Who Killed Palomino Molero?

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Lituma flattened out behind the rock where they’d taken up positions half an hour earlier. Was that dust cloud approaching them really Doña Adriana? Or was Lieutenant Silva so hot for her that he was seeing visions? The two of them were hiding up on Crab Point, a natural watchtower that overlooked a stony beach and a quiet inlet. How had the lieutenant discovered that Doña Adriana came here to take her afternoon baths when the setting sun turned red and the heat relented a little? Because in fact that moving red dust cloud was Doña Adriana. Lituma could now make out her compact shape and undulating walk.

  “This is the greatest gift I’ve ever given anyone, Lituma. You’re going to see Chubby’s ass, nothing less. And her tits. And, if you’re lucky, her snatch with its curly little hairs. Get ready, Lituma, because you’re going to die when you see it all. It’s your birthday present, your promotion. How lucky you are to work for a guy like me!”

  Lieutenant Silva had been chattering like a parrot ever since they’d arrived, but Lituma barely heard him. He paid more attention to the crabs than to his boss’s jokes or even to the advent of Doña Adriana. The point was justifiably famous for its myriad crabs: each one of those tiny holes in the ground represented a crab. Lituma watched in fascination as they peeked out, looking at first like moving stains. Once they emerged, they stretched, widened, and began to run in that confusing way which made it impossible to know if they were moving forward or backward. “Just like us in this Palomino Molero business.”

  “Get down, get down, don’t let her see you. Terrific! She’s stripping.”

  It occurred to Lituma that the entire point was honeycombed with crab tunnels. What if it caved in? Both of them would sink into the dark, asphyxiating sand crawling with swarms of those living shells armed with pincers. Before they died, they’d suffer hellish torture. He patted the ground: it was as hard as stone. Good.

  “Well, at least lend me the binoculars,” Lituma complained. “You invited me here so I could see her, too, but you’re doing all the looking.”

  “Why do you think I’m the boss, asshole?” But he passed him the binoculars. “Take a quick look. I don’t want you to become an addict.”

  Lituma adjusted the binoculars and looked. He saw Doña Adriana down below, leaning against the breakwater, calmly taking off her dress. Did she know she was being watched? Did she take her time like that just to get the lieutenant hot and bothered? No, her movements were loose and casual, because she was sure she was alone. She folded her dress and stretched to lay it on a rock where the spray wouldn’t reach it. Just as the lieutenant had said she wore a short pink slip, and Lituma could see her thighs which were as thick as young laurel trees, and her breasts which were exposed right to the edge of her nipples.

  “Who would have thought that at her age Doña Adriana had so many tasty little tidbits?”

  “Don’t look so hard. You’re going to wear her out,” the lieutenant scolded him as he took back the binoculars. “Actually, the best part comes now when she goes in the water, because the slip sticks to her body and turns transparent. This is not a show for enlisted men, Lituma. Only lieutenants and above.”

  Lituma laughed, just to be amiable, not because the lieutenant’s jokes were funny. He felt uncomfortable and impatient. Was it because of Palomino Molero? Could be. Ever since he’d seen the boy impaled, crucified, and burned on that rocky field, he hadn’t been able to get him out of his mind for a single moment. At first he thought that once they’d found out who killed him and why, he’d be free of Palomino Molero. But now, even though they’d more or less cleared up the mystery, the image of the boy was in his mind night and day. You’re ruining my life, you little bastard. He decided that this weekend he’d ask the lieutenant for a pass to go to Piura. It was payday. He’d dig up the Unstoppables and invite them to get drunk at La Chunga’s place. Then they’d finish off the evening in the Green House, with the whores. That would get his mind off things and make him feel better, goddamn it.

  “My little Chubby belongs to a superior race of women: those who don’t wear panties. Think of all the advantages of having a woman who goes through life without panties.”

  Lieutenant Silva passed him the binoculars, but no matter how much he squinted, he really didn’t see very much. Doña Adriana bathed right at the edge of the water: her paddling and the mild surf made her slip wet and translucent, so Lituma could actually see her body. It was garbage.

  “My eyes must not be so good, or maybe I just don’t have your imagination, Lieutenant. All I see is foam.”

  “Go fuck yourself. I, on the other hand, can see her as if she were on display. From top to bottom, from back to front. And, if you’re at all interested, I can tell you that her pubic hair’s as curly as any black woman’s. I can tell you how many hairs she has, if you want to know. I see them so clearly I can count them one by one.”

  “And what else?” said the girl, standing behind them.

  Lituma fell over backward. At the same time, he twisted his head so sharply that he wrenched his neck. Even though he could see it wasn’t so, he kept thinking it wasn’t a woman who had spoken but a crab.

  “What else can you add to the list of obscenities you’ve already spit out?” She had her fists on her hips, like a matador challenging a bull. “What other disgusting expressions do you have in your filthy mind? Are there any more left in the dictionary, or have I heard them all? I’ve also been watching the dirty way you’ve been looking at her. You make me sick to my stomach.”

  Lieutenant Silva bent over to pick up his binoculars which he’d dropped when the girl spoke. Lituma, still sitting on the ground, vaguely convinced he’d smashed an empty crab shell when he fell, saw that his boss had not yet recovered from the shock. He shook the sand off his trousers to gain a little time. He saluted, and Lituma heard him say: “It’s dangerous to surprise the police when they’re involved in their work, miss. Suppose I’d turned around shooting?”

  “Their work? You call spying on women while they bathe your work?”

  It was only then that Lituma realized she was Colonel Mindreau’s daughter. That’s right, Alicia Mindreau. His heart pounded in his chest. Now, from down below, boomed the outraged voice of Doña Adriana. Because of all the noise, she’d discovered them. As if in a dream, Lituma saw her stumble out of the water and run, half crouched and covering herself with her hands.

  “You’re not only pigs, but you abuse your authority, too. You call yourselves policemen? You’re even worse than what people say the cops are.”

  “This point is a natural lookout. We use it to keep track of boats bringing in contraband from Ecuador,” said the lieutenant with such conviction in his voice that Lituma’s jaw fell open as he listened. “Besides, miss, in case you didn’t already know it, insults from a lady like you are like roses to a gentleman. So go right ahead if it makes you feel better.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Lituma could see that Doña Adriana, half dressed, was bustling down the beach toward Punta Arena. She was swinging her hips, moving along energetically, and even though her back was to them, she was making furious gestures. She was probably cursing them up and down. The girl had fallen silent and stared at them as if her fury and disgust had suddenly abated. She was covered with grime from head to toe. It was impossible to know what the original color of her sleeveless blouse or her jeans had been because they were both the same dull ocher tone of the surrounding sand flats.

  To Lituma she seemed even thinner than on the day he’d seen her burst into Colonel Mindreau’s office. Flat-chested, with narrow hips, she was what Lieutenant Silva mockingly called a board member. That pretentious nose, which seemed to grade people according to their smell, seemed even haughtier to him than the previous time. She sniffed at them as if they had failed her olfactory test. Was she sixteen? Eighteen?

  “What’s a nice young lady like you doing among all these crabs?” Lieutenant Silva had slyly consigned the Peeping Tom incident to oblivion. He put his binoculars back into
their case and began to clean his sunglasses with his handkerchief. “This is a bit far from the base for a stroll, isn’t it? Suppose some animal took a bite out of you? What happened to you? Get a flat?”

  Lituma found Alicia Mindreau’s bicycle about sixty feet below, at the foot of Crab Point. Like its owner, it was covered with dirt. He studied the girl and tried to imagine Palomino Molero standing next to her. They’d be holding hands, saying tender things to each other, staring dreamily into each other’s eyes. She, fluttering her eyelids like butterflies, would whisper in his ear: “Sing to me, please, sing something pretty.” No. He couldn’t. He just could not imagine them like that.

  “My dad knows you’ve been getting things out of Ricardo,” she said suddenly in a cutting tone. She had her face tilted up and her eyes were measuring the effect her words had on them. “You took advantage of him when he was drunk the other night.”

  The lieutenant didn’t bat an eye. He carefully put on his sunglasses and began to descend the point toward the path, sliding on his backside as if on a sled. When he was down, he slapped the dust off his clothes..

  “Is Lieutenant Dufó’s first name really Ricardo? His friends love the gringos so much that they probably call him Richard.”

  “Daddy also knows you went to Amotape to talk to Doña Lupe.” She was actually rather short, small, barely any figure at all. She was no beauty. Did Palomino Molero fall in love with her just because of who she was? “He knows everything you’ve been doing.”

  Why did she talk like this? Alicia Mindreau didn’t seem to be threatening them; instead, she seemed to be making fun of them, turning them into the object of some private joke. Now Lituma came scrambling down the point, right behind the girl. The crabs zigzagged back and forth between his legs. There was no one in sight. The men in charge of the oil tanks must have left a while ago because the gates were locked and there was no noise on the other side.

  They had reached the path that led from the point to the fence that separated the I.P.C. From Talara. The lieutenant took the bicycle and pushed it along with one hand. They walked slowly, in Indian file, the crab shells crunching under their feet.

  “I followed you from your headquarters and neither of you realized it,” she said in the same unpredictable tone, mixing anger and mockery. “At the gate there, they tried to stop me, but I threatened to tell my daddy and they let me pass. You two didn’t even hear me. I was listening to you say all those dirty things and you didn’t even know I was there. If I hadn’t spoken, I could still be there spying on you.”

  The lieutenant agreed, laughing quietly. He moved his head from one side to the other in mock shame, congratulating her.

  “When men are by themselves, they talk dirty. We came to see what was going on, to see if any smugglers were around. It’s not our fault if some Talara ladies came to bathe at the same time. A coincidence, right, Lituma?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  “In any case, Miss Mindreau, we’re at your service. What can we do for you? Or would you prefer we talk over at the office? In the shade, and drinking sodas, we can be more comfortable. Naturally, our little office is not as comfortable as your dad’s.”

  The girl said nothing. Lituma could feel his thick, dark red blood coursing slowly through his veins and his pulse pounding in his wrists and temples. They went through the gate, and the Guardia Civil on duty, Lucio Tinoco from Huancabamba, gave the lieutenant a military salute. There were also three guards from International’s own security force on duty. They gaped at the girl, surprised to see her with Lieutenant Silva and Lituma. Were people in town already gossiping about their trip to Amotape? It wasn’t Lituma’s fault He had scrupulously followed his boss’s order to say nothing about Doña Lupe.

  They passed the shiny green company hospital, then the harbor officer’s headquarters, where two sailors stood guard with rifles on their shoulders. One of them winked at Lituma and nodded toward the lieutenant and the girl, as if to say birds of a feather flock together.

  “Does Colonel Mindreau know you’ve come to see us?”

  “Don’t be a fool. Of course he doesn’t know.”

  “He’ll find out soon enough,” thought Lituma. Everyone looked surprised to see the three of them together. Then they stared and whispered to each other.

  “Did you come just to tell us that the colonel found out we’d had a chat with Lieutenant Dufó and with Doña Lupe?” He spoke looking straight ahead, not turning toward Alicia Mindreau, and Lituma, who had dropped back a bit, could see that she also kept her head facing forward, never looking at the lieutenant.

  “That’s right.”

  “A lie,” Lituma thought. What had she come to tell them? Had the colonel sent her? In any case, she seemed to he having trouble speaking. Maybe she’d lost her nerve. Her brow was furrowed, her mouth half open, and her arrogant little nose twitched anxiously. Her skin was very white and her eyelashes extremely long. Was it her air of delicacy, fragility, of being a pampered child, that drove the kid wild? Whatever it was she’d come to tell them, she was sorry now and would say nothing.

  “It certainly was nice of you to drop by and chat with us. Really, thanks a lot.”

  They walked on in silence fifty yards or so, listening to the cries of the sea gulls and the roar of the surf. At one of the wooden houses, some women were expertly cleaning fish. Around them, snarling and jumping, was a pack of dogs, waiting to devour the waste. The stench was overpowering.

  “What was Palomino Molero like, miss?” A chill ran down Lituma’s spine, he was so surprised to hear himself. He’d spoken without premeditation, point-blank. Neither the lieutenant nor the girl turned to look at him. Now Lituma walked just behind them, occasionally stumbling.

  “The nicest boy in the world. An angel come from heaven.”

  Her voice did not tremble with bitterness or nostalgia as she spoke. Neither did it express tenderness. It was that same unusual tone, something between innocence and sarcasm, in which there occasionally flashed a spark of rage.

  “That’s exactly what everyone who knew him says,” murmured Lituma, when the silence began to seem too long. “That he was a really nice guy.”

  “You must have suffered a great deal because of Palomino Molero’s tragedy, Miss Alicia,” said the officer after a moment. “Isn’t that so?”

  Alicia Mindreau said nothing. They were passing a cluster of houses under construction, some without roofs, others with walls half finished. There were old men in T-shirts sitting on their front porches, naked children collecting shells, and knots of women. The air echoed with laughter, and the smell of fish was everywhere.

  Lituma made yet another spontaneous remark: “My friends say I heard him sing one time in Piura, but no matter how I try, I can’t remember. They say his specialty was boleros.”

  “And folk songs, too,” she added, nodding energetically. “He could also play the guitar really well.”

  “That’s right, the guitar. His mother, Doña Asunta, from Castilla, is a little crazy on the subject of her son’s guitar. She wants to get it back. Who could have stolen it?”

  “I have it,” said Alicia Mindreau. Her voice broke suddenly, as if she hadn’t meant to say the words she’d just spoken.

  Again, the three of them were silent. They were heading toward the heart of Talara, and the more deeply they moved into the tangle of houses, the more people there were crowding the streets. Behind the fences, on the point where the lighthouse was located and on Punta Arena, where the gringos and executives of the I.P.C. had their houses, the streetlights had already been turned on, though the sun was still shining. This was also true up above the cliffs, on the air base. At one end of the bay, the oil refinery spewed out a plume of reddish-gold flame; the structure looked like a gigantic crab dangling its legs in the water.

  “The poor old lady said, When they find the guitar, they’ll find the killers. Not that she knows anything. Pure women’s or mothers’ intuition.”

  He felt the
lieutenant turn to look at him.

  “What’s she like?” said the girl. Now she turned, and for a second Lituma saw her face: dirty, pale, irascible, and curious.

  “Do you mean Doña Asunta, Palomino Molero’s mother?”

  “Is she a chola, a half-breed?” specified the girl impatiently. It seemed to Lituma that his boss guffawed.

  “Well, she’s just an ordinary woman. Just like all these people around here, just like me,” he heard himself say, and was surprised at how annoyed he was with her. “Of course, she doesn’t belong to the same class as you or Colonel Mindreau. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “He didn’t look like a cholo,” said Alicia Mindreau in a softer tone, as if talking to herself. “His hair was very fine, even blondish. And he had the best manners of any man I’ve ever known. Not even Ricardo or my father have manners like his. No one would have believed he’d gone to public school or that he was from Castilla. The only thing cholo about him was his name, Palomino. And his second name was even worse, Temistocles.”

  Again it seemed to Lituma that his boss had laughed. But he didn’t have the slightest desire to laugh at what the girl was saying. He was puzzled and intrigued. Was she sorry or angry at the boy’s death? There was no way to guess. The colonel’s daughter talked as though Palomino Molero hadn’t been killed in the horrible way they all knew he had, as if he were still alive. Could she be a bit crazy?

  “Where did you meet Palomino Molero?” asked Lieutenant Silva.

  They had reached the rear of the church. That was the white wall that Teotonio Calle Frías used as the screen for his portable outdoor movie house. Those who wanted to sit down to see the movie had to bring their own chairs, but most people just hunkered down or stretched out on the ground. To get a good view, you had to pay five reales, which allowed you to sit, crouch, or recline on the other side of a rope. The lieutenant and Lituma could always get in free. Those who didn’t want to pay could always watch the movie free from outside the roped-off area. Of course, the view was bad and gave you a sore neck.