Who Killed Palomino Molero by Mario Vargas Llosa - Essay Example

[The [The [the Who Killed Palomino Molero by Mario Vargas Llosa As the last surviving son of a widow, Palomino Molero was exempt from military service. Indeed, Molero was not a fighter, he was a musician: He played the guitar and sang boleros to the young women in Talara, a small Peruvian town. Yet he enlisted in the Air Force. Only slightly more than halfway through the book, Silva and Lituma interview one Doa Lupe and learn that Molero had been kidnapped from her house by Mindreau and Duf shortly before his death.

For the Watsonesque Lituma this wraps up the case and clearly demonstrates--much to his own surprise--that Mindreau and Duf were the killers. But the relatively sophisticated Silva is not so quick to jump to conclusions. "Nothing's easy, Lituma," he says. "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" (86)1. Vargas Llosa, playing on the normal expectations of readers of detective fiction, produces a plot that is surprising for the very reason that it contains no surprises.

Yet he simultaneously undermines the expectations of postmodernist readers by keeping his detective story plot on track right through to the end. Who Killed Palomino Molero derives a great deal of its energy from metareading effects similar to those so important in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The text can be read by typical "unsophisticated" fans of detective fiction as an ordinary detective story. The ending of Vargas Llosa's subplot is thus very much like the ending of the detective plots.

Silva himself makes the parallel between the plots quite clear: "I've made a vow," he declares early in the book. "I won't die until I screw that fat bitch and until I find out who killed Palomino Molero" (58). 2The Foucauldian link between sex and epistemology suggested in Who Killed Palomino Molero indicates that these two roles are not all that different. Indeed, detectives often function as voyeurs, a standard detective assignment being the tracking of illicit sexual behavior on the part of straying spouses or lovers.

And one of the clearest links between sex and epistemology in Palomino Molero occurs in a scene of voyeurism in which Silva and Lituma look on with binoculars hoping to discover the secrets of Doa Adriana as she takes a bath in an isolated inlet. The major players in the murder soon present themselves, almost of their own accord, to the brilliant Silva, who has vowed not to die until he has solved the crime and conquered the woman of his dreams, Dona Adriana. The major characters emerge in sharp relief yet remain elusive and ambiguous: Richard Dufo, Colonel Mindreau, Alicia, Molero and Orpheus.

Mario Vargas Llosa's haunting novel presents the reader with an impenetrable mystery about the human soul, about guilt, and about innocence, challenging him to perform the painful task of pitying the cruel, judging the victim, and perhaps forgiving them both. On the other hand, the Silva/ Lituma solution to the mystery of Molero's death might not be quite so neat as it first appears. As Lituma explains to Silva, "They're saying the dumbest things you ever heard, Lieutenant. That it had to do with contraband, that it was a spy story, that Ecuador was involved".

And to add credibility to the rumors, both Lituma and Silva are then inexplicably transferred ( Captain Pantoja) to remote outposts, apparently to get them out of the way. These hints of conspiracy undermine the epistemological closure apparently provided by the identifica tion of Mindreau as Molero's killer, though in a highly unstable and ambiguous way, since we cannot be certain that the rumors have any foundation. Who Killed Palomino Molero is not a conventional detective story per se, but a postmodernist fiction loosely based on the epistemological format of the detective story, a situation that would not be at all unusual within the context of postmodernist culture, for which the detective story has frequently served as a structural model and object of parody.

Works CitedVargas Mario Llosa. Who Killed Palomino Molero 1986 (in Spanish). Translated by Alfred MacAdam . New York: Macmillan, 1988.