Fiona’s Reviews > Pedro Páramo > Status Update

For me, Juan Preciado, Heaven is right here where I am now.
—And what about your soul? Where do you think it’s disappeared to?
—I suspect it’s wandering the earth like so many others, searching for anyone still alive who’ll pray for it. It’s possible it despises me for the way I treated it, but I no longer care. I’ve broken free of its obsessive need for remorse.

—She’s been asked, and she’s more than willing. The priest wants sixty pesos to overlook the marriage banns. I told him he’d be paid in due time. Says he needs to fix the altar and that his dining table is falling apart. I promised we’d send a new one. He says you never attend mass. I promised him you would. He also says you haven’t paid any tithes since your grandmother passed. I told him not to worry.

Drops fall, one after another, through the stone filter. As fresh water emerges from the rock one hears the sound it makes as it drips into a clay pitcher. One listens. Hearing whispers. Hearing feet that scrape against the floor, that walk back and forth. The dripping continues nonstop. The pitcher overflows, sending water across the floor.
<> someone calls.

It was during the dog days of summer, when the August winds blow hot, tainted by the rotting smell of flowers.
The road rose and fell: “It rises or falls according to whether one’s going or coming. For the person who’s leaving , it rises; for the one who’s coming, it falls.
—What did you say was the name of that town down there?
—Comala, señor.