Juan Preciado’s death in Comala is presented not as a single clear cause but as an experience in which bodily suffocation, fear, and the village’s murmurs converge. Recounted after his burial, the episode turns his search for Pedro Páramo into a descent from hopeful arrival to a death he himself explains through the voices that seemed to surround him.

The suffocating night

Juan’s account begins in a borrowed bed beside a woman whose body seems to him to be made of earth. Near midnight, heat and sweat wake him. The woman appears to be crumbling into mud, and the sweat running from her leaves him feeling as if he is swimming in it, unable to draw enough air. When he gets up, she remains asleep, making a bubbling sound from her mouth like a death rattle.

He goes out to the street seeking air, but the heat follows him. The night is heavy and still, filled with the August heat rather than a breeze. Juan says there is no air to breathe; he cups the breath escaping from his own mouth in his hands, feeling it grow fainter until it slips away. He insists on the finality of that loss. Above him, foaming clouds whirl; he remembers being plunged into their turbulence and dark vapors, which form the last thing he sees.

The scene makes the body’s failure palpable before Juan explains what killed him. Heat, sweat, mud, and diminishing breath give his death a physical immediacy, but they do not settle its cause. His later insistence that the murmurs killed him will complicate the first impression of a death by suffocation.

The voices and the empty plaza

Dorotea challenges Juan’s account of having died for lack of air. She says she found him in the plaza, far from the house of Donis, with Donis beside her. They had dragged him into the shade of the portico, already stiff and knotted as if he had died of fright, and buried him. Her practical recollection—two people able to carry him and lay him in the earth—does not erase his experience, but makes clear that he is describing his death from beyond it.

Juan answers that the whispers killed him. He had carried too many fears and could no longer bear their accumulated weight. Leaving the woman’s house, he felt cold rather than hot. As he walked, the cold intensified into gooseflesh; when he tried to turn back toward the warmth, he realized it came from within him, rising out of his blood. Only then did he recognize his fear.

He thought the noise in the plaza came from a crowd and hoped that being among people would make his fear pass. Instead, the plaza was empty. Leaning against a portico pillar, he heard a continuous market-like hubbub, without order or intelligible pattern, like wind moving through unseen branches. He had not gone farther when the sound gathered around him like a swarm. A few nearly soundless words became audible, asking for prayer, and Juan says that his soul froze. The expected crowd never appears; the noise is present without a visible source, and the appeal he hears turns the plaza into a place where the dead seem to address him.

A death retold from the grave

The episode reaches the reader through Juan’s conversation with Dorotea, not as a straightforward account witnessed at the time. Juan reconstructs the night in fragments, correcting and elaborating on what Dorotea knows: where he went, what he heard, why he thought a crowd was there, and how fear took hold of him. Her testimony supplies the bodily fact of his death and burial; his recollection supplies the inward progression that led to it. Neither account simply cancels the other.

That difference matters to the event’s meaning. Juan’s physical sensations are vivid, but the scene does not offer a detached explanation that would separate heat, terror, and supernatural sound into distinct causes. His own conclusion is that the murmurs overwhelmed him; Dorotea’s memory confirms that fear had left him rigid. In Comala, the voices are not merely an atmosphere around the living: they are part of the experience through which Juan understands that he has died.

The failed journey and its aftermath

When Dorotea asks why he came to Comala, Juan returns to the purpose that brought him there: he had come to see Pedro Páramo, who was said to be his father. He acknowledges that illusions guided him. The journey therefore ends in a bitter reversal: the expectation of finding his father has brought him to a village where he encounters not reunion but fear, death, and voices asking for prayers.

Juan and Dorotea are now together in the same grave. Dorotea says that being buried there, held in his arms, has finally allowed her bones to rest; she even reflects that she ought to be the one embracing him. As they speak, she asks whether he can hear the rain, and Juan says it feels as though someone is walking over them. She tells him there is nothing more to fear and that they will remain buried for a long time. His death thus does not end the narration: it places his account within the continuing company of the dead, beneath the living world whose rain presses down on their shared grave.