Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

This is a second reading of this marvelous short novel. I first read the novel earlier this year, on a flight down to Mexico, after reading in the New York Times about a new translation. The novel is from 1955. It’s short, about the length of a three hour plane ride from Los Angeles to Guadalajara. It’s a rich novel, and intricately told, worth reading more than once. After the first reading I expected that I would read it again. So as Jim and I were coming down again to Guadalajara again and I was looking for something to read on the plane, I pulled this off my shelf and again, read it on the plane. My article on my first reading is here.

After this reading, I would say that I understood more. Of course I knew what to expect, and which of the many characters would become important. But even without understanding completely, the novel is excellent. The mystery is half of the beauty.

In summary, once you work out the chronology, the story is actually fairly simple though filled with multiple characters and incidents.

The novel begins with a man named Juan Preciado. He is the son of a woman named Dolores Preciado. She dies in the opening pages telling her son to go back to the city, Comala, where she was from, and he was born, and find his father who she left years ago and Juan never knew. The father’s name is Pedro Paramo.

Juan finds a muleteer named Abundio who is going to Comala, who tells him that he is also a son of Pedro Paramo. When they arrive in Comala, Juan finds the city nearly deserted. Abundio continues on his way telling Juan to find a woman named Eduviges Dyada. He finds the woman, who had been a friend of his mother’s. She tells Juan that his mother told her that he would be coming, but of course his mother died days ago and far away. It becomes apparent that the distinction between the living and the dead is blurred in this literal ghost town. Eduviges is a ghost. Abundio had also died years ago, we find out later. Another woman, Damiana Cisneros, comes to Juan and invites him away from Eduviges’ spectral home. He recognizes her name as someone who worked at Media Luna, the ranch that Pedro Paramo owned and where Juan was raised as an infant. Damiana says that it is she, but she is also a ghost. Juan comes upon a man and a woman, who are brother and sister but also lovers. As people moved away and the town died only the two of them were left and they coupled with the futile idea that they could repopulate it. The man leaves, now that Juan has appeared. But Juan dies, too, of what isn’t clear, perhaps just the enervation of the lifeless town. He’s found by a woman named Dorotea, also a ghost, and the two of them end up side by side in a single grave. It isn’t clear who buries them.

Damiana, Eduviges, Dorotea, and the voices of other dead souls that Juan overhears as they speak from their graves, and a third-person narrator as well, tell the stories of the town, all dominated by the central figure of Pedro Paramo, who himself died years ago.

We learn that Pedro was the son of a man named Lucas who owned Media Luna, the large ranch outside Comala. As a child, Pedro had been infatuated by a girl named Susana San Juan. She is the daughter of a man named San Juan Bartolome. But Susana married a man named Florencio, so Pedro spends his life pining for her and waiting.

When Lucas dies, Pedro becomes the owner of Media Luna. No one expects much of him, but he quickly, and ruthlessly, sets about making his fortune and consolidating power. One of his first actions is to marry Dolores Preciado in order to cancel the debts owed to her father. He sires Juan as well as many illegitimate children, Abundio, for one, and a son named Miguel who is the only one he gives his name to. We learn that it was Dorotea who arranged for the women that Pedro would sleep with, he with an insatiable carnal appetite, and magnetically attractive to women. Pedro and the foreman of the ranch Fulgor Sedano, kidnap a neighbor who is trying to enforce a border between his land and Pedro’s and they hang him in a room and then seal up the room.

Miguel Paramo is a hellion. Miguel murders the brother of the local priest, Father Renteria, and when Miguel comes later to apologize to the dead man’s daughter, Ana (Renteria’s niece) Miguel rapes her. Miguel is himself killed when he is thrown from a horse. Renteria is called to say the funeral mass and at first refuses to bless the man who abused his family, but Pedro bribes Renteria with a handful of gold coins, which Renteria accepts. Burdened with the guilt of his sin, Renteria becomes incapable of offering absolution to any of the town’s inhabitants, dooming them to haunt the town as perpetual ghosts.

Pedro’s wealth and power expand, and for awhile his fecundity prospers the city, too. About two thirds through the book the Mexican Revolution breaks out. The soldiers come to Pedro for money and men, which he gives them. The revolution is described as chaotic and pointless, men, eager for the excitement, change sides depending on who is winning or where they can get the most profit for themselves.

Then, Pedro learns that Florencio, Susana’s husband has died. He arranges for her and her father to come to Media Luna, then sends the father away. He says, to Fulgor, his foreman:

“Did you know, Fulgor, that she’s the most beautiful woman ever born to this earth? I began to believe I’d lost her forever. I have no intention of losing her again. Do you understand what I’m saying, Fulgor? Tell her father to go back and keep working the mines. And out there… I imagine it wouldn’t be difficult to make the old man disappear in a place no one ever visits. Don’t you think?” (p. 84).

At last, now an old man, Pedro has the woman he wants. But Susana is ill. She is cared for by a woman at the ranch named Justina. She has delusions. She imagines she is still married to Florencio. She is visited by her father’s ghost. Pedro never receives the satisfaction he had longed for of his unrequited love, and then Susana dies. “Those were gray days, sad ones for the Media Luna. Don Pedro didn’t say a word. He didn’t leave his room. He vowed to take revenge on Comala: –I’ll cross my arms and Comala will die of hunger. And that’s what he did” (p. 116). Without Pedro’s virility the town turns to dust.

In the final pages we learn how Pedro Paramo dies. Abundio Martinez, the muleteer we met in the very first pages, gets very drunk. He is trying to soothe the pain of his wife, Refugio, having just died while giving birth to a son that also died. He sold his burros trying to raise the money for a doctor to tend to her, but to no use. Now destitute and alone he stumbles home from the bar where he bought the booze, but takes a wrong turn and goes up to Media Luna. He finds Damiana Cisneros and Pedro Paramo on the porch. He asks for help: a little money to bury his wife. Pedro refuses and Abundio in a drunken rage kills them both, Damiana’s screams attracting men who drag Abundio away. In Pedro’s dying moments Damiana’s ghost already returns and attempts to tend to him. But as her support is only ghostly, he falls, in the novel’s final words, “crumbling as if he were a pile of rocks” (p. 123).

Once again, I find it impossible to give this extraordinary novel justice. I’m sure there are details of the story I missed. I’m sure I will read it again. If you haven’t, you should.