Who Killed Palomino Molero?

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “She was scared out of her wits, run, run, if they catch you, they’ll . . . I don’t know what, get out of here, I’ll keep them here, I don’t want them to kill you, darling.” She was so scared that Doña Lupe also got scared: “Who are they?” she asked the young couple, pointing at the dusty car, the silhouettes that got out and stood anonymously framed by the burning horizon. “Who’s coming? My God! What’s going to happen?”

  “Who was coming, Doña Lupe?” asked the lieutenant blowing smoke rings.

  “Who do you think it was? Who else could it be but your kind?”

  Lieutenant Silva didn’t move a muscle. “You mean the Guardia Civil? Or do you mean the military police from the Talara Air Force Base? Is that it?”

  “Your kind. Men in uniforms. Isn’t it all the same thing?”

  “Actually it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter.”

  At that moment, even though he missed not a one of Doña Lupe’s revelations, Lituma saw them. They were sitting right there, in the shade, holding hands, an instant before disaster struck. He’d bent his head covered with short, black curls over her shoulder and, caressing her ear with his lips, was singing to her: “Two souls joined by God in this world, two souls who loved each other, that’s what we were, you and I.” Moved by the tenderness and the beauty of his voice, she had tears in her eyes, and so she could hear him better, she shrugged her shoulders and crinkled up her loving face. There was no evidence of nastiness or arrogance in those adolescent features sweetened by love.

  Lituma felt desolated by sadness as he imagined the vehicle of the uniformed men: first a roaring motor, then clouds of yellow dust. It traced a path around midday Amotape and after a few horrid moments stopped a few yards from the very doorless shack where they were now. “At least he must have been very happy during the two days he spent here.”

  “Only two men?” Lituma was surprised to see the lieutenant so surprised. He avoided looking him in the eye, out of an obscure superstition.

  “Only two,” repeated the woman, nervous and uncertain. She squinted toward the ceiling, as if trying to figure out where she’d made her mistake. “Nobody else. They got out and the jeep was empty. Yes, a jeep. There were only two of them, I’m sure. Why do you ask, sir?”

  “No reason,” said the lieutenant, grinding his cigarette butt on the floor with his shoe. “I would have thought that at least a patrol would have come for them. But if you saw two, there were two and that’s that. Go on.”

  Another bray interrupted Doña Lupe. It floated in the scorching midday atmosphere of Amotape, prolonged, full of high and low notes, deep, funny, seminal. As soon as they heard it, the children playing on the floor got up and ran or toddled out, splitting their sides with malicious laughter. “They’re going to find the mare and see how the donkey mounts her and makes her yell like that,” Lituma thought.

  “Are you all right?” said the shadow of the older man, the shadow that did not have a pistol in its hand. “Did he hurt you? Are you all right?”

  It had suddenly gotten dark. In the few seconds it had taken for the two men to walk the short distance from the jeep to the shack, the afternoon had turned to night.

  “If you hurt him, I’ll kill myself,” said the girl, not shouting but challenging, her heels firmly planted on the ground, her fists tight, her chin shaking. “If you touch him, I’ll kill myself. But before I do, I’ll tell everything. Everyone will be ashamed and disgusted at you.”

  Doña Lupe was shaking like a leaf. “What’s going on, sir? Who are you? What can I do for you? This is my own little place, I mind my own business. I’m just a poor woman.”

  The shadow with the weapon, who flashed fire whenever he looked at the boy—the older one looked only at the girl —went up to Doña Lupe and put his pistol between her withered breasts. “We’re not here, we don’t even exist” he instructed her, drunk with hate and fury. “Open your mouth and you’re a dead bitch. I’ll blow your brains out. Understand?”

  She went down on her knees, begging. She knew nothing, understood nothing. “What did I do, sir? Nothing, nothing. I took in two kids who asked for a room. For the love of God, think of your own mother, sir, don’t shoot, we don’t want any trouble or disgrace around here.”

  “Did the younger man call the older one colonel?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” she replied, trying to find her way through the interrogation. She was trying to guess what he wanted her to say. “Colonel? The younger addressing the older one? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I don’t remember. I’m a poor, ignorant woman, sir. I don’t have anything to do with all this, it was all an accident. The one with the gun said that if I opened my mouth and told what I’m telling you, he’d come back and blow my brains out, then shoot me in the stomach, and then shoot me between the legs. What could I do, what was I going to do? I lost my husband, he was run over by a tractor. I’ve got six kids and I can just barely feed them. I had thirteen, and seven died. If I get killed, the other six will die. Is that fair?”

  “The one with the gun, was he an officer? Did he have stripes on his shoulder or just a silver bar on his cap?”

  Lituma began to believe in telepathy. His boss was asking the very questions he was thinking. He was panting, feeling dizzy.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Can’t you stop torturing me? Don’t ask me questions I don’t understand. What are stripes? What are you talking about?”

  Lituma heard her, but he was seeing the young couple again, clearly, despite the blue shadows that covered Amotape. Doña Lupe, on her knees in front of the frenetic, gesticulating young man, was whimpering right there on the doorstep; the old man’s staring eyes were bitterly, painfully, disdainfully on the girl, who defiantly protected the thin boy with her own body and kept him from stepping up to the men in uniform. Lituma was seeing how the arrival of the outsiders had taken the children, the old people, and even the dogs and goats of Amotape off the streets and buried them in their houses. Everyone was afraid of getting involved in this kind of trouble.

  “You keep quiet, keep your mouth shut, who do you think you are, who gave you the right, what are you doing here anyway,” said the girl, protecting him, pushing him out, holding him back, stopping him from speaking. At the same time she kept on threatening the shadow of the older man: “I’ll kill myself and tell the world everything.”

  “I love her with all my heart, I’m an honorable man, I’ll dedicate my life to loving her and making her happy.” No matter how he tried, the boy couldn’t get around the body of the girl who was shielding him, in order to come forward. The old man’s shadow never turned toward him but remained fixed on the girl, as if no one else existed in Amotape or the world for that matter. But the young man half turned the instant he heard the boy speak and lunged toward him, muttering curses and waving his pistol as if he were going to smash in the boy’s head. The girl grabbed him and tangled him up. Then the shadow of the older man gave a dry, definitive order: “At ease,” which the other obeyed instantly.

  “All he said was At ease? Or did he say At ease, Dufó? Or maybe At ease, Lieutenant Dufó?”

  This went beyond telepathy. The lieutenant asked the questions using the same words that came to Lituma. “I don’t know,” swore Doña Lupe. “I never heard any names. I only found out that his name was Palomino Molero when I saw the photos in the Piura newspaper. I recognized him right away. My heart broke, sir. That’s him, the kid who ran away with the girl and brought her to Amotape. But I never found out her name or the names of the men who came looking for them. And I don’t want to know, either. Don’t tell me if you know. I’m cooperating, okay? Don’t mention their names!”

  “Don’t get upset, stop shouting, don’t say those things,” said the shadow of the old one. “Child, how can you think of threatening me? You’re going to kill yourself, you?”

  “If you hurt him, if you touch a hair on his head.” In the sky, behind a bluish haze, the shadows grew darker. The stars had come out
. Some candles began to flicker among the adobe walls, cast-iron gates, and bamboo fences of Amotape.

  “Hurt him? I’m going to shake hands with him and say to him, from the bottom of my heart, ‘I forgive you,’” murmured the shadow of the old one. He actually did extend his arm toward him, although he was yet to look at him. Doña Lupe began to feel better. She saw they were shaking hands. The boy was so overcome with emotion he could barely speak.

  “I swear to you, I’ll do anything, she’s the light of my life, the holiest thing, she . . .”

  “Now you two have to shake hands as well,” ordered the older shadow. “No grudges. No rank here. Just two men, three men, arranging their affairs, the way real men always do things. Happy now, dear? Calmed down? That’s right, it’s all over now. Let’s get out of here.”

  He quickly took his wallet out of his back pocket. Doña Lupe felt the sweat-moistened bank notes in her hand and heard a gentlemanly voice thanking her for all her trouble and advising her to forget the whole thing. Then she saw the shadow of the older man walk out of the shack toward the jeep. But the younger shadow poked its pistol in her chest again before leaving: “If you open your mouth, you know what will happen to you. Remember that.”

  “And the kid and the girl got into the jeep like two little lambs, just like that? And they just drove off?” The lieutenant couldn’t believe it, judging by the expression on his face. Lituma didn’t believe it either.

  “She didn’t want to, she didn’t trust them, and tried to stop him: Let’s stay right here. Don’t believe him, don’t believe him.”

  “Come on now, let’s get going, my dear,” the voice of the older one encouraged them from the jeep. “He’s a deserter, don’t forget. He has to go back. This has to be taken care of immediately. This black mark has to be erased from his service record. He’s got to think of his future. Let’s get going.”

  “Yes, dear, he’s right, he’s forgiven us, let’s do what he wants and get in. I believe what he says. He wouldn’t lie.”

  “He wouldn’t lie.” Lituma felt a tear run down his cheek to his lips. It was salty, a drop of sea water. He kept on hearing Doña Lupe, her voice as deep as the ocean, interrupted from time to time by the lieutenant’s questions. He vaguely understood that she was no longer telling anything she hadn’t already said about the matter they had come to investigate. She cursed her bad luck, she wondered what would happen to her, she asked heaven what sin she’d committed that she should be tangled up in this horrible story. At times she sobbed. But nothing she said interested Lituma.

  It was a kind of waking dream, again and again he saw the happy couple enjoying their premarital honeymoon in the humble streets of Amotape: he a half-breed cholo from Castilla; she a white girl of good family. There are no barriers to love, as the old waltz said. In this case the song was correct: love had broken through social and racial prejudices, as well as the economic abyss that separated the two lovers. The love they must have felt for each other had to have been intense, uncontrollable, to make them do what they did. “I’ve never felt a love like that, not even that time I fell in love with Meche, Josefmo’s girl.” No, he’d fallen in love a couple of times, but they were passing fancies that faded if the woman gave in or if she put up such a strong resistance that he finally got bored. But he’d never felt a love so powerful he’d risk his life for it, the kind the kid had felt, the kind that had made the girt stand up to the whole world. “Maybe I’m not the kind who gets to feel real love,” he thought. “Probably it’s because I’ve spent my life chasing whores with the Unstoppables, my heart’s turned whore, and now I can’t love a woman the way the kid did.”

  “What am I going to do now, sir?” he heard Doña Lupe implore. “Give me some advice, at least.”

  The lieutenant, already standing, asked how much he owed her for the chicha and the stewed kid. When the woman said it was on the house, he insisted. He wasn’t, he said, one of those parasitic cops who abused their power, he paid his own way, on or off duty.

  “But at least tell me what I should do now.” She had her palms pressed together as if she were praying. “They’re going to kill me, the way they killed that poor kid. Don’t you see that? I don’t know where to go. I have no place to go. Didn’t I cooperate the way you asked? Tell me what I should do now.”

  “Just stay quiet, Doña Lupe.” The lieutenant put the money for the meal next to the chicha gourd. “No one’s going to kill you. No one will even bother you. Just go on living your normal life and forget what you saw, what you heard, and what you told us. Take it easy, now.” He nicked the visor of his cap with his fingers, his usual way of saying goodbye. Lituma got up quickly and followed him out, forgetting to bid Doña Lupe farewell.

  Walking out into the open air and receiving the vertical sun full blast without the protection of the woven mats and bamboo poles was like walking into hell. Within a few seconds, he felt his khaki shirt soaked and his head throbbing. Lieutenant Silva was stepping along smartly, while Lituma’s boots were sinking into the sand, making each step an effort. They walked up the winding main street of Amotape toward the open land and the highway.

  As they walked along, Lituma glimpsed the clusters of human eyes behind the bamboo walls of the shacks, Doña Lupe’s curious, nervous neighbors. When he and the lieutenant arrived, they’d all hidden, because they were frightened of the police. As soon as they were out of sight, Lituma was sure they’d all run over to Doña Lupe’s cabin to ask what happened, what the cops had seen and said. Lituma and the lieutenant walked in silence, each deep in his own thoughts.

  As they were passing the last houses, a mangy dog ran out to snarl at them. When they reached the sandy ground, darting lizards appeared and disappeared among the rocks. Lituma thought there were probably foxes as well as lizards. The kids had probably heard them howling during the two days they’d found refuge in Amotape. The foxes probably came in at night to prowl around the corrals where the goats and chickens were kept. Would the girl have been frightened when she heard the howling? Would she have hugged him close, trembling, seeking protection? Would he have calmed her down whispering sweet words into her ear? Or would they have been so in love that they would be oblivious, so absorbed in each other that they wouldn’t even hear the noises of the world? Had they made love for the first time in Amotape? Or had they done it among the sand dunes surrounding the Piura Air Force Base?

  When they reached the edge of the highway, Lituma was soaked from head to foot, as if he’d jumped fully clothed into a stream. He saw that Lieutenant Silva’s green trousers and cream-colored shirt also had large dark patches and that his forehead was covered with beads of sweat. There wasn’t a vehicle of any kind in sight. The lieutenant shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of resignation: “We’ll have to be patient.” He took out a pack of Incas, offered a cigarette to Lituma, and lit one for himself. For a while they smoked in silence, baking in the heat, thinking, observing the mirage of lakes, fountains, and seas out in front of them on the endless sand. The first truck that passed going toward Talara didn’t stop, despite the frantic gestures both made with their hats.

  “On my first tour of duty, in Abancay, when I’d just graduated from officer candidate school, I had a boss who wouldn’t stand for bullshit like that. A captain who, if anyone ever did something like that, you know what he did, Lituma? He’d take out his revolver and blow out the guy’s tires.” The lieutenant stared bitterly at the truck disappearing in the distance. “We called him Captain Cunthound because he was always after women. Wouldn’t you like to blow out that bastard’s tires?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  The officer looked at him curiously.

  “You can’t get all that stuff you heard out of your head, can you?”

  Lituma nodded.

  “I just can’t believe everything Doña Lupe told us. Or that it happened here in this miserable hole.”

  The lieutenant tossed his cigarette butt to the other side of the road and mopped his
forehead and neck with his already drenched handkerchief.

  “Right. She told us a lot.”

  “I never thought the story would turn out like this. Lieutenant. I’d imagined all kinds of things, but not this.”

  “Does that mean that you know everything that happened to the kid, Lituma?”

  “Well, more or less, Lieutenant. Don’t you?”

  “Not yet. That’s another thing you’re going to have to learn. Nothing’s easy, Lituma. The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out either to be half truths or lies.”

  “Okay, that may be, but in this case, aren’t things pretty much cut-and-dried?”

  “As of now, even though you think I’m kidding, I’m not even completely convinced that it was Colonel Mindreau and Lieutenant Dufó who killed him.” There was no irony in his voice. “The only thing I’m sure of is that they were the two men who came here and took them away.”

  “I’m going to tell you something. That’s not what got to me in all this. Know what it is? Now I know why the kid enlisted at the Talara base. So he could be near the girl he loved. Doesn’t it seem incredible that anyone would do something like that? That a boy exempt from the draft would come and join up for love, to be near the girl he loves?”

  “And why does that surprise you so much?” said Lieutenant Silva, laughing.

  “It’s certainly not what just anybody would do, not something you hear of every day.”

  Lieutenant Silva began to flag down a vehicle approaching in the distance.

  “Then you don’t know what love is. I’d join the Air Force, become a buck private in the Army, become a priest, a garbageman, and I’d even eat shit if I had to, just to be near my chubby, Lituma.”

  6

  “There she is. Didn’t I tell you? Here she comes,” exclaimed Lieutenant Silva, his binoculars jammed against his eyes. He stretched his neck like a giraffe reaching for a high branch. “As punctual as if she were meeting the Queen of England for tea. Welcome, my dear! Come on, strip so we can see you once and for all. Get down, Lituma, if she even turns this way a little she’ll see us for sure.”