I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there.

Vine a Comala porque me dijeron que acá vivía mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo.

I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there. It was mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see him. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything.... With the opening sentences of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, as with the beginnings of Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas and Joseph Roth's novel The Radetzky March, we know we are in the hands of a master storyteller. (Foreword)