Pedro Paramo -- Memories and Ghosts of the Past

Anyone whose parents or grandparents fled Fascism or Communism is familiar with the syndrome: there are three countries in their past. There is the country in the history books, dry and political, the details of its past told and re-told dispassionately in dusty books. Historians take great pride, after all, in not judging, but in understanding, the suffering that those with power can cause. There is the country of our parents' memories, of faded photographs and loving conversations about those long-ago days so often bathed in warmth and golden light. And there is the country we have invented in our minds. Never having been to the place of our parents' and grandparents' memories, we create our own Neverland, a place where our ancestors were born and grew up in perfect love and harmony, where nothing ever went wrong, where things were always better, the scenery more beautiful, the furniture more comfortable, the homes warmer, the food tasted better, the music more harmonious . . .

Juan Preciado goes on a journey to his mother's hometown after her death, hoping to reclaim his birthright. He is, after all, the only legitimate son and heir of town chieftain Pedro Paramo. Instead of finding a place bathed in warmth and golden light, filled with love and harmony, Preciado finds himself in Comala, a place which is quite literally hotter than hell, filled with the soulless ghosts of the dead, a town which is dead, barren, deliberately left to die years before by Pedro Paramo himself.

Author Juan Rulfo uses a unique narrative technique in this novel; narration shifts from the perspective of Juan Preciado to a third person omniscient point of view (telling the story of Pedro Paramo). This allows the author to shift the story in time, from the present of Preciado's ghost-filled Comala to the past of Paramo's Comala, a town filled with violence and injustice against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution (which Paramo's men join with a cynicism which would be awe-inspiring, were it not for the "true" Revolutionaries's own utter lack of understanding of their own cause). What, exactly, is the birthright that Dolores Preciado has asked her son to claim? Murder, rape, injustice, and theft? Barrenness and death? Unrepentant sin? Unrequited love? For just as Pedro Paramo never loved Dolores Preciado, and shunned her, Susana San Juan never loved Pedro Paramo, and, in her own delirium, never took this man, who was never refused by any woman, into her bed.

It is an understatement to say that Pedro Paramo is not a good person. He is selfish and cruel, living only for his own wants and needs, caring not at all for others, unable even to shed a tear when his son, Miguel, dies. He carries a torch for Susana San Juan for years, has her father killed in order to possess her, worries endlessly about her in her madness, yet does little for her, watching her writhe in her suffering. After she dies, he allows Comala to lie fallow in revenge, caring nothing even for the land he has lied, cheated, and stolen to possess. And Paramo himself dries out, becoming a shell of his former self, staring out of empty eyes at barren land, barely noticing, let alone caring about, his own senseless murder.

This is the birthright, the legacy of Comala, a town that has taken the wrong path at every turn, a town whose people have always been lost in their own decisions and delusions, and who, long since dead and buried, seek only to be heard from their graves, as they tell their stories endlessly, senselessly, their voices, moans, and murmurs, sometimes barely distinguishable, sometimes more real than last night's dream.