Faber £16.99 pp253
“In this country, a hard, narrow search will go nowhere,” the author is told by one of its natives. “The truth doesn’t travel in a straight line. It travels the way of the serpent.” Later in his beguiling narrative, James MacKinnon acknowledges that the Dominican Republic is “a place where a simple explanation is always suspicious, where the grandest conspiracy is believable”.
MacKinnon never knew his uncle, Father James Arthur MacKinnon, who died before the author was born. A tubercular Catholic priest sent to the Dominican Republic by the Scottsboro Missions (a Canadian organisation), Father Arturo died in mysterious circumstances during the American occupation of the country in 1965, the only foreign civilian to be murdered at that time. “He was killed on America’s watch, ” explains MacKinnon. “This fact, I remember, had a particular gilded weight.” Almost 40 years on, MacKinnon set out to discover the truth of what happened to Arturo. The investigation into his uncle’s death reaches a satisfactory conclusion, although there is no shining moment of revelation, more a gradual understanding. But this is more than a mere whodunnit in an exotic locale, for MacKinnon has produced a worldly-wise meditation on truth and reconciliation, or the lack of it, which reaches inside the troubled soul of this Caribbean island.
The Dominican Republic suffered under the military dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961, when “Hot Balls”, as Trujillo was known among Catholic priests, was assassinated in a military coup. A social democrat, Juan Bosch, was elected in 1962, and deposed by a junta in 1963. Then the junta fell in 1965 and American marines invaded in order to protect US citizens and stave off communism. The following year, a new “ soft” dictatorship began under Joaquin Balaguer, which would last for 12 years; Balaguer later served as president again, from 1986 to 1996.
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Arturo had been sympathetic to the cause of popular revolution against Trujillo, though he wasn’t politically active. Some senior military commander presumably gave the order for him to be killed. An army lieutenant and a policeman in plain clothes drove him out of town and were in the process of killing him when a soldier stumbled upon them and sprayed fire at all three men, killing the assassins.
There are several people in the town of Monte Plata who remember the day Father Arturo was killed. “It was a black day,” recalls Rosa. “Black! Rain came down like someone had opened a seam in the sky.” One of Father Arturo’s fellow priests, Joe McGuckin, explains that the official cover-up is “the tendency of the rich, the powerful . . . to kill a person, and to think they’ll become irrelevant . . . But if the people keep it alive, the blood never dries. It never dries”.
Several of those whom MacKinnon encounters are reminiscent of characters in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. In particular, he seeks out and approaches several retired soldiers and policemen, who give wily, deflective responses to his inquiries. General Imbert, the man who shot “Hot Balls” dead, strikes him as likeable but untrustworthy. “There’s a saying,” says Imbert.
“‘What time leaves behind remains to be forgotten.’ ” When General Cruz Brea says he doesn’t remember what his investigation into the Arturo murder yielded, MacKinnon realises he is on a futile quest: “And now the message seems to be: What is your goddam problem, gringo? Have you failed to grasp that this will be a conversation in which truth might only be revealed through triangulation, if any truth is revealed at all?” One surviving radical, Narciso Isa Conde, points out to the author that “impunity rules in this country”.
The publicity for this book makes comparison with several other writers (Ian Rankin, Jan Morris, Joan Didion, Philip Gourevitch and Adam Hochschild), but this is unnecessary. Certainly, it is gripping, vividly written and exquisitely structured, with a reflective coda about the cruelties of nature in this “paradise” that puts Arturo’s martyrdom into perspective, but MacKinnon has his own distinctive voice. With an air of resignation, he persuades the reader that, while for some the blood never dries, for others it evaporates like tropical rain.
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