Our Lady of the Assassins

Fernando Vallejo

4 ideas

1. Alexis, Wilmar, and the circle of killing

   Fernando, a grammarian in his fifties, returns to Medellín and takes Alexis, a teenage sicario, as a lover; Alexis kills strangers for trivial offenses like loud music or a rude remark while Fernando watches. After rival hitmen murder Alexis, Fernando takes up with Wilmar, then learns Wilmar was Alexis's killer. He resolves to have him killed but relents, and Wilmar is murdered anyway, leaving Fernando alone in a city where each boy's death simply replaces the last.

2. Devotion that sanctifies the killer's aim

   The teenage hitmen pray at the church of María Auxiliadora in Sabaneta and wear scapulars on the wrist, chest, and ankle, asking the Virgin that their shots hit and that they get paid and come back alive. Religion does not restrain the violence. It is taken up as a working tool, a ritual insurance policy that wraps contract murder in piety and removes any sense of transgression.

3. The grammarian glossing a murderous slang

   The narrator keeps stopping to define the boys' street slang (parlache) for an outside reader, translating words for killing, guns, and payment as if compiling a dictionary. Treating the city's words as specimens shows how a new vocabulary makes murder routine. It also shows how the scholar's detached precision becomes its own way of keeping the carnage at a distance.

4. The disgusted witness becomes the killer's accomplice

   The narrator rails against the poor, the Church, and human breeding, and he quietly welcomes the killings his lovers carry out on people who annoy him. His contempt passes for moral clarity, but it works as permission. A cultivated observer who calls the violence deserved or merely inevitable ends up sharing in it without ever pulling a trigger.

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