block of sunlight.
SIXTEEN
No one should care that he loved Celia García.
But Elyse cared. He and Celia were together for three years–thirty-eight and one-half months–duly noted by Elyse in her book. Of course, Elyse was most interested in the moment the relationship began–an event rich with inferences to Fernandez and the invisible hand of Hernan guiding the star-crossed lovers, etc. She spent a scant paragraph noting the relationship’s fractious conclusion, alluding to the fact that by this time Hernan and Patrick had both “got” what they wanted from each other, and, with surrogacy no longer necessary for either man, the otherwise baseless relationship between Celia and Patrick naturally dissolved. The time in between seemed not to interest Elyse, it being happy and human and lacking the various dramatic or symbolic elements that would otherwise make it worth mentioning in her book.
But he and Celia were happy, at least at the beginning. It wasn’t a lie. It was simple, ordinary love. He told himself this repeatedly, almost as if to rebut the continuous, forensic re-examination of their time together that Elyse’s book had forced him into, the search for deeper reasons for why two people would willingly share the same space for any period of time. They loved each other; it was a thought that fortified him, a chance occurrence and an assertion of mutual free will in the face of Elyse’s theories. No, Hernan had nothing to do with that, nothing to do with them.
The year after his father died, Patrick moved out of his mother’s house to a place of his own a couple of blocks from the hospital in the student ghetto–it was Montreal
in the depths of a recession. The city had emptied out like a pool after Labour Day and apartments were cheap and available. He found an apartment on the top floor of a greystone that gave evidence of having previously been a single, larger residence gyprocked into smaller rental units, each an illogical warren of rooms. All the furniture he owned filled fewer than half of the rooms, and that’s when he had the idea of offering one of them to Celia for studio space.
It made sense. No canvases stacked in her room at home, no Nina coughing away, no need to rent space on some dark street on the Plateau. Not living together, just sharing space. It was his apartment, they both made that clear, but, if she had to stay over, well, that was the artist’s prerogative. Again, no objection from Hernan. In the fifteen years that followed, he’d lived through his share of address changes, a succession of place-names where his mail arrived. A new locale every few years, each one convenient, provisional. But Lorne Avenue was different. He had three years there, below Elyse Brenman’s radar, finding another place, besides the Garcías’ house and Le Dépanneur Mondial, where he experienced moments of perfect happiness.