Mario Llosa: Who Killed Palomino Molero?

Lituma closed his eyes. There he was: roasting under the implacable sun in the flinty wasteland, tortured from head to foot, surrounded by indifferent, browsing goats. Hung, burned with cigarettes, a stick shoved up his ass. Poor kid.

“That’s another matter,” said the colonel. “But,” he corrected himself instantly, “you’re right, it doesn’t explain it.”

“You asked me a question and I answered it. Now allow me to ask you a question. Was there any reason to torture the kid like that? I ask because frankly I just don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. Oh, I guess I do understand. Now. At first I didn’t. He got drunk and got his men drunk. Liquor and a need for revenge turned him from a poor devil into a sadist. Need for revenge, a broken heart, tarnished honor. Those things exist even if a policeman doesn’t understand them, Lieutenant. He seemed to be only a poor devil, not a sadist. A single bullet between the eyes would have been enough. And a discreet grave. Those were my orders. The stupid bloodbath, naturally, was not my idea. Now not even all that matters. It happened the way it happened and everyone has to take responsibility for what he does. I’ve always done that.”

He gulped air again and panted. Lituma heard the lieutenant ask: “You were not there, then? Only Lieutenant Dufó and his men?

To Lituma it seemed that the colonel was hacking, as if he were about to spit. But he didn’t.

“That was my consolation prize for him, the bullet that would soothe his wounded pride,” he said coldly. “He surprised me. I didn’t think him capable of things like that. His men also surprised me. They were Molero’s buddies, after all. There is an element of bestiality in all of us. Educated or ignorant, all of us. I suppose there’s more among the lower classes, the cholos . Resentment, complexes of all kinds. Liquor and praise from their superior did the rest. There was no need to go that far, of course. I’m not sorry about anything, if that’s what you want to know. Have you ever heard of an airman who could kidnap and rape the daughter of a base commander and get away with it? But I would have done things more quickly and cleanly. A bullet in the back of the neck. End of story.”

“He’s just like his daughter,” thought Lituma. “Elusions, delusions, whatever it is.”

“Did Molero rape her, Colonel?” Once again, Lituma found that the lieutenant was asking the same questions he was thinking. “That he kidnapped her is a fact. Although it might be more accurate to say that they ran away together. They were in love and wanted to get married. The whole town of Amotape could testify to that. So where does the rape come in?”

Lituma again heard the colonel hacking. When he finally spoke, he was the same despotic, cutting man who’d spoken with them in his office: “The daughter of a base commander does not fall in love with a recruit,” he told them, annoyed at having to explain something so obvious. “Colonel Mindreau’s daughter does not fall in love with a guitar player from Castilla.”

“She gets it from him,” thought Lituma. From the father she supposedly hates so much, Alicia Mindreau inherits this mania for calling people cholos and treating them like dirt.

“I’m not making it up,” he heard Lieutenant Silva say softly. “It was Miss Alicia who told us. We didn’t have to ask her about it, Colonel. She said they loved each other and if the priest had been in Amotape they would have been married. A rape?”

“Haven’t I explained all that already?” Colonel Mindreau raised his voice for the first time. “Delusions, delusions. Lying fantasies. She wasn’t in love with him, she couldn’t fall in love with him. Can’t you see she was doing what she always does? Just what she did when she told you all those things. Just what she did when she went to the nuns at the Lourdes School to show them wounds she’d inflicted on herself, just so she could do me some harm. She was getting revenge, punishing me, making me pay for what hurt me the most, the death of her mother. As if”-he sighed and gasped for air-”that death wasn’t cross enough for me to bear all my life. Can’t a policeman’s mind grasp all this?”

“No, motherfucker, it can’t,” thought Lituma. “It can’t.” Why make up rules like that? Why couldn’t Alicia Mindreau fall in love with that skinny kid who played the guitar so beautifully and sang with that tender, romantic voice? Why was it impossible for a little white girl to be in love with a little cholo? Why did the colonel see that love as a tortuous conspiracy against him?

“I also explained it to Palomino Molero,” he heard the colonel say, again in that impersonal tone that distanced him from them and from what he was saying. “Just as I’ve explained it to you. In more detail to him. More clearly. Without threats or orders. Not as a colonel to an airman, but as one man to another. Giving him a chance to act like a gentleman, to be what he wasn’t.”

He fell silent, and passed his hand rapidly over his mouth, as if it were a flyswatter. Lituma, half closing his eyes, could see them: the colonel, severe and neat, with his straight mustache and his cold eyes, and the kid, standing at attention, stuffed into his recruit’s uniform, probably brand-new and with shiny buttons, his hair freshly cut. The colonel, short and domineering, walking around his office as he spoke, the sound of propellers and motors in the background; and the airman, very pale, not daring to move a muscle, blink, open his mouth, even to breathe.

That child, even though she talks, laughs, and does what other girls do, is not like them. She’s fragile, a crystal, a flower, a defenseless dove (Lituma realized that the colonel was really saying: I could simply say to you that an airman is forbidden even to look at the daughter of the base commander; a boy from Castilla cannot aspire, even in his wildest dreams, to Alicia Mindreau. I want you to know this and to know as well that you must not go near her, look at her, even dream about her, or you’ll pay for your daring with your life) but instead of just forbidding him to see her, I explained it all to him, man to man. Believing that a guitar player from Castillo could still be a rational being, could think like a decent person. He told me he understood, that he had no idea Alicia was that way, that he would never look at her or speak to her again. And that night, the hypocritical cholo kidnapped her and took advantage of her. He thought he had me, the poor man. That’s it, I raped her. Now you’ll just have to resign yourself to our getting married. No, my boy, my daughter, this sick child, can do what she likes with me, can trick and disgrace me all she likes, and I have to carry this cross God has imposed on me. She can do that, and I… but not you, you poor fool.

He fell silent, took a deep breath, and gasped. Then again the silence, regularly interrupted by the regular fall of the waves. The pier had stopped bouncing up and down. And once again Lituma heard his chief ask the question that was on the tip of his own tongue: “And why Ricardo Dufó? Why could he be Alicia Mindreau’s boyfriend, her fiancé?”

“Ricardo Dufó is no beggar from Castilla. He’s an officer. A man from a good family. But above all because he’s got a weak character and a weak mind,” shot back the colonel, fed up that no one but he could see what was plain as daylight. “Because, through that poor devil Ricardo Dufó, I could go on taking care of her, protecting her. Just as I had sworn to her dying mother I would. God and Mercedes know I’ve kept my word, despite what it’s cost me.”

His voice broke and he coughed several times, trying to cover up an irrepressible anguish. Off in the distance, cats were howling and hissing in a frenzy: were they fighting or screwing? Everything in the world is confusing, damn it.