Garcia's Heart (27 page)

The son of a surgeon and a prominent family in Tegucigalpa, Hernan García de la Cruz passed through the medical school of the National Autonomous University with expected ease. To his father's chagrin–chagrin was not the right word, Marta García would say when relating the story,
horror
was more precise–Hernan decided that surgery was not his love and instead travelled to the United States for his residency in internal medicine and fellowship in cardiology. Marta, whom he had met at university, accompanied him to Detroit with their infant son, Roberto. (The details of this era in their lives always seemed to Patrick to be clouded in a category nestled between mystery and scandal; there was a wedding, a decision to travel abroad, and Roberto's arrival. The chronology of events was never clear, and the children sensed it–whenever
this period was discussed, Roberto and Celia would grin wickedly at each other until their mother chastised them.) She finished her masters in American literature–a thesis entitled “Colonialism and Catharsis in
Moby-Dick
”–as her husband was becoming one of the first experts in the art of performing coronary angiograms. They were both pursuing their interests in the American heart, she would say.

Hernan himself described learning this skill to Patrick one day at Le Dépanneur Mondial. Even though angiograms had become fairly routine tests in the intervening years, for Patrick it was something new and exotic, and it wasn't difficult for Hernan to impart the risk and sense of excitement that accompanied threading a catheter up the aorta, past the aortic valve and into the left ventricle of a patient's beating heart. Hernan and his colleagues would watch the tip of the catheter advance on the monitor, all of them enveloped in that tense silence people describe as hushed. The procedure was performed under X-ray guidance, so the gazes of all those involved were directed toward a monitor placed above the patient and away from what their hands were actually, materially doing, a dissociation Patrick had often thought about since, given the accusations against Hernan. The catheter would be introduced through an artery in the patient's leg and snaked up, inch by inch, through the aorta until it reached the great arch of the vessel, beyond which lay the heart. Hernan would describe the physical sensation of pressure against which he had to advance the catheter. He told Patrick that he imagined the whole procedure as a conflict to be entered into, that one had to advance slowly, had to indulge the weight of opposition and proceed by stealth.

Once inside the heart, they would release a small amount of contrast dye, which emerged from the tip of the catheter looking like a puff of smoke on the monitors. They would watch as the inner contours of each chamber were defined in this cloud. From there, they would pull the catheter back and inject dye into the coronary arteries, which would appear seconds later, forking like bolts of lightning, exposing areas of narrowing along their lengths.

The arteries were important, of course, but, according to Hernan they were little more than conduits, so after gaining proficiency in the procedure, he became bored with this aspect of the test. Instead, he became fascinated by the inner contours of the heart's chambers. He would retrieve the film loops of the procedures and spend hours studying the planes and niches, the subtle irregularities around the base of a malfunctioning valve. At times, during procedures, the catheter's tip would inadvertently touch the wall of the patient's heart and occasionally, depending on the location of the point of contact, produce irregular electrical activity–arrhythmias. The heart would skip a beat or two before returning to normal or it would stumble and trip into a rapid and unstable rhythm that would require urgent action. This was the start of Hernan's interest in the electrical wiring of the heart, and the origin of his hypothesis that if normal rhythms could be tripped into abnormal ones by small physical insults like the tickling of a catheter tip, then perhaps the reverse was also possible.

Hernan extended his fellowship in Detroit for another three years, starting up his hospital's first electrophysiology lab where he studied patients with potentially lethal arrhythmias. Here, in a room just down the hall from the angiogram suite,
he applied electrodes to determine the origin of the heart's abnormal electrical activity and proposed to destroy the tissue that provoked these short circuits.

The hospital administration was less than impressed. Arrhythmias weren't a major concern in comparison with the busloads of well-insured patients with coronary artery disease who needed his services to diagnose them prior to their operations. Besides, there was the question of liability. Mistakes could be made in the procedure. Hernan could not argue with this, he had experienced for himself the way a rhythm could disorganize–the chaotic descent from sinus tach to v. tach tov. fib, the heart fluttering like a moth's wings. He was a decade ahead of himself, before chaos theory and higher quality electrophysiological testing revolutionized the procedure. Patrick could see him, though, hunched over in that darkened angiography suite, taking time to study the currents of electricity in the heart, working alone on his own Manhattan Project. A few papers came of it and can be found in the literature. Too theoretical to be seminal, they were curiosities now. Patrick saw a reprint of an original article dating back to 1977 that Hernan had authored in
The Journal of Investigative Cardiology
offered on an online auction house. Bids were up over two hundred dollars, rising fast as his trial approached.

Elyse Brenman covered the Garcías' Detroit experience well in her book, tracking down Hernan's departmental colleagues from that time for their take on the man who would gain such notoriety later. One of his contemporaries, a Dr. Stanley Feinbaum, recalled Hernan's participation at the resuscitation of cardiac arrests in the hospital. In Elyse's hands Hernan's dedication became something more sinister.

 

“There were a number of times when other doctors wanted to call off treatment and Hernan would step in and take over. If there was a heart rhythm, he'd just keep going, pumping in intravenous fluids, making the orderlies continue
CPR
until they were exhausted, using the defibrillator over and over again, even trying to insert a pacemaker during the arrest, which was pretty audacious back in the seventies. It was like he was trying to coax the heart back to life. Hernan's arrests would last ninety minutes and they were, I have to admit, unnerving to witness. And the orderlies hated Hernan. Hated him.”

 

In other parts of the book, Elyse provided a fairly credible (although occasionally heavy-handed) analysis of the socio-cultural and historical framework of Honduras as a context to Hernan's actions in Detroit and then back in Tegucigalpa.

She did go predictably far at times, hypothesizing that Hernan was just another raw export from this banana republic shipped off to America, inculcated into all the myths of the American dream, and then sent back to become an imperialist tool of oppression. It was an analysis Patrick didn't completely buy, one that ignored the Garcías as anything other than educated pawns, denying them a capacity to think or feel. A colonial critique of a colonial critique. Patrick remembered Marta García telling him about moving to Detroit in the early seventies, how surprised she was to arrive, heavy with Celia, Roberto in diapers, to find a city in a state of ruin familiar to her from Tegucigalpa. They lived in a suburb of Detroit called Hamtramck, a nice enough place but without much of a Latin American community, and there they had learned to be that self-sufficient family Patrick met in Montreal fifteen years later. It was Marta García who told
him about Hernan's experiences in Detroit, recounting the years with clear nostalgia as she and Patrick worked their shifts together in Le Dépanneur Mondial. In the early seventies, Detroit was a city not just reeling from race riots and the descent from prosperity to poverty and disarray, but a place clearly recognizing that the completeness of its descent had become its new civic image. Despite this, Marta García seemed to cherish the years they spent there: the backyard of the small place they rented, Celia's birth that first summer, the work she and Hernan were pursuing. This wasn't to say they viewed their American experience uncritically but rather they both realized that this was their necessary journey, one known to anyone from a country such as theirs, a journey fraught with hardships and isolation but one that they endured as a family, and from which they would emerge as something more. As for Hernan, his opinions of a city still raw from its newly declared racial divisions and a country embroiled in the staggering last months of the Vietnam War were kept private.

It was during an evening shift shared with Marta that he had first seen some of the Detroit photos. She knew he was curious about Hernan, and during a lull she pulled out a shoebox of photos that she had brought with her that day. They were the typical snapshots of a young family in 1970s America: birthday parties, picnics in Veterans' Park, Roberto and Hernan crouched in front of a car–the grille or the side panel, nobody ever posed in front of a rear bumper–faces squinting in Greektown sunshine. There was one particular photo where Celia sat trapped in a pram, scowling at the camera, as though knowing in advance that a future boyfriend would view the picture. Beside Celia stood Roberto, squinting under the bill of a Tigers' cap, holding a baseball bat at such
an angle that one could almost hear Marta warning him to be careful around the fontanelles of his little sister.

It was on one of these nights of shuffling through pictures that Marta García showed Patrick a particular photo of Hernan. In the photo, Hernan appeared almost surprised by the camera. Behind him stood a diorama of urban disaster, a fantastic, perplexing scene that Patrick had no reference for at the time but which became recognizable to him years later as the typical backdrop to the televised nightly sermon of foreign correspondents who reported from places of chaos. Grozny, Sarejevo, Baghdad. As Patrick held the photo, Marta told him that in the midst of his medical residency, Hernan decided to volunteer in a free clinic located in a Detroit neighbourhood freshly infamous for its razed buildings and abandonment by police. Part of the regular routine at the clinic was to be held up at gunpoint by somebody looking for drugs. Hernan would come home and, once Celia and Roberto were asleep and the house was quiet, lie in bed next to her and tell her about the most recent robbery, at whom the gun had been pointed, and how close it had come to catastrophe. Several times, it had been Hernan facing the gun. If only for the immediacy and the point of view, Patrick would have preferred to have heard the story from Hernan, but Hernan himself never spoke of it. And it hadn't mattered; after Marta's description, he'd been able to stage the scene in his mind, replaying it until it became his stock footage of heroism and dedication. It was strange, but if there was anything he could talk to Hernan about now, he would ask him what he would think about when the pistol–more ominous in Patrick's imaginings for being held in trembling, desperate hands–was lifted to his own face. Did he feel
surprise or hatred? Pity? Patrick imagined him standing there as the gun was lifted, using his voice to calm the person down, trying to keep the other staff from doing something stupid. In an act of cognitive reconstruction Patrick saw him doing all this, not in some clinic in the charred core of Detroit, but from behind the counter of Le Dépanneur Mondial. No wonder Hernan looked so surprised in the photo, he thought it would be a gun and not a camera. “Not even the children know this,” Marta García told him as she took the photo back and placed it in the box. He almost told Elyse about the clinic. But he didn't. She could easily have interpreted it in any number of other ways, the crucial moment in the Angel's education: the sickening feeling of helplessness before a criminal, the source of his rage at the underclass, the first necessary step designating them as the
other
before the hard business began.

The university professor had left the stand and another witness was being questioned by Lindbergh. This man was barely in his forties and given the arithmetic, he must have been a teenager when he first came into contact with Battalion 316. This was the particular shame of having to watch the proceedings, this calculation of ages and timelines. At an age when Patrick was embroiled in the melodrama of whether Celia García loved him, this man before him was being beaten with a rubber hose for his political beliefs. Patrick wondered if he even
had
political beliefs. He believed in the scientific method and the dependent variable, in quantification and reproducibility. More recently, he had come to believe in good corporate governance and the power of the quarterly report. Yes, he thought, he believed in something. But he doubted he'd take a beating with a rubber hose for any of it.

Fifteen minutes into his testimony, after the description of
the morning he was taken into custody, the witness was asked by Lindbergh to give the names of those arrested with him. Without pausing, he leaned toward the microphone and listed the five names. Patrick recognized only one, José-Maria Fernandez, a student Elyse had memorialized in her book. The name of Fernandez was like a roadside shrine in a devout country. It generally brought things to a halt. Lindbergh was no exception, veering off into questioning about Fernandez, what the witness had seen done to him, the last time Fernandez was seen alive by any of them. Lindbergh asked the witness how they found Fernandez, and the man calmly responded that they found his body several weeks later in a banana field outside of Tegucigalpa.

The words of the witnesses who had already testified were powerful enough, but, like any trial, it was usually one victim's story that rose above the others to encapsulate the act committed. Elyse Brenman understood this and was the first to use the story and the sole surviving image of José-Maria Fernandez in that way. September 3, 1981, became the reference point from which his story was told. From this date, when Fernandez had his photo taken for his student
ID
, his story cleaved, backwards to describe his life as son and student and alleged communist sympathizer, and forward to his arrest and interrogation in Lepaterique and his death on June 28, 1983.