Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa Page B

the kid who ran away with the girl and brought her to Amotape. But I never found out her name or the names of the men who came looking for them. And I don’t want to know, either. Don’t tell me if you know. I’m cooperating, okay? Don’t mention their names!”
    “Don’t get upset, stop shouting, don’t say those things,” said the shadow of the old one. “Child, how can you think of threatening me? You’re going to kill yourself, you?”
    “If you hurt him, if you touch a hair on his head.” In the sky, behind a bluish haze, the shadows grew darker. The stars had come out. Some candles began to flicker among the adobe walls, cast-iron gates, and bamboo fences of Amotape.
    “Hurt him? I’m going to shake hands with him and say to him, from the bottom of my heart, ‘I forgive you,’” murmured the shadow of the old one. He actually did extend his arm toward him, although he was yet to look at him. Doña Lupe began to feel better. She saw they were shaking hands. The boy was so overcome with emotion he could barely speak.
    “I swear to you, I’ll do anything, she’s the light of my life, the holiest thing, she . . .”
    “Now you two have to shake hands as well,” ordered the older shadow. “No grudges. No rank here. Just two men, three men, arranging their affairs, the way real men always do things. Happy now, dear? Calmed down? That’s right, it’s all over now. Let’s get out of here.”
    He quickly took his wallet out of his back pocket. Doña Lupe felt the sweat-moistened bank notes in her hand and heard a gentlemanly voice thanking her for all her trouble and advising her to forget the whole thing. Then she saw the shadow of the older man walk out of the shack toward the jeep. But the younger shadow poked its pistol in her chest again before leaving: “If you open your mouth, you know what will happen to you. Remember that.”
    “And the kid and the girl got into the jeep like two little lambs, just like that? And they just drove off?” The lieutenant couldn’t believe it, judging by the expression on his face. Lituma didn’t believe it either.
    “She didn’t want to, she didn’t trust them, and tried to stop him: Let’s stay right here. Don’t believe him, don’t believe him.”
    “Come on now, let’s get going, my dear,” the voice of the older one encouraged them from the jeep. “He’s a deserter, don’t forget. He has to go back. This has to be taken care of immediately. This black mark has to be erased from his service record. He’s got to think of his future. Let’s get going.”
    “Yes, dear, he’s right, he’s forgiven us, let’s do what he wants and get in. I believe what he says. He wouldn’t lie.”
    “He wouldn’t lie.” Lituma felt a tear run down his cheek to his lips. It was salty, a drop of sea water. He kept on hearing Doña Lupe, her voice as deep as the ocean, interrupted from time to time by the lieutenant’s questions. He vaguely understood that she was no longer telling anything she hadn’t already said about the matter they had come to investigate. She cursed her bad luck, she wondered what would happen to her, she asked heaven what sin she’d committed that she should be tangled up in this horrible story. At times she sobbed. But nothing she said interested Lituma.
    It was a kind of waking dream, again and again he saw the happy couple enjoying their premarital honeymoon in the humble streets of Amotape: he a half-breed cholo from Castilla; she a white girl of good family. There are no barriers to love, as the old waltz said. In this case the song was correct: love had broken through social and racial prejudices, as well as the economic abyss that separated the two lovers. The love they must have felt for each other had to have been intense, uncontrollable, to make them do what they did. “I’ve never felt a love like that, not even that time I fell in love with Meche, Josefmo’s girl.” No, he’d fallen in love a couple of times, but