Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa

Now nobody can come between us. They’ll have to accept our love. I’m not leaving. I’ll wait for him, talk to him.”
    “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