Juan Rulfo - Pedro Páramo

The men lifted her from the ground and carried her inside the house.

“Are you all right, patron?” they asked.

Pedro Paramo’s head appeared. He nodded.

They disarmed Abundio, who still held the bloody knife in his hand.

“Come with us,” they said. “A fine mess you’ve got yourself into.”

He followed them.

Before they got to the village he begged them to excuse him. He walked to the side of the road and vomited something yellow as bile. Streams and streams, as if he had drunk ten liters of water. His head began to burn and his tongue felt thick.

“I’m drunk,” he said.

He returned to where the men were waiting. He put his arms across their shoulders, and they dragged him back, his toes carving a furrow in the dust.

Behind them, still in his chair, Pedro Paramo watched the procession making its way back to the village. As he tried to lift his left hand, it dropped like lead to his knees, but he thought nothing of it. He was used to seeing some part of him die every day. He watched the leaves falling from the Paradise tree. “They all follow the same road. They all go away.”

Then he returned to where he had left his thoughts.

“Susana,” he said. He closed his eyes. “I begged you to come back….

“An enormous moon was shining over the world. I stared at you till I was nearly blind. At the moonlight pouring over your face. I never grew tired of looking at you, at the vision you were. Soft, caressed by the moonlight, your swollen, moist lips iridescent with stars, your body growing transparent in the night dew. Susana. Susana San Juan.”

He tried to raise his hand to wipe the image clear, but it clung to his legs like a magnet. He tried to lift the other hand, but it slipped slowly down his side until it touched the floor, a crutch supporting his boneless shoulder.

“This is death,” he thought.

The sun was tumbling over things, giving them form once again. The ruined, sterile earth lay before him. Heat scalded his body. His eyes scarcely moved; they leapt from memory to memory, blotting out the present. Suddenly his heart stopped, and it seemed as if time and the breath of life stopped with it.

“So there won’t be another night,” he thought.

Because he feared the nights that filled the darkness with phantoms. That locked him in with his ghosts. That was his fear.

“I know that within a few hours Abundio will come with his bloody hands to ask for the help I refused him. But I won’t have hands to cover my eyes, to block him out. I will have to hear him, listen until his voice fades with the day, until his voice dies.”

He felt a hand touch his shoulder, and straightened up, hardening himself.

“It’s me, don Pedro,” said Damiana. “Don’t you want me to bring you your dinner?”

Pedro Paramo replied:

“I’m coming along. I’m coming.”

He supported himself on Damiana Cisnero’s arm and tried to walk. After a few steps he fell; inside, he was begging for help, but no words were audible. He fell to the ground with a thud, and lay there, collapsed like a pile of rocks.