Who Killed Palomino Molero? 
by 

Mario Vargas Llosa

 

How Racism Distorts (Everything for Everyone)

On the face of it, Who Killed Palomino Molero? is a rather prosaic murder mystery. It reads almost like a practice piece to try out the technique of parallel conversations that Vargas Llosa uses in his follow-on Death in the Andes (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). And it has been read as a sort of preface to this latter work. I think that well may be the case but not in the obvious use of characters and geographical context that seems to provide superficial continuity between the two novels. 

It is noteworthy, for example, that Vargas Llosa doesn’t even allude to the dominant event of the period during which he was writing Palomino Molero, namely the Shining Path insurrection, which figures so importantly in the subsequent book. Palomino Molero is set in the early 1950’s, at least three decades before Death. So it seems likely that Palomino Molero is setting up not characters (who would be pensioned off by the time of the events in Death) but a social situation which will lead eventually to the Shining Path and more than four decades of civil war.

That social situation is the extreme racism of contemporary Peruvian society. Racism is the driving force not just of social segregation in Palomino Molero, it is also provides an instrument for more or less permanent economic stratification. Racial distinctions are the caste marks which provide a peculiar kind of stability (or stagnation) in Peruvian culture. This might be resented by much of the population but it is accepted as the way things are and how they will remain. 

Almost every page of Palomino Molero makes reference to the importance and strength of the racially-based system of identification. Bluebloods, purebreds, half-breeds, cholos, and Blacks is the rough pecking order, with further distinctions for mountain natives, slave-descendants, and oriental immigrants. Sex is a burlesqued game of genetic mixing rather than a serious human undertaking. The story itself hinges on the racial incompatibility of two lovers. Despite the fact that one of these, Palomino, “behaved just like one of us,” he was unacceptable in white society. 

Vargas Llosa doesn’t attack this racial profiling directly; he simply presents it. But he does criticize the white folk at the top of the social heap as living in “an illusion which is also a deception. A deceptive, fraudulent fantasy.” And this illusion also infects those among the lower echelons in a particular way. They believe that the world, even the world of the whites, is actually dominated by a conspiracy among the unspecified but all powerful ‘big guys.’ Consequently even after the crime is solved, no one believes it has been. Who really killed Palomino Molero? “The big guys, of course. Who else?”

In other words, racism is the distorting lens of all of Peruvian culture. It prevents anyone from seeing accurately what’s going on around them. Even in the brightest of sunlight (a dominant trope in the book) what is in front of Peruvian eyes cannot be seen, only felt as a vague mistrust of the world. As one of the characters in this tragi-comedy says, “Everything in the world is confusing, damn it.” Eventually it is this racism which will spawn and spread the violence and irrationality of the Shining Path rebellion, and threaten the survival of the country itself. So Palomino Molero is indeed a literary preface to Vargas Llosa’s further work but in a rather more profound way than as a mere Hollywood prequel.