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“I came to Comala because I was told that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo.”
Many Mexicans know the first sentence of Juan Rulfo’s revered novel, Pedro Páramo, by heart. This week they will hear it on Netflix, with the release of the first film adaptation in almost 50 years of the text that inspired Gabriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“This country, where Death is written with a capital letter because it defines us in an inexorable way, at times brutal and at others poetic, has not found a more powerful metaphor than the story of Pedro Páramo,” wrote the Mexican novelist Alma Delia Murillo in an ecstatic review of the new film.
The story is set in the decades around the Mexican revolution, more than 100 years ago, and those first words are uttered by Juan Preciado, who has travelled to the town of Comala to fulfil a promise made to his dying mother that he would claim the money owed to him by his father, who is a kind of feudal lord.
But on his way Preciado encounters a muleteer who tells him Páramo died long ago, and that Comala is abandoned. Páramo turns out to be the muleteer’s father, too. Preciado asks what he was like. “Rencor vivo,” mutters the muleteer – living bile.
Preciado descends into Comala as if entering an underworld. Thereafter the story is narrated not just by Preciado, but by a ghostly chorus in a place where the veil between the present and the past, the living and the dead, is threadbare.
Pedro Páramo is barely more than 100 pages long, and Rulfo never finished another book, working variously as an immigration agent, a travelling tyre salesman and an editor at the national agency of Indigenous communities. But it was still enough to put him in the pantheon of Mexican literature.
“I think in Mexico writers are aware you can’t follow in the footsteps of Juan Rulfo,” says Víctor Jiménez, the director of the Juan Rulfo Foundation. “But people read his works, soak in them. For many he is the author of the most important literary work in Mexico. And for some he is the most important Mexican author.”
Others place Pedro Páramo as a cornerstone of much Latin American fiction that followed. Jorge Luis Borges said it was one of the greatest works of literature ever written. García Márquez claimed he could recite the whole book, “forwards and backwards”.
When García Márquez arrived in Mexico in 1961, a friend pressed it on him and he read it twice that same night. He would later write a foreword to it. “The examination in depth of Juan Rulfo’s work gave me at last the way that I sought to continue my books,” he said.
The echoes of Pedro Páramo in One Hundred Years of Solitude are clear, from the seared imprints of their opening lines and the themes of political violence and powerful families to the mythical aspect of their isolated towns, Comala and Macondo.
Pedro Páramo is often billed as the spark that lit Latin America’s magical realism boom, of which One Hundred Years of Solitude would become the foremost example.
But whether the novel really belongs to magical realism is a source of some debate.
Rulfo himself liked to make wry comments about Pedro Páramo during interviews, saying it needed to be read three times, or that he took so many pages out in the editing that by the end not even he understood it.
Rulfo was also sceptical that it could ever be translated to film “because of the very complexity of its structure, which leaps backwards and forwards in time”, says Jiménez.
None of the previous adaptations, directed by Carlos Velo, José Bolaños and Salvador Sánchez, has satisfied. Jiménez recounts, with a note of horror, how the script for Velo’s film unpicked the novel’s narrative and reordered events chronologically.
Mexicans wonder whether the new entry, which is released on Wednesday, will do any better. Jiménez, who was at the premiere, reckons it is the best effort yet.
“The new film takes the bull by the horns. But this is a work that reveals itself in the hands of readers.”