Pages 2–5
No, seriously, we're doing this 2 or 3 pages at a time if we must.
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When we last left our unnamed narrator, his mother’s dying wish was for him to go to his estranged father’s town and ask him, “hey, what the hell”. When we last left our web of Things in the note-taking app Obsidian, which I barely understand how to use because it is kind of for coders and I am not that, it looked like this:
Are we prepared for literally only the second page of this book? I dunno, man. Let’s dive in.
Pages 2–5
Our unnamed main character begins his journey to Comala in the summer. He talks with an unnamed traveler – who seems to be taking him to Comala – and asks him, hey, we’re definitely going to Comala right? Because this place is dead as hell.
–What did you say was the name of that town down there?
–Comala, señor.
–And why does it look so sad?
–It’s the times, señor.
I had imagined I’d see the place of my mother’s memories, of her nostalgia, a nostalgia of tattered sighs. She was always sighing, mourning the loss of Comala, hoping to return. But she never came back. Now I’ve come in her place. And I come bearing the same eyes with which she saw these things, because she gave me her eyes to see.
She did not literally give him her eyes, in case I have to make this clear that, while this book is extremely confusing, it is not confusing in a magical realism way. It is confusing in a “‘oh, I guess dialogue is denoted by dashes instead of quotation marks. Got it’ but, lo, you will soon discover you do not, in fact, got it” way.
The other guy asks the narrator why he’s going to Comala. Narrator says he’s going to see his father. Other guy asks what his father is like. Narrator says he doesn’t know him, in fact the only thing he does know about him is his name, Pedro Páramo. The other guy goes “Ah! You don’t say.” and then after a moment says that Pedro Páramo is also his father. The narrator says… that it’s hot here.
Our narrator has absolutely no reaction to learning he has a half-brother, who he has happened upon by chance. It’s too hot, I guess, which, fair.
They continue to talk about how hot this town is. Narrator asks his maybe half-brother if he knows Pedro Páramo, what’s he like. “Bitterness incarnate”, his maybe half-brother says. It is pointed out to the narrator how a great deal of the land they approach is owned by Pedro Páramo. If you get nothing else out of this book, hold onto this information: Pedro Páramo is a book about how landlords suck.
Then we learn that some rather important information has been withheld from the narrator that he really should have gotten before they took him to this place to find Pedro Páramo.
–I said we’re almost there, señor.
–I can see that. But what came through here?
–A roadrunner, señor. That’s what they call those birds.
–No, I was asking about the town. It seems so alone, as if abandoned. As if no one were living here.
–It doesn’t just seem that way. That’s how it is. Nobody lives here.
–And Pedro Páramo?
–Pedro Páramo died years ago.
I feel like maybe I’d have led with that, but, ok, let’s go update our timeline then.
So this is the easy part of our update, and yet you may notice it is already fraught with uncertainty. I have no idea how many people are actually traveling with our narrator right now. We’re not getting anyone’s names yet, and although this scene sure reads like a conversation between two people, notice how the members of his traveling party are actually referred to during these pages:
someone (as in “I heard someone say”, so we got plausible deniability this voice is not the same as the person guiding him to Comala, might not even be a person the narrator can identify)
the voice of the man walking alongside me
the muleteer
this guy
the other guy
Maybe I’m wildly incorrect here, because we can directly attribute claims of being Pedro’s son to both “this guy” and “the muleteer” after all, but the ambiguity of “I heard someone say” is impossible to ignore (it might seem like all the suspicion is overkill on your first read, but we haven’t gotten to all the ghosts yet). (btw in case I haven’t brought it up yet it is possible every single character in this book is already dead and now a ghost.) (Don’t worry about it.) The narrator’s description of meeting his guide – offered smack dab in the middle of this section – is similarly strangely disconnected from a world where humans behave like humans.
I had met up with him at Los Encuentros, where several roads came together. I was there waiting, until finally this guy showed up.
–Where you headed? –I asked.
–Down that way, señor.
–You familiar with a place called Comala?
–That’s where I’m going.
So I followed him. I walked behind trying to match his pace, until he seemed to notice I was following and slowed his stride. After that we walked side by side so close together our shoulders were almost touching.
The translator’s note at the end of book has an entire section subtitled “What Exactly Do You Understand?”, so, noted, we are going to assume nothing. Scene number two is a dialogue between at least two people, and at least two of them have just learned they are related, and there is maybe a third one who is also related or is leading a group of people having a very juicy conversation about learning and ignoring that they’re related. So now our map of people and places looks like this:
ATTN people here for the Obsidian stuff: I still don’t know what I’m doing. I have decided to break out the main timeline into its own note, which I guess is going to be connected to everything. I didn’t create pages yet for those two locations tagged to Pedro at the bottom since I have no useful information about them yet aside from Pedro owns all the land between them. Not gonna lie, I am a little overwhelmed how I am probably excessively adding things to the web because I don’t know what’s going to become important in solving this puzzle.
There is now enough in here where I can see the value of Obsidian’s backlinks feature. For instance, I have nothing to say about this spot yet, but I can still pull what other notes are related to it.
I’m hoping this sort of thing becomes useful when we get to the second half of the book where, as everyone I’ve talked to IRL about it has agreed, it becomes impossible to tell who is talking. Not that this post about literally the second page of the book suggests that I’m particularly set up for success here.
Speaking of the titular Pedro Páramo, what do our notes tell us about him so far?
Beginning to worry these notes are going to become more unwieldy than this book.
tl;dr wtf happened in Pedro Páramo today
The narrator begins his journey to the town his estranged father lives in, finds a guide, learns his guide is his half-brother he didn’t know about, and then learns that the town is abandoned and his father died years ago.
It is super weird that this dude has no reaction to meeting a half-sibling. No one in this book is gonna be normal, huh.