Musings on the Novel, Pedro Paramo

                                                                             

                                                          

     For me, the novel Pedro Paramo is Mexico’s Moby Dick, its Don Quixote, its Crime and Punishment, probably even, its Inferno, except for one major difference, what took Melville, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Dante hundreds of pages to write, Mexican novelist, Jalisco’s Juan Rulfo, wrote his masterpiece in 124 pages.

     Maybe it's just Halloween and Dia de Los Muertos, and as I walk the streets, I see calaveras and goblins hanging in neighbors’ front porches, plastic boney skulls, hands, and feet protruding from the front yard graves, as if deleting the lines between life and death. Maybe, it’s because I’m aging, and thoughts of mortality and immortality are on my mind, so Rulfo’s 1955 novel becomes more real.

     It’s been a while since I’ve read Pedro Paramo, but it remains embedded in my psyche. I first assigned it to an advanced English composition class back in 1995, and I’ve probably read it dozens of times since, its main character, Pedro Paramo, in my face whenever I hear tyrants inflict atrocities on people somewhere in the world.

     Literary critics proclaimed Pedro Paramo a masterpiece in Mexican and World literature, but I’d never read it until I assigned it in class. In college, I minored in Spanish and majored in English, but in 1977, I changed my major to Spanish to take advantage of a fellowship to study in Spain.  

     Spanish teachers in American higher education taught as if only literature from Spain had relevance in the Castellano language, or what most people call Spanish. Even the few Chicano teachers in Spanish departments assigned mostly books from the Iberian Peninsula; though, they’d begun to explore works from the America’s, mostly the big boys, like Borges, Neruda, and Garcia Marquez. So, I don’t remember hearing much in the classroom about Mexican literature, except by a few renegade professors who mentioned names, like Azuela, Castellanos, Rulfo, and Fuentes, giants in Mexican literature.

     By 1995, I had tenure, so I could assign whatever I wanted. Also, I figured my community college English students needed to know there were literary masters beyond the limits of British and American writers. They also existed in France, Russia, Spain, and, yes, Latin America. So, as the deadline approached to submit my book list, I scribbled the words Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, Grove Books, on the form, stuck it in an envelope and dropped it off at the bookstore. This was before everything became electronic.

     I had a couple of weeks before classes, so I knew I’d better read the novel to discuss it intelligently in class. Once I received my complimentary copy, I sat down and started reading, the opening line: “I came to Comala in search of my father, a man named Pedro Paramo.” Easy enough. Okay, I got it. I can deal with that, kind of like Mexico’s version of, “Call me Ishmael.”

     So, I read on, as the unknown narrator stated, almost as if whispering: “It was what my mother had told me, and I promised I would go and see him after she died. I assured her I would do that. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything. ‘Don’t fail to go and see him,’ she told me. ‘That’s what his name is, although they sometimes called him something else.  I am sure he would want to know you.’”   

     I’m not sure I read it correctly, or I completely understand, something of a mental disconnect. The words sound more like murmurs, and I feel as though my world is shrinking, like I am alone with two people, a dying woman and her son, and they’re pulling me into a death scene. It smells of death and reminds me of my own family and friends’ dying, emotions that can’t be described in words but only felt.

     The narrator continues: “The only thing I could do was to tell her I would do it and, after saying it so often, it became such a habit that I continued repeating it, even after I managed to remove my hands from her lifeless hands.”

     Not only is Rulfo assaulting my senses but also my reason. I start asking questions, the key questions, who are these people and where are they? Is the narrator talking to us, the readers? Talk about critical thinking.

     My eyes move to the next lines: “Before she died, she also told me: ‘When you go, don’t ask him for anything. Demand that he give[s] you what is ours.  What he should have given me and never did…  Make him pay dearly, my son, for the way he has neglected us.’

    “Yes, I’ll do that, mother.”

     This doesn’t sound like any story I’ve read before. Who is making whom pay for what and why? Who are these voices, and why is a mother, on her deathbed, making her son promise revenge on a man, his father, who, it sounds like, took everything from her? My mind reels. I hear echoes of Joseph Conrad and William Faulker. The narrator’s voice is haunting, addictive, like it’s coming from some place unknown. So, I go where he leads.

    “I never really intended to fulfill my promise. But now I have started to dream about it and be filled with illusions.  After that a new world began to take shape, based on the hope of a man called Pedro Paramo, the husband of my mother.  And that’s why I came to Comala.”

    He said, “The husband of my mother,” instead of “my father.” He also implies he is already in Comala, not journeying there. Comala, such a strange name for a village, like comal, a hot platter used to make tortilla, symbolism?

     The opening, or exposition, was from one fragment of many, which, eventually, together, tell the story of Pedro Paramo, a man described as, depending on the translation, "pure evil," "human bile," and hatred personified, who murders viciously, with impunity, and is ultimately responsible for the destruction of Comala, not unlike many strongmen, politician, and corporate heads, modern day caciques, responsible for death around the world, personifications of evil. Was this Rulfo’s Mexico, or even Rulfo’s view of the world?

     Rulfo writes, ignoring a traditional structure in plot, character, setting, or narration. The voices within the fragments, like vignettes, tell the story, like fallen leaves from a tree, pick up a handful, toss them into the air, and however they fall, they tell a story.

     So, as I read, the characters appear, often with no context or reference, like spirits from the grave, Eduviges Dyada, Dorotea La Curaca, Miguel Paramo, Susana, Father Renteria, Juan Preciado and his mother, Dolores, whose voices we hear at the beginning, el Tartamudo, various revolutionaries, unknown peasants, all dead, yet think they are still alive. 

     Since there is no beginning, middle, or end, it is they who tell the story, the villagers of Comala, as they recall its once rich harvest to its final desolation. It isn’t until you finish the book do you know the story of Pedro Paramo and Comala, like so many old villages throughout Mexico, like those in Jalisco, Rulfo’s home state. 

      It is said that Rulfo, a government employee traveling throughout Mexico, stood in an abandoned Jalisco village, a ghost town, and wondered what it would be like if the people who lived there returned, and so was born the novel, Pedro Paramo.

     Books and dissertations have been written about the novel, about its richness, symbolism, Christian and pagan references, European and Aztec representations, like the name Pedro Paramo. Pedro, the name Jesus bestowed on the apostle Simon, whom Catholics call the first pope of their church. Pedro originates from the Greek Petros, or Petras, which means stone or rock, as in the original Aramaic. So, when Jesus told Simon, “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church,” Rulfo took the name for the main character, as a religious symbol.

     However, unlike the apostle Peter (Pedro), Paramo’s namesake, or as Mexicans say, tocayo, Rulfo juxtaposed the name with "Paramo," a barren plain, a wasteland, a soulless entity, evil swallowing the good, God versus the devil, heaven or hell, maybe purgatory, or the Aztec underworld, where the god Mictlantecuhtli rules. 

     As a descendent of Mexicans from villages, like Comala, did my ancestors, my great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles and aunts suffer revolutions, pestilence, and starvation, like the villagers in Rulfo’s novel? Did they live in towns controlled by caciques like Pedro Paramo, trapped some place between heaven and hell? Did death hang closely about them, or did they feel trapped by the laws of a church that threatened their existence in this life and the next, so they chose to celebrate death? Is that why they came north, in search of light to escape the darkness?

     Sure, Pedro Paramo is just a novel, and a good one, written to educate and to entertain; however, it leaves readers, all readers, asking so many questions about the lives we lead, where we have been, and where we are going, for that alone, it is a powerful testament to the human spirit.