This town is filled with echoes. They sound as if they’re trapped inside the cavity in the walls or under the paving-stones. When you walk you sense them following in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. Laughter. Time-worn laughter, as though weary of laughing. And voices wasted through use. All this you hear. I think the day will come when these sounds die out.
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Pàramo
Fragment 11
It is barely light when Adam starts out. He leaves town with the book deep in his pocket. He sets off for Comala.
He strikes out westwards, at random, leaving the coast behind him. He passes cotton fields. He sees the sky turn rosy where it meets the orchards. He walks with his back to the sun. His shadow is still pale, unclear.
He strides across unknown territory, chasing a ghost. But whose? That of Pedro Pàramo, Felipe Gomez Herrara, Clemens Dunkeltal, Thea, or himself? He does not know any more. In any case, the ghost flees.
He is bound for Comala, for nowhere, for a meeting with himself. His progress is erratic, frantic. He is an angry pilgrim come to throttle the paternal ghost and that of the naive child he once was who loved his father. But the ghost keeps giving him the slip, defying him, wearing him out, and in the process his anger intensifies, distills. His shadow lengthens, darkens.
He knows his quest is absurd, doomed to failure, but he does not relent. He senses something developing. Something indefinable. Weird and yet powerful. Between him and this place. Between him and this moment on the fringes of time. And what is conspiring inside him unsettles his memory, looses its moorings, and gradually sends it into a spin. The spinning gets faster.
Thousands of images run backwards before his eyes, just as a dying man sees his entire past go flashing by.
The heat is intense. He has been walking for hours. His shadow has narrowed, condensed: a black puddle at the tip of his shoes. He has not slept and has eaten nothing since the day before. All of sudden he is drained of strength. He sits at the edge of a field on a bare slope. The sun beats down, as torrid as it is high in the sky. He stretches out on the ground, overcome with dizziness.
There he lies on the earth’s surface, in direct contact with the landmass of his father’s language-shroud, the language acid-bath that will dissolve forever the sickening remains of his love for that father. But no, Spanish is not the language of this land. It is not indigenous. It came from outside just a few centuries ago, imposed by force of arms. A more ancient language frets beneath the stones, the dust. The language of the vanquished, unyielding, intractable.
And slowly yet another sound becomes audible. It emanates from all around, from the earth and the air, from the stones and the grass. It is a harsh haunting song that soon swells, expands, vibrates.
The song assails the phantom-chaser’s spent body. It is the chorus of insects in the pulsing heat of noon. A multiple voice. Monotonous. Voracious. The broiling air squeals and sizzles. The ground emits faint stridulations, low hummings. The insects embroider the silence of the sun-sated earth with their stubborn little voices. On the surface of emptiness they attend to their tiny destiny. They score this incandescent time of day with vocal striations as though to leave a trace of their presence no one cares about, to prove to themselves they exist, and to enjoy as much as possible their short spell in this world. Song of euphoria, desolation and combativeness. Song of the living. Of beast and mankind.
And all of a sudden, what was conspiring in his fevered brain just now as he staggered beneath the sun explodes in his body stretched out on the ground, riddled with the cries of insects: a tidal wave of vibrant visions sweeps through him. But his father does not figure in any of them. The rush of jolted memories that overwhelm him rise from elsewhere, from further back; it is an upsurge originating in the middle of the night that he died — he, Adam Schmalker, before he took that name, and even before he was called Franz-Georg Dunkeltal.
Long, long before.
Before. In the quick of the present moment.
He hears the bellowing of a monumental organ, deafening clashes of cymbals, the roll of millions of drums. An insane orchestra plays in the sky. It plays with instruments of steel, of fire. The tumult even reaches underground, and the ground quakes and screams.
It is a discordant choir of men and women of all ages, children, infants, dogs, screaming in response to the orchestra’s din, and this choir that was huddled close together underground suddenly disperses in a frantic rush. Its clamour spills out into the open, scatters across the face of the earth, fragments. He is one of the fragments of that pulverized clamour. He runs, shrieking and crying.
He sees the sky combust, burst like a dyke and torrents of black lava, blazing meteorites, sulphur-white flashes of lightning pour through the cracks. The insane orchestra is playing with fire, in a total frenzy.
He sees human beings and animals turn into live torches, others melt into the liquefied asphalt slushing in the gutted streets, and yet others blown apart.
He sees trees rise up in the air at an angle, enormous flame-trailing javelins that plunge into the fronts of houses while windowpanes shatter, chimneys, tiles and beams go flying.
He sees water blaze in the harbour, in the canals, rivers, ponds, gutters. Everywhere water catches fire and evaporates with a hiss. It ignites even in the tears on the faces of the distraught, of the dying.
He smells the acrid stench of burnt flesh, the nauseating sweetness of boiled flesh, the stink of blood and guts. Stones, pavings, timber frames are reduced to no more than black sand, gravel, bits of charcoal.
He sees coils of garish yellow, spills of bright red, splashes of blinding orange falling from the sky, lacerating the darkness. An orgy of colours at once viscous and limpid. Gigantic gobs of scarlet and gold to crown the perished city.
He hears the gobs of colour rumble and suddenly among the disjointed puppets running in all directions he sees a woman engulfed from head to toe in saffron flames dance a frenetic solitary waltz, emitting piercing screams. He sees her collapse, writhe for a few seconds more and…
And then nothing.
That’s all. He sees and hears nothing more, just that torch-woman reduced to a shapeless heap of reddening black that smokes and stinks. His mother? A fairy? A witch? A tree-trunk? A lightning-struck angel? A stranger?
He watches her. Watches her burn to a cinder. With eyes wide open, he watches her disappear from sight, disappear from his life. With eyes wide open, eyes blinded, he watches and watches…
Note
The mouth of hell is the orifice by which mankind is swallowed up — and here we recognize the famous theme of the descent into Hades. It is also the place from which voices emerge … The echo is a form of sound inscribed in time and produced in certain contexts favourable to the reflection of an original sound…
The future of an echo is a wall, an obstacle, a sentence of death. The echo impacts with something that sends it back into the past. An echo is a moving sound but one that travels backwards, with no hope of ever becoming other or different; its destiny is extinction.
Fabienne Bradu, Echoes of Pàramo