Juan Rulfo

As one enters Juan Rulfo's legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death.Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro P?ramo - lover, overlord, murderer. Rulfo?s extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To read Pedro P?ramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico nearly fifty years ago.

Pedro Páramo

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Kat Albanese

This town is filled with echoes. It's like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone's behind you, stepping in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years. Sounds like that. But I think the day will come when those sounds fade away…. And on windy days I see the wind blowing leaves from the trees, where anyone can see that there aren’t any trees here. There must have been once. Otherwise, where do the leaves come from? 

I saw that no one was there, even though I could still hear the murmuring of voices, like a crowd on market day. A steady sound with no words to it, like the sound of the wind through the branches of a tree at night when you can't see the tree or the branches but you hear the whispering. Like that. I couldn't take another step. I began to sense that whispering drawing nearer, circling around me, a constant buzzing like a swarm of bees, until finally I could hear the almost soundless words 'Pray tor us.' I could hear that's what they were saying to me. At that moment, my soul turned to ice. That's why you found me dead."

Nica Rhiana

I keep my grief hidden in a safe place. Don’t let your heart go out.

"There was a time when night after night I could hear the sounds of a fiesta. I could hear the noise clear out at the Media Luna. I would walk into town to see what the uproar was about, and this is what I would see: just what we're seeing now. Nothing. No one. The streets as empty as they are now.

Then I didn't hear anything anymore. You know, you can get worn out celebrating. That's why I wasn't surprised when it ended.”

The heat woke me just before midnight. And the sweat. The woman's body was made of earth, layered in crusts of earth; it was crumbling, melting into a pool of mud. I felt myself swimming in the sweat streaming from her body, and I couldn't get enough air to breathe. I got out of bed. She was sleeping. From her mouth bubbled a sound very like a death rattle.

Then he heard the weeping. That was what woke him: a soft but penetrating weeping that because it was so delicate was able to slip through the mesh of sleep and reach the place where his fear lived.

"Yes," Damiana Cisneros repeated. "This town is filled with echoes. I'm not afraid anymore. I hear the dogs howling, and I let them howl. And on windy days I see the wind blowing leaves from the trees, when anyone can see that there aren't any trees here. There must have been once. Otherwise, where do the leaves come from?”

“This town is filled with echoes. It's like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone's behind you, stepping in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up.

And voices worn away by the years. Sounds like that. But I think the day will come when those sounds fade away."

There was no air; only the dead, still night fired by the dog days of August.

Not a breath. I had to suck in the same air I exhaled, cupping it in my hands before it escaped. I felt it, in and out, less each time until it was so thin it slipped through my fingers forever.

Pedro Páramo quotes

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