Previously, our narrator happened upon a guide for his journey to Comala to find his estranged father, Pedro Páramo. Upon arriving there, he was informed that Comala is deserted and that Pedro Páramo died years ago, which seems like it was certainly someone’s responsibility to disclose before spending a day travelling there.
Pages 5–7
Now in Comala, our still-unnamed narrator remarks upon how this place is dead.
Now here I was, in this town devoid of all sound. I heard my footsteps as they fell on the rounded stones that paved the streets. Hollow footsteps, echoing off walls tinged by the light of the setting sun.
[…] I saw empty houses with broken doors, buried in weeds. What had that guy told me this weed was called? “La capitana, señor. A plague that waits for people to leave so it can overtake their homes. You’ll see.”
I’m sharing that bit not because it conveys anything essential to the summary, per se, but because 1) this is what the prose is like! It’s kinda pretty! And 2) the narrator is still referring to his actual-ass half-brother who he did not know existed as “that guy”. This guy is a real weirdo.
Now in Comala proper, which he is still exploring even though no one lives there and the man he is looking for died years ago (sunk cost fallacy, I guess; whom amongst us hasn’t powered through a vacation/trip to find your estranged father that you’re not enjoying but you gotta get your money’s worth), he encounters probably our first ghost. Let me lay out my ghostly evidence.
A woman appears and then “disappear[s] as if she’d never existed” (classic ghost behavior), then he encounters her again and asks her for directions to doña Eduviges’s home. He does not share with the reader any information about this person he’s apparently been looking for, but he does share some extremely normal details about the woman he gets directions from:
I noticed that her voice was made of human cords, that her mouth had teeth and a tongue that would engage and disengage as she spoke, and that her eyes were just like those of anyone else alive on earth.
Obviously I can appreciate the artistic craft going on here to suggest that although something strange is going on here everything sure seems normal enough, but this is nonetheless an unhinged prioritization of how to describe another person. Imagine a police sketch artist having to work with this.
She directs the narrator to a house by a bridge. As he follows the sound of a river to find it, his head begins to fill with voices, and he remembers his mother telling him that he will “hear [her] better” in Comala. We’re going to spend the entire rest of the book trying to figure out how wildly not a metaphor this is. Enjoy our time in linear narrative while you can.
I mean, here’s how little clarity this narrator wants you to have:
I knocked at the door, but to no avail. My hand swung in the air as if the wind had blown the door open.
You read one sentence and it sounds like a normal sentence about how he knocked but no one was home. Then you read the next sentence and slowly realize, wait, when he said his knock was unsuccessful, he meant he literally was unable to knock because the door mysteriously opened as he tried to do so. The way this book demands that you go back over every little detail, it’s like this 69-year-old novel expects every reader to write a blog about it just to get a surface-level understanding of what happens in it. During my first read, I didn’t pick up on any of this. We haven’t even gotten to the confusing shit yet, and I’m already questioning if I’m just actually bad at reading.
A woman inside tells him to come in and he comes in. The section ends. And speaking of “am I just bad at reading”, we return to Obsidian, the note-taking program I am using to try to understand this book.
Not a ton of new stuff in here since last time. Mostly just the maybe-ghost woman (wearing a rebozo) who gives directions to doña Eduviges’s house (who we know nothing about except that her house, with its mysteriously opening door, is possibly also ghost-like). One thing I’m excited about – following my first read of this book where I immediately lost track of who any characters were – is that this web helps me visualize that, yes, I do not know who doña Eduviges is yet. What a victory.
For example, opening up the local graph on “the woman with the rebozo” note, with a depth of 1 we can see basically only the links we collected ourselves:
But expanding the depth to 2 and turning on neighbor links, we can see how those points are connected, or not yet connected. We can see there’s a lot linking Comala and the unnamed main character (possibly too much; I may have more notes than are necessary to crack this mystery), but doña Eduviges is comparably untethered to elements of the story we’re currently familiar with.
Again, I know I seem insane because this story is not complicated yet, but trust me, one day we will appreciate this groundwork. Probably around the time the main character dies halfway through the book (spoilers).
tl;dr wtf happened in Pedro Páramo today
The narrator gets directions from maybe a ghost and gets invited inside a house.