Doctor Frigo

HÔPITAL CIVIL

FORT LOUIS
ST PAUL-LES-ALIZÉS

Antilles Françaises

The new night Sister from Guadeloupe appears to be intelligent and to know her job.

A relief.

There is one thing to be said for a tour of night duty at the hospital. The food one is expected to eat may be disgusting and the bed on which one is supposed to rest may be too near the main air-conditioning compressor; but, unless there is an unusually messy traffic accident or the night Sister in charge is inadequate, there is privacy and time for thought.

The duty man also has a desk and a supply of hospital stationery. So I shall make what use I can of these two nights to do something I should have done before: that is, put my side of this Villegas business down on paper so that in case of need I can later produce it, signed and dated, as evidence of my good intentions – if not of my good sense.

Naturally, I hope that the need will not arise. However, during the past twenty-four hours, I have had reason to suspect that there is more going on than I at present understand. So, I shall take no chances.

I will begin by recalling the circumstances of my father’s assassination.

About the assassination of my father, Clemente Castillo Borja.

As those obliged to interest themselves in the political and economic affairs of Central America will know, an aura of mystery still surrounds some aspects of the case. From time to time journalists claiming special knowledge of the country and inside information have written articles purporting to reveal all; but none of them has ever produced any new facts and the ‘alls’ revealed have been no more enlightening than the guesswork and speculation of which everyone else has long since grown tired.

The two gunmen who actually did the killing that night on the steps of the Hotel Nuevo Mundo were, of course, identified immediately. The scene was flood-lit and there were dozens of witnesses. What has never been established beyond doubt, however, is the identity of those who hired and paid the killers. All we know is that they had the forethought to booby-trap the getaway car in advance of the operation. It was expertly done. The gunmen were blown to pieces long before there was even a chance of their being
caught and questioned. Police records had both men down as ‘Wanted for armed robbery. No known political connections.’

The most widely held, you could almost say the ‘official’, view has always been that the assassination was ordered by the military junta immediately after their October coup, and carried out under the direction of a Special Security Forces action squad.

That could be the truth.

There are those, on the other hand, who still insist that, although the junta had every reason to want my father dead and were quite capable of organizing his destruction, the last thing they would want was to risk making a martyr of him. These more devious thinkers contend that both the assassination and the booby-trap murders were engineered by a left-wing, and violently anticlerical, faction within my father’s own Democratic Socialist Party. So, the thing was done partly to discredit the junta before it could stabilize the post-coup situation, and partly because this left-wing faction knew that my father had secretly committed the party to a coalition in the Assembly with the Christian Democrats.

This could also be true – just.

Until her own death in Florida last year, my mother thought that it was; though for no clear reasons that I could ever discover. A highly emotional, deeply feminine woman – the self-willed kind who is nevertheless at sea without a husband to dominate her – she became the centre of a woollyminded, self-dramatizing bunch of compatriot exiles. As doyenne of such a group she doubtless preferred the more exotic theory, with its byzantine trappings of conspiracy and betrayal, to the mundane alternative. At all events, she never ceased urging me to seek out the traitors and to exact an only son’s proper revenge – blood for blood.

In that, as in other ways, I was a disappointment to her. My only defence – and in this I was sometimes backed by my sisters and their husbands – was to insist that I found
the betrayal theory totally incredible. This annoyed her, of course, because these unknown traitors she postulated were the only objects of my filial vengeance who could conceivably be accessible to it. Not even my mother could expect me to mount a one-man punitive expedition against the junta and the SSF on their own ground. After the ’68 upheaval the vengeance situation became even more confused. Under the Oligarchy, backed by its so-called ‘patriotic militia’, the casualty rate among former members of the junta was high, and by the following year those senior officers who weren’t serving time in subordinate diplomatic posts abroad, were either ailing or dead.

What then did I really believe about the Castillo assassination plot?

A few days ago I would have answered that I had long ceased to care much who was the mastermind, if indeed there was one, or which cabal was responsible.

If that sounds callous or unfilial, let it. Twelve years have elapsed since my father’s death, and when he was killed I was an insecure nineteen-year-old just entering a French medical school an ocean away from home. What I remember most vividly now about that time is not the grief and confusion, not even the funeral in the pouring rain with armed troops crowding the mourners and police taking names at the graveside. What I remember are the blinding flashlights of the press photographers at Orly airport as I left to fly home, and the reporters bawling inane questions at me. There was a man there from our Paris embassy who was supposed to be helping me through, but he could do nothing. The newsmen elbowed him aside and one thrust his face right up to mine. He was sweating and out of breath and sprayed saliva over me as he shouted in Spanish above the din. ‘What were your feelings,’ he demanded, ‘when you heard that your father had been assassinated? You must have known how much he was hated. Were you surprised?’

I drew back my fist to hit him, but the embassy man
clutched my arm. Then the airport police moved in surrounding me and I was hustled away.

Today I am wiser; I know now that my feelings about my father were mixed and that even then I had begun to understand the kind of man he was. Now I can accept with equanimity propositions that once would have been unacceptable: the self-evident truth, for example, that even had he lived and come to power, Clemente Castillo would have served the people of my native land no better than the inept junta or the civilian obligarchy which now manipulates a figurehead president. A Castillo administration might have presented a better appearance, a more liberal image, to the outside world, but that would have been the whole extent of its accomplishment. My country’s difficulties, like those of other coffee republics which were once colonies of Spain, are rooted in history and they will not be solved by images of government, however glossy; nor by lightweight oportunists with simplistic programmes of reform.

I am aware that most of my colleagues in this hospital dislike me. In supermarket French the word
frigo
is used to mean not only refrigerator or freezer but also, a shade contemptuously, frozen meat. ‘Dr Frigo’ is the nickname by which I am usually known here. Of course I am always careful to treat it as a joke; but on re-reading the above paragraph I can see why, in a parochial little society such as ours, it has gained currency.

Lightweight opportunist? Is that the best the loyal son can say of the murdered father? Why then, if he were so negligible a person, was he assassinated? Other politicians have made enemies and lived. And why, if the pompous young Dr Frigo has really ceased to care about the circumstances of his father’s death, does he now start scratching at those well-healed wounds?

Fair questions. I must try to answer at least some of them.

As a young boy I both loved and respected my father; no
doubt about that; ours was a happy family. But as I grew up, though I still loved him, my respect became qualified.

He was a lawyer before he became a political leader and it is as a lawyer that I remember him best. When he practised in the courts it was his habit, over the evening meal and after, to regale us with an account of his day’s work. It was generally a tale of triumph, of course, of dangerous opponents out-manoeuvred and of the discomfiture of fools – all most enjoyable. And even when a defeat or setback had to be reported, the reasons for it were presented with so much wry humour and apparent moderation that the villain of the piece would seem more worthy of our commiseration than of hatred or contempt. While my father clearly enjoyed the sun of our uncritical admiration he was at the same time exercising and developing the rhetorical skills to be deployed later before larger audiences.

Most of his practice was concerned with defending persons accused of petty criminal offences and of cases involving debt. Over the years we children acquired, just through hearing so often about such things, some knowledge of court-room tactics, of the seamier aspects of pretrial investigation and of the rules of evidence. Though I doubt if my sisters retained much of it – for them my father’s tales of legal derring-do were only entertainments – I did and still do. Indeed it was that smattering of knowledge so gained that fostered my prejudice (doubtless ill-founded) against the law as a profession and encouraged me to hold the belief (no less erroneous, as I have since found, but shared then by my high-school biology teacher) that medicine is an exact science.