Javier Aranda Luna: Rulfo's Murmurs

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always called him The moon, and especially the moonrise in the lands of Bajío, is a big, red moon that seems static on the vast plains and grows, never disappearing. It's like a kind of horizon . That's why the man who picks up his wounded son to take him to another town finds it, enormous, lighting the way in the story Can't You Hear the Dogs Barking?

Those landscapes, devastated by drought and the Cristero War, never left Juan Rulfo's memory. They have been present since the first stories he published in the unusual magazine Pan de Guadalajara, Jalisco, which had a print run of one hundred copies and was edited by Antonio Alatorre and Juan José Arreola.

Rulfo's return to his village 30 years after leaving it unraveled the idea that had been swirling around in his head for so long and had become entangled . He found a ghost town, uninhabited, with streets lined with casuarina trees that, at night, in the strong wind that blows at the foot of the Sierra Madre, moo, howl , are like murmurs . It was then that he understood the loneliness of Comala and the crux of his novel: the return.

His childhood wasn't easy. During the Cristero War, his father was murdered when he was six years old, and when his mother died shortly afterward, he was placed in an orphanage. He studied accounting and wanted to study law, but failed the exam and ended up working for the Interior Ministry, in the archives department, then for Immigration, and then for the Goodrich-Euzkadi tire company. Later, he worked for the Papaloapan Commission and finally for the National Indigenous Institute.

Inoculated by writing, he worked on a novel of more than a thousand pages that he called The Son of Disconsolation , but ended up destroying it because “it was full of rhetoric, of academic pretensions without any attraction other than the aesthetic and the declamatory…. I think I was filling myself with rhetoric by being in bureaucracy… so exercising to free myself from that rhetorical language, a bit pompous, even garish, I wrote in a simpler way, with simpler characters… Of course I ended up on the other side.”

He ended up writing Pedro Páramo , one of the few masterpieces of Latin American literature , according to Octavio Paz; one of the best novels in Spanish-language literature, and even in all of literature, according to Borges; but more than just a masterpiece, in Susan Sontag's opinion, Pedro Páramo became one of the most influential books of this century . Let Galeano say it.

In 1955, the year Pedro Páramo was published, the rural population in Mexico was approximately 33.4 million inhabitants, 52.2 percent of the total population. The urbanization process was already underway in Mexico City, and the birth of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, consolidated the now-dwindling American Dream . It was also the year of Einstein's death and the first year in which women were allowed to vote in our country. A world seemingly very different from the one Rulfo showed us. Apparently, because the founding myths of the Mexican rural world are present in his novel, such as the sense of guilt, damnation, loneliness, the search for the father, living resentment, solitude, leaders, and shadows more than people. Myths that, far from being extinguished, passed from the countryside to the city. The search for the father has not ceased, and the plague of loneliness does not stop.

With this nightmarish story, where ghosts recount what life was like, Juan Rulfo marked a before and after in literature, an after that, despite thousands of published books, has not been surpassed. For one thing, I never tire of recalling that apparition I glimpsed from the first reading of the novel: a soft apparition, scrubbed with moonlight, with a swollen, moist mouth, iridescent with stars: a body transparent in the water of the night. Susana, Susana San Juan.