Pedro Páramo: Fragments 60-68, Pages 109-124 Summary & Analysis

The fact that Angeles and Fausta have been decorating the church implies that it houses both good and evil. Like so many of the novel’s characters, they view life and death through a primarily religious lens. This gives death a clear meaning: it is an opportunity for people to atone for their sins and ascend to heaven. Of course, this is just the opposite of what happens to Comala’s ghostly residents—even the benevolent ones, like Eduviges. Rulfo implies that religion deceives people by claiming that death will offer them redemption.

Father Rentería’s line, “My mouth is filled with earth,” implies that death is a kind of reunification with the natural world. This literally references the way she gets buried underground, but also clearly recalls the circumstances of Juan Preciado’s death. Juan watched Donis’s sister dissolve into dirt and mud, and then something similar happened to him. When Father Rentería is whispering into Susana’s ear, it’s impossible for the reader to know whether he’s really saying these sacrilegious things about dissolving into mud, or if this is just what Susana hears when he speaks to her. Either way, the prayer he is trying to recite gets distorted, which represents the way he has corrupted the Church and the way the Church’s teachings prove totally unhelpful in the bleak world of Comala. At the beginning of the book, Pedro daydreamed about Susana being in heaven, but here it seems like she is going to hell, which again demonstrates that they have completely opposite, incompatible perspectives on their marriage. Of course, both of them are forced to give up on their hopes and live in despair precisely because their only goals are incompatible: Pedro wants nothing more than to be with Susana, who wants nothing more than to leave him and be free. In a way, his heaven is her hell, and vice versa.

Susana’s final act is again one of defiance: she insists on dying on her own terms, free from other people’s control (especially men’s). Curiously, just like Juan Preciado, Susana experiences her death as a loss of breath and specifically a loss of the ability to speak, which again references the way the dead are silenced—or, at least, hard to hear except in places like Comala (where Susana gets to speak freely for the rest of eternity).

Dorotea’s claim is puzzling because she does not clearly appear in Susana’s death scene, but the reader knows that she would have been in Pedro Páramo’s house (since she lived and worked there) and that she is likely to have been erased from everyone else’s versions of the story. So again, she represents the forgotten participants in history, who are erased from the official version of events. But now that she is with Juan, her voice finally gets heard.

For Pedro Páramo, the town’s ultimate crime is defiance: it refuses to recognize his tragedy as a tragedy, even if it’s all based on a misinterpretation. Unable to exert total power over Susana, with whom he’s never truly able to have a loving relationship, Pedro cannot stand the town escaping his control, too, so decides to prove his power by destroying it. This scene also evokes the end of the Cristero War between the Mexican government and Catholic Church leaders in western Mexico (including the area surrounding Comala). When the war ended, church bells sounded for the first time in many years, so this might be what the townspeople think they’re celebrating. Rulfo himself lived through this celebration, which likely influenced this scene. But it’s perhaps more likely that the townspeople think the church bells are marking the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, an important celebration of the Virgin Mary generally held on December 8th. The festival is celebrated at the important pilgrimage site of San Juan de los Lagos in Jalisco, the state where Rulfo grew up, and which borders Colima (where Comala is located). It’s no coincidence that Susana San Juan shares her name with this town (and a frequent association with water, when los Lagos means “the lakes”). Moreover, the circus performers who arrive for this festival are a direct reference to the story of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos, the venerated statue of the Virgin Mary that the festival celebrates. Essentially, the statue was originally recognized as miraculous when it healed a girl who was severely injured during a circus act.

This short conversation exemplifies the tricks Juan Rulfo plays with time in this novel. The different factions El Tilcuate claims to be supporting formed and came into conflict over a period of more than a decade (from roughly 1913 to 1926). The novel compresses all this time into just a few lines. This shows how Pedro himself loses track of time after Susana’s death. This is similar to how Susana spent in her last years in a kind of fixed present—and how Comala spends all of eternity reliving the past, with no hope for the future. On a different note, Father Rentería’s decision to join the rebels is the culmination of his long slide into corruption and self-interest: like the other Cristeros, he cares more about maintaining the Catholic Church’s political and economic standing than achieving the justice and equality that the post-revolutionary government claims to be defending.

This fragment reveals the way Pedro lives out the rest of his life after Susana’s death. Like many of the dead in Comala, he falls into despair when he is unable to achieve the only thing he hoped for his whole life. He becomes lifeless, static, hardening into exactly what his name means: a stone. As Pedro spends his present reliving his past, death and life become two sides of the same coin: he spends his final years dead inside, waiting for the actual death that he thinks will bring him a new life (by reuniting him with Susana in heaven).

Inés Villalpando and her son are actually significant characters in the novel: very early in the book, she was the shopkeeper who sold Pedro a new mill for his family on credit. While Pedro and Comala totally transformed, she and her son have kept running the same shop. They represent the conventional idea of inheritance within a family, in which parents pass their property (and often their occupations) on to their sons. Pedro Páramo has been unable to do this, despite amassing an enormous fortune. And he’s left the Villalpandos—who saved him long ago with their credit—poor and hopeless, since Comala has already dried up and nobody wants to buy anything anymore. This is part of why Abundio—Pedro’s illegitimate son—falls into such despair: if he had more money, he might have been able to save his beloved wife. Meanwhile, all the money in the world couldn’t make Susana love Pedro Páramo.

Inés Villalpando’s gift to Abundio represents the principle of care and generosity that Pedro Páramo has tried to stamp out of Comala. Inés’s plea for a prayer from Abundio’s wife—after offering her own prayer—is a mutual exchange of prayers, which further demonstrates the equality and mutuality that their relationship is based on. In contrast, in Pedro Páramo and Father Rentería’s world, there’s only power, domination, and prayers for hire. However, Father Rentería seems to have condemned Comala’s people by abandoning the town, which may suggest that his vicious principle—power over equality—ultimately runs the world.

To make sense of this scene, it’s important to remember Abundio Martínez’s first appearance at the beginning of the book, also on the outskirts of Comala, when he tells Juan Preciado about having met Pedro Páramo at a crossroads long ago. This is clearly the crossroads he was talking about. In asking for money, Abundio is not only seeking help for his wife, but also asking for his inheritance—in other words, he’s trying to fulfill the exact same quest as Juan Preciado. Of course, the crossroads also connects with the sign of the cross that Damiana makes, and both also implicitly refers to the book’s chiastic (A-B-B-A) structure: the closing chapters are returning to the subject matter of the opening ones—in terms of characters, events, locations, and of course the deaths of Juan Preciado’s mother and (soon) father, respectively.

Distorted and told in fragments, this scene makes it difficult to tell who Abundio actually kills. Somehow, the facts of the matter are just out of the narrative’s reach: as with the novel as a whole, readers are forced to guess and reconstruct this scene in order to turn it into an intelligible, linear story. The fact that it resists this kind of reconstruction again testifies to the way history itself is fragmented, disjointed, and impossible to fully reconstruct: the information and voices that are accessible to people in the present day only tell part of the story. Like throughout this penultimate fragment of the text, this section repeatedly calls back to earlier language and events. For instance, Abundio vomits bile, and early in the novel he called Pedro Páramo “living bile.”

The novel ends with a totally different version of Pedro Páramo’s death, completing the novel’s cyclical structure: it began with Dolores Preciado’s death, then Juan Preciado himself died at the halfway point, and now Pedro Páramo—the father Juan was seeking and the title of the work itself—dies at the end. So the last two scenes narrate Pedro Páramo’s death twice in different ways, which directly parallels Juan Preciado’s death, which also happened over two scenes, told from different perspectives. Similarly, Damiana dies in one version but lives in the other. Her uncertain fate harkens back to the last time Juan Preciado saw her in the middle of the book—he asked if she was dead or alive, but she disappeared and he just heard the echo of his own voice, without hearing her response. As he encounters himself falling apart piece by piece, Pedro is actually excited and hopeful: like Susana, he looks forward to death, because it means a kind of release from the pain of life. At the same time, the ghosts eternally wandering Comala suggest that humans have little to look forward to in death—unless Pedro, unlike all the rest, makes it to some other realm (heaven or hell). The novel’s closing line is incredibly significant. For one, the name Pedro comes from the word for “rock,” and moreover, Pedro spent the last years of his life frozen in place like a rock (in both mind and body). The fact that he turns into rocks therefore represents not only the logical next step in his slow process of paralysis, but also the way that his fate becomes unified with the fate of Comala itself, which has turned from an Eden-like green paradise into a wasteland (or páramo) full of rocks (piedras).