Pedro Páramo

Rulfo set his town of the dead at the foot of the volcano in Colima, and the map holds the real Comala it grew from: a white-walled plaza, a parish church, the dusty road that drops down from the north, and the fire-mountain on the skyline. Juan Preciado goes looking for the father he was promised and finds a place where only the dead still speak.

Juan Preciado

Sayula and the road down

The descent

The book begins with a journey. Juan Preciado, honouring a promise to his dying mother, comes down toward Comala to claim the father he has never met. On the road he falls in with a stranger driving burros, and the descent into heat and dust carries him from the living world into a town that turns out to be full of the dead. Sayula, north across the Jalisco line, is the real town those roads climb down from, and the place Rulfo grew up near.

Opening; Juan Preciado sets out

explicit Sayula is a real town in Jalisco, named in the novel and the place Rulfo himself was born. It lies about sixty kilometres north of Comala, outside the book's Colima setting, so it is flagged as a deliberate excursion; the coordinates mark the town centre where the road toward Comala begins.

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