Geek stuff. A century of Juan Rulfo.

To each his own, as the saying goes.

Thus in life as in letters, Spain has Cervantes, France has Molière, England's got Shakespeare, Argentina has Cortázar, Colombia has García Márquez, Perú's got Vargas Llosa, USA's got Hemingway and in Mexico, we have none other than Juan Rulfo.

Very few people know that his titanic literary work Pedro Páramo, started like so:

"I went to Tuxcacuesco, because they told me that my father lived there, a so called Pedro Páramo".

This is how a preview of the same work appeared in 1954, but in the Prince edition of 1955, it appeared in this other way:

"I came to Comala because they told me that over here lived my father, a so called Pedro Páramo".

This phrase would be printed forever at the very heart of our Mexican storytelling so much that, until today, Pedro Páramo is the most read and translated Mexican prose in the whole world.

"My contemporary men did not understand me. In Mexico there were no reviews of my books".

Juan Rulfo on an interview with Julio Scherer García, in 1980.

Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Vizcaíno's life, born on May 16 of 1917 at Sayula, Jalisco (others said that he was born at the town of San Gabriel), was branded by the everyday tragedy since he was little, being an orphan from his father at the age of six, and an orphan from his mother at the age of ten.

It was precisely his father Juan Nepomuceno Pérez Rulfo's death, who was murdered due to a quarrel related to some grounds at "La Agüita", aside from the numerous crimes and tragedies quite common at that zone and at that time (post-revolutionary and cristera), which would constitute the primordial ooze for the creation of the series of stores of "El Llano en llamas". Without knowing it at the moment, that June 2 of 1923, day in which his father was murdered, on that day would born at the same time, out of the seed of that tragedy, the author who would give acknowledgement to our nation.

If Pedro Páramo consecrated Rulfo as a prose author, then El Llano en llamas most definitely gave him recognition as a storyteller!

Author, screen writer (El Gallo de Oro) and even photographer, Juan Rulfo is, without any doubt, the exception to the rule about that popular phrase that says "apprentice on everything, master at nothing". Even when his literary works are few, their forcefulness and relevance are of capital importance, for he projected the Mexican prose to levels never before seen, outside our borders.

"I'm a sad man by nature. But I didn't know what was the reason for that sadness. That wanting to isolate myself from life, why? Those were the consequences of those times. They came as diseases, as the dusts from out of those muds, and they appeared late, yet they appeared."

Juan Rulfo on an interview with Julio Scherer García, in 1980.

"The most beautiful novel!"

Gabriel García Márquez, on Pedro Páramo.

If I would have to choose a Rulfo work, without question that would be the series of stories published at "El Llano en llamas", and if between all of those stories I'd have to select one, that would be "Anacleto Morones", the typical portrait of the Mexican macho: a womanizer, a cynical and a playboy, living side by side with the classical sanctimonious ladies, swinging continuously in a double moral, between the forbidden and the desired.

Oh, Lucas Lucatero, you little devil!

Tonatiuh

Bibliography:

• Proceso (magazine). Edición especial. Semanario de Información y Análisis. Cien Años de Juan Rulfo. "Vine a Comala..." Año 40. Edición conmemorativa, mayo de 2017.