Biography of Juan Rulfo (1917-1986)

Juan Rulfo Juan Rulfo was a Mexican author of both novels and short stories. On May 16, 1917 he was born in the town of Sayula, in the state of Jalisco (in the western part of central Mexico). Jalisco is a Nahuatl word that means “sandy plain” and this is precisely the hot, arid, imposing terrain where nearly all of Rulfo’s narratives take place. Rulfo’s birth certificate bore the prodigious name “Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno,” and he spent a great deal of his childhood in the house of his paternal grandparents in San Gabriel. During this time he was granted access to the library of a priest who stored his books in the grandparents’ home, and he would always fondly remember devouring these texts which proved to be fundamental in his literary development. In order to understand Rulfo’s novel and short stories, it is important to be aware of the two events which were determining factors in Rulfo’s childhood: the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), without a doubt the most influential event in Mexican culture and history in the 20th Century, and the Cristero War (1926-1929), a struggle between the government of Plutarco Elias Calles and Catholic militias over the restricted rights of the Church. The latter event was particularly notable for Rulfo because during this time a number of his family members died, leaving him an orphan. In particular, the death of his father in 1923 (apparently killed by a young man with whom he had a conflict) and his mother in 1927, shortly after Rulfo had been sent to boarding school, would have a lasting effect on Rulfo and his work. The Mexican Revolution greatly altered Rulfo’s childhood home of San Gabriel, which had been a thriving town ever since the colonial period. After the Revolution, the town became poor. San Gabriel is much like the “ghost towns” that Rulfo writes about in many of his short stories, a place where the promised reforms of the Revolution never materialized. Rulfo’s literary production is relatively limited. In his lifetime he only published two narrative works, though each were of immense importance. The novel Pedro Páramo (1955) is recognized as one of the greatest works of Latin American literature, and The Burning Plain (1953) (El llano en llamas) is a collection of short stories. Short as both these works are, they had a profound influence on subsequent generations of Mexican writers. While Rulfo belongs chronologically to the “Generation of 1952,” his works (especially Pedro Páramo) are often classified as belonging to the period of the Latin American literary “boom” in the sixties and seventies during which novels from this part of the world gained international recognition, allowing prominent novelists were able to begin to make a living from their craft. Rulfo held a number of different writing, culture and art-related jobs during his lifetime. He worked as an archiver, an immigration agent, a travel agent, and as an editor in the National Indigenous Institute in Mexico City for twenty-four years. Another aspect of his work as an artist is apparent in the significant photography exhibit he presented in 1980 in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Two years after publishing Pedro Páramo, Rulfo retroactively won the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia of 1955. He also received the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras in 1983 and was posthumously awarded the Premio Manuel Gamio of 1985. He died January 7, 1986 in Mexico City. About The Burning Plain and Other Stories Juan Rulfo's The Burning Plain and other Short Stories (originally En llano en llamas) was published in 1953. It marked the first of Rulfo's two publications, the other being his highly regarded novel, Pedro Páramo (1955). These two works, though short, established Rulfo as among the most important writers of his generation - a figure comparable to Jorge Luis Borges in stature and a source of inspiration for subsequent writers, most notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Indeed, Marquez credits Rulfo as influencing the composition of his great novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rulfo’s narrative style in The Burning Plain is regarded by many critics as revolutionary - he had clearly invented a new way of writing about rural life in Mexico. In the collection, he avoids the conventions of regional realism (which involve an educated narrator who identifies local “traditional” characters and scenes) that made rural folk seem rustic or ignorant, and focuses instead on reproducing the peasant’s thought and spoken word. As a result, Rulfo’s narrators employ language found in no other Latin American author. They seem to use an artless, everyday discourse, but the language is actually highly metaphorical and lyrically stylized. This is perhaps the most unique aspect of Rulfo’s literary production. In keeping with his approach to the dialog of the narrators and peasants, Rulfo generally strives for simplicity and avoids challenging the reader with difficult constructions throughout his collection. The stories consist of simple, everyday words; the lexicon employed is relatively small, and sentences are typically short. The author does not, however, use regional dialects, for this would increase the difficulty of the text. Rulfo also avoids words that are emotionally charged. All this contributes to the remarkable impression of “neutrality” that Rulfo’s writing evokes. In these stories solitude constantly besets the main characters, and the only rest from it can be found in their monologues, confessions and testimonial narratives. These intimate discourses constitute the main structural framework of the short stories. As a result, throughout The Burning Plain the reader acts very much like a confessor who patiently lends an ear to the last words of the frequently condemned, marginalized or dying characters. Despite the works’ simplicity, rarely is this task of deciphering stories communicated through snippets of monologues an easy one. More often than not the meaning and nature of the characters’ original motives has been lost or forgotten due to the passage of time. Or, in many cases the backdrop to their current situation can be increasingly difficult to make out in the growing physical darkness. General elements and concerns of the the Mexican post-revolutionary period often provide the only discernible contextual landmarks. The work - especially the short story "Tell Them Not to Kill Me!" - has gained in popularity as well as critical interest and literary influence since its publication. Character List Macario (“Macario”): Macario is main character of the story that bears his name. He is a unique character in one of Rulfo’s most unique tales. What we can gather about Macario comes exclusively from what he tells us in his monologue, which is narrated in a style that could be characterized as “stream of consciousness.” We know he lives with his Godmother and Felipa, and that his parents have died. As the town “idiot” he is a social outcast and apparently has been adopted by the Godmother and Felipa. Felipa (“Macario”): Felipa is one of the two women Macario lives with, and we only learn about her through his words. He tells us she has green eyes. We get the impression that Felipa is a housekeeper and cook for Godmother. She is closer to Macario’s age than the Godmother and he likes her best because she treats him well and often gives him her food at mealtimes. Although they are not family, when she feeds him her breast milk and subsequently “tickles” him one gets the sense that their connection sometimes borders on incest. Godmother (“Macario”): She is the more severe of the two women Macario lives with. Macario tells us she has black eyes. She is still good to him but he prefers Felipa. She ties his hands with her shawl when he is at church to prevent him from making a scene and threatens him with descriptions of hell when he misbehaves. The narrator (“They Gave Us the Land”): The narrator is just one of a number of men who have been given the infertile, desert-like Big Plain as their share of redistributed land following the Revolution. He tells us in first person how he and three companions cross the Big Plain looking for a suitable place to plant their crop. He tells us about the men’s conversation with the unsympathetic government official who gave them the land and describes the arid, desolate conditions they confront on the plain before arriving at the town on the other side. Esteban (“They Gave Us the Land”): Like the other peasants in “They Gave Us the Land,” Esteban has been given the Big Plain as his share of the redistributed land after the Revolution. Esteban stands out in this group because he his carrying a red hen under his coat. He is very protective of the hen and has brought her along not for food but companionship. Melitón (“They Gave Us the Land”): Like the other peasants in the story, Melitón has been given the Big Plain as his share of the redistributed land after the Revolution. He travels with Esteban, the narrator, and Faustino, and is singled out for his unusual comments on the land that make his companions think he is suffering from sunstroke. He insists the land must be good for something when it is obvious to the others that the land is worthless. Faustino (“They Gave Us the Land”): The peasant Faustino is also crossing the Big Plain in search of a parcel of land. He is the most minor character of the four companions and says very little. Government Official (“They Gave Us the Land”): The government official is the distributor of land and represents the revolutionary government. He takes away the men’s guns and horses, explains to them that they can have the Big Plain up to the borders of the town, and sets them off to claim their parcels of land on the Big Plain. There is no negotiating with him, though the peasants try. When they complain, he says they can appeal in writing. The official also tells them that their attacks should be directed at the large landowners and not the government. The narrator (“We’re Very Poor”): The narrator of this story is the sibling of Tacha, the youngest daughter in his family. He speaks using simple language and we know very little about him, not even his age relative to his sisters. He explains both the flood and the family’s economic situation and seems to grasp the grave implications of the cards fate has dealt poor Tacha. Tacha (“We’re Very Poor”): Sister of the narrator and the last remaining daughter in the family. Her cow has been lost in the flooding of the river and, as a result, she no longer has a dowry. She is in puberty and her growing breasts are referenced by the narrator as signs of her impending perdition. This is because if she no longer has any capital to offer them she will be tempted to win their hearts through sex, something that her older sisters tried. As a result they became prostitutes. La Serpentina and her calf (“We’re Very Poor”): La Serpentina is Tacha’s cow, and it is killed in the flood. It was spotted and had a pink ear and pretty eyes. Along with her calf, La Serpentina was meant to be Tacha’s dowry, but now that it is lost, the calf is the girl’s only hope of escaping a life as a prostitute. The father (“We’re Very Poor”): The father is the first character in “We’re Very Poor” to fully recognize the devastation caused by the rains. Not only has his family lost its harvest of rye, but his daughter Tacha has lost her dowry. This almost certainly means she will become a prostitute, something which he had been trying to avoid since his two oldest daughters took that path in the past. The mother (“We’re Very Poor”): The mother in “We’re Very Poor” cannot comprehend why her daughters have each become prostitutes (with Tacha likely to follow suit). She searches her family tree for evidence of “bad women” but cannot find any explanation. The narrator (“The Hill of the Comadres”): This man narrates in first person the story of his relationship with the leading family on the Hill of the Comadres, the Torricos. He speaks in a matter-of-fact tone and, like nearly all of Rulfo’s characters, he is not highly educated or much of a “deep thinker.” He is simply a man who has grown accustomed over time to accepting the world the way it is. Remigio Torrico (“The Hill of the Comadres”): A local ruffian who, together with his brother Odilón, terrorizes the town of the Hill of the Comadres. Remigio has one black eye and has excellent vision. He and Odilón eat the other residents’ food and animals and rob and sometimes murder those who pass by the town on the road below, as is the case of the mule driver whom they rob and kill with the help of the narrator. Odilón Torrico (“The Hill of the Comadres”): A local ruffian who, together with his brother Remigio, terrorize the town of the Hill of the Comadres. Odilón is killed by the Alcaraz family in Zapotlán for spitting mescal in the face of an Alacaraz. His brother Remigio later erroneously accuses the narrator of killing Odilón and stealing his money. The Alcaraces (“The Hill of the Comadres”): The equivalent of the Torricos in the nearby town of Zapotlán. They do not like the Torricos and they control the city of Zapotlán (likely in the same way the Torricos control the Hill of the Comadres). They collectively kill Odilón by stabbing him after he spits liquor in the face of a member of their family. The man (“The Man”): The man’s real name is José, although that name is only used once in the story. Rulfo prefers the anonymity and general confusion that the use of the name “the man” implies. He is a fugitive fleeing a man who is pursuing him, and he spends most of the story lost as he wanders through a labyrinth-like riverbed. The man is running away because he killed the pursuer’s family with a machete as they slept in their beds. His goal was to kill the pursuer — as an act of revenge for this man’s murder of his brother — but as it turns out his intended victim was not at home that night. The pursuer (“The Man”): The pursuer’s last name is Urquidi, although that name is only used once for the same reason as in the case of José, the man he is pursuing: Rulfo prefers to emphasize the men’s universal qualities, rather than their particularities. The pursuer is chasing the man in order to exact revenge for the murder of his family at night while they slept in their beds. As Urquidi chases the man, he chastises himself for not being at home to defend his family. The shepherd (“The Man”): The shepherd is an innocent bystander who has partially witnessed the unfolding drama of the man and the pursuer from afar. He tends his boss’s sheep and sees the man wandering lost in the riverbed through the slats of a fence. Later in the story the man encounters the shepherd and drinks milk directly from one of his sheep. The two converse about the man’s family, and later on the shepherd finds the man dead in the riverbed, shot in the back of the head by the pursuer. Old Esteban (“At Daybreak”): Old Esteban is an elderly man whose job is to tend to Don Justo’s cows. He brings them back to his boss Don Justo’s corral in San Gabriel each morning. For no apparent reason he decides one morning that will kill one of the calves and begins to kick it until Don Justo intervenes and begins to beat the old man instead. He loses consciousness and wakes up to find that Don Justo has somehow died in the encounter. Don Justo Brambila (“At Daybreak”): Justo Brambila is Old Esteban’s boss, and he is described by Esteban as an angry man with a bad temper. In “At Daybreak” Don Justo beats Esteban for kicking one of his calves to death and dies while doing so. The reader does not find out whether Don Justo was killed by Esteban, whether he slipped on a rock and hit his head, or simply died of anger. Don Justo is also sexually involved with his niece, Margarita, with whom he sleeps at night. He returns her to her bed each morning and has considered marrying her except that the priest would excommunicate them for incest. Margarita (“At Daybreak”):: Margarita lives with her mother in her uncle Justo Brambila’s house. She has an incestuous relationship with her uncle and she sleeps with him at night before returning to her own bed each morning. Her mother does not know about the relationship because she is bedridden and sleeps in an adjoining room, but the mother does suspect that Margarita is seeing someone. Margarita discovers Justo’s body when she runs to tell him that her mother has scolded her and called her a prostitute. Justo Brambila’s Sister (“At Daybreak”): Justo Brambila’s sister and her daughter Margarita live with Justo. She is a bedridden cripple and as a result does not know about the incestuous relationship her daughter has with her brother. She does suspect Margarita is sneaking out at night with men, however, and therefore accuses her of being a prostitute. This accusation causes Margarita to run to Justo only to find him dead in the corral. Tanilo Santos (“Talpa”): Tanilo is the brother of the narrator and the husband of Natalia. He has an illness that covers his body in sores that ooze a pestilent yellow pus. His wife cannot bear to be around him in this state and is therefore involved in an affair with the narrator. Knowing the trip will kill him, the narrator and Natalia decide to encourage Tanilo’s idea of making a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Talpa, who he hopes will cure him. Natalia (“Talpa”): Natalia is Tanilo’s wife and the lover of Tanilo’s brother, the narrator. Natalia cannot stand the sight and smell of Tanilo’s illness, so she conspires with the narrator to urge Tanilo to undertake the pilgrimage to Talpa, even though she knows it will kill him. The narrator (“Talpa”): The narrator is the brother of Tanilo and the lover of Tanilo’s wife, Natalia. The narrator is not named by Rulfo, but like other characters in The Burning Plain he is driven by a primal instinct — in this case lust — which pushes him to seduce Natalia and plot his brother’s death. Together with Natalia he pushes Tanilo to take the voyage to Talpa to see the Virgin there, even though he knows the trip will kill the sick man. After this death, the narrator finds that his relationship with Natalia has changed. El Pichón (“The Burning Plain”): El Pichón is the narrator of “The Burning Plain.” He is a revolutionary and a bandit (these become interchangeable terms as the story proceeds) in Pedro Zamora’s band. Like his companions, he is an unscrupulous character who we can suspect has no reservations about stealing and killing. Although the text does not describe the narrator as involved in any murders, we know he fought the government soldiers and raided many towns. Pichón is occasionally given particular commands by Pedro, but generally plays the part of a chronicler who is relatively detached from the events he describes, even though he undoubtedly takes part. Pedro Zamora (“The Burning Plain”):: Pedro Zamora is the leader of a band of revolutionaries who might be characterized more as bandits and murderers than inspired ideologues. Zamora is a powerful leader who keeps his men constantly “alert.” His eyes are always “open” and watching his men or counting them in silence. Though Pedro is an effective leader, he also has a sadistic side. A shadowy figure, he appears and disappears at different points in the story. At the end we learn that Pichón believes he was killed in Mexico City after following a woman there. El Chihuila, Los Cuatro, La Perra (“The Burning Plain”): These characters are men in Pedro Zamora’s bloodthirsty band of revolutionaries. They are relatively indistinguishable from one another and are killed off as the story proceeds. El Chihuila, whose death comes last, is perhaps the most unsettling reminder of what awaits them all: he dies with a bloodstained grin on his face, appearing to laugh at those who look at him. The woman and her son (“The Burning Plain”): The woman who waits for Pichón at the end of the story is one of the best women the narrator has encountered in his travels. She is strong-willed and has waited for him to get out of jail for quite a while so she could introduce him to their son, who is also called Pichón. The boy is different from his father, however, in that he is a “good person” and not a bandit or murderer, despite the mean look he displays. Juvencio Nava (“Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”): Juvencio is the main character of “Tell Them Not to Kill Me!” At times in the story he takes up the narration in first person. He is the father of Justino and has been tied to a post where he awaits his execution by firing squad. Juvencio is to be executed for murdering a man, Don Lupe, nearly forty years earlier. Don Lupe had refused to let Juvencio graze his livestock on his land, so Juvencio killed him. Since the murder Juvencio has spent his life hiding from strangers and living in fear. Justino Nava (“Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”): Justino is Juvencio’s son, and he is pressured by his father to plead with the colonel for his father’s life. Justino is worried that his association with Juvencio will make him a target for execution and hereby endanger his wife and children, but he submits to his father’s begging and talks to the colonel. Unfortunately this is to no avail and Juvencio is shot. Justino then has the unpleasant job of transporting the corpse back to Palo de Venado for the wake. Colonel Terreros (“Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”): The Colonel is Don Lupe’s son, and was orphaned quite young due to the murder of his father by Juvencio. He has always had difficulty forgetting that his father’s murderer was wandering around free, and as a result when he finds Juvencio he is inflexible in executing him. The Colonel is not seen by Juvencio, but only heard. Don Lupe (Guadalupe) Terreros (“Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”): Don Lupe is the father of the colonel and the previous friend of Juvencio. Don Lupe was the owner of the Puerta de Piedra, a property with room for grazing that Juvencio lacked. Don Lupe would not share the grazing field with Juvencio, so Juvencio began to let his animals into Don Lupe’s property at night by cutting the fence so they could graze and Don Lupe would have to repair the fence each morning. This continued until Don Lupe killed one of Juvencio’s yearlings. This sparked Justino’s rage and he killed Don Lupe by hacking him first with a machete and then sticking an ox goad in his belly. The narrator (“Luvina”): The narrator is a teacher who used to work in the town of Luvina. Now he lives in another town quite different from Luvina, where children actually live happily and there is a river nearby. He is in a bar talking with an interlocutor who does not speak in the story but who has been assigned to teach in the ghost town. The narrator has taken it upon himself to tell the listener what he is getting into and describes the town and its surroundings in vivid detail. He is rather unique in Rulfo’s works because although descriptions of nature are relatively common, this narrator gives particularly vivid ones. The listener/interlocutor (“Luvina”): The listener in “Luvina” does not say a word throughout the story, but the narrator makes frequent references to him. The reader could almost take the place of the person listening in the story. We know he is a new teacher, likely relatively young and idealistic, and that he has been assigned to teach in Luvina, where the narrator once worked. In the story the narrator has taken it upon himself to bring the young man down to earth (if not frighten him) with his description of the dead-end town that is his destination. Feliciano Ruelas (“The Night They Left Him Alone”): Feliciano is the nephew of Tanis and Librado. He and his uncles are Cristero Rebels during the Cristero War against the revolutionary government. He is just a boy and is the one who laid an ambush for Lieutenant Parra of the federal forces. When the story begins Feliciano and the two men are fleeing at night toward the Comanja Sierra where they will meet up with the conservative forces of the Catorce. They are exhausted, however, and Feliciano slowly begins to fall behind. Eventually he sleeps against a tree by the side of the road and wakes up in horror to realize he is alone and exposed to travelers on the road who may see him. Tanis and Librado (“The Night They Left Him Alone”): Tanis and Librado are Feliciano’s uncles. They appear to be the more conscientious and disciplined Cristero rebels, but in contrast with their nephew they are caught by the federal soldiers and hung from a mesquite tree. This is ironic since they insisted that traveling at night was the best way to evade capture but it is Feliciano — who finally gave in to sleep — that survives in the end. Urbano Gómez (“Remember”): Urbano is someone the narrator (and apparently his interlocutor) knows from his childhood. Urbano was one of only two children to survive past infancy in his family, and he was known for making money by scamming the other children in the schoolyard. Although the narrator and his listener were friends with Urbano as children, they ceased to be his friends when he started to ask them to repay the money they owed his sister. Their friendship ended definitively when Urbano was caught fooling around with his cousin and was expelled from school and left town. He later returned to town as a policeman but refused to talk to anyone until he snapped one day and killed his brother-in-law Nachito. Eggplant (“Remember”): “Eggplant” is the nickname for Urbano’s mother. She was called this because she seemed to get pregnant every time she fooled around with a new man. She had many children but all died shortly after birth except for Urbano and his sister Natalia. She lost her fortune paying for extravagant funerals and wakes for these children. She died giving birth to her last baby. Stuck Up (“Remember”): This is the unfortunate nickname of Urbano’s cousin. Urbano was expelled from school when he was caught fooling around with her. This experience was traumatic for both parties as they were subjected to ridicule by the entire school. Nachito (“Remember”): Nachito is Urbano’s brother-in-law. He became feeble-minded shortly after getting married and played songs all day on a mandolin. He was violently killed by Urbano for no apparent reason when he tried to serenade him in the center of town. Urbano seemed to show remorse the next day when the authorities caught up with him by voluntarily assisting in his own execution by hanging. The father (“No Dogs Bark”): The father of Ignacio is not described in any detail. We only come to know him from the anxious questions (often rhetorical) and comments he directs at his injured son sitting on his shoulders. He bears his burden out of love for Ignacio's now-deceased mother. Toward the end of the story the father says that the mother died in childbirth — while delivering a younger sibling of Ignacio (perhaps his twin) — but that Ignacio would have killed her himself had she lived. Ignacio (“No Dogs Bark”): We receive no physical description of the wounded son, Ignacio. All we know of him is what he says (less and less as the story advances and Ignacio slowly dies while sitting on his father’s shoulders) and what his father says of him. We do know that he is not a boy, but rather an adult, because the narrator refers to the two characters at the beginning as two “men.” The narrator also says of Ignacio that he speaks very little, in some moments seems to sleep, and at others trembles as if he were very cold as his father carries him toward the town of Tonaya. The dogs (“No Dogs Bark”): Their sound of their barking is the sign that the two men have reached Tonaya. They listen for it throughout the story but only at the end — when it is too late and death has taken Ignacio — does the father hear them as he enters the town. The Son (“Paso del Norte”): The son is the central character of “El Paso del Norte.” Although he only narrates in third person for a few moments, his conversations with his father, workers in Ciudad Juárez and the Immigration Officer constitute the vast majority of the text. The son is a man struggling with a dilemma since he wants to provide for his family but cannot afford to do so in Mexico. Desperate to feed them something other than the weeds they have been eating he feels the only way to do this is to cross the border and work for some time in the United States. The Father (“Paso del Norte”): The father in “Paso del Norte” is portrayed by the son as a selfish character. He knows how to make firecrackers and gunpowder but refuses to teach his son this livelihood would give him financial security since they might have to compete for business. He also never taught his son how to recite poetry which would have also possibly earned him money. The father is not totally irresponsible, however, since he does decide to take care of the son’s family in the end. Tránsito (“Paso del Norte”): Tránsito is the son’s wife and the mother of his five children. The father did not like Tránsito when he met her and compared her to a prostitute he had met once on the street. She is a good woman according to the son, but at the end of the story she abandon’s her children and runs off with a mule driver. The son pursues her at the end of the story. Estanislado (“Paso del Norte”): Estanislado is a character the son knew from home and they decide to cross the Rio Grande together as the go to the “North.” As they cross the river their group is fired upon from the other side and Estanislado is fatally wounded. He dies after the son drags him to shore. The Immigration Officer (“Paso del Norte”): The immigration officer is described at first as a sergeant, but the son suspects he is from the army since he carries such a big gun. He accuses the son of murdering Estanislado when he finds him in the desert but then realizes the truth when he sees that the son has also been shot in the arm. The officer tells the son that the people who shot at him were probably Apaches and that he ought to go back home. He gives him some money for the trip and tells him not to come back. Lucas Lucatero (“Anacleto Morones”): Lucas Lucatero is the main character and narrator of “Anacleto Morones.” Like his mentor, Anacleto, Lucatero is a swindler who specializes in stealing women’s virginity, especially women like those who — many years after the fact — visit him in the story. Lucatero is a selfish rogue who now wants nothing to do with these women since he considers them “old” and “dried up” and he knows that all they are interested in doing is reviving the memory of Anacleto and turning him into a saint. Anacleto Morones (“Anacleto Morones”): Anacleto or “the Holy Child” as the women of Amula call him is Lucatero’s mentor in the art of swindling. He masquerades as a miracle worker and is a false salesman of saintly relics. He tricks the women of the town to sleep with him and preys on their desire to be loved and to approach something resembling divinity. Anacleto appears to be a more despicable character than Lucatero, but this may be because we only learn about him through his disenchanted apprentice. Pancha Fregoso (“Anacleto Morones”): : Pancha is the first spinster of the Congregation of Amula to address Lucatero and the last to leave his home. She was carried off by a man named Homobono Ramos, according to Lucatero, although Pancha denies this and says they were just “looking for berries.” At the end of the story Pancha agrees to spend the night with Lucatero if he agrees to come with her to Amula to testify. Nieves García (“Anacleto Morones”): Nieves García is one of the women from the Amula congregation and she is an old lover of Lucatero. He pretends not to recognize her in the story in order to provoke her departure. He slept with her when she was younger and then never married her despite her waiting for him. When she found out he was married to Anacleto’s daughter it was too late for her to marry anyone else. Eldemiro (“Anacleto Morones”): Eldemiro is the owner of a drugstore in Amula. He is described as an evil man by the women since he criticized the “Holy Child” for being an impostor. He died of rabies and this seems like divine justice to the women. Filomena (the “Dead One”) (“Anacleto Morones”): Disgusted with Lucatero’s behavior, Filomena, known as the “Dead One” for her quiet nature, forces herself to vomit up all the food and myrtle water he has offered her. Wanting to be purged of his evil influence, Filomena does this into one of Lucatero’s flowerpots and promptly leaves. Melquíades (“Anacleto Morones”): Melquíades is another of the women who visit Lucatero’s home. She tells Lucatero that Anacleto never required her to sleep with him, only to allow him to hold her through the night. Lucatero tells her that this is because she is old. “The Orphan” (“Anacleto Morones”): “The Orphan” is the oldest of the women who visit Lucatero. She claims to have found her lost parents in the arms of Anacleto Morones, and says because of this it was the happiest night of her life. Anastasio’s daughter Micaela (“Anacleto Morones”): Micaela claims that Anacleto cured her husband of syphilis by burning him with a hot reed and rubbing saliva on his sores. Lucatero says that the illness was probably only measles since he was cured the same way as a child. Major Themes The problematic relationship between father and son: Problematic relationships between father and son are plentiful in The Burning Plain. We see them in “No dogs bark,” “Tell them not to kill me!” and “The burning plain,” among other stories. These strained relationships can be symptomatic of the general breakdown of the family institution after the Mexican Revolution, or they be metaphors for the wider political circumstances faced by the Mexican nation during this period. Often in The Burning Plain, the father can represent the state apparatus which endeavors to create a union with the land (frequently portrayed in Rulfo and other Latin American works as the wife or mother). This union will ideally result in a son representing the nation. As we see in many of the stories in this collection, however, this process is almost always incomplete. The son (the nation) is typically in some way estranged from his father (the state). Eroticism: The theme of eroticism is also frequent in The Burning Plain. Among other stories it appears in “Macario,” “We’re very poor,” and “Anacleto Morones.” At times this eroticism is unconscious or innocent, as we see in “Macario” and “We’re very poor,” and at others it is quite the opposite, as in “Anacleto Morones.” In any case, those who dedicate themselves to erotic pleasure in Rulfo’s works are often characterized as mentally unbalanced. Macario clearly has a developmental disorder that alienates him from mainstream society, and should Tacha continue on the path of her sisters and become a prostitute, she too will be treated as an immoral woman. As we see in “Anacleto Morones” Lucas Lucatero is rejected by the Congregation of Amula as a lascivious heretic. It is important to note that in all these cases eroticism is infertile. Death: The anticipation of death is omnipresent in Rulfo’s collection of short stories, and death itself appears in quite a few of them. “No dogs bark,” “Tell them not to kill me,” “Talpa,” “Luvina,” “No dogs bark” and “The man” are just a few. The constant shadow of death leads to a certain fatalism in The Burning Plain, which leads the reader to expect the worst in any given situation. The reader is made aware of this predisposition in a story like “The night they left him alone” where seemingly certain death awaits the protagonist but claims his companions instead. Disequilibrium in nature: Nature frequently appears as unbalanced in the stories in The Burning Plain. In “They gave us the land” there is an overabundance of land, but an extreme paucity of water makes that land useless. In “We’re very poor” we encounter just the opposite: so much water that it threatens the family’s future. Nature rarely presents itself in Rulfo’s works as a balanced force. Its unpredictability always conspires against the characters, never working in their favor. The harsh natural environment mirrors the behavior of the protagonists, who frequently act in an equally savage manner, as we see in “The man.” Testimony/Confession: Many of Rulfo’s stories have testimonial or confessional qualities. In “Talpa” the main character confesses to having killed his brother, while in “Remember” the narrator asks the reader or listener to confess to knowing Urbano Gómez. In “The man” both the pursuer and the “man” confess their shortcomings to the reader, just as the shepherd confesses to the authorities, and in “Macario” the main character tells us in an intimate tone what everyday life is like for him. In these and other stories confession and testimony have ties to the Catholic rite of penance, but they also have a narrative function. The intimacy afforded by the confessional tone allows the narrators to tell their stories in an unguarded fashion that lends itself well to the task of objective analysis. It is a conversational, informal discourse that casts the reader in the role of judge or priest. We are charged with evaluating the events as objectively as possible. The Mexican Revolution and its shortcomings: The stories in The Burning Plain cannot be fully appreciated without first considering the historical context in which they take place. Nearly all of the stories take place after 1920, following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), and they all deal, even if indirectly, with everyday life after this momentous event. Rulfo’s evaluation of the Revolution is almost always negative, and his concerns range from topics as broad as: Cycles of violence (“The man,” “The burning plain”); Illegitimate children (“The burning plain”); The unrealized goal of land reform (“They gave us the land,” “Tell them not to kill me,” “The Hill of the Comadres”); Failed educational reform (“Luvina”); Immigration to the North (“Paso del Norte”); The subsequent Cristero War (“Anacleto Morones,” “The night they left him alone”). In just under one hundred pages Rulfo manages to give us a vivid panoramic view of the many struggles faced by rural Mexicans in the postrevolutionary period. The Cristero War: Another historical theme which provides some context for these stories is the Cristero War. This war, which occurred between 1926 and 1929 was a conservative reaction to the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) and more specifically the "revolutionary" government of Plutarco Elias Calles. Catholic militias rose up to protest the restricted rights of the Church under this new government and the Constitution of 1917. The Cristero rebels believed they were fighting for Christ. It is for this reason that Feliciano’s character repeatedly makes references such as “Long live Christ, Our Lord!” in "The night they left him alone" and Lucas Lucatero recounts having to confess at gunpoint before the Cristeros in "Anacleto Morones." The conflict was ended through diplomacy just as the future of the Cristero cause was beginning to appear more promising. The "Rulfian" narrator: Due to the relatively homogeneous style, tone and content of many of Rulfo’s stories in The Burning Plain, it is possible to conceive of nearly all the third person narrators as nearly interchangeable. This character, (along with nearly all the others) is dispossessed of any physical description. His narration is limited and occurs in third person. This narrator’s job—the same in each short story narrated in the third person —is to discreetly point out relevant and often more poetic details to the reader (for instance, in “No dogs bark” he notes that the father and son form just one wavering shadow, “una sola sombra, tambaleante”). Concentrated brevity is the goal in the narrator’s discourse, since Rulfo felt that the best short stories should be as short as possible. Glossary of Terms “Arroyo": A stream. “Barranca”: A gully or ravine. “Campesino”: A peasant. “Casuarina”: A tree whose leaves make a musical sound in the wind. “Caudillo”: A charismatic military and political leader who acts as a strongman or warlord. “Chachalaca”: A chicken-like bird found in Central America. It has greenish feathers and can fly. “Comadre”: The godmother of one's child or mother of one's godchild. Literally, “co- mother.” “Floripondio”: A Peruvian tree that grows to be three meters high. “Hibiscus”: A conspicuous tropical or subtropical flower with five petals in a trumpet shape. It comes in tones of white to pink, red, purple or yellow. “Huizache”: A spiny tree found in arid parts of Mexico. “Jarillas”: Flowering bushes that can grow to be three meters high. “Licenciado”: A lawyer or government representative. “Machismo”: The prominent exhibition of qualities typically considered “masculine,” often resulting in an emphasis on virility or even male chauvinism. “Maguey”: A fibrous plant that can be used to make thread and a cactus sap beverage. “Mescal”: A distilled liquor made from Agave plants. “Naturalism”: A philosophical and literary movement which gained impulse during the 19th century. It emphasized the importance of realist representation and science, as opposed to the representation of idealized forms. “Novena”: A prayer group for a deceased person; A book containing prayers dedicated to a deceased person. “Picaresque”: A humorous, satirical, realist narrative subgenre that usually deals with the adventures of a lower-class hero (or anti-hero) who survives though clever manipulation of his surroundings and wit. This genre first became popular in hispanic literature during the Spanish Golden Age in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” “Scapulary”: Garment consisting of a long wide piece of woolen cloth worn over the shoulders with an opening for the head; part of a monastic habit “Zapotlán”: A city in the state of Jalisco Short Summary The short story “Macario” is actually more of a monologue. In it the orphaned town idiot Macario describes in a flowing narrative style some of the aspects of his everyday life. He begins by talking about how his Godmother, with whom he lives, who has asked him to squash the frogs by the sewer which keep her awake at night. He then goes aspects of his life in her home and his relationship with Felipa, the other woman who lives with Godmother, in one long paragraph. We learn he suffers from being bullied by other townspeople who throw stones at him, and that he likes to bang his head on different surfaces to listen to the sound it makes. He also has an unusual relationship with Felipa who used to feed him her breast milk and tickle him in bed all night long. “They Gave Us the Land” involves four men (the narrator, Esteban, Melitón and Faustino) who are crossing a portion of the “Big Plain” somewhere in central Mexico. The men have been given this land by the government in order to cultivate it, but it consists entirely of sterile, desert terrain. As they cross the plain they recall a conversation they had with the official who gave them the land. He took their guns and horses and set them off walking to claim their plots. As they walk, they sense for a moment it is going to rain, but it doesn’t. Only one drop of water falls. The narrator also notices that Esteban is carrying a red hen under his coat. Esteban doesn’t keep it for food, but rather just because he cares about the animal’s welfare and didn’t want to leave it at home. Eventually the party gets to the other side of the plain where the town and river are, and they go their separate ways. They will presumably find whatever work they can and not return to the useless land they have been “given.” In “The Hill of the Comadres” a man describes his relationship with the most powerful family at the Hill of the Comadres, the Torricos. He explains how although the Torricos (more specifically Remigio and Odilón) weren’t liked by most who lived there, they were by him — at least initially. He tells us that the people who lived in the village feel the need to hide their possessions when the Torricos are around, and that they are always on the lookout to rob those who pass by the town on the road below the hill. One time the narrator participated in the robbery of a mule driver and discovered to his surprise that Remigio and Odilón had killed the man. The narrator decides not to participate again. He then tells us that he killed Remigio Torrico. This happened one night when Remigio came to him and accused him of killing his brother Odilón and taking the fourteen pesos he had on him at the time to buy a new blanket. The brother had actually been killed by the family in power in the nearby town of Zapotlán, but Remigio wouldn’t listen and picked up a machete to kill the narrator. The narrator had been mending a sack with a harness needle and managed to stab Remigio in the belly first. Remigio then dies an unpleasant death. The narrator remembers that the event happened during a festival because every time rockets were shot off he would see a flock of buzzards rise up from the place where he hid Remigio’s body. The story “We’re Very Poor” begins as the narrator describes how his family’s fortunes have taken a tragic turn. Torrential rains have begun to fall and have ruined his family’s rye harvest, which they did not have time to bring inside. Then, the family discovered that the cow (La Serpentina) the narrator’s sister Tacha had been counting on for her dowry has been swept away by the rising river. They are still uncertain as to whether its calf survived the flood. This is the last hope for Tacha, because if it is lost no good man will want to marry her and the father is sure that, like her two older sisters, she will succumb to the advances of local men and becoming a “bad woman” or a prostitute. As the story closes, Tacha watches the river and cries. The narrator notices that her breasts rise and fall with her sobs and observes that these signs of her impending womanhood are likely to be the cause of her ruin. “The Man” is a dark and relatively disorienting story told in two parts. The first part of the story is told in third person from two alternating points of view — that of a “man” (José Alcancía) and “the one pursuing him” (Urquidi). We learn the man killed the pursuer’s wife and two sons with a machete while they were asleep in their beds. This occurred while the pursuer was away from home mourning the death of his infant son. The man’s goal had been to only kill the pursuer (as an act of revenge for the murder of his brother), but since it was dark and he didn’t want to give himself away he killed all three of the people in the house to be sure. Since the pursuer was not at home, he decides to track the man down and kill him. Most of the first part of the story narrates the lost and confused man’s attempt to flee a labyrinth-like riverbed, while the pursuer tracks him. The second part of the story is told in first person to government authorities by a shepherd who has found the body of José, riddled with bullets (presumably killed by the pursuer). He explains that he saw José alive as he ran around the riverbed and even talked to him a few times before one day finding him dead. The shepherd is anxious now because the authorities have begun to accuse him of helping the dead man. The story “At Daybreak” is also told from multiple perspectives. It begins with a description of the city of San Gabriel at dawn and Old Esteban who is driving cattle to Don Justo’s corral. When they arrive there he begins to kick one of the calves until his boss, Don Justo, intervenes and instead begins to beat him until he loses consciousness. When the perspective shifts to Esteban we learn that Don Justo somehow died in the scuffle, although no one knows if Esteban killed him in the fight, if the man slipped and hit his head or simply died of rage. Margarita, Justo’s niece and lover, was the person who discovered his body. In any case Esteban ends up burdened with the blame and seems fatalistically prepared to accept whatever verdict the authorities will render. The story ends twenty-four hours it began with yet another eerie description of foggy San Gabriel “at daybreak.” “Talpa” is the story of three characters who make a pilgrimage to the city of Talpa from their home in Zenzontla. The pilgrimage is being undertaken by the leprosy-stricken Tanilo with the help of his brother the narrator and his wife Natalia. Tanilo hopes that the Virgin of Talpa will cure his illness. The narrator remorsefully tells us from the beginning, however, that the voyage is tainted by the fact that he and Natalia are lovers and know that the trip to Talpa will kill Tanilo rather than heal him. The voyage is long and difficult, and along the way Tanilo loses hope and wants to turn back but his brother and wife will not let him. They travel with other pilgrims and their only rest from the suffocating dust and heat of the road comes for a few hours at nighttime, during which time the narrator and Natalia make love in the shadows. When they finally reach Talpa, Tanilo needs his family’s help to drag his rotting body through the streets to the Virgin of Talpa. He dances before her with the other devotees and tries to emulate Christ with a crown of thorns, but he eventually dies of his exhaustion-exacerbated sickness. Along the way, however, the narrator and Natalia have begun to regret how they drove Tanilo to his death. When they arrive home Natalia cries in her mother’s arms and the narrator knows that the experience has made their relationship impossible. “The Burning Plain” is the story of a band of murderers and thieves who call themselves revolutionaries and terrorize the Great Plain and its surroundings, burning and plundering nearly every town and field they encounter. The narrator, El Pichón, is a member of this band and he chronicles the men’s activities and relates them to the reader. The band is lead by Pedro Zamora, a fearless man who keeps the revolutionaries on their toes. Along the way they fight with Federal soldiers, winning some battles and losing many more, until their cruelty — specifically their derailment of a train — causes the government to more actively rid the Plain of them. At the end of the story nearly all the men have been killed by the soldiers, and Pichón is one of the few who has survived. He has been jailed “only” for kidnapping and rape, and when he gets out one of his previous female conquests confronts him with her child. The boy displays the same mean look Pichón so often bore, but the mother insists that her son is a “good person” and not a bandit or killer. To this the narrator can only “hang his head.” In “Tell Them Not to Kill Me!” Juvencio Nava pleads with his son Justino to intervene on his behalf in order to stop his execution by firing squad. Juvencio is about to be executed by a colonel for the murder of a man, Don Lupe, forty years earlier. The conflict arose when Don Lupe would not allow Juvencio to let his livestock graze on his land, and Juvencio did it anyway. After Don Lupe killed one of Juvencio’s animals, Juvencio responded by killing the man with a machete. What Juvencio did not anticipate was the torment he would endure throughout the rest of his life as he constantly fled from the law in order to save his skin. He was successful up until his capture, now, at sixty years of age. It is only when he is confronted by the colonel that he understands that the colonel is the orphaned son of Don Lupe who has finally caught his father’s murderer. Despite Juvencio’s pleas that he has suffered enough for his crime, he is executed shortly afterward and his son Justino has to carry the bullet-riddled body home on the back of his burro. The story “Luvina” involves a one-sided conversation between an older teacher who used to teach in the town of Luvina quite a while ago and a younger one who has been assigned to work there. Although the listener does not say anything in the story, the conversation takes place in bar in a town on the young teacher’s way to Luvina. What stands out most in this story is the narrator’s description of this ghost town (indeed, the inhabitants seem closer to death than life) — “the place where sadness nests” — and the imposing terrain it occupies. The most life-like aspect of the village is the wind that erodes everything from the high hill that it rests on to weather-worn people who live there. It is a town with no future where only old women live since their husbands and children move away as quickly as they can. Additionally, the townspeople were skeptical of the narrator’s idealistic suggestion that they appeal to the government for help since the government has no interest in a population as isolated as theirs. On top of this, the inhabitants say they cannot leave because someone must watch over their dead, who continue to live in the town. After living there amongst these people with his family for as long as he could bear it, the narrator moved away. At the end of the story the narrator (at this point drunk) falls asleep on the table. In “The Night They Left Him Alone,” three Cristero rebels in the Cristero War (Feliciano Ruelas and his two uncles Tanis and Librado) flee an ambush they laid for the federal forces. The escape takes place at night in order to avoid the sentries, but the three men are exhausted so they proceed at a very slow pace. Feliciano, the main character, begins to fall behind and — in an act that seems at the time to foreshadow his demise — he eventually elects to spend the night sleeping at the foot of a tree beside the road. In the morning he wakes to the sound of mule drivers who greet him, but Feliciano is horrified that he might be turned in by them so he leaves the road and throws away his rifles to continue his journey in daylight. He vividly imagines the mule drivers telling the soldiers about having seen him and prays to God for help. Feliciano reaches the town of Agua Zarca and creeps along a fence in order to pass through it. As he does he hears soldiers discussing how they are lying in wait for him in the town and how he and the other Cristero rebels are headed to the sierra of Comanja. He also sees his uncles hanging from nooses from a mesquite tree. Feliciano creeps along the fence until he can move no further and then makes a run for it out into the open plain. Once he feels safe he can finally breathe. The story “Remember” comes in the form of a monologue by a narrator who urges an interlocutor (or, more likely, the reader) to “remember” Urbano Gómez. In this very short story the narrator runs through a series of memories surrounding Urbano, including memorable figures in his family tree and some of the things Urbano did that make him worth remembering. The narrator tells us about how Urbano was one of only two children his mother successfully gave birth to, and how he was adept at swindling children at school by selling them fruit he had stolen or bought for less money elsewhere. The narrator and the unnamed person he is speaking with also drank the juice Urbano’s sister sold without paying for it. This distanced them from him and then when Urbano was caught fooling around with his cousin at school, his expulsion and the ridicule he faced definitively separated him from his peers. Urbano left the town but later returned as a police officer. By then he was a sullen, bitter man and one day he snapped and beat his brother-in-law Nachito to death for no apparent reason. The next day he was caught by the authorities whereupon he willingly put a noose around his neck and picked the tree from which he was to be hanged. In “No Dogs Bark,” A father carries his injured son Ignacio in a sitting position on his shoulders across an arid landscape at night toward the town of Tonaya. The father asks the son (whose thighs are blocking his ears) every so often if he can hear the dogs of the town barking yet, announcing their arrival, but the son either says no or is too hurt to respond. As they proceed along the banks of a stream, the tired father talks to his semi-conscious son and criticizes his conduct. Through these words we learn he has turned into a highway robber and murderer who has even killed one of his father’s friends, Tranquilino. As the story develops we finally learn that the two men are in this predicament because the father happened across the gravely injured Ignacio (presumably from a robbery gone wrong) and — despite having disavowed and disowned him — decided to carry him to the town for medical attention. As the two men enter the town, the father finally hears the dogs barking, but the body of his son has started to slump lifelessly. Due to the dark tone of the story, we can be nearly certain they are too late and Ignacio has died. “Paso del Norte” is a story comprised almost entirely of dialog. It begins with a son and his father talking about how the son wants his father to take care of his family and five children while he goes “North” to look for work. He needs to do this in order to earn money so his family can eat. They are currently eating weeds and starving to death. The father refuses to do this because he never approved of Tránsito, the son’s wife, and because he thinks the son’s family should not be his burden. The son becomes angry, however, because his father never helped him develop a solid profession but rather pushed him out the door as early as possible. The son explains that the father didn’t even teach him how to make fireworks or gunpowder because he didn’t want the competition. As a result the son has been working as a pig seller, but this work has dried up. The two argue for some time about who’s fault the son’s failure is, and finally the father agrees to take care of the son’s family. When the son goes North he has to work in Ciudad Juárez (formally known as El Paso del Norte) for some time to make enough money to cross the border. The narration then shifts forward to a second conversation that the son has with his father after his return home. He explains how he and a friend from home, Estanislado, paid for someone to take them across the border, but as they crossed the Rio Grande the group was fired upon from the U.S. side. Estanislado was gravely wounded and the son dragged him to safety but he died. The son had been shot in the arm as well and in the morning was confronted by an immigration officer who asked whether he killed the dead man. The son explained what happened and the officer told them it was probably Apaches who shot at them. He told the son to go home. The father then tells him that all his suffering was for nothing since, although the children are sleeping in the back, Tránsito has run off with a mule driver and the father had to sell the son’s house. The son says he will repay his father but first runs off to catch up with his wife. In “Anacleto Morones,” Lucas Lucatero, the narrator and main character, sees that a group of ten old women dressed in black and carrying scapularies is approaching his home. He immediately recognizes them as the Congregation of Amula and desperately tries to think of a way to divert their attention from what he knows is the reason for their visit: Anacleto Morones. He greets them squatting on a rock naked, attempting to scandalize them, but he finds them to be persistent and they come inside. Finally he is forced to listen to their request that he accompany them back to Amula in order to testify that Anacleto, the “Holy Child,” is worthy of becoming a saint. Lucatero knows, however, that Anacleto is really nothing more than a devious rogue who, along with him, tricked many of these women into sleeping with him by pretending to be a miracle-worker. Lucatero turns down the women of Amula and they begin to chastise his lack of faith and the way he abandoned some of them after sleeping with them. Lucatero toys with them and returns their insults with cruel jokes about their age and status as single women. Eventually, infuriated, they abandon his house one by one until only Pancha is left. He asks Pancha if she will spend the night with him and says that if she does he will accompany her to Amula to testify. Pancha assents. Meanwhile, we learn that the narrator held a grudge against Anacleto and buried him alive in his home; grave stones still mark his final resting place. Pancha remains unaware of this, however. The story ends the following morning when Pancha remarks to Lucatero that he is a poor lover and that Anacleto was far better. Summary and Analysis of "They gave us the land" ("Nos han dado la tierra") Summary The story begins with the narrator hearing the sound of dogs barking after walking for hours without coming across a trace of anything living on the plain. He describes the “Big Plain” as a totally inhospitable place where the ground is so dry it cracks. There is a town ahead in the distance, though, with all the sounds and smells that typically accompany it. The narrator explains that he and his three companions (named Faustino, Esteban and Melitón) have been walking since dawn and that it is now four in the afternoon. The men walk two by two and as the narrator looks over his shoulder he realizes that they are now alone. At eleven o’clock there were more than twenty men in their party, but that number has dwindled down to the four that remain. Faustino remarks that it may rain, and the four men look up at a black cloud in the hope he is right, but then return to their silence. No one speaks because it is simply too hot. Suddenly “a big fat drop of water falls, making a hole in the earth and leaving a mark like spit. It’s the only one that falls.” The men wait for other drops, but none come and the cloud races off into the distance. As a result, “the drop of water which fell here by mistake is gobbled up by the thirsty earth. The narrator complains to himself about the enormity of the plain and its uselessness, and the men begin walking again. He remembers that since he was a boy he has never seen rain fall on the plain. There are no animals or birds that live there, and only a few huizache trees and some patches of grass. The story’s protagonist remembers that before they set out on foot, the men had horses and carried rifles, but that is not the case now. He notes that the government officials’ decision to take away their rifles was a good idea since it can be dangerous to be armed in these parts. If you have your rifle with you, you can be killed without warning in these parts. In the narrator’s opinion, taking the horses away was a bad idea, however, since they would have made the trip across the plain much easier. The narrator notes how, when his eyes scan the horizon of the plain, it is remarkable how they don’t find anything to settle on. There is just open, useless land. Only a few lizards stick their heads out from time to time before returning to the shade of a rock. The narrator explains that this land has been given to them for planting—but where will they find shade to rest from their work? The narrator goes on to describe the conversation the men had with the government official. To the peasants dismay this man explained to them that they could have all the land on the Big Plain up to the town. They protested that they wanted to be near the river, where the town and the cultivatable land can be found, but the officials said the issue wasn’t up for discussion. They only sarcastically remarked that the men shouldn’t be “afraid to have so much land just for yourselves.” The men complained that there is no water on the plain, and the official’s response is that when the rainy season comes, there will be plenty of water for corn. The peasants press him and argue that no corn will grow because the land is too hard for planting. The official’s final response is that they can complain in writing to the government, but that they should be arguing with the large landowners and not the government who is giving them land. The men immediately say their complaint is with the Big Plain and not the government. They try to start the conversation over but the official refuses to listen. This is what has brought the men to cross the plain in search of arable land. It is clear, however, that the plain is no more than a “sizzling frying pan.” Not even buzzards appear on the plain. They can only be seen flying high and fast in order to get away as quickly as possible. Melitón speculates that perhaps they could run mares on the plain, a comment that makes the others think he is suffering from sunstroke since they don’t have any mares. The narrator then notices that Esteban is carrying a red hen under his coat. When he asks Esteban where he found the hen, Esteban replies that she is his and that she’s from his chicken yard. He hasn’t brought her along for food but rather because he wants to take care of her. He brings her with him whenever he goes far from home. The narrator recommends that Esteban let her out of his coat so that she doesn’t get smothered. Esteban takes her out and blows air on her. Finally the men come to the cliff. They descend it in single file and Esteban holds the hen by her legs and swings her to avoid hitting her head on the rocks. After walking for so long in the open they they enjoy getting dusty during the descent. As soon as they reach the bottom of the barranca the land improves. Birds are flying over the green trees above the river, and they can hear the dogs barking nearer now. The wind carries the other noises of the town toward them. When they get to the first houses Esteban unties the hen’s legs and lets her run off into some nearby trees. He tells the others this is where he is stopping and they all begin to go their separate ways as they move into town. The narrator closes the story with the simple declaration: “The land they’ve given us is back up yonder.” Analysis The need of the rural poor for arable land was one of the main objectives of the Mexican Revolution. The title of the story lets us know from the very beginning that we are now in the postrevolutionary period, where the goals of the armed uprising have been realized and the peasants have received the parcels of land they laid so many laid down their lives for. The irony, however, is that the land they have been given is the desert-like Big Plain, a place which no one—not even buzzards—wants to occupy for very long. Indeed, as soon as the four men set foot upon its surface, their only goal is to cross it and get to the town and river on the other side. The Revolution, which seemed to be a breeding ground for great ideals, has proved to be as sterile as the cracked surface of the plain. Rulfo’s use of the present tense in the story brings to life the sense of exhaustion and defeat that the travelers face, and implies that this failure of the Revolution is something that continues to this very day. This narrative strategy is accompanied by an overwhelming sense of irony, which is evident in the way the travelers simply move from a town on one side of the plain to the other, gaining nothing. This fatalistic futility is crystallized in especially poetic fashion in the one drop of rain that falls “by mistake” on the plain and is immediately swallowed up. It is also supremely ironic that before setting out to claim their land the men must surrender the horses and weapons that helped them win the Revolution. The implication is that they have ceased to be revolutionaries and must now return to being poor, oppressed peasants who—once again—lack the means to impose their will on the world. In addition, apparently one set of wealthy landowners has simply been replaced by another, since the official invites them to complain to the “large-estate owners” and not to him. Clearly the government has returned to being of little use to rural folk and—as we see in the character of the official—a new opportunistic bureaucracy with little sense of solidarity has risen. It is also notable that this story was the first to appear in the version of The Burning Plain which was printed in 1945. In this manner, Rulfo clearly wanted to foreground the issue of land reform toward the end of the presidency of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-1946), and more specifically this government’s abandonment of the project of land redistribution. This story is perhaps most notable for the way it concentrates into so few pages the deep irony and resignation of this particular historical moment. Rather than the beginning of something new, the Revolution has proven to be a disenfranchising and uprooting event. This is evident in the moving description of Esteban who does not want to leave behind his hen since there would be no one at home to take care of it. It is important that, as in his other stories, Rulfo never critiques these problems explicitly. The reader is lead to them along the same winding path that the characters take as they cross the desert. Like the narrator, it often occurs to us that “we’ve walked more than the ground we’ve covered,” and that the characters’ story means much more than the six pages it is written on. Summary and Analysis of "Macario" Summary This story, which is better described as a monologue, begins with Macario describing the task of killing frogs that his Godmother has set for him: “I am sitting by the sewer waiting for the frogs to come out.” Godmother had trouble sleeping the night before due to their singing so she “ordered” him to sit by the sewer with a board to “whack to smithereens every frong that may come hopping out.” Macario discusses the difference in appearance between toads and frogs, noting that like the toads, Godmother’s eyes are black, whereas like the frogs, Felipa’s eyes are green. Frogs are good to eat, whereas toads are not, a detail which we later learn corresponds with the two women’s general disposition and relationship with Macario. Macario tells us that he loves Felipa more than Godmother, but that Godmother is the one who pays for the all the food in the house, so he and Felipa follow her orders. Felipa shops and cooks for Macario and Godmother, and we get the impression she is a housekeeper who receives food and lodging in exchange for the work she does. Macario’s tells us his job in the house is to do the dishes and carry wood for the stove. Godmother divides up and serves the food. To Macario’s delight, Felipa sometimes doesn’t feel hungry and gives him her food. The protagonist then begins to tell us of the most dominant force in his life, hunger. He says: “I’m always hungry and I never get filled up,” “They say in the street that I’m crazy because I never stop being hungry. Godmother has heard them say that. I haven’t.” As the story develops we learn that Macario is generally unaware of what other people think of him, only of what he thinks of them. As a result, Godmother is usually the one to tell him of his effect on the outside world and is careful to protect it from Macario’s disruptive nature. At church she ties his hands with her shawl (“she says it’s because they say I do crazy things”) so that he is tied to her. Macario also tells us that he has been accused of “hanging” a lady, “just to be doing it,” and that sometimes he is invited to eat by people who then throw stones at him. Due to these negative encounters with the outside world, he prefers life at Godmother’s house. Macario then goes on to describe Felipa’s breast milk, “as sweet as hibiscus flowers,” and better than goat’s or sow’s milk. She used to come into his room every night and lean over him to let him suckle, at “the breasts she has where we just have ribs.” Macario says that the hibiscus flowers often let him forget his hunger, and that Felipa’s milk has the same flavor. He prefers the milk to the flowers however, because as he sucked, she would also “tickle him all over.” At the end she would usually sleep by him until morning. This section of the text shows us the complex nature of Macario and Felipa’s relationship. One reason Macario appreciates Felipa’s company is because he isn’t afraid of being damned to hell if he is in her presence. She puts at ease his fear of dying, saying that when she goes to heaven she will tell God about Macario’s sins and ask for his forgiveness so that Macario doesn’t have to worry anymore. She goes to confession everyday to help rid Macario of the devils he has inside by confessing for him. Macario then begins to tell us about his hard head and how he loves to bang it against different surfaces (pillars, the floor) with different rhythms and intensities in order to make it sound like a drum. He especially wants to reproduce the sound of the drum that accompanies the wood flute he hears outside when in church. He also refers to leaving the house at night in order to wander the streets. Macario explains that he needs to have his hands tied after strangers throw rocks at him because he likes to pick at the scabs from his injuries. He says that the blood has a good taste, like that of Felipa’s milk. This is why he doesn’t leave the house. He likes to bar the door to his room so that his sins can’t find him in the dark. When he goes to sleep he doesn’t leave a torch on so he can see the cockroaches that climb on him, instead he just slaps them and listens to them “pop like firecrackers.” He doesn’t know if crickets make the same sound when smashed. Felipa says the noise of crickets drowns out the screams of the souls in purgatory. Macario therefore concludes that without crickets, “the world would be filled with the screams of holy souls.” Every once in a while he feels a scorpion crawl across him and has to stay very still. Felipa was stung once on the behind by a scorpion and was in horrible pain. Macario rubbed spit on the sting but it didn’t help. The protagonist says he likes it better in his room than outside because Godmother lets him eat whatever he wants, including the slop for the pigs. Macario will stay at the house as long as they continue to feed him. He then returns to the original topic of conversation and says no frogs have come out of the sewer while he has been talking. He says Godmother will be angry if the frogs start singing again and pray to the saints to send him straight to hell without purgatory (where his papa and mama are) so he had better keep talking. With the last lines of the story Macario returns to the topic of Felipa’s milk, saying he wishes he could have a few swallows of it. Analysis “Macario” is undoubtedly the most challenging of Rulfo’s short stories to summarize due to its narrative style. The story is really more of a monologue than a short story, and it is delivered by the protagonist, Macario, in one long paragraph in the first person. The flowing nature of Macario’s discourse resembles the technique of “stream of consciousness,” as the character free-associates, jumping from one topic to another and back in very little time. The sentences are short and simple, as in other Rulfo stories. The difference is that, in addition to capturing the voice of simple rural folk, here Rulfo’s language also communicates Macario’s childlike nature. While the rural town life Macario describes is very much the same as we encounter in other Rulfo stories, the “stream of conscious” narration is quite different. This is one of the few stories where there is no external narrator. The presentation of the character of Macario is akin to that which appears in Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, where characters’ thoughts are often related in an unmediated manner. This exploration of Macario’s complicated psyche is also notable when compared with the other stories in the collection. The majority of the characters in The Burning Plain are involved in basic but intense — and often instinctual — struggles with the land, the elements, or political forces beyond their control. In many cases these vaguely outlined characters are almost mutually substitutable. In “Macario,” however, we find the author content to explore the psyche of a most unique and irreplaceable figure, that of the town idiot. He is undoubtedly one of the most complex of Rulfo’s characters. His nature is strongly ambivalent, as he alternately entertains us (as he describes his Godmother’s habit of tying him up while in church) or repulses us (as he describes eating pig slop or crushing cockroaches or frogs and scratching his scabs). The story of his adoption by Godmother and Felipa is also a touching one, yet his relationship with the latter is likewise simultaneously beautiful and strange — or even taboo. These elements all combine to make “Macario” a particularly complex and unusual short story in Rulfo’s collection, both in its presentation and in the demands it makes on us as readers. Macario’s relationship with Felipa is one of the most interesting aspects of this short story, and is one source of the ambivalence it produces in the reader. Felipa is undoubtedly a nurturing figure in Macario’s life since she gives him her extra food, prays for him, and treats him with kindness. At the same time, her nurturing qualities manifest themselves in an unsettling fashion when we learn she used to feed him her breast milk. The reader is not given a time reference on when this occurred, we only know it happened when Macario was younger (and we do not know how old he is now). This would seem rather innocent if we did not also learn that after feeding him she would tickle him and spend the rest of the night in his bed. This strange undercurrent of sexuality is actually a theme in Rulfo’s production that some have characterized as “unconscious eroticism”: “Felipa used to come every night to the room where I sleep, and snuggle up next to me, leaning over me […]. Then she would fix her breasts so that I could suck the sweet, hot milk that came out in streams on my tongue.” We also observe this technique of “unconscious eroticism” in the description of the pubescent Tacha, whose growing breasts and work for her perdition, in “We’re very poor.” One cannot discount Felipa’s role as a surrogate mother to Macario, however. While, the moment of breastfeeding and subsequent tickling has erotic tones, these are complicated in turn by other factors in the wider Mexican political landscape. The desperate economic situation has evidently left all three of the characters in the story displaced. Although Macario is the most overt outcast, the husbandless Godmother has clearly been isolated from a relatively wealthy class since she willingly takes on Macario and Felipa. Felipa in turn must have also lost her family in order to be capable of breastfeeding. As a result, these characters have all managed to subtly build a makeshift family out of the wreckage of the post-revolutionary period. This fact makes Macario Rulfo’s happiest character (perhaps his only happy character), and makes this short story perhaps the only evidence of the rural poor triumphing over adversity in The Burning Plain. Sadly, Rulfo could be placing this story at the beginning of the collection in order to metaphorically represent the destruction of happiness in the stories that follow. Summary and Analysis of “The Hill of the Comadres” ("La Cuesta de las Comadres") Summary The narrator begins by talking about the Torricos, the controlling family of the Hill of the Comadres who, despite being good friends of his, are the enemies of the other residents of the hill and of those who live in nearby Zapotlán. He does note, however, that he was friends with them up until shortly before they died, a detail that foreshadows the ultimate outcome of the story. He tells us that the Torricos were constantly quarreling with those who lived on the Hill of the Comadres. The Torricos owned all the land on the Hill, though when the land was distributed most of it was divided equally among the sixty who lived there and the Torricos got just a small piece like everyone else. Yet, the Hill still belonged to them. The narrator’s land belonged to the brothers Odilón and Remigio Torrico, and he acknowledges no one ever bothered to protest, “Everybody knew that’s the way it was.” However, people began to periodically leave the Hill, simply crossing the cattle guard and disappearing among the oaks. The narrator thought of doing the same, but he liked the hill and was one of the few on good terms with the Torricos. The narrator is proud of his simple though rugged plot of land on the Hill, especially of the corn he grows at a gully called Bull’s Head, which does not require salt to taste good. He observes that the Torricos put salt on everything, but they never needed it for his corn. Even after the Torricos died, nobody came back. At first the narrator mended their houses for them, but abandoned the task after a while. He describes the natural environment of the hill in vivid terms, especially the view of nearby Zapotlán, which has now been obscured by the jarillas (flowering bushes) that blow back and forth in the wind. When the Torricos would sit and look in the direction of Zapotlán the narrator always thought they were thinking of possibly going into town, but he later discovered they were actually watching the sandy road below. The narrator says that from time to time Remigio Torrico would lead his brother away from the Hill to pursue something interesting he spotted off in the distance. When they did this, everything would change on the Hill of the Comadres, because all the residents would bring out the animals they had been hiding in the caves and hills and put them in their corrals. At these times you could see how everyone had sheep, turkey and corn that was invisible before, and it seemed as though the Hill had always been a peaceful village. Then the Torricos would return, signaled by their dogs who would run out to greet them. The residents could tell how far away they were and in which direction by the sound of the barks. At these times everyone would hide all their things again. The narrator reiterates that while “this was the kind of fear they spread,” he never was afraid of them because they were friends. Sometimes he wishes he wasn’t so old so he could join in on whatever they were doing. He tried one time to help them rob a mule driver, but he realized that night that his body wasn’t what it used to be: “like the life I had in me had been used up and couldn’t take any more strain.” When they got to the mule driver he didn’t get up to see who was coming. The narrator assumed he was waiting for the Torricos and that’s why their arrival didn’t surprise him. However, as they were moving the sacks the driver didn’t make a sound and just lay on the grass. The narrator pointed out to the Torricos that he seemed to be dead, but they told him the man was just asleep. The narrator then kicked the man several times but it was clear he was dead, though Remigio said he was just stunned since Odilón had hit him with a piece of wood. The narrator says that’s how he found out what the Torricos were looking for as they sat by his house on the Hill. The narrator then stops the narration “dead” with the isolated statement: “I killed Remigio Torrico.” He explains that this was when only a few people were left because frosts had continually destroyed the crops. The people didn’t want to put up with both the weather and the Torricos. As a result, there weren’t any people left when he killed Remigio. The narrator had been mending a sack in the moonlight when Remigio came to his house drunk. He said he liked to tell things like they were and wanted to talk with the protagonist, who kept mending his sack because it required all his attention to see the harness needle with which he was sewing in the darkness. This angered Remigio since he thought the narrator wasn’t listening to him. When Remigio finally got the narrator’s attention he accused him of killing his brother Odilón. The narrator hadn’t committed the crime and knew who did, but it looked like Remigio wouldn’t listen. Remigio said that he and Odilón fought a lot and wanted to know from the narrator if his death had come about because of some sort of argument. When the narrator shook his head Remigio then accused him of taking the fourteen pesos Odilón had in his pocket and buying a new blanket with them. The narrator explains to us that he had bought the blanket with the money from two goats he’d sold. Remigio then said he intended to get even with the person who killed Odilón, and the narrator said “So it was me?,” to which Remigio responded in the affirmative, angered not that he killed the man — something the Torricos had done before — but that he had done it for so little money. Remigio went and grabbed a machete and then came towards the narrator in the moonlight. However, when he came close, “the moonlight shone brightly on the harness needle I’d stuck in the sack,” and “when Remigio Torrico came up to my side, I pulled out the needle and without waiting for anything stabbed him with it near his navel. I plunged it in as far as it would go. And I left it there.” This begins a short but vivid description of Remigio’s last moments. The narrator describes how “his one eye filled with fear” and how he had to stab him once again in the heart to kill him. Only afterwards did he tell Remigio’s corpse that he didn’t kill Odilón, but rather that the Alcaraz family did. In Zapotlán (somewhere Odilón knew better than to be) they had all jumped on him and stabbed him. Odilón had spat mescal in the face of an Alcaraz and they all laughed and then pounced on him. After the incident with Remigio, the narrator explains he returned to the Hill. He only paused along the way to wash the man’s blood off of his market basket, since he was going to need it and didn’t want to be reminded each time of Remigio. The story closes with the narrator recalling that this happened in October during the fiesta in Zapotlán. He says he remembered it in those days because they were firing rockets at the time and each time one went off a great flock of buzzards rose up from the place he had left Remigio. The narrator’s last words are “That’s what I remember,” reminding us that almost the entire story is narrated in the past, from the perspective of the present. Analysis Narrated in first person by a man who speaks in a matter-of-fact tone, “The Hill of the Comadres” is more typical of Rulfo’s literary production than “Macario.” In this story we get the impression that (like nearly all of Rulfo’s characters) the story’s narrator is uneducated and far from being a philosopher. Yet (also like all of Rulfo’s characters) despite his simple language he nevertheless is able to show us a high level of understanding of the ways of the world. His straightforward way of talking is not a sign of ignorance; he is simply a man who, through contact with life’s hardships, has learned that one simply has to accept the things the way they are. This story touches again on one of Rulfo’s primary concerns in The Burning Plain: the failed reforms of the postrevolutionary period in Mexico. Land reform was one of the principal causes of the Revolution, and we learn in the second paragraph of “The Hill of the Comadres” that “most of the Hill had been divided equally among the sixty of us who lived there.” Yet, although the Torricos “got just a piece of land with a maguey field,” they now apparently “own” the land in the town. As in other stories, the narrator does not tell us exactly how the Torrico brothers came to possess the town, but we slowly learn that although the narrator gets along with them, most of the town doesn’t. When he describes how the townspeople only bring out their animals and food when the Torricos are not around, the implication is that the family forcefully takes whatever livestock or food it wants. Despite his amicable relationship with the brothers, evidently even the narrator is subject to giving up his food to the Torricos, as we learn that they never need to put salt on his corn when they eat it. This is therefore the dark story that bears witness to a high-minded Revolution with significant legislative impulse but little executive power to enforce the land reforms implemented. As a result, we see that slowly but surely the land redistributed to the peasants returns to the hands of the few—those bold enough to take it by brute force. The point of diminishing returns for the peasants — when they suddenly feel the need to abandon their land — is expressed in a quite moving fashion by Rulfo: “They didn’t go to Zapotlán, but in this other direction, from where the wind blows in full of the smell of oaks and the sounds of the mountain. They left silently, without saying anything or fighting with anybody.” This description of the peasants’ resignation over the loss of their land and their dreams is quite powerful, and contrasts quite a bit with the revolutionary zeal which got them the land in the first place. The narrator says these people “didn’t have the courage” to fight the Torricos, but we can also guess they had little motivation to engage in more fighting after all the violence they lived through between 1910 and 1920. We cannot assume that the problems of these rural folk will be resolved by a simple change of surroundings, however. The situation of the Hill of the Comadres is not unique, and because of this, those who leave do not opt to move to nearby Zapotlán. Instead they elect to leave with no particular destination in mind, to evaporate into thin air: “they would cross the cattle guard where the high post is, disappear among the oaks, and never return again. They left, that’s all.” As we learn at the end of the story, Zapotlán is not an option is because the Alcaraces, another family that rules by violence, live there. The narrator never tells us that the Alcaraz family are Zapotlán’s equivalent of the Torricos, but this is made clear by his explanation that the Torricos don’t like the Alcaraces and don’t have any urge to visit Zapotlán. Later on the narrator also tells us that Odilón should have known better than to go there and pick a fight when “so many people had reason to remember all about him. And the Alcaraces didn’t like him either.” Rulfo therefore clearly implies that violence and extortion are commonplace in most every rural town and village. Perhaps it is also notable that the narrative voice of “The Hill of the Comadres” is different from the average narrator of The Burning Plain in a number of ways. Most of Rulfo’s narrators are interchangeable with the rural poor who surround them. In this case however, the main character is clearly different from the other villagers. He likes the Torricos and they like him, and — because he doesn’t understand why the townspeople would choose to leave — he ends up being the only person left in the Hill at the story’s end. Summary and Analysis of “We’re very poor” ("Es que somos muy pobres") Summary “We’re very poor” begins with a sentence that sums up the tone of the story quite well: “Everything is going from bad to worse here.” The narrator is speaking about the hardships that his family has recently had to endure, and he subsequently tells us that his Aunt Jacinta died last week, and then during the burial “it began raining like never before.” The rain represents a problem because it has ruined the rye harvest which was stacked outside to dry in the sun, making the narrator's father very angry. The storm came unexpectedly, “in great waves of water,” without giving the family time to bring any of the harvest inside. All they could do was sit under their roof watching the water. On top of these misfortunes, we are told that the cow that the father had given to the narrator’s twelve-year-old sister Tacha for her birthday has been swept away by the river. The narrator then talks about the river, saying it began to rise at around dawn three nights ago. He had been sleeping but the noise of the river woke him up and made him get out of bed, because he thought the roof might be caving in. When he woke in the morning it was still raining and the roar of the river sounded closer and louder than before. Now the narrator could smell the river, “like you smell a fire, the rotting smell of backwater.” When he went to look at the river it had breached it’s banks and was climbing along the town’s main street toward the home of a woman called La Tambora. Water was gushing out of her front door. The woman was desperately trying to move hens into the street so they could find a place to escape the water. The narrator also notes that the tamarind tree in Aunt Jacinta’s yard has been taken by the river. This is a sign that this is an extraordinary flood, since the tree has always survived when the river rose in the past. Tacha and the narrator went back later in the afternoon to watch “that mountain of water that kept getting thicker and darker” and has risen far beyond where the bridge should be. The two stood there for hours without tiring, just contemplating the water’s fury. Afterwards they moved back to where one could talk over the sound, and then they learned that the river had taken away La Serpentina, Tacha’s cow with one red ear and pretty eyes. The narrator asks himself how it occurred to La Serpentina to cross the river when it was so violent. All he can think of is that she must have fallen asleep and drowned when the water reached her. He remembers that she was always content to stay and sleep in the corral rather than leaving to feed. The narrator wonders if the cow woke up when the water touched her. He imagines she must have been frightened and tried to escape, but she probably got confused and got a cramp in the black slippery water. Perhaps she cried for help: “Only God knows how she bellowed.” The main character then asks a man who saw her swept away if he also saw the cow’s calf. The man didn’t know, however. He only saw the spotted La Serpentina wash by with her legs in the air before she turned over and disappeared. The man had been fishing firewood out of the river so he couldn’t be sure what was floating by. As a result, the family doesn’t know if the calf died with its mother. The family is particularly upset because now Tacha is without her cow. The father worked hard to acquire the animal to give to her as a future dowry. This way she wouldn’t become a “bad woman” (a prostitute, in the Spanish), like his two older sisters did. The father says they were bad because they were poor and very wild. They were difficult children, went out with the wrong types of men and listened to the whistles directed their way at nighttime. They would go down to the river for water all too often and all of a sudden would both be rolling around naked on the ground with a man each. After putting up with them for as long as he could, the narrator’s father ran the two girls off. They went to Ayutla where they are now “bad women.” This is what makes the father upset, because he doesn’t want Tacha to turn into a prostitute. Now she is very poor without the cow and will have trouble attracting “a good man who will always love her.” The narrator explains that before someone would have “had the courage to marry her, just to get that fine cow.” The family’s last hope is that the calf survived. If it didn’t Tacha is all too close to becoming a “bad woman.” The mother questions God’s decision to punish her daughters, especially since her family has always consisted of good people, ever since her grandmother. She wonders where her daughters went wrong, because she can’t find any fault in the way they were raised. She hopes God will look after them. The father says there is nothing they can do now. The danger is that Tacha is growing, particularly her chest, and her breasts are “promising to be like her sisters,” “the kind that […] attract attention.” He is sure that his daughter’s breasts will catch the eye of local men and that she will end up a prostitute. The narrator observes Tacha crying over the cow. At his side in her pink dress he watches as “streams of dirty water run down her face as if the river had gotten inside her.” He hugs her but she cries harder, and a noise comes out of her mouth — like the river as it overrides its banks — and she shakes as the water rises. The story ends as the narrator describes how drops from the river splash Tacha’s face, and her breasts move up and down rhythmically “as if suddenly they were beginning to swell, to start now on the road to ruin.” Analysis In “We’re very poor” we once against perceive Rulfo’s subtle critique of post-revolutionary Mexican society. This time it is the economy that comes under fire, however, as the reader immediately notices the profoundly rudimentary agricultural methods of the narrator’s family. The family has no choice but to set the harvest of rye out in the open to dry under the sun. As a result, when bad weather comes there is no way to shelter it. Additionally, when it needs to be moved, this can only be accomplished by hand. This description emphasizes the extremely underdeveloped nature of Mexican agriculture, especially in comparison with the modern capitalist system that the contemporary government hopes to impose. Given the relatively poor quality of the redistributed land after the Revolution, many of the hopes of the rural poor rested in the possession of capital or consumption goods. In “We’re very poor” resources are so scarce that all the family’s hopes rest in the cow La Serpentina and her calf. This spotted cow with a pink ear and pretty eyes receives more physical description than the vast majority of Rulfo’s characters. The role of the father is prominent once again in “We’re very poor.” Throughout The Burning Plain the father is the person charged with the responsibility of shepherding his family through the various trials of life, and in this case we see he is the first to recognize the full ramifications of the flood. With the rising of the waters not only has the family lost its collective capital in the ruined rye, but also that of their last daughter. The father’s failed economic attempt to capitalize therefore leads to a moral failure as it means his daughter will become a prostitute. The Rulfian theme of “unbalanced nature” is once again at play in this story. While in “They gave us the land,” there is an extreme shortage of water on the Big Plain, in this there is far too much water. This lack of equilibrium in nature is a common theme in Rulfo and proves to be the downfall of many of his characters. Such emphasis on the natural environment and its effect on the men and women who are subject to its whims might remind us of the “naturalist” quality of much of Rulfo’s writing. Naturalism is a philosophical and literary movement which gained impulse during the 19th century and stressed the importance of realist representation and science, as opposed to the ideal. In “We’re very poor” we see in an objective manner the effect of three of the primary forces at work in naturalist writing: the environment, biological heritage and the instincts. All three of these factors conspire to determine the fate of Tacha: the floods kills her cow, the mother contemplates her family tree to discover where the trait of being a “bad woman” comes from, and we see that Tacha’s sisters clearly succumb to their instinct to fool around with the opposite sex. As we can see from these elements, naturalism tends to show that — just like in the description of Tacha’s breasts at the end of the story — nature usually works toward man’s destruction. Summary and Analysis of "The man" ("El hombre") Summary The first of this very challenging story’s two parts is narrated in third person and alternates between descriptions of two different people: a fugitive “man” and his “pursuer,” often referred to as “the one who was following him.” The perspective changes every couple of paragraphs from one man to the other, so for the purpose of clarity in this summary I will refer to the fugitive as the “man” and the follower as the “pursuer.” In addition, it is important to note that every once in a while the author includes a purely descriptive paragraph about the terrain. In instances such as these it is impossible to definitively attribute these descriptions to the experience of one man or the other. “The man” begins with back-and-forth narration, as a man walks through the sand and his pursuer follows at a distance. The pursuer notes that the man is missing his left big toe, which makes him easy to track. The pursuer says out loud that the man is using a machete to clear his path: “You can tell he was gripped by fear. Fear always leaves marks. That’s what will cause his downfall.” The narrator shifts back to the man and explains that his courage is disappearing as the horizon seems to get further and further away. He cut away roots and grass and “chewed on a slimy mess” before spitting it out in anger. It is the dry season and the terrain is very thorny and rough. He decides to stop using the machete because otherwise it will get dull. The man hears the sound of his own voice. Although the narrator does not signal it explicitly, the narration then moves backwards in time to an earlier sequence of events. The man is outside a house at night with his machete and is greeted by two dogs in the darkness. The narration then jumps back to the present perspective of the pursuer who talks to himself about what happened next in the house. He says that the man didn’t wake up the people in the house. He arrived at around one in the morning at the moment when, taken over by sleep, the body is completely unsuspecting. In the next paragraph the man then says to himself: “I shouldn’t have killed all of them.” In the present, the man approaches a winding river. The perspective then shifts back to the moment when the man was in the house. The man asks for forgiveness and then “began his work.” Although it is not completely clear to the reader exactly what is happening, we later understand that he is killing three people in their sleep with a machete. As this happens he can’t tell if the moisture on his face is sweat or tears. The pursuer then notes that at this point in the trail the man must have sat down beside the river to wait for the sun to come out. He says that he remembers that day because it was the day he buried his newborn son. He says he remembers the flowers he was carrying were faded and drooping since the sun wasn’t out that afternoon. The perspective then shifts back to the fugitive man, who continues on his way, very guilt- stricken. He says to himself that he had to leave the path in order to avoid others. The man then says to himself that he has to be careful when crossing the river, which is a “tangle of bends” that might take him back to where he doesn’t want to be. The narration then shifts back to the pursuer, who imagines himself talking to members of his dead family as he walks. The pursuer then reveals the significant detail that the fleeing man was only trying to get revenge for the murder of his brother. He explains that the man’s name is José Alcancía, and that José is the brother of a man he killed. The difference between the pursuer’s act of murder and that of José is that José killed his victims while they were asleep, whereas the pursuer killed José’s brother face to face. The pursuer goes on to explain that he waited for José for a month, knowing he would come to kill him. However, the burial of his newborn baby delayed him one day and this was the day the man came to the house. The perspective shifts back to the guilt-ridden man (José), who clearly thinks he managed to kill his pursuer. In the meantime, he is still concerned that he has not been able to find a way out of the riverbed. Sensing that the man he is chasing has reached a dead end, the pursuer says to himself: “You’re caught.” He decides to sit and wait for the man to come back since he knows the fugitive is blocked from proceeding by the river. He says he will use the time to practice his aim and plan where he will shoot the man: “Time doesn’t matter. I’m patient.” Sure enough, when the perspective shifts back to the man, he realizes: “I’ll have to go back.” The story then shifts to its second part, which is narrated in first person by a shepherd. His narration seems to take form of a transcript of an interrogation where only the interviewee’s responses are recorded. The shepherd describes how he saw the man from a distance. The man wandered the riverbed, obviously lost. The shepherd then explains how he saw the man come back to the riverbed a while later, skinnier than before. The man approached the shepherd and asked if the sheep were his before grabbing a ewe, turning it over and sucking on its teats. The animal protested but the man held it so tightly it couldn’t escape. The man said he was from far away and that he hadn’t eaten in days. The narrator reports that he would have killed him if he had known about the murders. However, the man didn’t seem evil, and talked with sadness about his wife and children. The shepherd mentions that later the man ate an animal that had died of disease. The tone of the story then becomes more urgent as the shepherd appears to defend himself from his accusers: “So now when I come to tell you what I know, I’m in cahoots with him? […] And you say you’re going to throw me in jail for hiding that guy? Like I was the one who killed that family. I just came to tell you that there’s a dead man in a pool of the river.” He insists that had he known who the man was, he would have killed him. The shepherd then relates finding the man dead. He says that he thought the man somehow drowned in a pool when he found him, but then he saw that the back of his neck was filled with bullet holes. Analysis The multiple perspectives in “The man” make it a relatively unique story in Rulfo’s production. Three perspectives are employed by the author, and though they might seem to belong to very different characters, they all actually correspond quite well with the Rulfian practice of character interchangeability. While we might be tempted to classify José as the murderer and Urquidi as the pursuer, this is really just a game of cat and mouse where the roles are exchanged every so often. Though at the beginning José is pursued by Urquidi, in the course of the story we learn that José was originally looking for Urquidi in order to exact revenge for the murder of his brother before he killed his family. When the story ends, we learn from the shepherd’s testimony that Urquidi has again turned into a wanted man. In this manner, the two men are actually quite similar in that they both love their family’s very much (Urquidi talks with great sadness about the loss of his sons, and the shepherd tells us José cried when he talked about his wife and children), and each also killed a member of the other’s family. As a result, through their monologues we see how they classify themselves as both pursuer and pursued, murderer and victim, family man and bad father. We as readers find ourselves reacting with both empathy and dismay at both man’s actions. In the end we see that each man’s particular circumstances end up being secondary to the cycle of violence in which they are trapped. This lack of differentiation between the two men is reinforced by the fact that the reader can scarcely tell the characters’ voices apart amidst the alternating quotation marks and italics. This cycle of violence does not limit itself to José and Urquidi, however. At the story’s end it widens to include the shepherd, who at first was merely an innocent witness. Now he becomes converted into a suspect, someone to be pursued by the law. Since he is being interrogated by the Licenciado we can see that the local government officials who should work to end this cycle only add to it. The intervention of official juridical forces does not resolve problems but rather creates more victims. This is yet another indictment of the post-revolutionary government in Mexico. All three men are fugitives in their own country. In this story the reader also observes the breakdown of family institutions. Both of the men in the first part of the story lose contact with their families as a result of personal vendettas. The fugitive man has abandoned his wife and children in order to seek revenge on the pursuer, and the pursuer has lost his family as a result of killing the fugitive’s brother. We also learn that the pursuer was off on his own when his family was killed, mourning the loss of his infant son. In this manner, these personal acts of vengeance come at the price of a breakdown of the institution of the family. It is no coincidence that the most shocking crime is committed against the innocent members of a family while they sleep in their own home. Throughout this story, the impossibility of escape emerges as a dominant theme. The armed struggle of the Revolution began a cycle of violence from which none of the characters can disentangle themselves. Violence has evidently become so prevalent that it no longer requires justification. Hence the apparent lack of information surrounding the events that set off the conflict between José and Urquidi. Why did Urquidi kill José’s brother? What did José’s brother do to deserve his fate? The attitudes of both men imply that these details have become too distant to be relevant. The cycle of violence began at some point they are compelled to continue it. Perhaps this is why Rulfo originally titled this story “Where the river runs in circles.” Summary and Analysis of “At daybreak” ("En la madrugada") Summary The third person narrator begins with a separated eerie description of the town of San Gabriel. The town “emerges from the fog laden with dew,” and the narrator describes a number of elements that serve to obscure it from view: clouds, rising steam and black smoke from the kitchens. The narrator is describing sights and sounds of daybreak in a very peculiar way: “an earth-colored spot shrouds the village, which keeps on snoring a little longer, slumbering in the color of daybreak.” The description then turns to the protagonist of the story, old Esteban, who advances up Jiquilpan road riding on the back of his cow, followed by his milking herd. The toothless man whistles to his cows, and when he hears the San Gabriel bell that rings at daybreak he gets down off the cow, kneels, and makes the sign of the cross with his arms extended. Esteban then climbs back on the cow, removes his shirt “so the breeze will whip away his fear,” and continues toward San Gabriel. He counts the cows as they enter the town, and grabs one of them by the ears. He says to her “Now they’re going to take away your baby, you silly one. Carry on if you want to, but it’s the last day you’ll see your calf.” The cow ignores the man and continues on. The narrator then speculates on the uncertain origin of the swallows in San Gabriel that constantly fly back and forth in a zigzag pattern. Old Esteban explains in first person that he arrived at the corral and that they wouldn’t open up the gate even though he was banging on it with a stone. He thought his boss, Don Justo, was asleep. The cows were waiting behind him so in order to keep them from following him he crept around the corral and entered it through a low point in the fence. Then he opened the corral from the inside. Just as he was doing this he saw Don Justo come out of the attic carrying his sleeping niece Margarita in his arms. The man crossed the corral without seeing Esteban, “at least that’s what I thought.” The narrator then describes how Esteban then milked the cows, letting them into the corral one by one, and leaving the mother of the calf for last. He speaks to her and tells her that he’ll let her in to see the calf one last time. He tells her that she is about to give birth again and yet she is still worried about the older calf. He says to the calf that he ought to enjoy his mother’s milk while he can because it is actually meant for the unborn calf. Then the narrator says that Esteban kicked the calf when he saw it sucking on its mother’s teats. The narration then shifts back to Esteban’s first person testimony, as he explains that he would have broken the calf’s nose if Don Justo hadn’t kicked him and started to beat him. He explains that the beating was severe and that he still has a great deal of pain. Esteban then says: “What happened next? I didn’t know. I didn’t work for him any more. Nor anybody else either, because he died that same day.” He tells us that some people came to his house — where he was recovering from the beating under the care of his wife — to tell him that Don Justo was dead. They accused him of killing his boss, but Esteban says he does not remember doing this. He notes that since he is now in jail, perhaps that means something about his guilt. All he remembers is the moment after he hit the calf when Don Justo came towards him. After that he just recalls waking up and being cared for by his wife. Esteban explains that they have accused him of killing the man with a rock. He says that this information is relatively plausible because if they’d said he used a knife he would know if was false because he hasn’t carried a knife in years. The narrative then shifts back to that of the third person narrator. He describes how Justo Brambila left his niece Margarita on her bed in the room beside that of her crippled mother. Dawn is the only time when the mother sleeps, but she wakes up when the sun rises. The mother calls out, asking her daughter where she was last night, but “before the yelling started that would end by waking her up, Justo Brambila silently left the room.” At six in the morning Don Justo went out to the corral to open the gate for Esteban. The narrator tells us he also thought of going back up to the attic to smooth out the bed where he and Margarita had slept. Don Justo thinks to himself: “If the priest would authorize this I’d marry her,” but “He’ll say it’s incest and will excommunicate us both. Better to leave things in secret.” Don Justo then saw Esteban kicking the calf in the head and sticking his hands in the animal’s nose. The calf’s back seemed to already be broken, since its legs were flopping around and it could not get up. He ran down to Esteban and began to beat him, but then felt himself blacking out and falling back against the stone pavement. He tried to get up but was unable to, and as darkness enveloped him he stopped feeling any pain. Esteban began to move when the sun was high in the sky. He stumbled back to his house with his eyes closed, dripping blood as he went. When he arrived he lay down on his cot and slept. The narrator explains that at eleven in the morning Margarita entered the corral looking for Don Justo. When she found him dead she had been crying because her mother had accused her of being a prostitute. The narration then shifts back to Esteban’s confession. He once again affirms that when the others accuse him of killing his boss, it could be true. Esteban says the man might have died of anger however, since he had a bad temper. He muses that now the authorities have him and will judge him for killing his boss. Esteban speculates that perhaps they were both blind and didn’t realize they were killing each other. The narration then shifts back to the fog which advances on San Gabriel at night. That night they didn’t turn the lights on because Don Justo owned them. The church was lit up with candles for Don Justo’s wake. The church bells rang until dawn, hereby closing the twenty- four hours that the story covers. Analysis This story shares a number of similarities with “The man.” In both stories the discourse shifts back and forth between multiple narrative voices and perspectives. While “The man” shares three different perspectives with the reader, “At daybreak” presents two: the narrator and old Esteban. In order to approach an understanding of both stories, it is necessary to gather information from both narrators and combine it in order to fill in the gaps. We learn in both cases that complete knowledge of the nature of the events narrated will inevitably escape us. Beyond the narrative style of these two stories, Rulfo seems to outline two different forms of violence. In “The man” violence is willfully committed, and where it rears its head it inevitably begets itself and sets in motion a cycle of destruction which eventually hurts even the most innocent. In “At daybreak” violence is something that lies dormant inside us and is often beyond our control. It is determined by our environment and basic instincts. As a result, the protagonist in this story is almost “innocent.” Esteban’s senility is one possible explanation for his mistreatment of the calf, and it sparks his boss’s anger. When Justo is found dead, Esteban can also no longer remember exactly what happened. For his part, Justo is clearly subservient to his instincts since he maintains an incestuous relationship with his young niece Margarita. We also learn he is perpetually “angry.” Perhaps this is what drives him to react forcefully to Esteban’s beating of the calf. If stories like “We’re very poor” or “Macario” exhibit a tendency toward “unconscious” eroticism, in “At daybreak” the reader encounters the theme of “unconscious” violence. Violence has become so second nature that the protagonists cannot pinpoint what motivates their actions or even claim full responsibility for them. As in “The man,” there is certainly a cyclical nature to this violence, however. The story begins and ends with a somewhat dream-like description of daybreak. Nature is described as beautiful or even idyllic, but its tranquility is ominous because we know Rulfo’s fatalist vision will soon take over. This nagging sense of foreboding reinforces the notion that— unlike in “The man,” where violence is transferred back and forth through causes and effects across a chain of relationships between people—the protagonists of “At daybreak” do not know what the next day will bring and how or where violence will interrupt the peaceful dawn. Indeed, Esteban’s killing of the calf seems quite unprovoked. Perhaps it is as a response to the unpredictability of violence in San Gabriel that the narrator enigmatically claims old Esteban removed his shirt “so the breeze will whip away his fear” that fateful morning. Like “The man,” “At daybreak” also deals with the theme of “official” justice. In both stories we find “confessions” or “testimonies” of characters who defend themselves from the accusations of the authorities. In “The man” we know the shepherd is innocent. In “At daybreak,” the truth is more difficult to determine, although one interpretation of the story is that Justo died when he suddenly blacked out and hit his head on the corral’s stone pavement. However, when people show up at Esteban’s home, they tell him right away that he killed Justo without a doubt. In both the stories we realize that when the institutions of post-revolutionary justice are involved the guilt of the accused is assumed from the beginning. Summary and Analysis of “Talpa” Summary “Talpa” is narrated in third person by a nameless character who is described only as the brother of Tanilo and the lover of Tanilo’s wife, Natalia. The story begins at what is technically its end, with a description of Natalia throwing herself into her mother’s arms and sobbing upon their return to Zenzontla. The narrator tells us she has been keeping these emotions inside for the entire journey. He explains that she has not been able to cry because they had been under the stress of burying Tanilo without help in Talpa. This had been done using their bare hands and in great haste in order to “hide Tanilo in the grave so he wouldn’t keep on scaring people with his smell so full of death.” Natalia did not allow herself to cry on the way home despite the way their footsteps seemed “like blows on Tanilo’s grave.” Natalia cried in her mother’s arms in order to upset the woman, so she would know Natalia was truly suffering from the death of her husband. The narrator explains that he felt her weeping inside him too, “as if she was wringing out the cloth of our sins.” He goes on to conclude the first section of the story with the startling confession that he and Natalia killed Tanilo Santos. He says they made Tanilo come with them to Talpa, knowing the journey would kill him. The perspective of the story then shifts from a description of the recent past (Natalia and the narrator’s return to Zenzontla) to the more distant past (the journey to Talpa and the events that preceeded it). The narrator tells us that the idea of traveling to Talpa was Tanilo’s before anyone else thought of it. Tanilo had been hoping someone would take him for years, ever since he noticed the purple blisters on his arms and legs. The blisters then became wounds that didn’t bleed but oozed yellow pus. He said he knew that the only cure available was to travel to Talpa so the Virgin of Talpa could cure him with her gaze. Talpa was far away and the voyage would be difficult under the hot sun and cold March nights, but it would be worth it when the Virgin washed his wounds “making everything fresh and new like a recently rained-on field.” The narrator explains that he and Natalia encouraged this notion. They would both have to go with him: the narrator because he is Tanilo’s brother, Natalia because she is his wife. Natalia would have to help him, “taking him by the arm, bearing his weight on her shoulders […], while he dragged along on his hope.” The narrator tells us that he and Natalia had feelings for each other, but that as long as Talpa was alive they could never be together because she would have to take care of him. Both the narrator and Natalia feel guilt for their role in expediting Talpa's death. What makes them feel particularly guilty, however, is the way they pushed Tanilo on when he did not want to walk anymore. When he told them he wanted to go back home Natalia and the narrator would yank him up and tell him they couldn’t go back since Talpa was now closer than Zenzontla. This was a lie however since Talpa was still many days away. They wanted him to die. The narrator recalls the nights on the road particularly well. At first they would have some light from the fire, but when it died down they would go off into the shadows and make love. Night after night the heat of their bodies would combine with that of the earth until the cold dawn arrived. During these times Natalia would finally feel as if she were resting. Getting to the main road to Talpa took twenty days of travel alone. However, at the main road pilgrims began to join them and they formed a river-like mass, pushing one another along. The current of people was difficult to navigate with Tanilo, and the dust raised by the throngs made travel extra difficult. Only at nighttime was the trio able to rest from the sun that had beat down on them all day. The days also began to get longer and the nights shorter since it was now March and they had left Zenzontla in the middle of February. Tanilo’s condition began to worsen and he started to say he didn’t want to proceed. His feet had begun to bleed and they helped him recuperate. He said he would stay there for a couple of days and then return to Zenzontla. Natalia and the narrator, however, could feel no pity for him. Natalia rubbed his feet with alcohol and encouraged him, saying only the Virgin of Talpa could cure him. The narrator explains that they finally entered Talpa at the end of March singing a hymn praising the Lord. A lot of people were already returning home. Inspired by the religious sights and sounds of Talpa, Tanilo decided to do penance. He tied his feet together so that walking was harder and wanted to wear a crown of thorns. Later he bandaged his eyes and decided to walk on this knees. Due to this self-mortification he took on a dehumanized appearance: “that thing that was my brother Tanilo Santos reached Talpa, that thing so covered with plasters and dried streaks of blood that it left in the air a sour smell like a dead animal when he passed by.” When they entered the church Natalia had Tanilo kneel beside her in front of the golden figure of the Virgin of Talpa. He started to pray and “let a huge tear fall, from way down inside him, snuffing out the candle Natalia had placed in his hands.” He continued praying, shouting so that he could hear himself over the other pilgrims. The narrator repeats that all this didn’t matter, though, because Tanilo died anyway. A priest recited a prayer to the Virgin from the pulpit and the narrator and Natalia discovered that Tanilo had died with his head resting on his knees. The story then returns to its initial perspective of the more recent past, after the trip to Talpa. The narrator says that Natalia’s mother hasn’t asked him what he did with his brother Tanilo. Natalia cried on her shoulder and told her everything. He and Natalia have begun to be afraid of each other. Tanilo’s body seems to still be with them. They cannot get the image of the cadaver out of their minds, especially the way his eyes were wide open “like he was looking at his own death,” or the stench so thick they could taste it in their mouths. The narrator concludes with the confession-like observation that what they remember most is that Tanilo was buried in the Talpa graveyard and that they had to throw earth and stones on him “so the wild animals wouldn’t come dig him up.” Analysis Religion is a significant theme throughout The Burning Plain, but it takes a particularly central position in “Talpa.” Not only is the story driven on the surface by Tanilo’s religious pilgrimage to Talpa, but within this frame we also see other characters accommodate Tanilo’s desire to be the consummate pilgrim by themselves behaving as if this were a sacred voyage. Though Natalia and the narrator begin the trip with the intention of finishing off the dying Tanilo so they can be together, along the way they do their best to feed his hope of a religious miracle, if only to further motivate him to drive himself toward an early grave. Ironically, Tanilo had been seeking a surprising miracle of renewed life when he undertook the pilgrimage that unsurprisingly resulted in his death. The narrator ruins the reader’s hope for this kind of miracle in the story’s first lines when he explains that Tanilo did not survive. However, in a way the pilgrimage to Talpa did result in a miracle — just not the one Tanilo expected. Perhaps the miracle is the effect that the trip has on his wife and brother, who come out of it shamed into abandoning their sinful relationship and stricken by guilt. Additionally, while Tanilo is referred to by the narrator earlier in the story as “that thing that was my brother Tanilo Santos,” his wife and brother come to contemplate him with empathy in his last moments of life. The descriptions of the great tear that extinguishes his candle and of the way his prayerful, curled-up body obstructs the Virgin’s view of the festivities are quite moving and are what drive Natalia and the narrator to feel remorse and finally identify with his suffering. In this manner, Tanilo truly does become the Christ-like figure he tries to emulate. Through his death and suffering, new awareness is born in Natalia and the narrator. Though the final description of Tanilo’s dead body filled with flies might seem too grotesque to be transcendent, visually graphic depictions of Christ’s suffering on the cross have long been central images in Catholic iconography. The narrator’s discourse — as we see throughout The Burning Plain — also comes in the form of a Catholic-like confession of sins: “we took him there so he’d die, and that’s what I can’t forget.” During the pilgrimage, Tanilo, Natalia and the narrator seem to do their best to perform the ideal religious narrative to which the sick man is aspiring. Most notably, Tanilo asks to wear a crown of thorns toward the end of the story. Also, the narrator explains in the beginning that Natalia would have to bear “his weight on her shoulders on the trip there and perhaps on the way back,” and later on says that: “Natalia and I felt that our bodies were being bent double. It was as if something was holding us and placing a heavy load on top of us. Tanilo fell down and we had to pick him up and sometimes carry him on our backs.” These descriptions evoke the via crucis or Stations of the Cross, where Jesus struggled to carry the cross and was helped at one point by Simon of Cyrene. Natalia also is described in a similar way to Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene has been identified as an adulteress and a prostitute, and this coincides with the description of Natalia’s nightly lustful liaisons with her husband’s brother. Natalia also washes Tanilo’s blistered feet with alcohol at one point in “Talpa,” which is similar to Mary Magdalene’s washing of Jesus’s feet with oil at the house of Simon the Pharisee. Perhaps not coincidentally, Simon the Pharisee is often viewed as a leper, and leprosy could be one diagnosis of Tanilo’s disease. Lazarus is another character whose sickness could be compared to that of Tanilo. As for the narrator, his traitorous behavior could be compared with Judas’ betrayal of Jesus or with the way Cain lead Abel out into the field to kill him. In this way, “Talpa” can be read as a religious allegory whose incomplete or even contradictory nature becomes increasingly evident as the characters force themselves to imitate ideals that they know are beyond them. Desperation drives them to call on elements of a number of Biblical tales in an effort to transcend their surroundings. Though the allegory is faulty and predominantly motivated by the trio’s self-interest, the reader nevertheless finds him or herself moved by the painstaking lengths these characters go to in order to make the story of their trip to Talpa approach the status of a parable. Summary and Analysis of “The burning plain” ("El Llano en llamas") Summary This story begins with an epigraph from a popular ballad. These words (“They’ve gone and killed the bitch / but the puppies still remain…”) refer to the way that the spark that began the Revolution created successive movements which were often quite independent of its original impulses and were difficult to bring to heel. The narrator of “The burning plain,” Pichón, describes the fate of one such group, that of Pedro Zamora. The narrator is a member of Pedro’s band of revolutionaries, and after the epigraph the story begins in medias res with a battle cry from the federal soldiers in support of their general, just before a skirmish begins: “¡Viva Petronilo Flores!” The soldiers are in a ravine whereas the revolutionaries are up above, and after a few moments La Perra, one of Pedro’s men, gathers the four Benavides brothers (Los Cuatro) to “see what bulls we’re going to fight.” The reconnaissance mission is observed leaving by the rest of Pedro’s men (including the narrator) from their position against a stone fence. The men try to sleep but keep getting distracted by the noise in the ravine. Finally a shot rings out and Pedro’s men hear the racket of a gunfight. El Chihuila gets up and goes to see what has happened. Some time later, the soldiers suddenly appear right in front of the men in hiding. They are passing by, unaware they are being watched. Pedro’s men take aim and when then signal comes they fire on the soldiers, picking them off quite easily, “like ninepins.” Once silence reigns again, one of Pedro’s men shouts out: “Viva Pedro Zamora!,” to which some of the wounded federal troops whisper: “Save me, boss! Save me! Holy Child of Atocha, help me!” Suddenly the revolutionaries receive fire from behind their position. They run to the other side of the fence, past the men they have killed. They continue to run for some time, and every so often one of them is hit by a bullet. They reach the barranca and roll down as they continue to hear the battle cry. Panting, the men stay crouched behind some stones and look at Pedro Zamora to see what he wants to do. Pedro is silent and counts the men silently with his eyes. Eleven or twelve men are missing, not counting those who had left before the ambush. Los Joseses, La Perra’s two sons pace back and forth until Pedro tells them not to worry, that they will find their father. The Federal troops keep the revolutionaries pinned there all afternoon. When night arrives El Chihuila returns with one of Los Cuatro, but he cannot tell the band if the soldiers have left. Pedro calls to the narrator, Pichón, and gives him a commission to go to Piedra Lisa with Los Joseses and and see what happened to La Perra. If the man is dead, they will bury him, along with any others. Any wounded will be left for the soldiers to pick up. When the narrator reaches the corral where the horses had been, there are none left. The Federals have taken the horses. Shortly later they find the bodies of Los Cuatro, stacked on top of each other. They find other dead bodies in the vicinity as well, but see no sign of La Perra. They speculate the soldiers must have taken him captive to show him to the government. A few days later Pedro’s band meets Petronilo Flores at a river crossing. The narrator manages to escape a general slaughter by sinking under his dead horse in the river until it came ashore downstream. After this encounter, Pedro's band lays low for some time. As a result, no one is afraid of Pedro’s men anymore: “Peace had returned to the Great Plain.” This does not last long, however. Soon Armancio Alcalá arrives at Pichón's hiding place in the Tozin Canyon. Alcalá a mountain of rifles slung like a suitcase over his horses’ haunches and directs Pichón and the group to San Buenaventura, where Pedro Zamora is waiting. The next day the party sets out. Before they reach the ranch they can tell its buildings are on fire. Just before entering San Buenaventura they encountered horses dragging men behind them, some living, some dead. Pedro has more men than ever before, which pleases Pichón and his friends. The united band later burns San Pedro and continues on to Petacal. It is harvest-time for the corn, and Pichón takes pleasure in seeing the dry cornfields burn. The smoke “smelled of cane and honey because the fire had reached the canefields too. Eventually, the federal troops arrive, but this time they can't kill Pedro’s men as easily. Pedro’s men ambush the Federals, who fight harder than the soldiers did before. These new soldiers are brave and professional. They come from the highlands of Teocaltiche. Pichón remarks that it would be much easier to simply raid the ranches rather than try to ambush the Federals. As a result they scatter, doing more damage than ever this way. Some burn ranches and others approach the soldiers, dragging branches behind them to stir up dust and exaggerate their numbers. Many towns are burned during this time and the soldiers are helpless to prevent it. Every time they moved, the town behind them would go up in flames. At El Cuastecomate Pedro’s men kill soldiers in a playful way, goring them as though they are “bullfighting.” Rulfo provides a description of one such "bullfight," in which eight soldiers are killed with a razor. Soon, people from other places, including Indians, join the revolutionaries. The Indians are some of the most dedicated to Pedro; sometimes they bring him the best girls from the towns they raided. All this changes after a train derailment on the Sayula hill, however. The band puts cow bones and horns along the tracks and — just in case — bent the rails as the tracks approached a curve. Then they waited. As dawn a train full of people topples off the tracks and plunges "to the bottom of the barranca," killing all aboard. Pedro’s men run away, but the federal troops come after them with machine guns. Eventually, even the Indians turn against Pedro's band. The revolutionaries wish for peace, but this is impossible after so much damage has been done. In the end, Pedro’s men have no choice but to separate, “each one going in a different direction.” Pichón remarks, from a present-day perspective, that he was with Pedro for five years. He recalls some say Pedro went to Mexico City, following a woman, and that he was killed there. Pichón was released from prison three years ago. He was punished for lots of crimes while there, but not for being one of Pedro’s men. They didn’t know he was with Pedro, but rather jailed him “for the bad habit I had of carrying off girls.” The narrator says that now he is living with one of them, perhaps the best: the one that was waiting for him when he was released. She said to him that she had been waiting for him for a long time, and Pichón suspected she might be there to kill him. He vaguely remembered her, and “felt again the cold water of the storm falling that night we entered Telcampana and plundered the town.” He suspects that this woman’s father was the man they killed as he pulled the girl up onto his horse. He had to hit her a few times to stop her from biting him. Upon exiting the jail the woman told him she had a son of his, “and she pointed with her finger at a tall skinny boy with frightened eyes.” The boy looked just like Pichón, “with something mean in his look.” The woman tells him that they call the boy “El Pichón” too, “but he’s not a bandit or a killer. He’s a good person.” Upon hearing this, the narrator’s final words are: “I hung my head.” Analysis “The burning plain” is the longest story in the collection that bears its name. This is the first story that gives the reader insight into what the historical moment of the Revolution was like, and it does a particularly effective job of eroding away the mythical veneer that makes it seem to be a movement by and for the inspired, morally just masses. Narrated in first person, “El llano en llamas” makes the Revolution seem like little more than a celebration of “machista” brotherhood. Here Rulfo adds little to the description of the nature of the male revolutionary already captured by other previous writers (men like Pedro are violent on and off the battlefield and ignorant of the far-reaching repercussions generated by their actions). Supposedly an emancipatory movement, the Revolution is ironically characterized by violence and betrayal so profound that — when the fighting is over — it is hard to imagine a way forward. In fact, one must ask if the “Revolution” ever really accomplished anything, or if it has even ended. This ambivalence is apparent in the final encounter of Pichón with the woman he raped and who bore his son. While he seems to recognize his own “mean look” in the boy’s face, the woman insists that he is no thief or murderer but rather a “good person.” Much like the promises of the post-revolutionary politicians, despite the mother’s assurances it is difficult to say with any certainty what the boy’s future holds. Even the epigraph that starts the story — taken from a popular ballad — is ambivalent: “They’ve gone and killed the bitch but the puppies still remain.” One might be tempted to interpret this as an idealistic affirmation of revolutionary zeal: the Revolution is more than just one man, each campesino is a seed capable of multiplying itself indefinitely, and the struggle will run its course until justice is done. However, one can also interpret these lyrics in a more troubling way. The violence done to and by one generation of Mexicans has resulted in another generation of orphaned children who are now in jeopardy of losing their moral compass. What example will guide the “puppies” left behind by the Revolution? The ballad lyrics imply that the maternal influence is the crucial one, and it can be no coincidence that the boy’s mother is the only “moral” character that Pichón has any contact with. It is she who is capable of making him hang his head in shame by reaffirming the value of being a “good person.” In this manner, her words subvert the violent cult of masculinity that Pedro Zamora’s and his men have been promoting — always at the expense of women and children — as the ideal model for male offspring to follow. Perhaps “The burning plain” best captures the ambivalence of the Revolution in the character of Pedro Zamora, which is very likely based on a real-life historical figure. Pedro is much more than a small time bandit, he is a revolutionary caudillo. Latin American caudillos (charismatic populist leaders who combined political and military strength in order to act as strongmen or warlords) who were were common in the 19th and into the 20th century. As much as one rejects Pedro’s violent tactics, he is still considered a great leader by his men. His calm nature and particularly his watchful, piercing eyes are much admired by the narrator. In this manner his men feel protected around him, and protection is exactly what caudillos offered the campesinos who lived in the areas under their influence. The admiration expressed in “The burning plain” for the figure of the caudillo is rather remarkable, since normally realist narrative treated them as nothing more than oppressors. Rulfo effectively communicates the apparent need men have for a powerful father, while also recognizing the importance of the mediating ethical role played by the figure of the mother in the story. Summary and Analysis of “Tell them not to kill me!” ("¡Diles que no me maten!") Summary “Tell them not to kill me!,” narrated in third person, begins with this very phrase, uttered by Juvencio Nava speaking to his son Justino. Juvencio is begging his son to ask the sergeant who has him tied to a post to spare him, to tell his captor that tying him up and scaring him has been enough punishment. The son responds that he cannot help his father, that the sergeant doesn’t want to listen, but the father continues to plead for his son’s intervention. The son says that he cannot intervene because “if I do they’ll know I’m your son. If I keep bothering them they’ll end up knowing who I am and will decide to shoot me too." The father tells Justino that he should say that his father is not worth killing because he is so old. Finally Justino relents and goes to the corral, turning on the way to ask his father what will happen to his wife and kids if he too is shot. To this the father replies: “Providence will take care of them, Justino. You go there now and see what you can do for me. That’s what matters.” After this first section of the story — which consists predominantly of dialog — the narrator’s perspective shifts to become a little more omniscient and he takes a more active role in the storytelling. The narrator tells us that the father was brought in at dawn and had been tied to the post all morning long. Juvencio could not calm down, especially since “now that he knew they were really going to kill him, all he could feel was his great desire to stay alive, like a recently resuscitated man.” The narrator then begins to relate to us Juvencio’s thoughts as he muses on his murder of Don Lupe, the event that led to his condemnation. He recalls that he he killed Don Lupe because he would not share his pasture with Juvencio's animals. Juvencio remembers that at first he didn’t do anything, but with the drought later his animals began to die off, so he broke through the fence and drove his animals through the hole so they could eat the grass on the other side. Don Lupe didn’t like this and fixed the fence, but Juvencio cut through it again. This became a pattern where at night the fence would be broken and in the morning it would be mended. During the daytime the livestock would stay right next to the fence, waiting for nighttime when Juvencio would cut the hole so they could eat. Juvencio and Don Lupe would constantly argue but could not come to an agreement. Finally Don Lupe said that he would kill any animal that came into his pasture. Juvencio replied that the fact that the animals were breaking through was not his fault and that if Don Lupe killed one of them, he would have to pay for it. Then Don Lupe killed one of Juvencio’s yearlings. The narrator at this point switches to first person and narrates from Juvencio’s perspective. The conflict happened thirty-five years ago in March, because by April Juvencio was already on the run, living in the mountains. The money and livestock he had given the judge didn’t matter, they kept pursuing him anyway. Finally he and his son began living on another of his plots of land, Palo de Venado, before his son married Ignacia, and had eight children. All this shows that the fateful event took place years ago and should be forgotten. Around that time Juvencio figured that everything should be fixed with around a hundred pesos. Don Lupe had left his wife and two young kids behind, and then his widow died shortly after from grief. The kids were shipped off to live with relatives, “so there was nothing to fear from them.” Nevertheless, everyone kept pursuing him, and Juvencio believes it was in order to keep robbing him. Every time someone would enter the village he would have to run up into the mountains like an animal, and this happened for thirty-five years. At this point in the story the narration then switches back to third person. The narrator observes that ironically they caught Juvencio now, when he didn’t expect it. He had hoped with all his heart that they would never find him. This is what made it so hard to believe that he would die like this after fighting off death for so long. The narrator tells us about Juvencio's capture. He had seen the men at nightfall walking through his tender corn crop and he had told them to stop. Juvencio had had time to escape but he didn’t; he simply walked beside them without protesting. At this point the narration jumps forward in time to a meeting between the Colonel and Juvencio. The Colonel, who is hidden, says that Don Lupe was his father and that he died when he was young. As a result he had no male role model to follow as a boy. He goes on to say that later he learned his father had been killed by being hacked with a machete and then having an ox goad stuck in his belly. The Colonel found it particularly terrible that Juvencio, the murderer, remained free. After being condemned to die, Juvencio pleaded with the Colonel to let him go given his old age, saying that he has paid many times over for his crime, since he has spent “forty years hiding like a leper” and fearing death. In response to his cries the Colonel told his men to tie the man up and get him drunk so the shots won’t hurt. The narration then shifts to a more recent past, as Justino disposes of his father's corpse, which has been hooded to hide a disfigured face. Justino spurs the burro forward in the hopes that they can reach Palo de Venado in time to arrange the wake. He says to Juvencio’s body that his daughter-in-law and grandchildren will miss the old man, and that when they see his face they won’t believe it’s him. The narrator ends with these last words from Justino: “They’ll think the coyote has been eating on you when they see your face so full of holes from all those bullets they shot at you.” Analysis As in “The burning plain,” the father-son relationship is a crucial one in Rulfian narrative. Fathers are usually considered crucial role models for their children and, as the colonel in “Tell them not to kill me!” says to Juvencio: “It’s hard to grow up knowing that the thing we have to hang on or take roots from is dead.” This loss of the father figure drives the Colonel to affirm — if not exaggerate — his masculinity by hunting down the man who was “tough enough” to kill his father. Freudian theory could support the speculation that for the Colonel the killer of his father (Juvencio) has come to replaced Don Lupe as the target of an Oedipal death wish. Since Don Lupe’s murder precluded the Colonel’s ability to desire his death and hereby follow the normative Oedipal trajectory, one could say that this hatred was displaced on to Juvencio. By killing Juvencio, the Colonel is able to achieve manhood. Intriguing as this interpretation may be however, it tells us little about the reality of the Mexican context in which this story takes place. In this story of revenge, a son kills his father’s murderer, but this moment of “justice” simply creates another imbalance where another son (Justino) is left without a father. In this manner, the cycle of violence continues much like in the story “The man.” This crisis in the father-son relationship can be read as a metaphor for a relatively young nation (Mexico) experiencing the instability — if not complete loss — of one of its fundamental pillars, the patriarchal state, after the chaotic events of the Revolution. In “Tell them not to kill me!” we see that the burden of loss constantly displaced, although none who pass it along find any consolation in the act. In this story the reader is again subtly exposed to the problem of land reform in the post- revolutionary period. Although Juvencio appears to own more than one piece of land (the property near Puerta de Piedra and Palo de Venado, where his son lives), apparently this land is not irrigated and when droughts come his animals begin to die. This is much like the characters in “They gave us the land” who have land in abundance, but none of it has water. Between the lines one can tell that this lack of access to irrigated land is what drives a wedge into the friendship between Juvencio and Don Lupe. Paradoxically, Juvencio might almost be considered innocent despite murdering his friend, since the only way he can feed his family is by killing his neighbor. Much like “The man,” “Tell them not to kill me!” is another variation on the theme of violence in post-revolutionary Jalisco. In this tale the violence experienced by the colonel at an early age results in an implacable obsession and anticipation of revenge. However, by the time he finally encounters his father’s murderer, we see that that the act revenge is inconsequential in comparison with the immeasurable anguish Juvencio has felt while running for decades from the authorities and from death. Indeed, the imminence of death is tangible from the moment the reader sees the story’s remarkable title, and for Rulfo this is just one more way to intensify and build suspense. Much like the title in the story “No dogs bark,” Rulfo uses the line “Tell them not to kill me!” just enough times to make it a leitmotiv but not so many as to make it repetitive. Summary and Analysis of “Luvina” Summary Like other stories in The Burning Plain, “Luvina” is written in the form of a confession or story told by one man to another. In this case the speaker is the teacher who previously taught in the town of Luvina, speaking to the new teacher who is about to travel there. The reader does not discover this until midway through the story, however. The narration occurs in first person except in moments where an omniscient narrator intervenes with some general details about the scene. The story begins with a description of the terrain in which the town is situated. Luvina is a mountain in the south and it is “the highest and the rockiest.” The narrator goes on to describe in great detail how treacherous the mountainous terrain is. It is “steep and slashed on all sides by deep barrancas, so deep you can’t make out the bottom.” The man speaking goes quiet for a moment and the sound of the river can be heard along with the air gently rustling through the tree branches. The sounds of children playing can also be heard. Because of this the reader knows that the two men are not currently in the town of Luvina. The speaker asks for two more beers from the barman named Camilo. He continues talking to his listener about Luvina, describing the landscape and the lack of luxuries - like the beer they are now drinking. After much of this description, the reader learns that the narrator used to live in Luvina, where the listener will be visiting. He says, “I went to that place full of illusions and returned old and worn out.” He says that when he first arrived in Luvina the mule driver who took him didn’t even want to stop in the town. He left “spurring his horses on as if he was leaving some place haunted by the devil.” The narrator was left with his wife and three children in the middle of the plaza, and all they could hear was the wind. He then asked his wife: “What country are we in, Agripina?” She didn’t answer and he sent her to find a place to eat and spend the night. Agripina is not able to find either, and ends up sleeping with her child in the church. When the narrator finds her there, she explains that she was denied food. The family sleeps in the church. They awaken to see the women of Luvina carrying their water jugs down to the river for water: “As if they were shadows they started walking down the street with their black water jugs.” The narrator says that the only people who live in Luvina are these dealth-like old women and the unborn children. Everyone flees the town. The narrator explains that one day he tried to convince the inhabitants that they should go to another place where the land was good, or to at least ask for the government’s help. After all, the government was beholden to them because it is their country. In response, the people of Luvina laughed at his naive speech. The narrator explains that they were right. The only time the government visits Luvina is when one of its sons has done something wrong in a part of the country that matters: “Then he sends to Luvina for him and they kill him.” The narrator explains that the only reason the people of Luvina don't leave is because they do not want to abandon their dead. The narrator explains that this is why he left Luvina and does not intend to return. His listener, however, is going there in a few hours. He remembers how fifteen years ago told him the same thing when they assigned him to teach there: “you’re going to San Juan Luvina.” He remarks that once upon a time he was idealistic and hoped to change the town and make a difference, “but it didn’t work out in Luvina. I made the experiment and it failed.” The name “San Juan Luvina” originally sounded heavenly to him, but now he knows it is “purgatory;” “A dying place where even the dogs have died off, so there’s not a creature to bark at the silence.” He remarks that when the young teacher arrives there he will understand. The narrator then proposes that the two ask the bartender for some mescal instead of more beers. He is about to begin talking again, but goes silent as his gaze becomes fixed on the table where the carcasses of flying ants have collected in a ring around the lamp. The night closes in outside and the children’s shouts are now further away. The narrator finally falls asleep on the table. Analysis In terms of building an atmosphere of suspenseful malevolence, “Luvina” might well be Rulfo’s most chilling tale. This is quite an accomplishment given no one dies in the story, and Rulfo’s cultivation of dread is often predicated upon the presence or presentiment of death. It is also notable that this story is practically devoid of action. It is simply one man’s account of his first visit and subsequent stay in Luvina, told to a listener who is about to depart for the town and does not speak. The only tangible action in the story is the narrator’s description of his family’s first night in the town (his wife finds refuge in an abandoned church and the family cannot sleep because of the wind and the bat-like shuffling sound made by the town’s women before dawn). Other than this, the vast majority of this story is comprised of vivid description of the town and the natural elements that endeavor to rid the town of any vestiges of life. As a result, the wind is really the only active “character” that inhabits the town. Everyone else simply “waits for death.” The descriptions of the wind are particularly frightening: “it takes hold of things in Luvina as if it was going to bite them,” “sweeping along Luvina’s streets, bearing behind it a black blanket,” “it scratches like it had nails: scraping the walls, tearing off strips of earth, digging with its sharp shovel under the doors, until you feel it boiling inside of you as if it was going to remove the hinges of your very bones.” The wind is not the only inhospitable aspect of Luvina’s environment, however. It’s backdrop is equally menacing: the moon is “the image of despair,” the hills are “silent as if they were dead” and Luvina sits atop “the highest hill with its white houses like a crown of the dead.” The horizon is also “always clouded over by a dark stain that never goes away,” the terrain “is steep and slashed on all sides by deep barrancas, so deep you can’t make out the bottom,” and as one walks on the ground it’s “as if the earth itself had grown thorns there.” All these descriptions make Luvina the most threatening and cruel terrain in The burning plain. The barren Great Plain in “They gave us the land” might seem like stiff competition, but it lacks the “active” menace of the wind in “Luvina” that willfully seeks out life in order to slowly wear it down and eventually extinguish it. The interiorization of the narrative action in “Luvina” (in the memory of the narrator) will be familiar to readers who have read Rulfo’s later and best known work, Pedro Páramo. This technique is intensified in Pedro Páramo, where much of the narration follows the thoughts of the characters, often in a “stream of consciousness” format. This is not the only similarity between the novel and “Luvina,” however. On the contrary, “Luvina” and Pedro Páramo are so similar that the characters in the short story could easily fit into the novel and vice-versa. In “Luvina” the town’s inhabitants have an ethereal, ghostly quality about them, and the same is true of the residents of Comala in Pedro Páramo. In fact, in the novel the characters actually are ghosts, although the reader does not realize this until late in the story. While Luvina is described in the story as “purgatory,” and Comala is most certainly yet another place where lost souls cannot find rest. One wonders if perhaps the idea for Rulfo’s master work might draw heavily on “Luvina.” While Luvina might seem otherwordly, like the other stories in The burning plain it is nevertheless tied into the Mexico’s historical reality during the post-revolutionary period. In this story the critical social issue at hand is the education of a country in desperate need of social justice and modernization. As the narrator explains, however, not only is the government deaf to the needs of the citizens of Luvina (it only pays them a visit when in pursuit of one of their delinquent sons), but the citizens themselves are so closely tied to provincial traditions that they cannot bear the thought of abandoning the town. This would mean leaving dead ancestors behind, perhaps a metaphor for their strong attachment to the past: “If we leave, who’ll bring along our dead ones?” These two forces combine to crush the idealism of even the most spirited educators, as was the narrator’s case so long ago. As the he describes his urging of the townspeople to appeal to the government for assistance, we are reminded that—for the first time in The burning plain—the protagonist is a employee and promoter of the revolutionary government. However, his time in Luvina changes his mind about both the hope for the modernization of rural Mexico and its political trajectory since he eventually confesses that the citizens were right all along and the leaders aren’t aware of the existence of towns like this. In the end it is clear that the likelihood of successfully integrating Luvina into the nation — the task laid out for both the towns old (the narrator) and new (the listener) teachers — is slim. In fact, one wonders by the story’s end if the new teacher was not scared off by the narrator long before the story’s end, or if the narrator has been talking to himself all along. Summary and Analysis of “The night they left him alone” ("La noche que lo dejaron solo") Summary This story takes place between 1926 and 1929 during what was known as the Cristero War. It is told in third person by an omniscient narrator who describes the flight of a Cristero soldier, Feliciano Ruelas, from a successful ambush of federal troops. The tale begins with Feliciano asking his two companions why they are walking so slowly, warning them that if they continue at this pace they will become sleepy. The other two men reply that they want to arrive at their destination at dawn. The narrator tells us that these were the last words Feliciano heard his friends say, “but he would only remember that afterward, the next day.” Then he adds that the men had also said that it was better to travel in the dark because then they would not be seen. Feliciano walks off ahead of his two companions. He leans back against a tree trunk and falls fast asleep. Feliciano awakes to the sound of mule drivers traveling along the road. They say, "Good morning!" but he doesn't reply. Feliciano gets up and leaves the road. He abandons his heavy weaponry in order to travel faster, worried that the mule drivers will alert sentries of his presence. Finally he sees the gray plain stretch out ahead of him and thinks that his friends must now be out there, lying in the sun with no worries. Feliciano rolls down the canyon to the plain. Once there, he approaches the houses at Agua Zarca and watches the noisy movements of soldiers warming up beside bonfires. He sees two men hanging from a mesquite tree and realizes that they are his uncles, Tanis and Librado. Feliciano hides himself in a corner to rest and hears someone above him say, “What are we waiting for to take them down?” Another man says, “We’re waiting for the other one to come” and adds that “the third one is just a boy” but that he was the one who “laid the ambush for Lieutenant Parra and wiped out his men.” They add that “if he doesn’t come today or tomorrow, we’ll finish off the first one who passes by so our orders will be carried out." Feliciano calms his nerves, creeps to the edge of the stream begins to run through the tall grass. He doesn’t stop until he could no longer see the water: “Then he stopped. He breathed deeply, in trembling gulps.” Analysis As far as historical context is concerned, this story is notable because it is the first to treat the subject of the Cristero War (1926-1929), which took place in Mexico after the Revolution (1910-1920). The Cristero War was a period of conflict between Plutarco Elias Calles’ government and Catholic militias. The topic of contention was the restricted rights of the Church under the revolutionary government and the Constitution of 1917. The Cristero rebels believed they were fighting for Christ, and this is why Feliciano’s character repeatedly makes references such as “Long live Christ, Our Lord!” The conflict was ended through diplomacy just as the tide was turning the Cristeros’ way. This is a topic of particular interest for Rulfo because his family lost much their financial assets in both this conflict and the Revolution. In addition to losing his mother during the Cristero War in 1927, perhaps it is not irrelevant to the analysis of this story that two of his uncles died in 1928. However, none of the family deaths have been conclusively linked to the Cristero War despite speculation to the contrary. “The night they left him alone” is also rather unique because it is a tale where negligence does not cost the main character his life. Death stalks the protagonists in Rulfo’s works and it seldom forgives mistakes. This is the case in stories like “The man,” “Tell them not to kill me!” and “At daybreak.” “The Hill of the Comadres” is perhaps one of the few other examples where impending death is foiled (or at least postponed). Rulfo cultivates a sense of dread as “The night they left him alone” proceeds and we become certain that Feliciano has made a fatal mistake in falling behind his uncles during the overnight trek. Indeed, death is a sure thing from the fourth line of the story: “It was the last thing he heard them say.” The only information we lack is who dies and how. As a result, the reader is tempted to anticipate death in all its possible forms: Will Feliciano get lost in the night and fall down a canyon? Will he freeze to death as he sleeps under the tree? Will he wake up in the hands of the soldiers? Or, will the mule drivers turn him in as he himself suspects? Ironically, however, death does not come for this negligent young man but for the conscientious ones. Hence in this story we are confronted by the theme of death as the great leveler: it comes for all of us and when or how is beyond our control. Luck and chance are also depicted as being as important as calculation and preparation. In some ways this brush with death brings the reality of its implacable yet unpredictable nature into greater focus for both Feliciano and the reader. When seemingly certain death is avoided it sends chills down both his and our spines. While the survival of the main character is rather surprising in Rulfo’s narrative world, his stories are filled with “limit- experiences” that give them narrative intensity. While men and women are pushed to their limits in stories like “The night they left him alone” and “Talpa,” in others (such as “They gave us the land” or “We’re very poor, where water is either severely lacking or in excess, respectively) it is nature that is presented in a situation of extreme disequilibrium. In all these cases life hangs in the balance. Summary and Analysis of “Remember” ("Acuérdate") Summary The narrator tells us that Urbano Gómez died a while ago, perhaps fifteen years, but that he was a memorable person. He was often called “Grandfather” and his other son, Fidencio, had two “frisky” daughters, one of which had the mean nickname of “Stuck Up.” The other daughter was tall and blue-eyed and many said she wasn’t his. This one got hiccups often and one time interrupted Mass at the moment of the Elevation: “it seemed like she was laughing and crying at the same time.” She wound up marrying Lucio Chico the tavern owner. They called Urbano’s mother “Eggplant” because she would always get pregnant whenever she fooled around. She had money, but it all went into elaborate burials since all her children died shortly after being born. The wakes were always expensive so she lost her fortune this way. Only two of her children, Urbano and Natalia, survived. “Eggplant” died in her last childbirth, but in life she was a scrapper. The narrator tells us she would always get into arguments with the saleswomen in the market. Eventually when she became poor she had to rummage through the trash to find scraps to feed her children with. The narrator explains that “Urbano Gómez was more or less our age — maybe a few months older” and was a bit of a swindler or trickster. He sold the narrator Pink flowers, even though they were easy to find on the hillsides. He also sold fruit he had stolen or bought for less from other places, along with whatever other junk he had on him. We also learn Urbano was also Nachito Rivera’s brother-in-law. Nachito got “feeble-minded” after marrying his wife Inés who then had to take care of him. Nachito would spend all day playing songs on an out of tune mandolin. The narrator and his interlocutor would always go with Urbano to visit his sister and “drink the fruit juice we always owed her for and never paid for.” Later on in life Urbano lost his friends because everyone avoided him so they would not have to pay him back. The narrator wonders if this is why he turned bad, “or maybe he was just that way right from birth.” Urbano was expelled from school before his fifth year because he got caught “playing man and wife” with his cousin Stuck Up. They humiliated him by pulling him out the doors by his ears between rows of boys and girls: “He marched along there with his face held high, shaking his fist at all of us, like he was saying, ‘You’ll pay for this.’” Later came Stuck Up who burst into tears, “a shrill weeping you could hear all afternoon like it was a coyote’s howl.” The narrator remarks that “only if your memory’s real bad you won’t remember that.” It is rumored that Urbano’s uncle Fidencio gave him a beating so bad that he almost left the boy paralyzed. This caused Urbano to leave the village. He eventually came back as a policeman, however. He would just sit in the town’s main square with his gun between his legs, “staring at all of us filled with hate.” He never said anything and pretended not to know anyone. The narrator then remarks that soon afterwards Urbano killed his brother-in-law Nachito. At nighttime Nachito had decided to serenade him with his out of tune mandolin. The church bells were still ringing for the souls in purgatory when the people in the church heard the screams and saw “Nachito on his back defending himself with the mandolin and Urbano hitting him again and again with the butt of his mauser, not hearing what the people shouted at him, rabid, like a sick dog.” Finally someone took the gun away and hit him in the back with it. Urbano collapsed over the garden bench and lay there for the rest of the night. He left in the morning, but not before asking for the priest’s blessing at the church, which he was denied. The narrator tells us that Urbano was arrested on the road. He didn’t resist and even put the noose around his neck and picked out the tree for them to hang him. The narrator ends the story with another reference to “you,” the reader or interlocutor: “You must remember him, because we were classmates at school, and you knew him just like I did.” Analysis “Remember” is a particularly short story told in third person by a narrator who employs a confidential tone. Like many of Rulfo’s stories, this tale has the intimate feel of a monologue or a recited religious litany. The narrator recalls details about Urbano Gómez and his family as if he were speaking to an invisible interlocutor or perhaps directly to the reader. A significant trend in Rulfo’s narrative is the manner in which he manages to include or even implicate the reader in the story. In “Remember,” the narrator repeatedly draws the reader into a dialog with him, even if only through the use of rhetorical comments such as “You must’ve known her,” or “Urbano Gómez was more or less our age — maybe a few months older.” Still more frequent is the narrator’s use of the word “remember” early on in quite a few sentences. When “remember” appears at the beginning of a sentence, it is never as a question. In fact, there are no rhetorical questions asked of the reader or interlocutor. This is significant because the narrator is not asking us to remember, he is telling us — or even commanding us — to remember. If the narrator were to ask us to remember and not tell us to do so, we would find it easier to disengage from the story and shift the burden of memory onto someone else, onto a contemporary of the narrator, perhaps. However, the way the narrator commands us to dedicate to memory (or revive it in our memory) the story of Urbano Gómez demands the reader’s more active participation. The story’s final line seems almost accusatory in nature: “You must remember him, because we were classmates at school, and you knew him just like I did.” These words seem to elicit a particular response from the reader, specifically a confession. Additionally, as we know by now, many of the stories in this collection already come in the form of a confession. It almost seems as though after so many characters have spilled their darkest secrets out on the page, the narrator is now asking the reader to do the same: Confess that you know Urbano Gómez or someone like him, and that you have tried to forget about them. Confess that stories like his are not as far from your own experience as you might like to think. This confession need not be articulated out loud. The narrator seems to suggest it would be sufficient to simply engage our memory and “remember.” Rulfo was undoubtedly a politically and socially committed writer. His stories are filled with vivid descriptions of the shortcomings of overarching political institutions like the judicial system, the legislative branch, or the system of public education. In this story, however, there is no apparent institution or governmental department at which one can point a finger. It has been easy up until now for the reader to shake his or her fist at the sky and curse the abstract “powers that be.” For this reason “Remember” is special because it is the individual, rather than the institution, that finally must bear the burden of responsibility for the tragic end of Urbano Gómez. It is we who abandoned him along the way: “we’d go with Urbano to see his sister, and to drink the fruit juice we always owed her and never paid her for […]. Later on he didn’t have any friends left because all of us, when we’d see him, would avoid him so he wouldn’t collect from us.” Individuals like “us” also subjected him to merciless ridicule as he exited the school after being expelled, and the narrator tells us so: “Only if your memory’s real bad you won’t remember that.” In the end Urbano certainly fully recognizes his own guilt in the murder of Nachito (“he himself tied the rope around his neck and even picked out the tree of his choice for them to hang him from”), it is only fair that we should reciprocate and acknowledge or “confess” our role in forsaking him along the way. Summary and Analysis of “No dogs bark” ("No oyes ladrar los perros") Summary The story with a father’s request that his son Ignacio tell him if he can’t hear anything or see any lights in the distance: “You up there, Ignacio! Don’t you hear something or see a light somewhere?” Ignacio responds that he does not, and the father says that they must be getting close. The reader slowly realizes that Ignacio is being carried in a sitting position on his father’s shoulders. This is a technique typical of Rulfo, who likes to keep certain information from his readers in order to disorient them and make them work to make sense of a story. We do not yet know the relationship between the two adult men (both are referred to as “men”) or why Ignacio is being carried. The father notes that they should soon be getting to the town of Tonaya, which someone told them was just beyond the hill they crossed hours ago. The father says he is tired and Ignacio responds, “Put me down.” The “old man” is able to lean against a property wall for a few moments but does not lower his son. The narrator notes that the son speaks very little, and less and less with time. He also seems to sleep at times or tremble as if he were very cold. We hereby know that something is wrong with Ignacio but we do not know what. The son’s feet dig into his father’s sides as if they were spurs and his hands shake his head as if it were a rattle. The father wonders aloud where "Tonaya" is; Ignacio responds that the doesn’t feel well and wants to be set down. The father responds that he’ll get his son to the town and there the doctor will see him. At this point, the relationship between father and son becomes more nuanced. The father notes that he is not doing this for Ignacio, but rather for Ignacio’s dead mother, who would never have forgiven him for leaving her son where he found him. He says that his wife is what gives him courage, not his son, who has caused him “nothing but trouble, humiliation, and shame.” We discover that Ignacio has been a wandering thief and has even murdered people, including the father’s old friend, Tranquilino, who baptized the boy. The father again asks Ignacio if he can see or hear anything, to which he responds in the negative. The father observes that Ignacio should be able to hear the dogs barking even thought the lights in the town have been turned off. The son asks for water but the father says he can’t let him down because he won’t be able to lift him up again. This leads the father to speak about Ignacio's mother, who died when her son was a baby. The memory of Ignacio’s mother seems to make Ignacio cry, even though he never did anything for her. He says his son’s body was always full of evil rather than love. At the end of the story we finally glimpse the events that brought Ignacio to this point. The father notes that now “they” have wounded Ignacio’s body. He notes that all Ignacio’s “friends” have been killed, only they didn’t have anyone to look after them as Ignacio does. Finally, the two men arrive at Tonaya, with it’s roofs shining in the moonlight. When the father gets to the first house he leans against the wall. With difficulty he slips Ignacio’s dangling body off his back and separates his son’s hands from around his neck. Now that Ignacio is no longer blocking his hearing, the sound of dogs barking. In a circular fashion, the story ends as it began, with the father words on the inefficacy of Ignacio as a lookout. “And you didn’t hear them, Ignacio?” he says. “You didn’t even help me listen.” Analysis In this story we witness a common theme in Mexican literature, as well as in that of Latin America as a whole: the problematic nature of the father-son relationship. Ignacio’s relationship with his father is interesting in and of itself for the way in which the father, despite being clearly at odds with his son, nevertheless undertakes the incredible task of carrying him to Tonaya. It can be also be read, however, as an allegory of the problematic relationship of the post-revolutionary period with the idealistic Revolution that preceded it. The Mexican Revolution (1910-20) was driven by idealism and hope for a great future, particularly one where the poor would receive the land they desired and the economic stability that had previously belonged to corrupt politicians. Many of these hopes were never realized however, since instead of land reform, a new generation of corruption began where previous revolutionaries sold their allegiance to the highest bidder. Although the allegory is far from obvious, we can see the outlines of this problem in the relationship of Ignacio and his father. The father clearly had great hopes for his family (a common metaphor for the “nation”) but these quickly faded with the loss of his wife and the fragmentation of his family. The next generation — his son Ignacio — due in part to the impossibility of this ideal “family” and his own shortcomings, has become corrupted, much like many during the post-revolutionary period. The role of the bad friends who contribute to Ignacio’s downfall is important here, since “friends” are allegiances that are outside the family and the nation. These friends could be metaphors for the role of the foreign influences (such as the United States) that tried to benefit economically from the chaos that followed the Revolution. Rulfo does not neatly wrap this story up in allegory, however, since the father’s feelings for his son are clearly ambivalent. He feels the strong desire to reject his son, but nevertheless must yield to the urge to save him from mortal danger. Perhaps this could be a sign of the persistence of revolutionary idealism in the face of what is clearly a lost cause. The political shortcomings of the Revolution and their subsequent repercussions are not treated directly by the story, but are certainly hidden below its surface and emanate out through the dramatic events narrated. Evidence of these failures is implicit in “No dogs bark” in the question of why the father is carrying the son to Tonaya, and not to his own town. The unstated reason is that there is no doctor where the father and son live. With this simple detail, Rulfo manages to work in a persistent problem that the Revolution proposed to vanquish, the basic issues of social security: health care, shelter, employment, education. He does not denounce or draw attention to it, but the lack of a doctor remains as an underlying cause of the two men’s predicament. As a result, in the most subtle way — and without taking away from the aesthetic value of the work — these stories continue to serve as nagging reminders of how so many promises were broken or forgotten. One could argue “No dogs bark” has some of the theatrical qualities of tragedy in the fatalistic manner in which the characters are driven towards their inevitable destruction. This quality is supported by the way the story largely consists of dialog between the father and son. It is also notable that “No dogs bark” also exhibits a tendency towards romanticism. The night, the moon and the individual heroism of the father in carrying his son contribute to this romantic impulse, and these elements serve in turn to heighten the force of the story’s tragic ending. Summary and Analysis of “Paso del Norte” Summary Except for a sliver of third person narration at the story’s center, “Paso del Norte” consists entirely of dialog. The story begins with a conversation between a son and his father: “I’m going a long way off, Father, that’s why I’ve come to let you know.” The father asks the son where he is headed and learns his destination is “up North.” The son’s pig-buying business has failed and his family is starving, in contrast with his father. The son says the father can’t understand his family’s suffering because he sells “skyrockets and firecrackers and gun powder” which are popular whenever there are holiday celebrations. The business in pigs is more seasonal and therefore less successful. The father asks his son what he will do up North and the son responds that he doesn’t have an exact idea except that Carmelo came back from there rich and brought a phonograph that plays music. He charges money for each song and people line up to listen: “So you see, you just have to go and come back.” The father asks what the son will do with his wife and children, and the son responds that he wants his father to look after them. The father responds that they are not his responsibility and that he is too old to raise children. Raising his own son and daughter — who has since passed away — was enough work. The son is angry upon hearing this and says he didn’t get anything out of being raised by his father: “you didn’t even teach me the fireworks trade, so I wouldn’t be in competition with you.” The son was almost thrown out on the street to live and learn, and now he and his family are starving to death. To this the father replies that he never gave his son permission to marry, but the son then says his reason was that the father never liked his wife, Tránsito. The son explains that his father treated the girl badly when she came by, acting as if she was a prostitute the old man had met before on the streets. This is why he has not brought her by. The son repeats that he must go up North and that he wants his father to watch over his family. The father says that hard work is all a man needs to get by in the world, but the son says that he never received any guidance from his father: “you should’ve got me started on the road, and not just turn me out like a horse to pasture.” To this the father replies that the son should be happy that he has managed to have a wife and family, “some others haven’t even had that in their life.” The son explains that his father didn’t even teach him to recite verses: “If I’d just had that I might’ve earned something, amusing people the way you do.” Instead of teaching him, his father told him to sell eggs. Last week his family ate weeds, and this week they ate less. This is way he must go north. His father tells him then that “in each new nest, one must leave an egg,” implying that children will only cost you money and end up abandoning you. The son replies that this is nonsense since he has not forgotten his father, but the father notes that his son only comes to see him when he needs something. The father has been lonely for a long time and “now you want to come and stir up my feelings, but you don’t know that it’s harder to revive a dead man than give life again.” The son then asks his father if he is saying definitively that he won’t care for his family, and the father finally agrees to watch over the three boys, two girls and their mother. The son promises he will return with money to compensate his father for double his expenses: just feed them, that’s all I ask you.” The narration then briefly changes to third person as the story shifts gears to the son’s voyage to the North: “From the ranches the people came down to the villages; the people of the villages went to the cities. In the cities the people got lost, vanished among the people.” What then follows is a short jumbled series of conversations where the speaker is not explicitly identified. It appears that the son is asking where work can be found so that he can earn the money to cross the U.S.-Mexican border. He learns Ciudad Juárez is the place to go in order to be “passed” for two hundred pesos. He hears that in Nonoalco men for unloading trains are needed, and says that he unloaded bananas in Merced Market but was subsequently accused of stealing so he was not paid. Working on the railroad is another option, but an unidentified speaker wonders if the son is brave enough for this kind of labor. The narration then jumps to the son offering two hundred pesos to the man who will arrange for him to be taken across the border. The man tells him who he should contact in Ciudad Juárez and explains that Oregon, not Texas, is the place to go for work. There a man can harvest apples or lay railroad ties. Working on the railroad pays the most and lasts the longest. Rulfo jolts the reader forward in time to another conversation between the son and father. The son explains that when he and his fellow immigrants crossed the Río Grande at El Paso del Norte they were shot at until they were all dead. The son tells his father that Estanislado, someone his father knows, organized the plan. They were to head to Mexico City and then proceed from there to El Paso. But, when they reached the river they were shot at and he had to turn back because Estanislado was wounded and didn’t want to be left behind: “and then he was already on his back, his body all full of holes, and gone slack.” The son explains that he dragged the man, trying as best he could to stay out of the beam of the searchlights. Estanislado was still alive, but the son then realized his own arm had been smashed by a bullet. He tried to pull the man further, but he died shortly later on the Mexican side of the border. The son tried to revive Estanislado all night long, but to no avail. In the morning an immigration officer found him and asked him what he was doing with the dead man. The man interrogated the son about whether or not he killed Estanislado, but when he saw his broken arm he stopped. He asked what happened and the son said the group had been shot at while they were in the middle of the river. He and the dead man had been the only two to escape. The officer asked if the son had seen who was shooting at them and the son said no, they just turned the lights on and started firing. The officer then noted that the shooters must have been Apaches. The son asked why they would be Apaches if Texans lived on the other side and the officer said: “but you have no idea how full of Apaches it is.” The officer then told the son to go home and gave him money for the trip home in addition to the money Estanislado was carrying: “If I see you here again, I’ll just let you look out for yourself. I don’t like to see the same face twice. Go on now, on your way!” The father then told the son: “That’s what you get for being a sucker and a fool. And you’ll see when you go to your house, you’ll see what you gained by going.” He told the son that the children are with him sleeping in the back, but that Tránsito had run off with a mule driver: “And you can go look for some place to spend the night, because I sold your house to pay for the expenses. And you still owe me thirty pesos, which the title cost.” The son responds that he will pay his father back, but asks him which way the mule driver went with Tránsito and the father points him in the general direction. The son says he will be right back, since he is going to track her down. Analysis “Paso del Norte” deals with an issue as recognizable to contemporary readers as it was when the collection was published in 1953: Immigration. In fact, an examination of this story shows that little has changed for the immigrants since that time. Many of them today, much like the son in this story, make their way to Mexico City before continuing on to Ciudad Juárez where they make arrangements to pay a “coyote,” a guide, to conduct them across the border and give them a contact who will help them find work. Just like at the time of “Paso del Norte,” the border zone is still a dangerous place where many immigrants are killed before making it to the United States. The description of the how the son’s companions are shot after they have bright lights directed at them makes one wonder who killed them. The Mexican immigration officer leads the son to believe it was probably Apache Indians, but this is likely an ironic barb Rulfo has directed at the way indigenous communities are poorly treated in both Mexico and in the United States and are easy scapegoats for “uncivilized” incidents. “Paso del Norte” is especially resonant in this day and age where private citizen groups patrol the border in addition to the United States Border Patrol. The location of the murder of the son’s companions is also significant. The Rio Grande was designated as the border between the United States and Mexico a little over a century before 1953 in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (indeed, 1953 was the centenary the subsequent “Gadsden Purchase”). This treaty ended the Mexican-American War and made what used to be nearly half of Mexico’s territory part of the southwestern United States. This story is hereby interesting for its portrayal of the border as a site of much historical and cultural frustration for Mexicans. In addition to the social issue of immigration, this story also gives us a glimpse of the contemporary Mexican demography. Suffering significant economic hardship, those who live in rural areas are beginning to gravitate to the cities. The only two sentences narrated in third person — and therefore significant ones — indicate that “from the ranches the people came down to the villages; the people of the villages went to the cities. In the cities the people got lost, vanished among the people.” This movement is precisely what the son experiences as he goes to Mexico City. It is significant that this is the only time in the whole book that the capital is mentioned, and it has strongly negative connotations. This story also tells us a great deal about the county’s economy. The agricultural situation has become so desperate that only certain types of work are well remunerated, and none of them can serve as the base of a strong national economy. Notably, the son speaks jealously of his father’s knowledge of fireworks. One would not think this to be a particularly lucrative occupation, but the son observes that his father’s work is in high demand any time there is a religious “fiesta.” For this same reason he wishes his father would have taught him how to recite poetry: “If I’d just had that I might’ve earned something, amusing people the way you do.” Entertainment and “amusement” appear to be the only jobs that pay well in the countryside, and we learn that even this is not an exclusively domestic product, since the son’s friend Carmelo brought back a phonograph from the North “and he charges five centavos to listen to the music.” Even the songs are not Mexican, but rather Cuban, or by “that Anderson woman who sings sad songs.” The only jobs that pay are the furthest from being “modern”: they deal only in idle pleasures capable of distracting the farm laborer from his or her troubles. Summary and Analysis of “Anacleto Morones” Summary One of the longer stories in The Burning Plain, “Anacleto Morones” is told in first person by the character of Lucas Lucatero. Lucatero begins the story by cursing the women who have come to visit him: “Old women, daughters of the devil! I saw them coming all together in a procession. Dressed in black, sweating like mules under the hot sun.” They were carrying “their large black scapularies on which the sweat from their faces fell in big drops.” Knowing “what they were up to and who they were looking for,” the narrator immediately hides out in his backyard, running with his pants in his hands. The women found him naked, idly squatting on a stone, however, and were immediately scandalized. Lucatero does this intentionally, “so they would see me and not come close,” but this does not discourage the women. They then explain that they have come from the town of Amula to see him, “but we didn’t figure you would be way back here doing this.” The narrator curses them again, comparing them to saddle sores on a donkey. He then asks them what they want as he buttons his pants and they avert their eyes. The women explain that they have come on a mission, and have been searching for him in various towns. The narrator tells us he already knows all the women by name, but he decides to act as if he doesn’t. He then invites them onto his porch, brings out some chairs and offers them some food and drink. The women decline the food and return to the subject of their visit. One woman asks him if he recognizes her and Lucatero says he thinks she might be “Pancha Fregoso, who let herself be carried off by Homobono Ramos.” The woman says she is Pancha but that no one carried her off, “the two of us got lost looking for berries. I’m a church member and I would never have let him.” She then chastizes him for having an evil mind. The narrator then offers them a glass of water, and the women finally agree to accept it. There were ten women seated on his porch in a row and all dressed in black, “the daugthers of Ponciano, Emiliano, Crescenciano, Toribio the Tavernkeeper and Anastasio the barber.” The women explain that they have had a hard time tracking him down, and as they begin to go into the reason for their visit the narrator gets up to collect some eggs from the yard despite the women’s protest. The narrator sees a pile of stones outlining a grave. Lucatero scatters the rocks in every direction. He goes back inside and gives the women the eggs. He knows that these women of the Congregation of Amula have been looking for him since January, when Anacleto Morones disappeared: “They were the only ones who could have any interest in Anacleto Morones. And now here they were.” The narrator decides to stall until night, when would have to leave: “They wouldn’t dare spend the night in my house.” Sure enough, night falls and the women refuse to stay for fear of what the townspeople would think if they spent the night there alone with him. They don't leave yet, however. Lucatero speaks to one of the women, Nieves García, continuing to stall her. Nieves and he used to be lovers, and Lucatero abandoned her while she was pregnant; he conveniently forgets this history for a while before flirting with her, describing how he used to kiss the back of her knees. Nieves responds that God will not pardon Lucatero because she had to abort their baby. The narrator feigns ignorance and goes outside to make more myrtle water. When he returns Nieves has left. The conversation soon turns to the subject of Anacleto, "the Holy Child." They speak of a man, Eldemiro, who was punished by God for accusing Anacleto of being a quack. They note that the judge who “sent the Holy Child to jail” also met the same fate. Suddenly one of the women asks Lucatero if he will come with them to Amula. This is why they have come. They explain that they want him to participate in their novena, a prayer group for Anacleto. They need someone who had known him “before he became famous for his miracles” so they can put together a case to have him made a saint. This is repulsive to Lucatero, and he says he cannot go because no one will take care of his house. They respond that two of them will stay to take care of it along with his wife, the Holy Child's daughter. Lucatero says that he does not have a wife anymore, telling them that he ran her off, which shocks the women. They hope that she has at least been placed in a convent but the narrator says she was “too fond of being loose and bawdy” to be in a convent. The women then say that all this can be fixed if he just confesses when he gets to Amula. They ask him when he last confessed and he says that it was fifteen years ago, “when the Cristeros were going to shoot me. They shoved a gun in my back and made me kneel in front of a priest, and I confessed to things there that I hadn’t even done yet.” To this the women again say that if he wasn’t the son-in-law of the Holy Child they wouldn’t ask this of him because “you’ve always been a real devil, Lucas Lucatero.” The narrator then remarks that he was just “Anacleto Morones’ helper. He was the living devil himself.” This scandalizes the women once again, and they say he was a saint. Lucatero explains, however, that Anacleto used to sell phony saints’ relics in the fairs. Lucatero says that Anacleto once pretended to endure ant bites with the help of a piece of the true cross, with the aim of then selling the relic, though in fact he simply bit his tongue to keep from crying out. The women deny that the narrator is telling the truth. They say Lucatero was ungrateful because he was nothing more than a swineherd before he met Anacleto. The women say that Anacleto is in heaven now, but Lucatero says he heard the man was in jail. To this the women say that he has since escaped, leaving no trace, so he must be in heaven. The women then kneel down and kiss their scapularies with images of Anacleto. During this time the narrator goes to the kitchen to eat some tacos: “When I came out only five women were left.” Pancha tells him that they were so disgusted they had to go. He then offers those that remain some more myrtle water. Filomena, who’s nickname was the Dead One for her quiet nature, “rushed over to one of my flowerpots and, putting her finger down her throat, brought up all the myrtle water she had swallowed, mixed in with pieces of sausage and fruit seeds.” She then said that she didn’t want anything from him and leaving her egg on her chair, left: “Now only four were left.” Pancha said she felt like vomiting too, but that they had to get him to go to Amula. She reminds him that he was almost Anacleto’s son: “You inherited the fruit of his saintliness. He put his eyes on you to perpetuate him. He gave you his daughter.” To this the narrator responds by saying “yes, but he gave her to me already perpetuated.” The women again are shocked, but he insists that the girl was already four months pregnant when they were married and was proud of showing off her bulging stomach. She ran off with someone else just because he offered to take care of the child. The narrator then truly stuns the women by telling them that “inside Anacleto Morones’ daughter was Anacleto Morones’ grandchild.” She wasn’t the only one either, because he “left this part of the country without virgins, always seeing to it that a maiden watched over his sleep.” The women then defend the man by saying he did this to stay pure, but the narrator responds that they say this because he didn’t choose to be with them. Melquíades, one of the remaining four then said that Anacleto did call on her, and that he only held her through the night. The narrator tells her that this was because she is old, and that Anacleto “liked them young and tender, liked to hear their bones breaking, to hear them snap as if they were peanut shells.” The one named “The Orphan” then called Lucatero a cursed atheist. She said she was an orphan and that Anacleto comforted her. She explains that she found her parents again in his embrace when the night they spent together: the only happy night I spent was with the Holy Child Anacleto in his consoling arms. And now you say bad things about him.” After another batch of insults thrown Lucatero’s way, only two women remain. Anastasio’s daughter Micaela then asks if he would really deny that Anacleto performed miracles. She claims that he cured her husband of syphilis. The narrator expresses surprise at this since he had heard that she was single. Micaela, then tells him that being a señorita and a being single are different things. She says she got little benefit out of living as a señorita: “I’m a woman. And a woman is born to give what is given her.” Lucatero remarks that these are Anacleto’s words. Micaela explains that he got her to sleep with him in order to cure her liver trouble, but that “being fifty years old and a virgin is a sin.” The narrator again recognizes Anacleto’s voice in her words. He asks the two women why they don’t want to make him a saint instead, and Micaela replies that he has never cured anyone of syphilis. She describes how her husband suffered before Anacleto burned him with a hot reed and rubbed saliva on his sores to cure him. Lucatero tells her that he must have had the measles since he too was cured as a child using this technique. They again criticize his lack of faith, but Lucatero responds: “I have the consolation that Anacleto Morones was worse than me.” Upon hearing this Micaela decides to leave. Lucatero then asks Pancha if she will stay and sleep with him now that the other women have left. She replies that she only wants to convince him to come with them. Lucatero says that they ought to try to convince each other: “After all, what have you got to lose? You’re too old for anybody to pay attention to you or do you that favor.” Finally she says she will stay but only until dawn and only if he promises to go to Amula with her so she can tell them she spent the night begging him to accompany her. He then jokingly says: “Okay. But first cuto off those hairs over your lips. I’ll bring you the scissors.” She replies that they can’t trim her moustache since someone will notice. When it gets dark Pancha helps Lucatero put the rocks he had scattered back into the corner where they originally were. The narrator tells us that “she had no idea that Anacleto Morones was buried there. Or that he died the same day he escaped from jail and came here demanding I return his property to him.” Anacleto had asked him to sell everything so he could have money to travel up North. He promised to write Lucatero so that he could then join him and they could go into business together again. Lucatero had told him to take his daughter since that’s all he had left of Anacleto’s. Anacleto responded that they could join him later once he got in touch: “There we’ll settle accounts.” He asked Lucatero how much money he had saved, and the narrator told him there was a little left, “but I’m not going to give it to you. I’ve gone through hell with your shameless daughter. Consider yourself well paid by my keeping her.” Anacleto then got angry and shouted that he had to get out of town. Lucatero buried him with stones from the river and said to the grave: “You won’t get out of here even though you use all your tricks.” The narrator notes the irony that Pancha is now helping him rearrange the stones without knowing Anacleto is buried underneath, and says the reason he puts stones on the grave is so Anacleto won’t be able to escape: “Pile on more rocks, Pancha, here in this corner; I don’t like to see my yard all rocky.” The next morning at dawn Pancha says to him: “You’re a flop Lucas Lucatero. You aren’t the least bit affectionate. Do you know who was really loving?” When the narrator asks who, she replies: “The Holy Child Anacleto. He knew how to make love.” Analysis “Anacleto Morones” has a humorous tone that is quite different from the other stories in this collection. The comic elements in this tale are certainly dark, but they nevertheless provide a strong contrast with the stark and harrowing tales that accompany it. While the Amula women have the understandable excuse of being little more than a product of their social and historical context — much of which is shaped by the actions of “machista” men like Anacleto and Lucatero — the narrator’s mockery of their rigid and provincial religiously- oriented behavior is certainly capable of provoking laughter. The humorous elements of “Anacleto Morones” are derived from a certain brand of the comic, however. Moments such as the narrator’s naked greeting of the supposedly pious congregation, Filomena’s decision to forcefully purge all the myrtle water she has drunk at Lucatero’s house in one of his flowerpots, and Lucatero’s flirtatious request that Pancha trim her moustache are all funny in grotesque, bodily ways. The story also has a strongly macabre irony since the “Holy Child” whom the women are so desperately seeking is actually buried a few meters away in the narrator’s backyard. This type of macabre humor has deep roots in Mexico in particular and in Latin America in general. In fact, these roots stretch all the way across the Atlantic to Spain, where during the sixteenth and seventeenth century Golden Age authors wrote highly popular stories in the picaresque genre. The picaresque is a satirical narrative sub-genre that usually deals with the adventures of a lower-class hero who survives though clever manipulation of his surroundings and wit. Much like “Anacleto Morones,” the picaresque hero is typically humorously involved in base and grotesque acts and as he rises through the social hierarchy he descends morally. Lucatero is clearly more wealthy at the end of the story than when he first met Anacleto, but along the way he and his mentor have also corrupted the virtue of quite a few of Amula’s women. However, the picaresque appears in Rulfo’s story with a typically Latin-American slant since Anacleto and Lucatero masquerade as divinely inspired miracle-workers who are only distinct from indigenous “curanderos” — or witch doctors — in their close identification with the Catholic Church. Indeed, it appears that these “picaroons” are likely a product of the devout Catholicism sparked by the Cristero War. Lucatero himself admits that the Cristeros made a strong impression on him when they forced him to confess at gunpoint fifteen years earlier. All he and Anacleto have done is to appeal to this heightened religious fervor at every opportunity. Though the women in this story certainly inspire a certain amount of laughter, they also at times inspire compassion. Pancha is clearly a woman who, underneath the black clothing of a spinster, simply wants to feel loved and live a little. Sadly enough, Lucatero is right when he offers her the opportunity for intimacy and says: “you’re too old for anybody to pay attention to you or do you that favor.” Micaela also demonstrates a strong understanding of her tragic situation when she says: “what good did I get out of living as a señorita? I’m a woman. And a woman is born to give what is given her.” Micaela’s observation that “being fifty years old and a virgin is a sin” also gives us the impression that, as repugnant as the story’s two roguish picaroons are, they certainly provide some release for the sexual frustrations of women like these. Oppressed by the more “respectable” — but still machista — men of their town, these women know where to go to find satisfaction. While men like Lucatero and Anacleto have caused a great deal of heartache, they do serve the purpose of making these women feel alive. As a result, just as the rascals use the women, we should make no mistake that the women use them reciprocally. After all, Pancha puts Lucatero in his place at the end of the story when his performance in bed doesn’t live up to her expectations: “You’re a flop, Lucas Lucatero. You aren’t the least bit affectionate.” Lucatero is just a shadow of the “Holy Child” Anacleto in bed: “He knew how to make love.” In this way, it is important to remember that humor is used to accent and highlight the social situation of the women, and not to trivialize it.