Dolores Preciado and Eduviges Dyada: Close Friends

Dolores Preciado and Eduviges Dyada: Close Friends describes a bond that is both tender and unusually intimate. They promise to die together, yet Dolores’s marriage to Pedro Páramo briefly places Eduviges inside the life Dolores has entered; later, Dolores leaves Media Luna forever, and the friends’ reunion is reduced to memory and a vow to follow one another beyond death.

Friendship and a Shared Promise

Eduviges recalls that she and Dolores were very close when they were young. Their attachment was not merely affectionate in retrospect: they had promised to die together, setting out as companions so that they could encourage one another through whatever difficulty the journey after death might bring. The promise gives their friendship a horizon beyond ordinary separation. It also makes the news of Dolores’s death especially painful to Eduviges, who learns that her friend died a week earlier and imagines that she must have felt abandoned.

Eduviges’s recollection presents Dolores as someone whose tenderness invited love. She remembers her as beautiful and gentle, and insists that loving her had been a pleasure—something one felt drawn to do. This is more than a fond description: Eduviges’s later actions show that affection could make her take Dolores’s place, even in a moment of intimate risk. She also tells Juan Preciado that she regards him as her son because he is Dolores’s child, joining her enduring attachment to the mother with an immediate claim of kinship toward the son.

The Wedding-Night Substitution

The friendship is tested on the night Dolores is supposed to share with her new husband, Pedro Páramo. Inocencio Osorio, a horse trainer at Media Luna known for his agility and for encouraging dreams, has warned Dolores not to unite with any man that night because the moon is unfavorable. Eduviges describes Osorio as an impostor who used supposed healing, physical manipulation, predictions, and ritual gestures to influence women. Though she tries to persuade Dolores not to trust his warning, Dolores says she cannot go to Pedro and asks Eduviges to take her place, promising to repay the favor many times over.

Eduviges is younger than Dolores, and she recalls that their differences in complexion would not be noticeable in the dark. But the substitution is not presented as a simple act of duty. Eduviges admits that she, too, desired Pedro, and that she went willingly and enjoyed being with him. Her choice therefore combines loyalty to Dolores with a desire of her own: she accepts the requested favor while taking an opportunity that the circumstances make possible. The scene makes their closeness consequential, without suggesting that the encounter becomes a continuing relationship between Eduviges and Pedro.

The night does not unfold as Eduviges might have expected. Pedro is exhausted by the feasting of the previous evening and spends the night snoring. He does nothing beyond entwining his legs with hers. The subdued outcome contrasts with the charged request that brought Eduviges to his bed. It also leaves the substitution defined by what Dolores asked and Eduviges chose, rather than by any lasting intimacy with Pedro.

Separation at Media Luna

Later, Eduviges accompanies Pedro and Dolores in the countryside. As they watch flights of cattle egrets and a solitary vulture overhead, Dolores expresses a wish to fly to the place where her sister is. Pedro responds by ordering that her bags be prepared so she can visit her. Dolores leaves Media Luna, and Eduviges emphasizes that she never returns. The departure turns the friends’ closeness into an absence: the woman who had once asked Eduviges to stand in for her is now permanently beyond her reach.

Months afterward, Eduviges goes to Pedro to ask after Dolores. His response makes clear that he does not intend to concern himself with Dolores’s welfare. He says that she loved her sister more than she loved him, assumes she must be content where she is, and adds that she had begun to irritate him. When Eduviges asks how Dolores and her household will live, Pedro leaves the matter to God. His indifference sharply opposes the care Eduviges continues to show, even after Dolores has left his estate.

Memory, Kinship, and the Unfulfilled Vow

Eduviges recounts these events to Juan Preciado while speaking of his mother. The story explains why she claims him as a son, but it also reveals how much of her relationship with Dolores has remained unknown to him: he says that his mother never told him about Eduviges. Their intimate history—its shared promise, the wedding-night favor, and the final departure—survives not through Dolores’s account but through the friend left behind.

After learning that Dolores has died, Eduviges says she will catch up with her by one path or another into eternity. She speaks of death as a journey whose distance might be shortened, and recalls having often thought that Dolores’s son ought to have been hers. Her insistence that she will follow Dolores brings their old promise into the present, now that it can no longer be fulfilled together as planned. In the novel’s account of their friendship, memory becomes the last form of companionship available to Eduviges: she cannot undo Dolores’s departure from Media Luna or recover the years they lost, but she continues to address her friend’s absence as a bond that death has not erased.