Pedro Páramo in Gallup, New Mexico

Last June, while on a family road trip across the southwest, I stopped in Gallup, New Mexico, a small city just across the border from Arizona. Located on historic Route 66, its seemingly endless Main Street offers nostalgic artifacts to the period: Old fashioned diners with big reach-above-the-highway awnings; the saloon style El Rancho Hotel, where John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart stayed while filming Westerns in the surrounding desert; a row of wholesalers for Native American silver, leather and jewelry.

There were plenty of parked cars in Gallup’s downtown, but almost no people inside or outside, with the exception of a few homeless resting from the July heat on a shaded sidewalk. The city is known as “The Heart of Indian Country,” so named for its large indigenous population and proximity to five major reservations: the Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, Hopi and Navajo. You can see this in its architecture, most typically in the beautiful, adobe-style El Morro theater, whose marquee announced just one screening in blocked red letters: “Spider Man, 6pm.” The city felt at once alive with presence yet completely empty. It carried the testaments of its history and culture as well as the ghosts of its abandonment.

*The El Morro Theater, Gallup, New Mexico*

While there, my thoughts kept turning to Pedro Páramo, a novel by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. Published in 1955, it carries a status in that country and much of the Spanish-speaking world similar to The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye in the United States — known at least by name to every person, taught in every high school literature class. Susan Sontag called it “one of the masterpieces of 20th Century world literature.” Gabriel Garcia Márquez so revered it that he could reportedly recite its 130 pages from memory. Yet, despite numerous English translations — the latest just released in September — it is largely unknown in the United States. (I only learned of it because my wife, who grew up in Mexico City, gave me a copy).

The book focuses on a rural town called Comala in Rulfo’s native state of Jalisco. As the story unfolds, Comala starts to feel very much like Gallup, as well as any number of isolated and forgotten towns across the United States, towns that seem to pop up in the middle of an endless expanse of land, as if they emerged from the earth, miles from anything else, towns that inspire dismissive scorn or overinflated pride, rarely anything in between. Although Rulfo never lived outside of Mexico (and indeed spent most of his life in the country’s sprawling capital city), his novel reflects such an intimate and profound understanding of such towns that an American reading it will likely find themself with a deeper understanding of the life of their own country as well as that of their southern neighbor.

The story begins with a dying woman, Dolores Preciado, imparting her last wish to her son, Juan. She grew up in Comala, always longing to return, but never did. She asks Juan to go there in her place and find his father, Pedro Páramo, who he never knew. (I’ve included all of the original quotes in Spanish before my translations into English). She tells him:

No vayas a pedirle nada. Exígele lo nuestro. Lo que estuvo obligado darme y nunca me dio… El olvido en que nos tuvo, mi hijo, cóbraselo caro.

Don’t ask him for anything. Demand what’s ours. What he was obligated to give me and never gave…The way he forgot us, my son, make him pay dearly.

With such an opening, we might expect a kind of detective story to unfold, with Juan Preciado arriving in Comala and embarking on a search for his father, building up to a showdown where he extracts clarity and justice for his mother.

But before he even arrives, Juan learns that Pedro Páramo has actually been dead for years. And once in Comala, he finds a completely abandoned town, its remaining houses vacant and overgrown with weeds. As he walks through the silent place, his mother’s remembrances of her home float through his head, contrasting with the desolation he encounters:

“Hay allí, pasando el puerto de Los Colimotes, la vista muy hermosa de una llanura verde, algo amarilla por el maíz maduro. Desde ese lugar se ve Comala, blanqueando la tierra, iluminándola durante la noche.”

“There, passing the port of Los Colimotes, is the beautiful view of a green plain, slightly yellow for the matured cornfields. From there you’ll see Comala, whitening the earth, illuminating it at night.”

And:

"Mi pueblo, levantado sobre la llanura. Lleno de árboles y de hojas, como una alcancía donde hemos guardado nuestros recuerdos…El amanecer; la mañana; el mediodía y la noche, siempre los mismos; pero con la diferencia del aire. Allí, donde el aire cambia el color de las cosas; donde se ventila la vida como si fuera un murmullo; como si fuera un puro murmullo de la vida…”

“My town, lifted upon the plain. Full of trees and leaves, like a safe where we had stored our memories…The dawn; morning; noon and night, always the same, except for the air. There, where the air changes the color of things; where it ventilates life like a whisper; as if it was a pure whisper of life…”

Juan continues to hear his mother’s memories as he stays in Comala, but he never recognizes them in the place he finds, as he imagined he would. Instead, they become for him a waking dream of what the town used to be — just as those memories were for his mother. Rulfo understands well the feeling of longing for somewhere from which we’ve been displaced, when the possibility of return becomes elusive. We romanticize and hold onto those details of how the sky looked at a certain hour, the buildings in the light of sunset, the stars at night. Fleeting, quotidian details become larger than life in the confines of memory.

As the story unfolds, Rulfo brings in glimpses of Comala’s past into the narrative and allows Juan Preciado to hear not just his mother’s voice but the voices of the town’s residents in general, so that the novel becomes something of an oral history rather than Juan Preciado’s story alone. Throughout the sequences set during Comala’s past, when it had people and life-rhythms, Rulfo puts a great deal of emphasis on the physical environment, to the point that it sometimes takes on a personality of its own:

El cielo estaba lleno de estrellas, gordas, hinchadas de tanta noche. La luna había salido un rato y luego se había ido. Era una de esas lunas tristes que nadie mira, a las que nadie hace caso. Estuvo un rato allí desfigurada, sin dar ninguna luz, y después fue a esconderse detrás de los cerros. (111)

The sky was full of stars, fat, swollen from so much night. The moon had come out for a moment and later went away again. It was one of those sad moons that nobody watches, to whom nobody pays attention. It stayed there a while, disfigured, without giving any light, and afterwards went to hide itself behind the hills. (111)

Rulfo’s descriptions of the natural environment, in spite of their extensive detail, serve not to endow Comala with a greater sense of grounded-ness or solidity, but to capture it in that space between a real place and a dream lost to memory. He conjures its physical life with the flourishing language of nostalgia rather than the to-the-point dictations of fact. In this way, he makes Comala a suitable setting for his characters, all of whom find themselves inflicted by longing for a person or place to which they cannot return, but which still clings to their minds like a ghost.

Even though I only spent a few hours in Gallup, I can imagine that a number of people may have had such an experience there, with its roadside testaments to a culture based in real, lived experience but expanded into the iconography of collective nostalgia. I think of the Navajos, Acomas, Lagunas, Hopis and Zumas, caught between the living memory of their specific histories and the cultivated memory on display at Gallup’s wholesalers. And the contrast between the largely desolate city center and the cloudless blue sky above it, an epic desert blue that you feel you can touch, and the deep red mountains beyond the highway, whose beauty has stuck to my mind ever since, undiminished by the eeriness of the town itself. If Juan Rulfo had lived to see Gallup today, he would likely recognize it as a place much like Comala, caught in between beauty and abandonment, memory and reality.

*Self portrait of the author, Juan Rulfo, overlooking a desert landscape.*

Given Rulfo’s central theme for the novel — the individual and collective experiences of the past — it is worth noting that his title character feels no obligation to honor his past, in fact actively scorns and denies it. Pedro Páramo’s father, Lucas, was the head of La Media Luna, a large ranch that controls a great piece of land in and around Comala. When his father dies, Pedro takes over and, as his first order of business, calls a meeting with La Media Luna’s elderly administrator, Fulgor Sedano, who worked for many years with Lucas and knew Pedro as a baby. In spite of this, Pedro feels no reason to respect Fulgor, nor his institutional memory:

Estaban en el corral. Pedro Páramo se arrellanó en un pesebre y esperó:

— Por que no te sientas?

— Prefiero estar de pie, Pedro.

— Como tu quieras. Pero no se te olvide el “don.”

Quién era aquel muchacho para hablarle así? Ni su padre don Lucas Páramo se había atrevido a hacerlo. Y de pronto éste, que jamás se había parado en la Media Luna, ni conocía de oídas el trabajo, le hablaba como a un gañán. Vaya, pues!

They were in the corral. Pedro Páramo stretched out on a manger and waited:

“Why don’t you sit?”

“I’d rather stand, Pedro.”

“As you wish. But don’t forget to address me as ‘don.’”

Who was that kid to talk to him like that? Not even his father don Lucas Páramo dared to do so. And now this one, who never set foot in la Media Luna, knew nothing of its work, spoke to him as if he was a mere farmhand. The hell with that!

Pedro takes a similar attitude with the rest of La Media Luna’s longtime staff, from the servants to the lawyer, centering their world around him and him alone. He goes on to show that he not only places little value on his own family, but on family in general. On learning that his ranch owes significant debt to that owned by the Preciado family, he proposes marriage to its eldest daughter — Juan’s mother, Dolores. She thinks his intentions and feelings are genuine. But once they marry and he takes control of her family’s land, he does what he can to push her away, as Juan learns from one of Comala’s few remaining inhabitants:

[Dolores] siempre odió a Pedro Páramo. “Doloritas! Ya ordenó que me preparen el desayuno?” Y tu madre se levantaba antes del amanecer…Cuantas veces oyó tu madre aquel llamado? “Doña Doloritas, esto está frío. Esto no sirve.” Cuantas veces? Y aunque estaba acostumbrada a pasar lo peor, sus ojos humildes se endurecieron.

[Dolores] always hated Pedro Páramo. “Doloritas! Did you order them to prepare my breakfast?” And your mother got up before dawn…How many times did your mother hear that name? “Doña Doloritas, this is cold. This doesn’t work.” How many times? And even though she was accustomed to the worst, her humble eyes began to harden.

Dolores is not the only one towards whom Pedro Páramo assumes this tactic. He loses track of the amount of children born by him. Through his dishonestly and ruthlessness, La Media Luna accumulates nearly all the land in Comala. He turns Comala’s only social institution, the Church, into an asset for his own profit and power, as its hapless parish priest, Padre Rentería, is forced to support Páramo’s harmful acts lest he bite the hand that feeds him. Indeed, Páramo finally claims responsibility for one of his children only after Padre Rentería makes a direct challenge to his pride:

— Don Pedro, la mamá murió al alumbrarlo. Dijo que era de usted. Aquí lo tiene.

Y él ni lo dudó, solamente le dijo:

— Por qué no se queda con él, padre? Hágalo cura.

— Con la sangre que lleva dentro no quiero tener esa responsabilidad.

— De verdad cree usted que tengo mala sangre?

— Realmente sí, don Pedro.

— Le probaré que no es cierto. Déjemelo aquí. Sobra quien se encargue de cuidarlo…

Después había abierto la botella:

— Por la difunta y por usted beberé este trago.

— Y por él?

— Por él también, por qué no?

“Don Pedro, the mother died giving birth to him. She said he was yours. Here he is.”

And he didn’t even doubt it, he only said:

“Why don’t you keep him, Father? Make him a priest.”

“With the blood he carries inside, I do not want that responsibility.”

“Do you really believe I have bad blood?”

“I really do, don Pedro.”

“I’ll prove to you that it isn’t true. Leave him here. There are plenty who can take care of him…”

Afterwards, he had opened the bottle:

“Here’s to the deceased and to you.”

“And the baby?”

“To him too, why not?”

With such a person controlling Comala’s livelihood — its crops, food, income — it’s impressive that the town lasts as long as it does. There is, however, one memory which Pedro Páramo values even above his own profit and power: that of Susana San Juan, a girl he knew when they were little. She left Comala seemingly never to return and left Páramo with an unwavering, elusive longing. In his private thoughts, Susana San Juan inspires in him the same kind of flourishing nostalgia that Dolores feels for Comala:

“Pensaba en ti, Susana. En las lomas verdes. Cuando volábamos papalotes en la época del aire. Oíamos allá abajo el rumor viviente del pueblo mientras estábamos encima de él, arriba de la loma, en tanto se nos iba el hilo de cáñamo arrastrado por el viento…Tus labios estaban mojados como si los hubiera besado el rocío.”

“I thought of you, Susana. In the green hills. When we flew kites in the windy days. We heard the living sound of the village below us while we were above it, on top of the hill, as the string was blown by the wind…Your lips were wet as if they’d been kissed by the dew.”

Further, his attachment to her is so great largely because it allows him to suppress all other memories, to diminish any need to think of his own past:

…le serviría para irse de la vida alumbrándose con aquella imagen que borraría todos los demás recuerdos.

…she would allow him to go through life lighted by that image which erased all other memories.

Unexpected circumstances force Susana and her father, Bartolomé San Juan, to return to Comala when Páramo has become its equivalent to a feudal lord. But he is never able to bring his quiet longing for her into reality. Susana is afflicted by a heightened sensitivity towards death, an ongoing connection with her loved ones, particularly to her mother and recently-dead husband, Florencio. This leaves her in constant mental turbulence, contorting in sleep while the ghosts of her memories invade her dreams. She asks herself:

“Por qué ese recordar intenso de tantas cosas? Por qué no simplemente la muerte y no esa música tierna del pasado?”

“Why this intense remembrance of so many things? Why not simply death and not this tender music of the past?”

Pedro Páramo is unable to relieve her of this condition because he cannot understand it. He can only approach his love for her in the same way he has approached all else in his life — through divide and conquer. Bartolomé San Juan, aware of Pedro Páramo’s character, had long gone to great lengths to keep his daughter away from him. So Páramo has Bartolomé killed without Susana knowing, believing this will remove future impediments to their being together. But all it does is keep her secluded to her bed, her mind a confusion of memories. Not once after her return to Comala do she and Pedro share a present, physical moment together. We only see him watch her from afar as she lies in unconsolable sleep:

Si al menos fuera dolor lo que sintiera ella, y no esos sueños sin sosiego, esos interminables y agotadores sueños, él podría buscar algún consuelo. Así pensaba Pedro Páramo, fija la vista en Susana San Juan, siguiendo cada uno de sus movimientos.

If at least it was only pain that she felt and not those dreams without rest, those interminable and overwhelming dreams, he could search for some consolation. That’s the way Pedro Páramo thought, his gaze fixed on Susana San Juan, following every one of her movements.

Pedro Páramo is unable to console Susana because he’s unable to understand and thereby reach her soul. In all of his actions, he shows a rejection of his own past, that of his family and his home, a suppression of his own memories, all in favor of the cold facts of power and property. How could he possibly understand a woman whose mind is dominated by the “tender music of the past?” Without revealing this situation’s conclusion, it is enough to say that Rulfo leaves Pedro Páramo something of a tragic figure, for as his power and property fade, his elusive, unfulfilled longing for Susana is all he has left. It becomes just another one of Comala’s amorphous voices.

In all of this, Rulfo conveys to us the deceptively simple idea that for a town and community to thrive, it requires the kind of sustenance that allows it to thrive. This means more than just economic sustenance, but social and spiritual sustenance, as well as a sense of value for its history and collective memory. These should not be displaced for the sake of a quick buck. Comala fades away because it is controlled by a man who is incapable of providing this true form of sustenance, even for himself. He leaves Comala with the same unfulfilled longing that will define the rest of his days.

Americans who read Pedro Páramo will instantly recognize Comala’s story. It’s the same fundamental story well known in small towns in every state, where an economic engine disappeared with nothing to replace it and little to support what was left, leaving addiction and poverty in its place. What Rulfo tells us is that no matter the state of such places, even when they are completely abandoned, the voices and whispers of its unfulfilled longing continue to fill it. We would do best to give space to those voices. They have nowhere else to go.

As I left Gallup heading east, I found that it wasn’t completely abandoned. On the other side of Highway 40 was the Fire Rock Navajo Casino, open 24 hours, its parking lot packed to overflowing. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the casino on one side of the freeway and Gallup’s nostalgic marquees on the other. I thought of the memories that must still be floating there, whose voices no amount of turns on the slot machine or rolls of the dice can quiet down.

There are similar voices and whispers in towns and cities on either side of this piece of the North American continent. But no matter on what side you’re on, by the time you finish Rulfo’s story you might just hear them a little bit better.