Pedro Páramo: A Man and a Wasteland

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, though slender, is a rich composition that rattles and wrings its readers. It paints bottom-up a world of worn out revenants and sinners who haunt a Mexican desolation. Absolute and surreal in its execution, the novel feels akin to the infernal Dante, to Lautréamont, to Rimbaud and to Breton. It glistens with the uniquely Mexican richness to be found in the paintings of Frida Kahlo and Rufino Tamayo, or in the poems of Octavio Paz: Earthiness, subtlety, ripe allusion, and a proximity to death that fascinates and frightens alike. And Rulfo succeeds in vertiginously abducting the reader into this torn work which is both sire and testament to a force that has long existed in Latin America. Perspectives constantly shift. You feel like it could possibly be a postmodern experimentation where all the paragraphs, the histories and the severed dialogues are interchangeable, overlapping tiles in a broken tessellation. One wonders what will happen next, or what happened before, or plainly what is happening. Here, one makes love with tumbleweeds, bloody knives shiver in sheathes, guilty, and clay jars of coffee sit silently. How shall the characters wander through this shorn wasteland of spirits, of falsehoods and diluted truths? How does a reader? Even the name of the novel denotes the shifting center of gravity that consumes all attention, all space, all lives: Pedro Páramo. As the novel begins the protagonist’s mother tells him that, “Some call him one thing, some another.” Who, what, and where is Pedro Páramo, and what will readers have read by the uncertain end? Down these paths I hope here to travel, and map out a reply.

In a quote attributed to Deepak Chopra, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and John Gardner among others, there only exist two plots in literature: 1) A person goes on a journey 2) A stranger arrives in town. Both plots apply to the beginning of Pedro Páramo and the words speak likewise to a diffuse sense of estrangement that plagues even the villagers in their own town. We are plainly told in the first line that, “I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo lived there.” The speaker, Juan Preciado, stands in the shoes of The Stranger’s Meursault. Preciado too drifts through lovers, vaguely comes to terms with his mother’s death that, by necessity, stirs his lacking life. Preciado’s journey to Comala is a fluctuating descent, up and down large hills, yet the ultimate result is a steady decline into a desolate valley. A traveler he comes across remarks, “The town sits on the coals of the earth, at the very mouth of hell.” It’s not a stretch then to call Preciado’s journey a katabasis, a journey to the underworld. But unlike Odysseus, Aeneas, Orpheus, or the pilgrim Dante, Preciado is neither imbued with divine favor nor with the clarity of intent that guides a hero. He is instead a lost, mortal man. By acting as a proxy for his mother’s desire to reconcile with Pedro Páramo (who may not be called that and who may not be there), he inherits the same destiny as the unsettled, deceased mother. And this inheritance demands nostos; his journey must close the circle that began with his mother’s encounter with Pedro Páramo in Comala. He must return, and yet does so as an unfamiliar stranger.

Comala is a crater bathed in twilight, better suited for departures than for arrivals. And Rulfo is expert in subtly blurring the lives of Comala’s inhabitants with the sparse, abrasive surroundings. Just as the environment longs for rain and life, so too do the people. An early passage reads:

The day you went away I knew I would never see you again. You were stained by the late afternoon sun, by the dusk filling the sky with blood. You were smiling. You had often said of the town you were leaving behind, “I like it because of you; but I hate everything else about it -- even having been born here.” I thought, she will never come back; I will never see her again.

The language is straightforward, direct. A single simile, the bloodletting dusk, forms the backdrop of what is the lover’s lament. The passage is held together by the past tense yet suggests the recollections of a figure who is present, invisible. We are not privileged with details because now we too are part of this person’s mental landscape; we are expected to feel our way around the confusion, the archetypical suffering of romantic bereavement. But the passage encloses the woman and denies her leaving; it varies slightly but ultimately echoes: “I knew I would never see you again… I will never see her again.” A person leaves the city, and Pedro Páramo testifies in the relative innocence of youth to a loss that is later revealed to be a machination of hard-hearted resolve. It is this very resolve that will leave Comala a worn husk.

As Juan Preciado testifies, there is a deep incongruence between the emptiness of Comala and the feeling that it is crowded, loud, oscillating with motion. Mostly it is a movement of voices:

This town is filled with echoes. It’s like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone’s behind you, stepping in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years. Sounds like that. But I think the day will come when those sounds fade away.

From below, surrounding him ahead and behind, Juan Preciado is assaulted by wisps of sound. Above is only the sanguine sky. But what are they laughing about? The disembodied voices reenact the traces of life in the Comala of the past, where at least there was life and the children played in the streets. But even that Comala is illusory; Preciado’s mother left because the town’s hardships were more stifling than its joys. The testaments of the other inhabitants evoke these repeated, harrowing defeats against circumstance. This laughter heard by Preciado is the macabre double-laugh of the murdered and the victimized who, even if they persist in Comala, cannot have reconciled with the collective tragedy of their deaths. Their stories lead through tangents and trials to the doorstep of Pedro Páramo who, paradoxically, is judged to be the true life and slow death of the city, often in the same breath.

The rain that finally parches Comala comes to us through Rulfo’s language which, quite often, boasts poetic appeal in its mystery and intensity. I refer here specifically to the quality of his language that at times leans on sibilance, other times on alliteration and synalepha to demonstrate poetically that the vessel and its contents are singular, attuned. The words he uses, their individual and relational qualities, support the actual story he recounts with them. Preciado begins speaking:

Drops are falling steadily on the stone trough. The air carries the sounds of the clear water escaping the stone and falling on the storage urn. He is conscious of sounds: feet scraping the ground, back and forth, back and forth. The endless dripping. The urn overflows, spilling water onto the wet earth.

(En el hidrante las gotas caen una tras otra. Uno oye, salida de la piedra, el agua clara caer sobre el cántaro. Uno oye. Oye rumores; pies que raspan el suelo, que caminan, que van y vienen. Las gotas siguen cayendo sin cesar. El cántaro se desborda haciendo rodar el agua sobre un suelo mojado.)

Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation captures the effusive liquidity of the Spanish; L sounds move easily into R sounds which are oftener smooth rather than strident. The second sentence (The air carries… Uno oye, salida de la piedra…) most clearly demonstrates this overlap in languages and the subtle flow of Rulfo’s prose which, like the water, pours at length. But his Spanish is more passive. Uno oye (One hears); there is an impersonal aspect to the falling of the water and the sounds that emerge to be heard. Preciado is subjected to the sounds, just as when he wandered between the echoes not long before. But the reader is also one of the “ones” who could hear this water fall. We have to trust in Rulfo’s language or be captured enough by it to form part of Comala’s cast of disembodied voices. The image of an abundant jug spilling water onto the soaked earth is at once sensual and almost painful; Comala knows only deprivation or excess.

Most characteristic of this duality in the text is Páramo who deprives villagers, the land, and posterity of all possibilities. This is all done to feed his shuffling desire which no one but him understands. And he doesn’t care to understand it, only to enact that desire to the bloody end. Thus, he provides a house and complete amenities to the miner Bartolomé San Juan and the miner’s daughter, Susana San Juan. Bartolomé damns Comala as a cursed town and flatly calls Pedro Páramo “unmitigated evil” (“pura maldad”), especially for this façade of generosity which Páramo will employ to entrap Susana. The father laments:

This world presses in on us from every side; it scatters fistfuls of our dust across the land and takes bits and pieces of us as if to water the earth with our blood. What did we do? Why have our souls rotted away?

(Este mundo que lo aprieta a uno por todos lados, que va vaciando puños de nuestro polvo aquí y allá, deshaciéndonos en pedazos como si rociara la tierra con nuestra sangre. ¿Qué hemos hecho? ¿Porqué se nos ha podrido el alma?)

The hard consonants of the original, T and P, find echoes in the translated text. Yet the passages also share a moment of verbal fragility when mentioning the ashes. The original achieves this with the quick succession of va vaciando and the easily spoken procession puños de nuestro polvo aquí y allá. Compare this with the number of vocal stops in what precedes and follows the passage. The translation effectively decompresses the compact units of Spanish into more familiar English monosyllables and prepositions while trying to preserve its spoken weightiness. The first rhetorical question presents the idea that the San Juans must have done something wicked to deserve punishment. But this question which could properly be addressed to God is instead posed with the acrid understanding that Pedro Páramo is the final voice, the circumstance engendering all events in the novel. Páramo cites the vague pretext of love for Susana for his actions. But what is love to Pedro Páramo?

Not surprisingly, Páramo’s love amounts to indifferent abuse and exploitation which only further alienates him from any sincere connections. After all, Preciado is seeking out his estranged father on the behalf of his mother who seems to have adored and feared Páramo simultaneously. The village priest, Father Rentería, is a witness to these repeated offenses. A litany of confessions makes clear the extent of Páramo’s unrelenting malevolence:

“I have sinned, padre. Yesterday I slept with Pedro Páramo.” I have sinned, padre. I bore Pedro Páramo’s child.” “I gave my daughter to Pedro Páramo, padre.”

Each confession forms a link in a never-ending chain of falsehood, deception, and lust. The villagers know this, it’s why they are confessing. And yet in the moment, most families feel an admixture of surprise, fear, and reverence to be approached by the phantasmal landlord. Father Rentería is one of the few figures in the novel that patently reflects on the manipulation of Páramo, but like the others balks under the pressure of confrontation. He too is supported by and, with regret, supportive of Páramo. But it is not so simple as fearing death or having a loyalty to the hand that feeds him. Death is an all too familiar reality in Comala and any loyalty to Páramo is a taking on of sin and sorrow. Hence the priest proceeds into the dark room of Susana San Juan as she writhes in pain:

Through the haze of her eyelashes a blurred figure takes form. A diffuse light burns in place of its heart, a tiny heart like a flickering flame. “Your heart is dying of pain,” Susana thinks. “… Don’t be sad about anything else; don’t worry about me. I keep my grief hidden in a safe place. Don’t let your heart go out!”

She got out of bed, dragged herself toward Father Rentería.

“Let me console you,” he said, “protecting the flame of the candle with his cupped hand, “console you with my own inconsolable sorrow.”

Though the love between Susana and Rentería is not romantic, the long-sought possibility of empathy and the concern for another’s woestruck heart betrays a hard reality: love is painful, and here it seeks to gain ground through appeals to grief. In fact, the only love that arises in the novel is stained irrevocably with sorrow: taboos are crossed, people are betrayed, the pages prescribing unkind conclusions. Thus, when Pedro Páramo looks upon Susana San Juan we are challenged as readers:

An enormous moon was shining over the world. I stared at you till I was nearly blind. At the moonlight pouring over your face. I never grew tired of looking at you, at the vision you were. Soft, caressed by moonlight, your swollen, moist lips iridescent with stars, your body growing transparent in the night dew. Susana. Susana San Juan.

Páramo reveals an elegiac sensitivity as he looks upon Susana. But like her biblical predecessor, she does not have any say in the matter. She is an object in Páramo’s limited, waning world, albeit a beautiful one that Rulfo arrests us with. Páramo celebrates and laments in the same breath. He feels the pangs of grief and love bear deep here. But the reader is challenged to see if they feel sympathy for the man who stole her, desolated Comala, and championed atrocities both civil and spiritual. Anyone reading this reflection might think the answer is obvious. But therein lies the genius of Rulfo and the mystery of Pedro Páramo, a depraved non-entity that, at this very moment of verbal artistry, threatens to enthrall us too, to keep us in the bounds of Comala. But the novel does end and, as Juan Preciado predicted, the sounds of its many voices do begin to fade away. But then, they don’t really disappear, for we speak in and of them here.

The novel is a marvelous, vivid depiction of an uncertain tangle of mysteries. Vaguely the ghosts and Páramo himself flicker intermittently like the candle of Father Rentería’s heart. It is stressful, revealing to read this novel about a man that threatens to be larger than life and yet does not exist. But then, a lot of men do not actually exist; they too turn the palindrome promise of Roma/amoR, the name of Peter into infernal permutations. What then do we know or inherit at the end? I can only say for myself that the novel’s disheveled, measured shards have invaded my world. Sunlight is brighter, the setting sun more scarlet, love a far more earthy affair and my sensitivity to uncertainty more readied. But go to Comala, and you shall see for yourself what it does not contain.

---

Image: Tierra Quemada, Rufino Tamayo, 1951