Garcia's Heart Hardback - 2007

Excerpt

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.

Media reviews

“Engrossing. . . . Durcan doesn’t offer any easy answers in this searching meticulously observed novel of moral complexity. He does offer plenty to think about.”
— Toronto Star

“Lucid and subtle. . . . Durcan has crafted an entertaining and convincing portrayal of a man awkwardly perched atop a precipice of identities and histories on the verge of collapse.”
— Montreal Review of Books

“Couldn't be timelier. . . . Thought-provoking and memorable.”
— Montreal Gazette

“Stunningly well-written. . . . Durcan writes the way one imagines a brain surgeon employs his tools — with strength to cut through bone and feather-light delicacy to excise minute strands of tissue. Durcan's style is a mixture of precision and playfulness, irony and moral seriousness reminiscent of British master Ian McEwan, or even a slightly restrained Martin Amis. . . . A remarkable accomplishment.”
— Winnipeg Free Press

“With this remarkable debut novel, Liam Durcan, a neurologist and the author of the much-lauded short story collection A Short Journey by Car (2004), has firmly ensconced himself within the hallowed ranks of doctors making successful forays into literature, a line running straight from Chekov through William Carlos Williams and W. Somerset Maugham to, most recently, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam. . . .There are evocations of Ian McEwan’s Saturday here . . . Durcan beats McEwan at his own game by resisting the tendency to show off and, in doing so, produces a restrained, artfully paced work built around its central ethical question, which is not so much “what is evil?” as “what, exactly, is the nature of good?”
— Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Like a cross between John le Carre and Ian McEwan -- García's Heart, treads the line between an elegant, elegiac novel of ideas and a sophisticated political thriller. It was exciting, intellectually compelling, and beautifully written. It was also that rarest of books: A literary work with an intensely humanistic core. I am so happy to have discovered Liam Durcan; he will be a major writer for years to come.”
— Pauls Toutonghi

“Eloquent and haunting, García's Heart fearlessly explores the moral ambiguities of the modern world. Durcan demonstrates his supreme versatility with this psychologically penetrating, technically assured, yet empathic and human portrait of a man struggling to come to terms with a terrible angel.”
— Eden Robinson,

“In his debut novel, Liam Durcan skillfully performs complex forensic procedures: autopsies on mysteriously damaged hearts, brain scans on characters whose deepest thoughts remain beyond diagnosis. Throughout, Durcan writes with operating room precision. A grim, gripping, confident, and provocative book.”
— Steven Heighton

“Liam Durcan raises complex and important issues in García’s Heart, exposing the frailty of human nature against the background of medical science. It’s an intelligent book, thought-provoking and satisfying — a meditation on the workings of the mind. I found myself thinking about it for a long time afterwards.”
— Clare Morrall

“Liam Durcan spins dynamite stories of unease and empathy and anarchy. . . . His characters are neurons, hurtling unhappily into the mortal world, into the wild rumpus.”
— Mark Jarman