Abundio Martínez and Refugio (Cuca): Husband and Wife

Abundio Martínez and Refugio (Cuca) are husband and wife whose relationship is disclosed most fully through its final hours. Refugio dies after an illness, leaving Abundio to keep watch over her body and seek alcohol to endure his grief. The account also recalls their physical tenderness, the death of their newborn child, and the donkeys Abundio sold to bring a doctor. Their marriage is thus presented not as a long history but through the small, intimate details of a shared life and the material costs of its loss.

Identity and Shared Life

Refugio is Abundio’s wife, and he calls her Cuca, a familiar name that persists in his speech after her death. The recollection of the day before she died makes their intimacy concrete: they had shared a bed, and she had been lively with him, biting him and rubbing her nose against his. These details give the marriage a physical immediacy that stands in sharp contrast to the still body he watches afterward.

The account also records the birth of their child, who died almost immediately. Refugio was said to be incapable of being a mother, but the passage does not establish this as an explanation for the child’s death; instead, Abundio recalls the doctor’s list of possible causes, including bad luck, chills, heartburn, burns, and other illnesses. The child’s brief life and Refugio’s death form part of the accumulated loss surrounding the marriage, without any suggestion that the couple’s affection had disappeared.

Illness, Sacrifice, and Refugio’s Death

When Refugio becomes gravely ill, Abundio sells his donkeys to fetch a doctor. The expense is substantial enough to be singled out, and he says the sale was meant to soften her final hours. The effort does not save her: she dies in his hands at about eleven o’clock the previous night. The sequence makes his care visible as an action with a cost, but also as an effort that cannot alter the outcome.

Abundio then spends the night keeping vigil over the dead woman. When asked whether Refugio had fainted again, he answers that she has died; the exchange brings the shopkeeper’s question into painful collision with the finality of the news. He seeks alcohol not for a gathering but to ease his sorrow, explaining that there will be no visitors for the wake. The absence of mourners leaves him alone with the body and his grief.

Grief and the Absent Wife

At the shop, Abundio pays another twenty centavos for a small bottle and says he will drink it beside his dead Cuca. His use of the intimate name keeps the relationship present in the very moment he acknowledges that she is gone. The alcohol is described as fierce, and he drinks it in repeated swallows while fanning his mouth with the hem of his shirt. He has been advised how to make it go to his head more quickly, turning the purchase into an attempt to blunt the immediate force of bereavement.

He initially tries to go straight home, where Refugio is waiting, but changes direction and leaves the village. The account does not explain the change of route as a considered decision or say where he intends to go. Its placement beside his pledge to drink near Cuca nevertheless makes the movement away from home part of the scene’s unresolved grief: the dead wife remains the destination he names, even as his path carries him elsewhere.

Deafness, Memory, and the Final Scene

The narrative also marks a condition that shapes how the couple and those around Abundio communicate: he is deaf, so the shopkeeper speaks very loudly to him. Later, when Damiana cries out that Pedro Páramo is being killed, Abundio hears the shouting but cannot understand what it means. The cries hurt his ears, and he cannot work out how to stop them. His deafness is not presented as an explanation for his grief; rather, it makes the surrounding tumult difficult to interpret at the moment his thoughts return to Refugio.

As the cries continue, Abundio imagines his wife alone in the courtyard, lying where he had put her to catch the cool air and delay the smell of death. His memory moves back to the previous day, when she was still alive, and to the child who died almost at birth. He remembers that she can no longer see the sunrise—not that morning, or any other. He calls for help and asks for something to be given to him, but the shouting is so overwhelming that he cannot hear his own words. The passage brings the marriage’s ending into the noise of another death: while the crowd’s cries concern Pedro Páramo, Abundio’s attention is fixed on the wife he has just lost.