Murmurs on the Plain: In Search of Juan Rulfo's Mexico

In the short story "Es que somos muy pobres," Juan Rulfo describes a river bursting its banks. The river is brown and roaring, a destructive force ravaging the landscape and assaulting the senses. "You could smell it the way you can smell a fire," the story's nameless narrator recounts, "it's so loud you can only see mouths opening and closing as if they want to say something; but you can't hear a word." For hours he stands with his sister at the edge of a ravine, watching as the river swells and grows dark, swallowing bridges and spilling into the homes and streets of their town.

Rulfo's literary reputation rests on just two slim books—the short story collection El Llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames), first published in 1953, and the novel Pedro Páramo, released two years later. Pedro Páramo would arguably go on to become the defining novel of Mexico's twentieth century, inspiring the writers of Latin America's "Boom" generation and helping to usher in a new age of literature across the continent. The book's sense of ghostliness and surrealism also helped plant the seeds that would later grow into magical realism, and was cited as a central influence by the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, who went on to win the Nobel Prize.

I first read Rulfo in college, for a class on the Latin American short story, and remember the experience of reading his work like I remember no other. I sat in a dark corner of the campus coffee shop in a deep couch and opened my course book to "Es que somos muy pobres." Our course readings were all in the original Spanish, and the class marked the first time I was being made to read serious literature in the language spoken by my ancestors, a language never passed on to me, but which I nonetheless endeavored to learn as part of an unending search for reclamation.

I still remember sitting in that café as I read the story's opening paragraphs, falling headlong into its simple, unadorned sentences. Despite a few linguistic barriers, I could feel Rulfo's prose gripping me in a way I had never before experienced in my second language. The story's central drama is that Tacha, the narrator's sister, has lost her cow to the swollen river: a cow given to her by her father to serve as a dowry to help attract a decent husband, an animal that represented all the wealth and promise the family could muster. In a rural Mexico ruled by machismo, Tacha holds little agency, and her father is certain that, without the promise of a dowry, her maturing body will fetch only the worst kind of attention, the worst kind of men.

"Tacha cries when she thinks her cow won't come back because the river has killed it," her brother tells us. "She's right here at my side, in her pink dress, looking at the river from the top of the ravine, unable to stop crying. Streams of dirty water run down her face, as if the river were inside of her. I put my arms around her, trying to comfort her, but she doesn't understand. She cries even more. A sound similar to the one sweeping along the riverbanks emerges from her lips, making her shiver, and she trembles all over."

These lines, coming at the end of the story, were the ones that hooked me on Rulfo: I had perhaps never read a more affecting description

of how a landscape could be held within the body, or how it could flow out from it as well. A year later I would go to central Mexico for a semester abroad. During Semana Santa I traveled with a friend to the region where Rulfo was...