Pedro Paramo

One of the greatest challenges Rulfo poses to the reader is to construct Susana San Juan from the fragmentary sequences provided in the text, as much of her life is indeed made up of silences. How was the psyche of the pubescent Susana affected when her father lowered her into a cavern full of skeletons? Does this event, which takes on the significance of a primal scene, explain her later madness? The causes of Susana San Juan's breakdown are not methodically investigated in the text. With so few details provided, the reader who looks for the coherent development of her character is invited to write his or her own story to fill in the spaces Rulfo deliberately left blank.

This lack of narrative may frustrate us as we reflect on the character of Susana San Juan, yet at the same time we are liberated by the text's refusal to enter into case-history minutiae. While the nov

As a fetishized goddess, the Susana San Juan of Pedro Paramo's imagination exhibits the iconography traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary--which includes the Virgin's paradoxically chaste sensuality. His obsession for Susana San Juan is clearly sexual, but his worshipful devotion elevates her beyond the reach of his predatory embrace. When she returns to Comala, he is faced with the dilemma of trying to "have" a woman who by the terms of his own obsession is unattainable. After having her father killed and moving her to the Media Luna ranch, he hovers at her bedside, but does not force sex upon her. Instead, Susana's image arouses him while he sleeps with the young girls in the town who serve as her proxies. He looks back on one such encounter and makes the connection clear: He thought of the young girl he had just slept with. Of the small, frightened, trembling body, and the thudding of a heart that seemed about to leap from her chest. "You sweet little handful," he had said to her. And embraced her, trying to transform her into Susana San Juan. "A woman who is not of this world" (108).

There are further intimations of incest upon their return years later to Comala. Fulgor Sedano, Pedro Paramo's foreman, watches them as they arrive and mistakes them for a couple, reporting that, "Well, from the way he treats her, she seems more like his wife" (82). And on the night of her father's murder, Susana tells her maid that her sleep was disturbed by a cat that leaped about on her bed; when the maid replies by announcing her father's death, she instantly concludes, "Then it was Father....So he came to tell me good-bye" (90). Since this is a novel in which we may believe in ghosts and the supernatural (our reading of Juan Preciado's story has already caused us to suspend our disbelief), this assertion does not necessarily signal a mental disturbance.

Instead of trying to resolve what actually happened to Susana San Juan, we can ask ourselves what effect the scenario of incest has in this text. The possibility that society's strongest taboo has been violated focuses our attention on the body as a place of transgression, a site of defilement. We may reflect back on the encounter between Juan Preciado and the incestuous couple for a clear instance of the association between incest and a woman's physical mortification. In that scene, the nameless woman whose brother took her as his sexual partner tells Juan Preciado: Don't you see my sin? Don't you see those purplish spots? Like impetigo. I'm covered with them. And that's only the outside: inside I'm a sea of mud (51) This last image becomes real when Juan Preciado sleeps with her and wakes to find her body "melting into a pool of mud" (57). Her base and loathsome body takes a deadly turn with the suggestion that her body's disintegration causes Juan Preciado to suffocate. The strongest image conveyed here is that she has reverted to a primordial condition.

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