- Juan Preciado asks Dorotea if she had been the one talking about her mother dying, but she says no, that she had been sleeping.
- Dorotea says that it must have been Susanita talking, Pedro Páramo's last wife, who was crazy. She says that Susana's mother had had tuberculosis, and that that's why no one had come to the funeral, because they were afraid of catching the disease.
- Dorotea is interested in hearing more from Susana—it's really hot dead-person gossip.
- But when they tune in to listen they hear a man talking about being covered with blood—Pedro had shot him because he had supposedly been at a wedding a couple of days before.
- The man says he's lucky that he only lost the use of one arm, and that Pedro hadn't wanted to kill him.
- Dorotea explains to Juan that after Lucas, Pedro's father, was killed, Pedro had gone on a rampage and killed almost everyone at a wedding in revenge.
- It turned out that whoever killed Lucas had really been trying to kill the groom and had made a mistake. Since they didn't catch the killer, Pedro just murdered everyone.
- But Dorotea is mostly interested in Susana, whom she can't hear very well. Juan tells her that she's just moaning.
- Dorotea says that Pedro had loved Susana very much, and that after she died he had decided to quit working his land, to destroy all the tools, and to throw all the workers off the land.
- Since Pedro had owned all the land in Comala, when he quit working the town went downhill fast.
- Plagues and poverty caused people to leave the town looking for opportunities. Others stayed, waiting for Pedro to die, but he lived for a very long time.
- Right before he died, there was a war against the Catholic Church in Mexico, known as the Cristero Wars, which killed off the few men left in Comala.
- After that, Dorotea began to starve and the town pretty much became a ghost town.
- All of these bad things happened to the town because of Pedro's grief over his wife Susana.