Who Killed Palomino Molero?

This article or section needs to be revised. Details should be given on the talk page. Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

Who Killed Palomino Molero? ( Spanish: ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? ) is a novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa from 1986. The book has been translated into 18 languages. The action takes place in 1954 under the military rule of General Odría on the Pacific coast in northern Peru.

content

A goatherd finds the battered body of a young man in remote terrain and notifies the nearest police station in Talara . The young, “shitty sentimental” gendarme Lituma has to take care of the case and cannot get over the cruel torture of the victim. The taxi driver Don Jerómino recognizes the soldier Palomino Molero from Castilla near Piura in the unfortunate man . The gendarme goes to Doña Asunta Sánchez, the mother of the murdered man, of his own accord - perhaps because he is a Cholo himself like the victim. The widow claims that whoever has the dead man's guitar is his murderer. Doña Asunta's only son had volunteered for the Talara Air Force. The father Don Teófilo Molero of Palomino, who was born in marriage on February 13, 1936, has died.

Lituma returns to Castilla and learns that on his guitar the otherwise shy palomino has occasionally offered boleros and Creole pieces of music to the whites at their parties . He also sang with a voice like Leo Marini . A hopeless love for a woman drove him to the military. His mistress lives near the air base.

The gendarme Lituma and his superior, the “fair-skinned” young lieutenant Silva, went to Colonel Mindreau, in command of the nearby base. The lieutenant is dispatched from above by the colonel. At least there is some information. The silent recruit Molero had no friends. The commandant refuses to question the roommates. In addition, members of the armed forces came under internal jurisdiction and not the gendarmerie. On their way home to the station, the two policemen, who are brilliant detectives, learn something from the mouth of a soldier. Blame for the Colonel's bad mood is his snippy daughter Alicia, a flat-chested half-orphan with narrow hips. Her groom, the pilot lieutenant Ricardo Dufó, squeezes Silva. He got the passport from Alicia; Because of palomino moleros. But he has already received his well-deserved punishment for aiming too high. Question Time comes to an early end. A military patrol picks up the drunkard. Nevertheless, the detective work can continue quickly, because an anonymous letter refers to a hot lead in the area. The landlady Doña Lupe in Amotape turns out to be a useful witness regarding an action by the colonel together with his lieutenant. Palomino had slipped into Doña Lupe's house while she was still alive, along with Alicia on the run from angry papa. The colonel had tracked down the lovers who wanted to get married in Amotape but couldn't find a clergyman quickly enough and brought them back. The father had given the recruits Molero to Lieutenant Dufó and his soldiers as deserters.

One after the other, Alicia and her papa go to the two detectives. It turns out Alicia has Palomino's guitar. The detectives hardly believe their ears. The colonel had abused his daughter and afterwards asked her to shoot him. When they find a guitar in the station a little later, Lieutenant Silva and his gendarme Lituma believe that Alicia brought the instrument as well as the anonymous letter before. Vargas Llosa immediately trumps Alicia's appearance with that of her father. The Colonel accuses Alicia of lying; takes back the statements of the daughter, as it were, justifies his claims plausibly and thus unsettles not only the two so far successful detectives, but also the reader. Trapped in dire insanity, Alicia claims her own father is abusing her. After Mindreau's nocturnal appearance, it sounds like a shot nearby. It looks as if the colonel withdrew his last statement with the alleged suicide. He had previously stressed that recruit Molero should have been appropriately punished and that it had happened. However, the subordinates acted excessively. A shot in the recruit's head would have sufficed.

Gendarme Lituma wants to look for the colonel's body. Lieutenant Silva is not interested. The case has been clarified down to insignificant details.

In the police station the police received a letter of confession. The colonel killed his daughter.

For the reader, at the end of the novel, nothing is cleared up. Because everything is probable, but nothing is certain. There is more than one possible perpetrator. The population does not want to buy the abuse variant of the police. One believes in smuggling in the Talara border region or in an espionage story instigated by the neighboring Ecuadorians against innocent Peru.

The concluding report of Lieutenant Silvas finds no favor with the superior. As a punishment for their failure, the two detectives are transferred. Lituma has to leave relatives and friends at home and is deported to the remote region of Junín .

shape

The straightforward educational work of the two detectives is presented in virtuoso prose, fluid and lightweight. The author enforced that style with drastic restriction to the essentials. Although Vargas is narrating Llosa, it seems that the plot is being presented from the point of view of the naive gendarme Lituma. In addition, Lituma is often told in a sometimes cheerful manner. In his creative attempts to investigate the murder case, Lieutenant Silva finds in Lituma an admirer who is always in awe. Lituma very rarely intervenes in the current “interrogation”. And if he does, then he is amazed at himself. He considers his superior to be an honest person who has the appropriate, successful strategy ready for questioning every suspect or witness. Lieutenant Silva laughingly explains his strategy to the subordinate. He just knocks all over the bush. However, a burlesque, sprawling subplot ensures that the reader does not have to share the gendarme's admiration. Throughout the entire novel, the lieutenant intends to go to bed with the innkeeper Doña Adriana by immoral means. The innkeeper, wife of the old fisherman Don Matías Querecotillo, could be his mother. When Silva finally stands before the goal of his most ardent desires, Doña Adriana, mother of adult children, turns the slippery tables and drives the bewildered admirer to flight once and for all.

reception

Whoever reads the book as a detective story à la Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson reads that I misunderstood Vargas Llosa. The novel is disguised as a crime thriller, but ultimately it isn't. Because, for example, the question, whether Alicia or her father is lying, cannot be decided. Another example: The narrator - as indicated - always approaches the narrow vision of the somewhat simple-minded gendarme Lituma in a threatening way and thus distanced himself threateningly from reality. Colonel Mindreau appears as the hated representative of the military regime for whom only one truth applies. That is his truth: recruit Molero should not have approached a white man as a Cholo. The colonel wanted to conceal his crime or that of Lieutenant Dufó.

literature

Used edition

• Who Killed Palomino Molero? Novel. Translated from the Spanish by Elke Wehr. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-38286-1 .

Secondary literature

• Thomas M. Scheerer : Mario Vargas Llosa. Life and work. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-38289-6 .
• Norbert Lentzen: Literature and Society: Studies on the relationship between reality and fiction in the novels of Mario Vargas Llosas. Romanistischer Verlag, Bonn 1994 (Diss. RWTH Aachen 1994), ISBN 3-86143-053-3 .

Remarks

1. ↑ The novel can be read as a racial conflict. The white people mean the upper class. These are the Spanish-born residents of Peru. It seems that there is no decent whites in the text.
2. ↑ In the vicinity of the Peruvian air force base, the gringos from the "International Petroleum Company" pollute the environment, including the ocean (edition used, for example, p. 32 above and p. 39 below).
3. ↑ Amotape is a town in the district of the same name in the Peruvian province of Paita (Eng. Province of Paita ).
4. ↑ To the two detectives, Alicia describes her treasure Palomino, whom she calls Palito, as an angel who has fallen from heaven (Edition used, p. 131, 15. Zvo).
5. ↑ Scheerer also points to the successful balancing act between “tragic and comic” (Scheerer, p. 136, 12th Zvu).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ span. ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?
2. ↑ Edition used, p. 42, 10. Zvo
3. ↑ Lentzen, p. 139, 6th Zvu
4. ↑ Scheerer, p. 135, 6. Zvo
5. ↑ Vargas Llosa cited in Scheerer, p. 133, 19. Zvo
6. ↑ See for example the edition used, p. 120, 3rd Zvu or also p. 161, 3rd Zvo and p. 161, 8th Zvu
7. ↑ Lentzen, p. 144 above
8. ↑ Lentzen, p. 145 below
9. ↑ Lentzen, p. 146 middle