Pages 30–31
We finally return to the present day narrator, who has not connected any dots yet
Previously, we’ve been spending quite a lot of time in ghosts’ memories of the past. Possibly to the point where you’ve forgotten, hang on, wasn’t there another dude this book was about? The guy who went to this haunted-ass town in the first place per his mother’s deathbed wish to track down his father? Who is now in the guest room of someone who claims she was his mom’s BFF and also almost his mom because she almost boinked his dad after he married his mom? And we also don’t know his name yet?
Reader, we at last return to that man. (We still do not learn his name.)
Welcome to spooky season, dear reader, assuming you’re reading this when it goes live. Today’s section goes full ghost story.
Pages 30–31
–All the better, Son. All the better. –said Eduviges Dyada.
Since we were last in the present day, while Eduviges (and a few ghosts) told our unnamed son of Pedro Páramo about the past, we learned something extremely important about our unnamed narrator’s host, Eduviges Dyada. That she’s been dead the whole time.
Our unnamed narrator has not picked up on this.
The lantern burns out, and the narrator “sensed that the woman was getting up” (sensed… as though she isn’t really there at all?????), which he assumes is to get a new lamp. But she never returns.
GHOST STORY SHIT.
He decides to call it a night and goes to the guest room he had been shown to by his ghost host. He is still staying in this haunted-ass house, although I suppose he has not realized it is haunted, so maybe that isn’t a particularly strange decision. Until the screams begin.
I slept on and off, uneasily.
It was during a restless moment that I heard the scream. It was a long and dispirited howl like one you might hear from a drunkard: “A-y-y-y life, you don’t deserve me!”
GHOST STORY SHIT! He sits up with a fright, but as suddenly as it happened, it is immediately quiet again. Very quiet. “[S]imply no way to fathom the depth of the silence that followed in the wake of that scream” quiet. Ghost. Story. Shit.
The scream returns.
“At least grant me the right of those sent to the gallows to kick at the air!”
Worth noting that the screams are not in dashes, this novel’s “normal” quotation mark, but rather in quotation marks, which thus far serve as this novel’s single quotation marks, ie, when someone says that someone else said something. The reader doesn’t even “hear” the screams – the narrator only tells us he hears them. Intellectual ghost story shit!
The door flies open, but it is neither Eduviges nor the screaming ghost. She introduces herself as Damiana Cisneros, whom the narrator recognizes as a woman his mother said took care of him after he was born who lives out at the Media Luna. She says she heard he was here and wanted to invite him to spend the night at her house. He accepts her offer, saying he couldn’t get any rest with the screaming. She doesn’t exactly say “what screaming?”, which would have been a real ghost story move, but instead goes (paraphrasing here), “Screaming? Oh, that must be Toribio Aldrete. They hanged him in this very room.”, which is way more ghost story actually.
–I can’t imagine how you got in since there’s no key to open the door.
–It was doña Eduviges who let me in. She said it was the only room available.
–Eduviges Dyada?
–That’s her.
–Poor Eduviges. Her soul must be in torment.
Nothing like one last ghost story–ass mic drop that the narrator does not even catch onto.
wtf does Obsidian have to say about all of this
It’s been a minute since we’ve gotten to talk about the note-taking app Obsidian that I’m using to try to keep track of the nonchronoligcally revealed info in this book, but we’re approaching a point where a cool feature of the software has come up. Even though I’ve never made a note about the Media Luna, because I’ve bracketed each proper noun when writing details in everyone else’s notes, it still shows up in Graph View with all of its connections:
Pulling up all of those, we recall that:
Colima, a town outside the Media Luna, is where Dolores and her son (the unnamed MC) lived with her sister Gertudis
Pedro Páramo, by the time of his death, owns all the land between Media Luna and (checks notes) the “other hilltop seen en route to Comala”. See, that’s why I haven’t bothered making a separate note for literally everything yet.
For all you geography-heads out there who care about things like “how many locations are in this story” and “where are the locations in this story” and “Matthew, how do you understand books if you don’t pay attention to different locations”
tl;dr wtf happened in Pedro Páramo today
Back in the present day, Pedro Páramo’s son is abandoned by the ghost of Eduviges Dyada while staying in her house, and (presumably) another ghost comes to tell him to stay with her instead. He has not realized that any of these people are ghosts yet.