Juan Rulfo’s World: What a Voice Can Carry
At dawn in The Golden Cockerel, Dionisio Pinzón calls out the description of a lost horse. His voice reaches every corner of San Miguel del Milagro. The horse remains missing, so its owner withholds payment; Dionisio goes home with a little food after a full day’s work. His damaged arm has left him few other ways to earn a living. The sound of his calls eventually blends with the town’s dogs, while the practical question underneath them stays unanswered: who will find the horse, and who will feed the man who announces its loss?
Rulfo often makes a place audible before we can see it. The sound may direct someone toward a village, convey news, or summon another person to help. What happens after it is heard gives each of his books a different motion. The stories can bring a journey to a sharp halt; Pedro Páramo makes a traveler lose his bearings among voices; The Golden Cockerel follows one man through the consequences of making his voice a trade.
Listening opens these worlds, though it cannot guarantee that anyone will answer.
Spoiler note: This essay discusses major turns and endings in Pedro Páramo and The Golden Cockerel, as well as the endings of several stories.
The dogs in The Burning Plain
Dogs bark in the first lines of “They Gave Us the Land” and again when the walkers finally descend toward the village. The sound changes distance. At first the wind brings it over a vast, dry plain, giving four exhausted men a reason to believe that people live beyond it. At the end the barking fills the ravine and the earth underfoot becomes good. Between those points, the men recall the government official who has awarded them the unusable land above the river. They try to explain what can and cannot grow there. He hands them papers, answers with the size of the grant, and refuses to hear them out.
Rulfo lets the walkers reach the village, so the promise carried by the dogs is real. That arrival cannot alter the official’s decision. The story holds both facts in place: a human community is near enough to hear, and the men have been given ground on which they cannot live by cultivating it. The official’s written version of the land cannot be talked into agreement with the soil. The journey changes what the men can touch and hear while leaving the terms of ownership untouched.
“No Dogs Bark” gives the wait for that sound to two people who cannot share the same burden. A father carries his wounded son, Ignacio, toward a town with a doctor. The father’s eyes are fixed low by the weight on his shoulders; Ignacio is high enough to look and has his ears free.
Again and again the father asks him to listen for dogs. As the son weakens, the father’s speech moves between concern, accusations over Ignacio’s crimes, and the dead mother for whose sake he says he keeps walking. His arms continue the journey through words that seem to disown the person he holds.
Only after reaching the first houses and lowering Ignacio does the father hear dogs everywhere. His last question asks why the son did not help him listen. It carries blame, need, and the fear of having reached help too late; the story gives Ignacio no reply. Rulfo has made the father depend on the one sense available to the person he must carry. The interval is counted in the father’s failing strength.
Another story, “Luvina,” places a man’s account of a desolate village inside a store, with a river passing nearby and children playing outside. The listener is preparing to go to Luvina; the speaker’s memory brings its abrasive wind into the room. Those present sounds keep interrupting his account. We can hear the life around the speaker even as he insists on the barrenness of the place he left. Rulfo gives the warning to a man whose own experience may have shaped every detail of it.
The stories impress, without especially enchanting me. They make the distance between a voice and its listener almost physically measurable, then release us at the point of greatest pressure. I found the longer movement of The Golden Cockerel more absorbing; Pedro Páramo made the act of listening stranger.
Pedro Páramo: a town assembled by voices
Juan Preciado sets out for Comala on the strength of his mother’s words. She has asked him to find the father who neglected them, and she has described a green plain and a town lit at night. Juan brings her remembered view with him. On the road, the muleteer Abundio tells him that Pedro Páramo is also his father and that Pedro died years ago. Juan has barely seen Comala when another voice changes what his mother’s promise could mean.
From there, hearing becomes a way of losing one’s position in time. Juan meets people who speak with knowledge he lacks; the novel breaks away into episodes from Pedro’s life. We follow a voice before we always know whether its speaker belongs to Juan’s present, to a remembered past, or to the dead. When Juan speaks with Dorotea from their shared grave, his account of the murmurs that killed him changes the status of the journey we thought we were following. The difficulty is part of the novel’s construction: a voice can bring us close to a person while leaving us uncertain when, or from where, that person speaks.
The bells after Susana San Juan’s death carry this difficulty into public life. They ring so long and so loudly that people come from elsewhere. A crowd gathers, then musicians and fairgoers; the town celebrates through the noise. The visitors hear the bells without recognizing the mourning they announce. Pedro takes the fair as an affront to his grief and vows to let Comala starve. The sound’s reach helps produce the opposite response from the one he needed, and the consequences fall on Comala.
The atmosphere of Pedro Páramo remains singular to me, and its handling of time and voice is startlingly original. The mother’s recalled speech, Abundio’s corrections, Juan’s murmurs, and the bells all ask us to revise our sense of the town.
A first journey into Comala becomes a history that no single traveler can hold together. Even its noises have more than one time attached to them.
The Golden Cockerel: a life in motion
Dionisio’s story offers a firmer line to follow. After working as the crier, he takes in a golden cock discarded with a broken wing and nurses it back to health. His mother dies as the bird recovers. Too poor to bury her with dignity, he leaves San Miguel carrying the cock toward other fairs. The recovery has the force of a folk tale’s strange gift, but every gain still passes through a wager: Dionisio must find a backer for his first fight, learn the gaming world, and live with what a lost bet costs.
After the golden bird dies, Dionisio’s wagers expand from cockfighting to cards, and he becomes increasingly attached to Bernarda Cutiño, La Caponera, whose singing travels from fair to fair.
She chooses her movements and her company with a freedom he cannot easily control. He calls her his magnet for good luck. They travel together, marry, and have a daughter. When Dionisio wins Lorenzo Benavides’s house, Lorenzo strikes Bernarda and calls her a witch, making her bear the blame for a wager made by men. She leaves that house with their daughter rather than settle inside it.
Dionisio finds her after his own losses; they return to the fairs, but her voice weakens and her musicians leave her. He then makes the former public singer sit near him through the long card games because he thinks he loses when she is absent. Bernarda is a person making choices before Dionisio treats her as a condition of winning.
I followed this story’s turns with even greater interest than Juan Preciado’s fractured search. Dionisio’s gains change the stakes of the next fair or card game, while Rulfo can move across months and years without losing sight of an old debt. A coffin makes that compression especially sharp. Dionisio once buys an elaborate one for his mother after he has grown rich, only to find that her grave cannot be located. The coffin waits through the rest of his rise and ruin and finally holds him.
We remember the man who could not afford to bury her; now money has arrived too late to change the first loss.
The book feels to me like a condensed epic, a folk tale large enough to contain a whole life. It has a wounded animal, a journey from poverty, extraordinary reversals, and a return in the next generation. Its apparent enchantment stays answerable to wages, hunger, gambling, and Bernarda’s loss of freedom. Pedro Páramo is more daring with time and more singular in atmosphere. The Golden Cockerel guided me more compellingly through what one decision makes possible, and what the next one takes away.
After Bernarda and Dionisio die, their daughter goes out to sing as her mother did. A crier announces another fight as the book closes. Those two public voices recall the world in which her parents met, but the daughter’s future has only begun. Rulfo leaves us with the sound of a trade that outlives its worker and a song that passes to someone who must now make her own living. Dionisio’s long wager is over; the fair is still open.
Sources
Juan Rulfo, “They Gave Us the Land,” “No Dogs Bark,” and “Luvina,” in The Burning Plain and Other Stories, translated by George D. Schade (University of Texas Press, 1967). The supplied PDF was read against these passages.
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, in the supplied Spanish Pedro Páramo y El llano en llamas (Planeta volume; date not legible in the scan).
Juan Rulfo, El gallo de oro (Editorial RM and Fundación Juan Rulfo, definitive text established by the Foundation, © 2010; supplied scan, ISBN 978-607-7515-70-8), pp. 81–144. The opening was also checked against the licensed Deep Vellum excerpt.
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