...
“And why are you going to Comala..., if I might ask?” I heard the man say.
“I am going to see my father,” I told him.
“Ah!” he said
...
Then he added: “And what can you tell me about your father, if I may ask?”
“I don’t know him,” I said. “I only know that his name is Pedro Paramo, that’s what they told me his name was.”
Again I heard the mule-driver say “Ah!” I had met him in Los Encuentros.
...
“I am also the son of Pedro Paramo,” he said to me.
...
“And Pedro Paramo?”
“Pedro Paramo died many years ago.”
....
“And what is your name?”
I heard him say “Abundio,” but by then he was so far away I couldn’t hear his last name.
...
“I am Eduviges Dyada. Come in.”
...
I heard of you from a mule-driver who brought me here. He said his name was Abundio.”
“Ah, Abundio. So he still remembers me? I used to give him something for every traveler he would send to my house. We got along very well. Now, unfortunately, everything here has changed because, since this place has become so impoverished no one thinks about us any more. So then, he told you to come to see me?”
“Yes, he told me to come and see if you were still here.”
“Well, I can only thank him for that. He was a good man, and very helpful. He was the one who brought the mail, and he continued doing that, even after he became deaf. I remember the terrible day when he had his misfortune. We were very sorry, because we all liked him. He used to bring and take our letters. He told us how things were going there, in the other part of the world, and he surely must have also told them about us too. He was quite a talker. But not later; after his accident he stopped talking. He said he didn’t feel like saying things he couldn’t hear, things that for him had no sound. It all happened after he shot off one of those rockets we use here to scare away water moccasins very close to his head. After that he became mute, even though he wasn’t a mute, but he never stopped being a good person.”
“The man I talked to could hear just fine.”
“Then it must not have been him; besides, Abundio has already died. He must have died, surely. Do you see? It couldn’t have been him.”
...
Dona Ines, the mother of Gamaliel Villalpando, was sweeping the street in front of her son’s shop, when Abundio Martinez walked through the open door.
...
“I just wanted a bottle of whisky, which I need very much.”
“Has your Refugio become ill again?”
“She has died, Mother Villa. Just last night, about eleven o’clock. Because of that I sold my burros; I had to do that in order to try and help her.”
“I can’t hear what you’re saying, Abundio. Or is it because you’re not saying anything? What are you saying?”
“That I spent last night watching over her, over Refugio. She stopped breathing last night.”
...
Abundio kept on walking, stumbling, bowing his head, and sometimes walking on all fours. He felt like the ground was twisting, turning him around and then letting him go. He ran to catchup with it and when he caught up with things, he kept on walking until he was in front of a man who was sitting next to a doorway. Then he stopped:
“Give me a little money, so that I can bury my wife,” he said.
...
“I have come here for some help so that I can bury my wife.”
...
Pedro Paramo’s face was hidden beneath his poncho, as if he were hiding from the sunlight, while the shouts of Damiana Cisneros echoed through the fields: “They’re killing Don Pedro!”
Abundio Martinez heard the woman shouting. He didn’t know what to do in order to stop her. He thought that the shouts of that old woman could probably be heard far away. Maybe his wife would even be able to hear those ear-splitting shouts, although he wasn’t able to understand what they were saying. He thought about his wife, stretched out on the cot all by herself, there in the patio of his house where he put her so that her body wouldn’t cool so quickly. His dear Cuca, who had been sleeping with him yesterday, still quite alive, and was frisking about like a colt, biting him and rubbing his nose with her nose. The woman who had given him that child who had died soon after he was born, according to what they said because she was weakened by all the illnesses she had suffered. Even though he sold all of his burros in order to bring a doctor there to treat her, it had all been for nothing… His Cuca, who was now there under the night dew with her eyes closed, without being able to see the arrival of dawn, or the sunlight.
“Help me!” he said. “Give me something.”
But he couldn’t even hear himself. The shouts of that woman were so loud that they blocked out everything.
From "Pedro Paramo" by Juan Rulfo