Garcia's Heart

Book by Durcan Liam

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 accused would be seated was empty. There were sixty or so spectators in the galley 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 incredulousness 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 showed him seated in the defendant’s bullet-proof glass kiosk, scribbling the occasional notes that he allowed no one, not his family, not the judges, not di Costini, to see. To Patrick, watching from the safety of an over-designed 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 expected that he could just sit down and start hearing details like this. He’d also expected it to 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.
From the Hardcover edition.