Pages 38–39
Pedro continues to scheme and/or prepare for his fairytale wedding
We’re in the middle of a series of scenes where Pedro Páramo enacts his first official business/romantic scams on behalf of the Páramo family business.
Pages 38–39
After Pedro sent his lackey, don Fulgor Sedano, to propose to doña Dolores Preciado – whose family he just happens to be massively in debt to – on his behalf, Fulgor returns with the good news, which is phrased – and I’d be so curious if Fulgor is just as weird in the original Spanish – disconcertingly:
–She’s been asked, and she’s more than willing.
Fulgor adds that the priest is willing to be bribed (to overlook the marriage banns, to overlook that Pedro never comes to church or pays tithes) for 60 pesos. Pedro asks if he asked Dolores, his fiance whom he is marrying to get out of debt, for an advance to pay that with. (It’s actually pretty remarkable how shameless he is about all this, which, again, leads me to what simply must be the only possible subtext: Pedro Páramo is hot.1) Fulgor says he didn’t ask about money because Dolores was so happy about getting married. Pedro roasts Fulgor for being a sentimental little bitch when they have crimes to do.
Pedro begins to prepare the next steps of his scheme to gain control of everything by just changing all the rules.
–Next week, you’re going to pay a visite to Aldrete. And you’ll tell him to redo the fencing. He’s trespassing on land that belongs to the Media Luna.
–His measurements are accurate. I’m sure of it.
–Well, tell him he made a mistake. That he’s figured wrong. Tear down the fencing if that’s what it takes.
–And what about the laws?
–What laws, Fulgor? From now on, we’ll be the ones making the laws.
My dear reader, it’s time for us to visit an old friend. No, not Pedro Páramo’s son who was the narrator of this book once upon a time whose name we still don’t even know. Today we get a lovely visit from our old pal usufruct.
–Send [some troublemakers] on a job to visit Aldrete. Then you file a complaint accusing him of “usufruct”2, or whatever else you come up with. Remind him that Lucas Páramo is dead. That he’s gonna need to make new arrangements with me.
I suppose the point here is that it does not actually matter what usufruct is, that the point of Pedro Páramo is that control over the construction of power is more important than power itself, that it doesn’t matter if you – say – steal millions of dollars from the city you’re mayor of and actually get caught for doing those crimes if you sufficiently suck the dick of the guy who’s suddenly in charge of the rules even though the city is literally on fire now because you took that money for yourself, but I still do not understand what usufruct is.
tl;dr wtf happened in Pedro Páramo today
Pedro inches closer to his mob wedding and mob state, and no one is prepared to fight someone who has decided the rules don’t apply to him. When the dust settles and they’re left wondering how Pedro Páramo got away with ransacking everything between them and the horizon, the Aldrete and Preciado families will probably blame it on trans people.
This doesn’t totally line up with the Pedro Páramo–billionaire grifter god emperor demagogue connection I make later, since whatever Donald Trumps’s strongman attraction is, it’s not via conventional masculinity and that’s way beyond the scope of what’s going on here. But I love this little theory that Pedro’s just a total smokeshow too much to get hung up on that.
A reminder from the last post, Cornell Law School defines usufruct as “the right to use and benefit from a property, while the ownership of which belongs to another person.” So we can understand that Pedro’s scam is to allege that Aldrete is doing business on property that belongs to Pedro. We are also just going to ignore that usufruct seems to mean that you’re allowed to do that, rather than that usufruct is the crime of doing that. We’re not lawyers here. We’re morons struggling to read a book.