Pedro Páramo

My discovery of Juan Rulfo—like that of Kafka—will without doubt be an essential chapter in my memoirs. I had arrived in Mexico on the same day Ernest Hemingway pulled the trigger—June 2, 1961—and not only had I not read Juan Rulfo’s books, I hadn’t even heard of him.

So I was already a writer with five underground books. For me that wasn’t a problem, since neither then nor ever have I written for fame, but rather so that my friends would love me more, and I believed I had managed that.

Juan Rulfo has said—or is claimed to have said—that he takes his characters’ names from the headstones of the graves in cemeteries throughout Jalisco.

This is the case not just with days and months, but with flowers too. There are writers who use them purely for the sophistication of their names, without paying much attention to whether they correspond to the place or season. This is why it is not uncommon to find books where geraniums flower on the beach and tulips in the snow.

That place sits on the burning embers of the earth, at the very mouth of Hell. They say many of those who die there and go to Hell come back to fetch their blankets.

I noticed that her voice was made of human cords, that her mouth had teeth and a tongue that would engage and disengage as she spoke, and that her eyes were just like those of anyone else alive on earth.

And that if all I heard was silence, it was because I hadn’t yet grown accustomed to the silence. Maybe because my head was still full of sounds and voices.

Yes, filled with voices. And here, with the air so thin, they were easier to hear. They settled inside you, heavy. I remembered what my mother had told me: “You’ll hear me better there. I’ll be closer to you. You’ll find the voice of my memories closer to you there than that of my death, that is if death has ever had a voice.” My mother … The living one.

“… Green fields. Seeing the horizon rise and fall as the wheat sways in the wind, the afternoon rippling as it is battered by the rain. The color of the earth, the scent of alfalfa and bread. A town that smells of spilled honey …”

He heard the weeping. That’s what woke him for good: a calm and thin lament, that perhaps on account of its being so thin was able to seep through the confusion of his dreams and reach the very spot where dread had made a home.

It’s exhausting being happy.