Juan Rulfo - Pedro Páramo

I wanted to say, “I feel dizzy. I’m going out to get a little air.” Instead, I said: “Don’t worry. He’ll be back.”

When I got out of bed, she said:

“I left something for you on the coals in the kitchen. It’s not very much, but it will at least keep you from starving.”

I found a piece of dried beef, and a few warm tortillas.

“That’s all I could get,” I heard her saying from the other room. “I traded my sister two clean sheets I’ve had since my mother died. I kept them under the bed. She must have come to get them. I didn’t want to tell you in front of Donis, but she was the woman you saw… the one who gave you such a scare.”

A black sky, filled with stars. And beside the moon the largest star of all.

Don’t you hear me?” I asked in a low voice. And her voice replied: “Where are you?”

“I’m here, in your village. With your people. Don’t you see me?”

“No, son. I don’t see you.”

Her voice seemed all-encompassing. It faded into distant space. “I don’t see you.”

I went back to the room where the woman was sleeping and told her:

“I’ll stay over here in my own corner. After all, the bed’s as hard as the floor. If anything happens, let me know.”

“Donis won’t be back,” she. said. “I saw it in his eyes. He was waiting for someone to come so he could get away. Now you’ll be the one to look after me. Won’t you? Don’t you want to take care of me? Come sleep here by my side.”

“I’m fine where I am.”

“You’d be better off up here in the bed. The ticks will eat you alive down there.”

I got up and crawled in bed with her.

The heat woke me just before midnight. And the sweat. The woman’s body was made of earth, layered in crusts of earth; it was crumbling, melting into a pool of mud. I felt myself swimming in the sweat streaming from her body, and I couldn’t get enough air to breathe. I got out of bed. She was sleeping. From her mouth bubbled a sound very like a death rattle.

I went outside for air, but I could not escape the heat that followed wherever I went.

There was no air; only the dead, still night fired by the dog days of August.

Not a breath. I had to suck in the same air I exhaled, cupping it in my hands before it escaped. I felt it, in and out, less each time… until it was so thin it slipped through my fingers forever.

I mean, forever.

I have a memory of having seen something like foamy clouds swirling above my head, and then being washed by the foam and pinking into the thick clouds. That was the last thing I saw.

Are you trying to make me believe you drowned, Juan Preciado? I found you in the town plaza, far from Donis’s house, and he was there, too, telling me you were playing dead. Between us we dragged you into the shadow of the arches, already stiff as a board and all drawn up like a person who’d died of fright. If there hadn’t been any air to breathe that night you’re talking about, we wouldn’t have had the strength to carry you, even less bury you. And, as you see, bury you we did.”

“You’re right, Doroteo. You say your name’s Doroteo?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s really Dorotea. But it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s true, Dorotea. The murmuring killed me.” There you’ll find the place I love most in the world.

The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You’ll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: always the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a I murmur… the pure murmuring of life…. “Yes, Dorotea. The murmuring killed me. I was trying to hold back my fear. But it kept building until I couldn’t contain it any longer. And when I was face to face with the murmuring, the dam burst. “I went to the plaza. You’re right about that. I was drawn there by the sound of people; I thought there really were people. I wasn’t in my right mind by then. I remember I got there by feeling my way along the walls as if I were walking with my hands. And the walls seemed to distill the voices, they seemed to be filtering through the cracks and crumbling mortar. I heard them. Human voices: not clear, but secretive voices that seemed to be whispering something to me as I passed, like a buzzing in my ears. I moved away from the walls and continued down the middle of the street. But I still heard them; they seemed to be keeping pace with me -ahead of me, or just behind me. Like I told you, I wasn’t hot anymore. Just the opposite, I was cold. From the time I left the house of that woman who let me use her bed, the one — I told you — I’d seen dissolving in the liquid of her sweat, from that time on I’d felt cold. And the farther I walked, the colder I got, until my skin was all goose bumps. I wanted to turn back; I thought that if I went back I might find the warmth I’d left behind; but I realized after I walked a bit farther that the cold was coming from me, from my own blood. Then I realized I was afraid. I heard all the noise in the plaza, and I thought I’d find people there to help me get over my fear. That’s how you came to find me in the plaza. So Donis came back after all? The woman was sure she’d never see him again.”

“It was morning by the time we found you. I don’t know where he came from. I didn’t ask him.”

“Well, anyway, I reached the plaza. I leaned against a pillar of the arcade. I saw that no one was there, even though I could still hear the murmuring of voices, like a crowd on market day. A steady sound with no words to it, like the sound of the wind through the branches of a tree at night when you can’t see the tree or the branches but you hear the whispering. Like that. I couldn’t take another step. I began to sense that whispering drawing nearer, circling around me, a constant buzzing like a swarm of bees, until finally I could hear the almost soundless words Tray for us.’ I could hear that’s what they were saying to me. At that moment, my soul turned to ice. That’s why you found me dead.”

“You’d have done better to stay home. Why did you come here?”

“I told you that at the very beginning. I came to find Pedro Paramo, who they say was my father. Hope brought me here.”

“Hope? You pay dear for that. My illusions made me live longer than I should have. And that was the price I paid to find my son, who in a manner of speaking was just one more illusion. Because I never had a son. Now that I’m dead I’ve had time to think and understand. God never gave me so much as a nest to shelter my baby in. Only an endless lifetime of dragging myself from pillar to post, sad eyes casting sidelong glances, always looking past people, suspicious that this one or that one had hidden my baby from me. And it was all the fault of one bad dream. I had two: one of them I call the ‘good dream,’ and the other the ‘bad dream.’ The first was the one that made me dream I had a son to begin with. And as long as I lived, I always believed it was true. I could feel him in my arms, my sweet baby, with his little mouth and eyes and hands. For a long, long time I could feel his eyelids, and the beating of his heart, on my fingertips. Why wouldn’t I think it was true?

I carried him with me everywhere I went, wrapped in my rebozo, and then one day I lost him. In heaven they told me they’d made a mistake. That they’d given me a mother’s heart but the womb of a whore. That was the other dream I had. I went up to heaven and peeked in to see whether I could recognize my son’s face among the angels. Nothing. The faces were all the same, all made from the same mold. Then I asked. One of those saints came over to me and, without a word, sank his hand into my stomach, like he would have poked into a ball of wax. When he pulled out his hand he showed me something that looked like a nutshell. This proves what I’m demonstrating to you.’