Walking Through a Mexican Ghost Town

On Juan Rulfo and "Pedro Paramo"

What follows is a meditation on Juan Rulfo and his greatest work, Pedro Paramo, the novel that inspired One Hundred Years of Solitude. In 2,000 words Brandon Westlake, the fine poet and fiction writer (and Rulfo’s greatest English-speaking supporter), opens up the under-appreciated world of the Mexican gothic, enticing the reader to Paramo’s pages while leaving him to discover the full extent of its beauty alone, in silence and reverence. We hope you enjoy this piece and are called to the novel; in the words of Westlake, Rulfo “absolutely needs to be read.”

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—What exactly do you understand?

She placed herself by his side, leaned on his shoulders and repeated:

—What exactly do you understand?

It was surreal to read this passage for the first time some three years ago. Few books have floored me like Pedro Paramo, which went so far as to push me to learn its original Spanish so I could read it as the author intended. On the legends of the past, the novel’s impact was even more powerful: Jorge Luis Borges lauded it as one of the greatest novels in not only Hispanic literature, but in literature as a whole. Gabriel Garcia Marquez credits it for pulling him from a writer’s block that paved the path for him to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, his magnum opus. Susan Sontag declared the novel “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature.” It is a novel filled with silence; I sometimes wonder, as I slave away at my own work, how Rulfo did it, how he made every page speak in whispers harrowed with sorrow and despair.

Call the book what you will: Mexican gothic, magical realist, surrealist. Pedro Paramo entwines Mexican folklore and culture with fragmented narratives, streams of consciousness, constant shifts from first-person to third. Rulfo blends it all masterfully, stripping the prose down to the bone so that it shines in your face yet leaves much beneath the surface. From the very first page we are wrapped in the mood of what this book will come to emanate, revealing to us its major theme, death:

I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Paramo. That’s what my mother told me. And I promised I’d come to see him as soon as she died. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would. After all, she was near death, and I was of a mind to promise her anything. “Don’t fail to visit him —she urged—. Some call him one thing, some another. I’m sure he’d love to meet you.” That’s why I couldn’t refuse her, and after agreeing so many times I just kept at it until I had to struggle to free my hands from hers, which were now without life.

Thus begins the adventure of Juan Preciado, the abandoned son of Pedro Paramo. In the first few pages he goes from the room where his mother has died to the middle of a desert, as if in a dream. In this wasteland another man, Abundio, appears to lead Juan to his father’s town of Comala. In short, smooth sentences that read like an exhale, oppressed by the “dog days of August” heat, accompanied by ominous flocks of passing crows, Abundio reveals that he is also the son of Pedro Paramo. When Juan asks who Paramo is, Abundio answers: “Bitterness incarnate.”

All of this in the first four pages. On the fifth we come to learn, through Abundio, that Pedro Paramo has been dead for years. And when they finally reach Comala, which sinks down into the sweltering earth within the hills, Juan discovers the town is also dead, in the literal sense. Shortly after, he realizes that his guide is dead too, a ghost among many haunting the empty streets of Comala. Juan wanders into the town in a daze, searching for shelter, attempting to speak to inhabitants that vanish as if they were never there. Slowly the feelings of anxiety and terror increase as he becomes trapped in the town, doubting whether the people he meets throughout the narrative are alive or dead. The novel’s feeling of silence almost breaks when he is suddenly overwhelmed by the town’s whispers, which are scattered through perspectives divided by chapter cuts. One by one they piece together the story of the town, and how it came to be this way.

It is through these flashbacks and whispers—perhaps even from the ghost of Pedro Paramo himself—that we discover more about Juan’s father. With a name roughly translating to “barren wasteland,” Paramo is a tyrant landowner who held a heavy hand over the town. One who murdered and manipulated his way to the top, preyed on women, bore sons he never acknowledged save for Miguel, a monster in the image of his father. Paramo’s power looms even over that of the church and its priest, Father Renteria, another major character among a small handful. Torn within by doubts over his faith, he says he serves the landowner “All because I’m afraid of offending those who provide for me… I get nothing from the poor, and prayers won’t fill my stomach” (28).¹

Paramo’s actions lead to the town’s decay and the death of its people. He is a cruel man who uses whoever he sees fit and discards them when they come of no use. Yet Rulfo shows us what little of a human side there is to the man, too. We first see the world from Pedro Paramo’s eyes as a child (9), already deeply in love with Susana San Juan, yearning for her when she leaves Comala bathed “in a reddish hue, in the blood red sky of dusk” (18). Her departure is not Paramo’s only loss. Everything in his life is taken away from him with the murder of his father and the death of his mother, after which rival landowners rob their lands, once proudly held, to collect on the family’s debts. His every waking day is spent working to regain the power his family once had and finding Susana so that they can be together. His scattered perspective is among the most striking, poetic, and beautiful:

“We’d laugh at the wind and find each other’s eyes as the string slipped through our fingers and ran with the wind before breaking with a faint cracking sound as if it had been cut by the wings of a passing bird. Then way above us that paper bird would flail downward, dragging its loose tail behind until it became lost in the green earth below.”

The beauty of his own words are rivaled by those of whose love he craves. Susan San Juan’s dialogue comprises some of the most beautiful passages on nature I’ve read. Her voice is that of a candle in the dark, every word a poetry of its own that I will leave you to discover.

Despite its beauty, this story is a tragedy, with the ghosts of Comala acting as a Greek Chorus. Within the ever-shifting narrative—sometimes on the same page—we glimpse the sad and tragic ends of the town’s inhabitants as it crumbles, conveyed in perfectly clean sentences; there is not a single loose thread anywhere in this novel.

You’d think a book of this caliber would have a writer with just as fantastic a body of work, but Pedro Paramo is the only novel Juan Rulfo ever wrote. Accompanying this slim book are two collections of short stories. What kind of man is able to write a novel that becomes required reading throughout Mexico, a novel that Carlos Fuentes called “The essential Mexican novel, unsurpassed and unsurpassable…” and then goes on to work as a public servant for Mexico’s National Institute for Indigenous People?

Rulfo was born in 1917, in Jalisco, Mexico, right in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. Though without memories of the conflict itself, he must have had a childhood abound with stories from that period. He came, after all, from a family of landowners who lost their lands and wealth to revolutionaries and the government during the war. Rulfo did, however, remember the Cristero War that followed shortly after. In this conflict, between the secularized government of Mexico and the Catholic Church, priests took up arms against an authority that stripped them of their influence and began killing them off. In the proceeding years, both sides committed murders and slaughters that bathed no one in a victorious light. Rulfo’s father and uncle were killed in this war, and his mother died soon after. At ten years old Rulfo was left to face the world alone, joining a class of orphaned writers, such as Edgar Allen Poe, Joseph Conrad, Jean Genet, who are known for their darker work.

In interviews, Rulfo notes that no one went outside often during those times. Bodies hanging from posts, put there by both sides of the war, was a common occurrence. The risk of being shot was great. Thus he spent much of his time reading indoors. Around then the local priest confiscated all the books in the area and hid them away in the church cellar, deeming them unsafe for faithful eyes. Later, when that priest fled into the bogs and hills to fight in the war, Rulfo wandered into this cellar and discovered the many books therein. This treasure trove of knowledge fused with the bleak history of his family and country; all mixed together to create the writer that he would become. For years, Rulfo carried Pedro Paramo inside him before he knew how to write it, as Susan Sontag notes:

[H]e was writing hundreds of pages and then discarding them. He once called the novel an exercise in elimination.

Considering the complex structure of the novel, which Rulfo described as “made of silences,” it should not be surprising the author took so many years to transpose it from his mind to the page. The non-linear narratives constantly shift from various points of past and present—sometimes going back a decade or more and back again in a single page. Leaping from one perspective to the next, the reader may lose whose perspective they’re looking through unless they pay closer attention.

Though one can feel the various influences on his work, from Elio Vittorini to Knut Hamson, it is Faulkner that casts the largest shadow over Pedro Paramo. The novel is reminiscent of As I Lay Dying with its shifting perspectives between an abundance of characters. The dreamy monologues of Susana San Juan later in the book gives me the impression of a reverse Addie Bundren, while also that of a Molly Bloom. While I have no idea if he could be an influence—it could be the translation—some of Rulfo’s characters also have a Dostoevskyian high energy, a boisterous bluntness, though they never reach the peaks of the Russian’s chaos. One can also see how works of the far past impact the landscape of the novel. Fog, for one, is brought up and used in the novel similarly to the gloomy fog of the River Styx, which souls must pass through to reach Hades in Greek myth.

Those that approach Pedro Paramo with an open mind—those interested in the gothic, the surreal, a vast cast of characters all with personalities of their own—will gather a lot from the first read. Written by a distinctly Mexican author, Rulfo layers his work with observations of the nation through dialogue, character names, and even the changing weather of the valleys. The bleak outlook of Rulfo’s work resonates with the current landscape of Mexico as it did when it was published in 1955—for the oppression depicted in Pedro Paramo, from the cruel feudal landowners to the chaotic revolutionaries bare little difference to the government death squads and roving cartels of today.

For anyone that may like the book but find it a challenge, a reread will only enrich the experience, as will a deeper dive into Mexican history and literature. The novel encompasses a tumultuous time in Mexico, from the dictatorship of feudal landowners during the time of Porfirio Diaz, to the resulting Mexican Revolution, to the proceeding Cristero War—a bloody and sorrowful history that hangs like a shadow over Pedro Paramo’s narrative. Novels such as The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene, as well as the works of Carlos Fuentes will deepen the reader’s understanding of the environment Pedro Paramo was born out of. For non-fiction, I’d recommend The Life and Times of Pancho Villa by Fredrich Katz or The Mexican Revolution by Alan Knight.

These books will help elucidate the many layers of this novel, which are as deep as perhaps your favorite classics, even down to the names of its characters. While Rulfo claimed he chose his names by reading off the tombstones of graveyards, Spanish speaking readers will be quick to catch the falseness of his claim through their own understanding of that beautiful language. To learn the meaning of these names adds further layers to the novel. I’ve already mentioned earlier that Pedro Paramo means “barren wasteland.” Comala itself comes from the name of a hotplate used to warm tortillas with, a term so aptly used in the first few pages when Abundio describes the town to Juan as sitting “on the burning embers of the earth at the very mouth of Hell.” To know the meanings of these names will allow one to look at a character and region under a different light. It may even lead one to doubt their true intentions.

Such attention to detail and a burning desire to the perfection of his craft should mark Juan Rulfo as a master in his own right that writers of today can learn from. He absolutely needs to be read. His style is perfect minimalism, breathing silence and tone in its own way rather than allowing the reader to fill in the spaces themselves. I’d argue that if Moby Dick is the great novel of America, and The Divine Comedy the great work of Italy, so too is Pedro Paramo for Mexico. He deserves more recognition in the West than he’s received and, if my word means anything, you won’t regret walking alongside Juan Preciado through the ghostly bowels of Comala.

There you’ll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You’ll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.

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1. All page numbers are from the Douglas J. Weatherford translation (2023).