Carlos Martínez García: The progeny of Pedro Páramo

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I dare to say that in this country we are all children of Pedro Páramo. The phrase, at the end of the first page, of Alma Delia Murillo’s book ( my father’s head), it shook me deeply. She touched sensitive chords with the reference to Juan Rulfo’s devastating novel and all the damage caused to one of his children.

The readers of Pedro Paramo They know from the beginning of the work that Dolores Preciado entrusts her son Juan with the fulfillment of her last wish: that he travel to Comala in search of his biological father, whose name is the title of Rulfo’s novel. She tells him not to go in order to ask her for something, but rather “demand ours from him. What he was obliged to give me and he never gave me… The oblivion in which he had us, my son, charge him dearly.” Páramo not only deceived Dolores and kept her assets. He robbed her and her son of the right to a decent life.

In my father’s head The author narrates the havoc caused to her mother and siblings by the abandonment of Porfirio Murillo Carrillo, father of eight children. Alma Delia was the youngest and she remembered having seen Porfirio only once. She learned from a young age to imitate her brothers, that they put deceased on every school form that asked for the father’s name. This is how it was added to the family myth because it was It is more worthy to have a dead father than a father who does not love you and hurts less.. At the age of 40, a premonitory dream causes him to decide to follow the father’s vague clues and he embarks on his search, embarking on a geographical, identity, and emotional journey that uncovers not only the family case, but that of millions of procreated and abandoned Mexicans. by the almost infinitely multiplied Pedro Páramo.

I’m not going to try to review here. my father’s head, but I do invite my few readers to venture into the pages of a work that I consider to have great challenging potential. It is, for me, one of the books to reread, because, as Franz Kafka said, it fully complies with the works that question and dissect us: A book must be the ax that breaks the frozen sea within us.

There are multiple studies from different disciplines on Mexican families. From anthropological, psychological, historical and philosophical perspectives, to name a few. These approaches are inputs to understand the formation and development of families; However, I believe that another gateway to the topic is literary and this can sensitize us to feel the tragedy of the punishment and/or parental abandonment suffered by millions in Mexico.

Zygmunt Bauman, well known for his several books on the characteristics of what he called liquid societies, considered feedback between literature and sociology to be essential to broaden the cognitive horizons that would allow to reveal the mystery of the human condition and thus tear away the veil woven with prejudices and insinuations of self-created misconceptionsFor him it was It is essential that sociology and literature work together to increase our ability to judge and reveal the authenticity obscured by the veils that surround us and provide us with the freedom to be guided by our needs. (Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo, Praise of literature, pp. 12 and 20).

In one fell swoop, Alma Delia Murillo has removed the veil so that we can see one of the faces of patriarchy, that of the flight from responsibilities towards one’s partner and children. She tore, from her own pain, the veil that she intends to deny a lacerating reality, that of a country in which almost half of the homes live without the father who one day went for cigarettes and did not return (p.14). In their escape they left behind helpless children who will survive, if they succeed, with material and emotional deficits.

By trusting us with her story, the author opens questions not only about the ominous reality she describes, what causes it, why does Pedro Páramo have so many millions of emulators? How does an abandoned mother, like Alma Delia’s, manage to snatch her children from the shipwreck? Why are such painful blows added to the scourge of paternal abandonment? accidents that only the poorest suffer? Where are the institutions that could replace the fulfillment of responsibilities abandoned by the father?

Another question that I derive from reading my father’s head It has to do with the fruitful reproduction of Pedro Páramo syndrome. Because the issue is not just one here and another there, but rather a systemic generation of parents who unceremoniously raise anchor to head to other ports. How to break the extensive chain linked by generations of absent fathers, or violent fathers who perhaps the least worst thing for their children would have been for them to leave?

An introspection is necessary not only within the family, but also socially, culturally and in the State itself to find ways to constantly reduce what eats away from within the homes of the most defenseless, the countless progeny of Pedro Páramo.