Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

The novel Pedro Páramo by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo is based on a popular trope: the son who returns to find his father. Juan Preciado’s story begins when, on her deathbed, his mother asks him to search for his father in Comala, a town she fondly remembers as a vibrant and bustling place.

Upon his arrival in Comala, Juan Preciado encounters a desolate and decadent destiny. Along the way, his first encounter is with Abundio Martínez, who describes Pedro Páramo as pure hate. From there, Juan begins to piece together the story of his deceased father, guided by the ghosts he encounters on his journey.

Pedro Páramo is structured into two distinct narrative lines: one that follows Juan Preciado’s journey and another that delves into the memories that shape Pedro Páramo’s life, a cruel and unscrupulous cacique whose actions are paradoxically driven by the love he holds for Susana San Juan, a woman he has known since childhood, when they were kids diving together in the river, who slowly became a splendor of beauty with aquamarine eyes like the very Aphrodite, the Greek goddess, the one who rose from the foam to make us ponder about the playful laws of attraction, never-ending love, and abundant sexual desire.

Susana San Juan and Pedro Páramo had an affair until Susana’s mother passed away. After her mother’s death, her father, Bartolomé San Juan, took her to a lonely mining region where she was sexually abused by her own father. Later, she was traded to Florencio, a man with whom she fell deeply in love, but he suddenly died, leaving Susana in a fragile state of mind. Devastated by grief, she soon spiraled into madness, seclusion, and raw nymphomania always under the shadow of Florencio. The death of Bartolomé, ordered by Pedro himself, serves as the final trigger that sets the course for Susana’s mental health, which was already weakened by insomnia and fear of the dark.

Pedro is unable to forget her and desires her, he’s trapped into a treadmill of unrequited love and sorrow, leading him to find no other way to heal this wound than abuse the power of his money to extort sexual favors from his housemaids and the whole neighborhood, scornfully referring to them as “a handful of flesh.” All the other women in Comala have black eyes, a common trait among Mexican Native Americans, except for Susana. This fact holds significant importance, as it is the reason behind Pedro’s curse and misery. The exotic blend of colors and shapes.

Sandro Botticelli’s Italian Renaissance painting, Birth of Venus, the Roman name of the classical and hellenistic goddess of love and beauty, depicts Aphrodite-Venus as a blonde woman with possibly straight hair. Her eyes are usually green or brown, but more likely, aquamarine. Her face, adorned with hair longer than any goddess, and her full legs completely bare and exposed, glows like the Sun. Her hips are both slender and voluminous, with her knees flexing above her shins.

A defining characteristic of Magical Realism is that all its authors pay homage to Faulkner. I wonder whether bookstores in South America were poorly stocked. Albert Camus’s victory cry was that Old Bill made it. But prudish readers since the middle of the 30s had already canceled Faulkner for penning Sanctuary, a pulp fiction novel—there is no story without conflict—where Ole Miss coed Temple Drake ends up as the sex slave of a gangster named Popeye.

Faulkner faced criticism for his new heroine, Temple Drake, the triple Maiden-Mother-Crone Goddess, and how all that evil flowed off her like water off a duck’s back, both in Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun. Albert Camus adapted the latest for a play and also wrote the preface to Maurice Coindreau’s translation of the novel into French. I imagine Camus deeply moved by the painful experiences that shape us all, despite our pride in surviving them and our belief that they are forgotten forever. Faulkner’s famous line about the past is just an observation of the lawyer Stevens, while Temple Drake says that her old identity has vanished, and no one cares about the depth of her wounds.

Beyond his literary achievements and the broad recognition of his peers, including García Márquez, Rulfo was a multifaceted artist. His photographs gained widespread recognition and meticulously documented the indigenous peoples of Mexico. He found a stable and fulfilling sinecure until his passing at the National Institute, where he curated and edited collections of social anthropology.

Post-revolutionary Mexican conflicts like the Cristero War, during the early years of Juan Rulfo, in the late 20s, a reactionary movement against the implementation of secular and anticlerical articles of the 1917 Constitution, in his own words: "I had a very hard, very difficult childhood. A family that disintegrated very easily in a place that was totally destroyed. From my father and my mother, even all of my father's siblings were killed. Then I lived in an area of devastation. Not only of human devastation, but of geographical devastation. I never found, nor have I found to date, the logic of all that. It cannot be attributed to the revolution. It was more of an atavistic thing, a fate thing, an illogical thing."

I find myself spinning about Faulkner and Rulfo because of a recent trip back in time, inspired by a book I read in 1984, thanks to a suitable film adaptation on Netflix that I highly recommend to those who have read Pedro Páramo. And especially to those who never did, given that their reading abilities have diminished like the new barbarians they are.

Pedro Páramo, according to Netflix, left me with wonderful expectations as a pledge, because of the impending premiere of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the Xmas season, the decades-longer, self-censored film adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel.

Yes, I have a long list of niggles, mostly because the author wrote the novel just to make fun of the cheap and greedy ways of producers. It was a love-and-hate relationship. While he was selling copies by millions, García Márquez never sold the movie rights.

We shall see; maybe I will toss away my niggles as I did this last time watching for the first time Susana San Juan, like the one who rose from the foam. It really paid me off to change my mind. You’ll never know, will you? But I shall admit that it’s a good thing to be alive. Time is a flat circle.