Doctor Frigo Read Free Page A

out covering the smaller islands with the mobile clinic. The local dispensary now took care of his insulin requirements but every three months he came in for me to look him over. His wife always came with him. She could never quite understand the nature of the disease – or remember what I had told her about it last time – and, asI had difficulty translating my over-simplified explanations into patois, patience on both sides was necessary. It waseleven-fifteen before I could get away. Then I had trouble starting my moto and had to pedal up to the main road. That made me very hot as well as nervous, so the fast ride down the hill into the town was not as refreshing as usual.
    The island of St Paul-les-Alizés was first sighted by Columbus on his second voyage to the Indies and named San Pablo de la Montanas. The ‘mountains’ then visible were twin peaks of the volcano now called Mont Velu, the two craters of which became joined during the eruptions of 1785. San Pablo was never colonized by Spain. The idigen-ous Caribs were a ferocious lot and three Dominican missions sent to convert them to the Faith were all in the end massacred. It was not until a French trading company took possession a century and a half later that the Caribs of St Paul were, by better armed savages from Europe, themselves massacred. Aside from a temporary occupation by the British during the Napoleonic wars, St Paul has been French territory ever since.
    Although, like Martinique, Guadeloupe and other islands of the French Antilles, it is fast being ‘developed’, few of St Paul’s recent acquisitions – the Plan Five light industry complex and commercial centre, the municipal low-cost housing estate, the new elementary school, the Alizés supermarket and the Hotel Ajoupa – have yet impinged on the old port of Fort Louis and the streets above it. Within the amphitheatre bounded by the Vaubanesque ramparts on the headland, the Môle du Bassin and the foothills of the Grand Mamelon, the place still looks much as it did in the nineteenth century. True, there are now microwave dishes mounted on the roof of the citadel beside the flagstaff, jumbo jets from the lengthened airport runway now thunder overhead, and out across the bay the concrete pylons of the new Club Nautique can be seen sprouting like toadstools on the green slopes of La Pointe de Christophe; but the town of Fort Louis itself is little changed. It is still ugly, overcrowded, ramshackle, noisy and, for the most part, squalid.
    The Préfecture occupies one side of the Place Lamartine halfway up the hill.
    The claim, made in the guidebook put out by the Bureau de Tourisme, that the old quarter of the town is ‘a picturesque evocation of the colonial past’, though not completely false, is certainly misleading. A few years back the balconied façades of a street of early limestone and maçonne-du-bon-dieu houses near the old church were restored. That is all; and, for those of us who actually live in the houses, it was not enough. Nothing was done about our plumbing. This continues to evoke the colonial past in ways which can sometimes surprise even the hard-faced men of the Service Sanitaire. The money that should have been spent on it was used instead to install an air-conditioning system in the Préfecture. The bureaucratic tricks employed to legalize that bare-faced swindle are still resented.
    Built in 1920 to replace a wooden predecessor destroyed by fire, the Préfecture looks like a mairie of the period transported from some industrial town in north-east France and then whitewashed. It stares brazenly across the Place at the statue of Lamartine, the poet who as a statesman sought to make men free and who was so little corrupt that he became penniless.
    The black policeman under the drooping tricolour eyed me curiously when I asked for Commissaire Gillon’s office and then directed me to the annex.
    I know the main building and its creaking parquet well enough – the Bureau