César Vallejo, private detective? Peruvian comic imagines the great poet in a mystery worthy of cinema

By one of those whims of chance, Cesar Vallejo He no longer looks at culture. Moved under the pretext of some works from its location in front of the Segura theater, the statue of the poet made by Miguel Baca Rossi now looks into optics. On the side of the Huancavelica street, as if incognito among the people, he awaits his moment. He almost seems to be on a detective mission. A poet detective? The unusual combination of nouns is at the heart of a graphic novel set in a foreign Paris, which in its strangeness bears resemblance to today’s Peru.

Written by Gino Palomino, “Marías que se van” (Casa de Cartón, 2024) begins in Paris in 1924, where private detective Lucien Falcón is commissioned to find a missing, perhaps dead, woman; the singer Maria. In his search for her he encounters the Peruvian poet César Vallejo several times, self-exiled at the time, in whom he discovers a sensitivity to see things that others do not see. So, he recruits her as his assistant, like a malnourished Dr. Watson, with his humerus in a bad position.

A poet on a suicide mission

“I was clear that Vallejo was not going to be the detective, because Vallejo has to be himself. Detective work involves a much more rational mentality and has to be a kind of Sherlock Holmes and Vallejo was not like that.”says Palomino, whom we met in front of the statue; He also drew and colored the work, 200 pages of titanic work that required an entire year. While Vallejo does his thing with words, Falcón gets into the investigations like the rational guy that he is, a survivor of war and a bad life. Vallejo is different from him, he was also poor at that time, but he always remains connected to more transcendent things, with an artist’s vision.

In the Paris of this work there is a climate of debauchery (they were the so-called “crazy years”), but also of oppression. The work highlights the emergence of far-right groups; There are the seeds that would lead to Nazism in Germany and fascism to Italy and Spain. “They didn’t want to know anything about the foreigners who ‘came to Paris and degraded everything.’ But yes, there are things in common with these times [en Perú]”says the author, who finds another coincidence: in 1924, the City of Light held an Olympics, as is also the case in 2024.

Giving voice to the voice of a country is not to be taken lightly. “You have to investigate,” says Palomino, seriously. For this work, two biographies of the poet were read; “I, who have just been born!” by Miguel Pachas Almeida, and “César Vallejo: the barbarian life” by Jorge Nájar. These books gave him a basis on which to transform reality and create his fiction. “I know that there are specialists and if the work attracts attention, they will review a little with a magnifying glass, but I also keep in mind that this is a work of fiction that has an entertainment intention,” says the author.

In his research, Palomino discovered that the poet once said “there is always someone who hides a revolver against me,” an accurate phrase for the comic; What’s more detective than a gun pointed at the hero. Or the poet, who in real life will never return to his land. Because being marked by tragedy is also the fate of the detective.