Abundio Martínez’s attack on Pedro Páramo grows out of grief and need: after his wife Refugio dies, he seeks money to bury her and instead reaches the man who has ruled Comala. The encounter turns a plea for charity into a fatal confrontation, bringing Pedro’s power to an abrupt end and leaving both men in the hands of others.

Causes and Background

The confrontation takes place after Susana San Juan’s death, when Pedro has withdrawn into silence at Media Luna. The bells that began as a public signal of mourning drew crowds to Comala; the gathering became a noisy celebration, while Susana was buried with few townspeople aware of it. The contrast between the village’s revelry and the estate’s subdued grief sharpened Pedro’s isolation. He vowed revenge on Comala, and the town’s later ruin forms the bleak setting for his final encounter with Abundio.

Abundio approaches from a more immediate desperation. Refugio has died, and he tells a woman at a drinking place that he sold even his donkeys to ease her last hours. After spending the night keeping watch over her body, he sets out and asks for charity so he can bury her. He is drunk and unsteady; as he walks, the ground seems to buck beneath him, making his progress toward Pedro feel precarious even before the knife appears.

Pedro, seated near a doorway, calls Damiana Cisneros to see what the approaching man wants. Abundio’s request meets fear rather than assistance: Damiana prays and makes the sign of the cross toward him. The gesture casts him as a possible threat, while his plea makes plain the material need that brought him there. This is the charged beginning of the encounter: a bereaved man asking for the means to bury his wife, before the landowner whose authority has shaped the village.

The Stabbing and Its Immediate Aftermath

The plea gives way to violence, and the evidence fixes the encounter through its aftermath: Abundio is still holding a bloodied knife when the men with Pedro disarm him. They take him away, telling him that he has got himself into serious trouble. Abundio says he is drunk and lets them lead him back toward the village, his toes dragging a furrow through the earth. His request for help burying Refugio has ended with him in custody and Pedro gravely wounded.

Pedro watches the group recede from his chair. He tries to raise his left hand, but it falls inert onto his knees; the failure does not surprise him, since he has grown used to losing a part of himself each day. Nearby, the sacred tree shakes and sheds its leaves, an image accompanying his thought that everyone takes the same road and goes away. The scene links his bodily failing to the departures that have marked his life, without turning the image into an escape from the immediate fact of his decline.

His attention returns to Susana San Juan. He calls her name and recalls asking her to come back, then dwells on a moonlit vision of her face and body. The recollection displaces the present even as his body makes that displacement final: when he tries to gesture, his legs hold him as if made of stone, and his other arm falls to the ground. He recognizes that this is his death.

When Damiana Cisneros helps him attempt to walk, Pedro manages only a few steps before falling. He strikes the earth and collapses like a heap of stones. The man who had once exercised power over Comala ends not in a public reckoning or a spoken confession, but in physical helplessness, with his last attention turned toward the absent woman whose loss had already drawn him away from the world.

Paternity, Money, and the Limits of Authority

The attack’s family significance sharpens against an earlier scene in which Pedro intervenes over the burial of Miguel Páramo. Father Rentería initially refuses to bless Miguel, whose crimes include the murder of the priest’s brother and the rape of his niece, Ana. Pedro asks the priest to set aside those grievances and places a handful of gold coins on the prie-dieu as an offering to the church. Rentería performs the blessing after all. The episode shows Pedro’s money operating not merely as private wealth but as leverage over religious authority and the public treatment of his son.

Abundio’s appeal presents a different measure of that power. He comes with the immediate, concrete need to bury Refugio, after selling even his donkeys in an effort to ease her final hours. Pedro summons Damiana Cisneros to find out what the approaching man wants, but the encounter yields no comparable scene of money securing help or recognition. Abundio is Pedro’s son, yet the request reaches him as a plea from a grieving, drunken man rather than as a claim acknowledged within the family. The contrast is pointed: Pedro had used gold to secure a rite for Miguel, while Abundio arrives needing charity for his wife’s burial.

That contrast does not establish that Pedro deliberately refuses Abundio’s request; the scene does not record an answer before the violence. Its force lies instead in the distance between paternal status and lived relation. Pedro’s authority had been able to bend a priest’s conduct in Miguel’s favor, but it has not brought Abundio into a recognized family bond or protected him from desperation. The confrontation therefore closes around an unresolved exchange: a son approaches his father asking for help, and the evidence that remains is not reconciliation but the bloodied knife and the men who carry Abundio away.

The Appeal and the Final Reversal

The episode binds two acts of physical dependence into a grim reversal. Abundio arrives needing help to bury Refugio; after the stabbing, other men disarm him and lead him away, his toes drawing a furrow in the earth. Pedro, who had called Damiana Cisneros to meet the approaching man, later needs her arm in order to try to walk. The request for aid has not been answered in the form Abundio sought, and the powerful landowner ends the encounter unable to keep himself upright.

The parallel does not resolve into a transfer of power or a reconciliation between father and son. Abundio is taken away, while Pedro falls after only a few steps; the account gives no further outcome for Abundio. Pedro’s last words and attention turn instead toward Susana San Juan, and his body collapses on the earth. The scene closes the confrontation through dependence and departure: one man is carried off by others, and the other cannot rise again.