Pedro Páramo Section 9 Summary

  • We're back with Eduviges and the first narrator. She claims that Abundio (the guy with the mules who brought the narrator to Comala) is deaf. That's weird—he seemed perfectly able to hear our narrator.
  • Apparently, a firecracker used for scaring snakes, which is the best way of scaring snakes ever, went off next to his ear and took his hearing, and he also quit speaking right around then. Huh. The Abundio we met was totally able to speak.
  • Also Eduviges then says that Abundio has been dead for a long time. So it must not be the same guy, right? Ugh, we have a bad feeling about this.
  • She blabs on and on about the narrator's mom, but he is only interested in how she looks—almost transparent, and wearing old-fashioned clothes. Hmm…wonder what that could mean?
  • Anyway, the reason Eduviges says she should have been the narrator's mother is that his real mother—Dolores—went to a sort of a witch doctor one day and he told her that she shouldn't have sexytimes because the moon wasn't right.
  • This is a problem, though, because it's her wedding night. Pedro Páramo is definitely going to want to do it. So what's she supposed to do about the honeymoon?
  • Well, she does what anyone would do—she sends her best friend, Eduviges, to go trick her new husband into sleeping with her.
  • So Eduviges, being such a good friend, goes and does the deed with Pedro Páramo so he won't get mad that Dolores couldn't do it that night.
  • Since the narrator was born a year later, Eduviges feels like he could have been her son, since she had a night with Pedro Páramo.
  • She tells him that his mother Dolores hated Pedro because he was always bossing her around.
  • One day, she complained about missing her sister, and finally Pedro got fed up sent her back home to live with her family.
  • That's why the narrator grew up in Colima, a nearby city, with his Aunt Gertrudis and his mother.
  • It's also why Dolores asked the narrator to go back to Comala and make Pedro pay for all the years he ignored his wife and child.