Pages 45–52
We do not learn less unsettling things about the naked couple
Alright let’s crack open Pedro Páramo and take a look at the next little section to write a recap –eight pages??? That’s like a sixth of how much of the book we’ve even read up to this point! Jesus Christ. Well, if you want to read all of this subscribers-only post, perhaps subscribe today? You can get access for a whole year for a mere $10 if you click here instead of the button below, because Substack’s gonna Substack.
Pages 45–52
Juan – who you may recall last time was welcomed into the home of an older, nakeder couple and immediately said hey gang let’s just go straight to sleep! – is asleep. The naked couple bickers with each other as he slumbers. Most of this is probably entertaining if you like bickering couples. I likely skimmed this the first time I read this book. Juan hints at the ghostly ghostliness of the conversation:
The voices seem to be fading. Seem to be losing their sound. As if suffocating. Now no one’s saying a thing. It’s all in my dream.
But soon after, they start up again.
–He just stirred. Perhaps he’s wanting to wake up. And if he sees us here, he’s gonna ask us things.
–What things could he ask us?
“Why are you naked” would be my first question, personally.
–Well, he’ll say something, don’t you think?
About you inviting strangers into your home while you’re naked? I do think it’s reasonable to assume he’d say something about that, yes. Although, thinking about what I’d do, also plausible he would just not acknowledge it at all.
Eventually, the woman studies Juan more closely, concludes he’s “up to no good” because he’s sleeping too restlessly, and frets about how they’ve "taken him in” and “let him hide out here. That’s going to catch up with us sooner or later.” Blessedly, she also refers to her partner by name (Donis), so my notes about this section will not have to endlessly look like this:
Donis, for his part, suggests Juan’s “probably just some unfortunate soul” and they should just let him sleep. When Juan wakes up later, they’ve left him some coffee. He drinks it. Perhaps you notice the conundrum here. He drinks the ghost coffee without issue. Can ghosts make real-world coffee? Is Juan a ghost? (Update: I wrote this whole post before realizing the simplest explanation: it’s possible these two aren’t dead. Now it is I who is the fool.)
The woman apologizes there isn’t more coffee, explaining they’re short on everything, “so short…”. Juan assures them not to worry and asks how he can leave Comala. They helpfully explain “there’s a multitude of roads”, which is objectively very funny.
–[That road] runs past the Media Luna. And then there’s another one that extends the entire length of the earth. It’s the one that travels the farthest.
Yeah, no shit.
–Maybe that’s the road I came in on.
–Where does it go?
–To Sayula.
–You’re kidding. And I thought Sayula was over this way. I always wanted to go there. I hear lots of people live there, right?
–About as many as anywhere.
Bro you know that technically no one lives here, right?
–You don’t say. And we’re out here all by ourselves. Dying to know anything about life.
Classic ghost statement if I’ve ever heard one.
Juan asks the woman where her husband went. She explains that, no, he’s her brother. Now I REALLY don’t want to know why they were naked.
…oh no, why were they naked???
–You must’ve known Dolores Preciado.
–Maybe he did, Donis, that is. I know so little about people. I never go anywhere. Right here where you see me now, I’ve been here sempiternally1 … Well, perhaps not forver. Just since Donis made me his wife.
I SAID I DIDN’T WANT TO KNOW.
Donis’s sister/wife says that she never leaves the house ever since the incest started, because she fears everyone can see the incest on her face. Literally, somehow.
–don’t you think I’d startle people? […] Look at my face!
It was a common face, just like any other.
Juan tries to cheer her up by pointing out that there’s no one in town to see her anyway. Donis’s sister/wife then lists a bunch of people she used to know just to make my note-taking that much harder.
A brief aside about how Obsidian is pretty cool and does not sponsor me but they should know my rates are low: although you do have to manually tag everything that links to another note (just by typing in two left brackets, so it’s more a learning curve thing than an actual issue), it will automatically link to other notes that already exist (see the darker purple “Juan Preciado”) but remain in light purple for notes that do not already exist, and you could click on them to make them right from there! So for all these characters who are just mentioned once but never show up or do anything, I can just leave them un-created, they don’t gum up the world cloud crazy board of connections; if they do show up later, when I create that note, it’ll automatically link back to where they’ve previously been tagged! So if, say, Prudencio the elder become a major character later, I don’t need to search through my notes for them; Obsidian will update the link between them once a Prudencio the elder note is created, and then I’ll immediately be reminded that one time another character in this book said “hey, is that guy still alive?” Maybe something even more useful than that could even happen! Neat!
Donis’s sister/wife tells of how one time a bishop came through town and she told him about her incestuous relationship during confession and the bishop was super weirded out.
»–Marry us!
»–Go your separate ways!
»I tried telling him that life had brought us together, had cornered us and forced us into each other's arms. We felt so alone here, being the only ones around. And somehow, we needed to populate the town.
Did you though?
»Maybe when he returns, there’ll be someone here for him to confirm.2
Her story ends with the bishop noping out and never coming back for some reason. She theorizes that this is why Comala is “so full of spirits, a constant movement of restless souls who died without forgiveness and who have no chance of finding it”. It would be quite a twist if Comala’s purgatorial status doesn’t actually have anything to do with Pedro Páramo extracting all concievable value from the town to the point where the souls of the dead can’t even leave this earth, but instead there was just this incest couple that drove away a bishop one time and that’s why everyone’s fucked.
Donis comes back. Donis and his sister/wife talk about unruly livestock. Juan, out of goddamn nowhere, throws out that he “just found out that you two are brother and sister” buddy I know it doesn’t mean that much in this book but still some shit you take to the grave. His explanation why he does so is bonkers.
–I only mention it to let you know I understand. No other reason.
I don’t know what’s more unsettling about this. If he’s just trying to say no judgment… maybe don’t even bring it up? If he’s trying to say he understands because he wanted to fuck his sister too… that’s weird, not the least because he doesn’t have a sister?3
Donis’s sister/wife says exactly what anyone would after that.
–What exactly do you understand?
She placed herself by his side, leaned on his shoulders and repeated:
–What exactly do you understand?
Wow, it’s the theme of the book! The question so central to Pedro Páramo that half of the translator’s note is about this!4 And it’s from this incest couple asking Juan why he thinks he understands incest! That is… a twist! Maybe these two did damn Comala to its status as purgatory on earth. I guess they’re important enough.
–What exactly do you understand?
–Nothing –I responded–. With each moment, I understand less and less –
We get it, dude, this book is WeIrD.
Fancy word for “eternally”. I had to look it up. Translation seems hard, y’all.
Confirmation is a sort of coming of age equivalent of baptism in Catholicism. It is distinct from communion, for reasons that I do not remember, despite the fact that I was confirmed when I was 14.
That he knows of, anyway. Nor that we know of, as of yet. One of the first people he met on his journey was a half-brother, and we’ve learned about his other half-brother Miguel Páramo who was Pedro’s favorite. And we know that Pedro’s just got a whole bunch of illegitimate children. So there could be a half-sister (or multiple half-sisters) somewhere, but their existence is entirely theoretical at the moment. Is Juan saying, theoretically, he could fuck his sister if he had one? I don’t even want to know.
We’ll talk about the note later, maybe after the recap of the whole book is finished and we’re sorting through what’s all happened, but here it is right now:
‘Nearing the halfway point of Juan Rulfo’s groundbreaking novel, an incesuous brother and sister interrogate Pedro Páramo’s estranged son with an inquiry that seems, in a metafictional masterstroke, to lift off the page and challenge the readers themselves: “What exactly do you understand?” Pedro Páramo is a novel that defies comprehension, with confusion and fragmentation becoming central to Rulfo’s fictional world. The novel vacillates between presence and absence, between reality and irreality, and even between life and death. It is my opinion that a successful translation of Pedro Páramo must honor Rulfo’s deliberately fractured narrative and avoid the temptation to clarify complexities that are integral elements of the text’