The Feather Pillow
By Horacio Quiroga
By Horacio Quiroga
Horacio Quiroga / El almohadón de plumas (A short story in Spanish)
Horacio Quiroga / A almofada de penas (A shor story in Portuguese)
Alicia's entire honeymoon gave her hot and cold shivers. A blonde,
angelic, and timid young girl, the childish fancies she had dreamed about being
a bride had been chilled by her husband's rough character. She loved him very
much, nonetheless, although sometimes she gave a light shudder when, as they
returned home through the streets together at night, she cast a furtive glance
at the impressive stature of her Jordan, who had been silent for an hour. He,
for his part, loved her profoundly but never let it be seen.
For three months--they had been married in
April--they lived in a special kind of bliss.
Doubtless she would have wished less severity
in the rigorous sky of love, more expansive and less cautious tenderness, but
her husband's impassive manner always restrained her.
The house in which they lived influenced her
chills and shuddering to no small degree. The whiteness of the silent
patio--friezes, columns, and marble statues--produced the wintry impression of
an enchanted palace. Inside the glacial brilliance of stucco, the completely
bare walls, affirmed the sensation of unpleasant coldness. As one crossed from
one room to another, the echo of his steps reverberated throughout the house,
as if long abandonment had sensitized its resonance.
Alicia passed the autumn in this strange love
nest. She had determined, however, to cast a veil over her former dreams and
live like a sleeping beauty in the hostile house, trying not to think about
anything until her husband arrived each evening.
It is not strange that she grew thin. She had
a light attack of influenza that dragged on insidiously for days and days:
after that Alicia's health never returned. Finally one afternoon she was able
to go into the garden, supported on her husband's arm. She looked around
listlessly.
Suddenly Jordan, with deep tenderness, ran
his hand very slowly over her head, and Alicia instantly burst into sobs,
throwing her arms around his neck. For a long time she cried out all the fears
she had kept silent, redoubling her weeping at Jordan's slightest caress. Then
her sobs subsided, and she stood a long while, her face hidden in the hollow of
his neck, not moving or speaking a word.
This was the last day Alicia was well enough
to be up. On the following day she awakened feeling faint. Jordan's doctor
examined her with minute attention, prescribing calm and absolute rest.
'I don't know,' he said to Jordan at the
street door. 'She has a great weakness that I am unable to explain. And with no
vomiting, nothing...if she wakes tomorrow as she did today, call me at once.
When she awakened the following day, Alicia
was worse. There was a consultation. It was agreed there was an anaemia of
incredible progression, completely inexplicable. Alicia had no more fainting
spells, but she was visibly moving toward death. The lights were lighted all
day long in her bedroom, and there was complete silence. Hours went by without
the slightest sound.
Alicia dozed. Jordan virtually lived in the
drawing room, which was also always lighted. With tireless persistence he paced
ceaselessly from one end of the room to the other. The carpet swallowed his
steps. At times he entered the bedroom and continued his silent pacing back and
forth alongside the bed, stopping for an instant at each end to regard his
wife.
Suddenly Alicia began to have hallucinations,
vague images, at first seeming to float in the air, then descending to floor
level. Her eyes excessively wide, she stared continuously at the carpet on
either side of the head of her bed. One night she suddenly focused on one spot.
Then she opened her mouth to scream, and pearls of sweat suddenly beaded her
nose and lips.
'Jordan! Jordan!' she clamoured, rigid with
fright, still staring at the carpet.
Jordan ran to the bedroom, and, when she saw
him appear, Alicia screamed with terror.
'It's I, Alicia, it's I!'
Alicia looked at him confusedly; she looked
at the carpet; she looked at him once again; and after a long moment of
stupefied confrontation, she regained her senses. She smiled and took her
husband's hand in hers, caressing it, trembling, for half an hour.
Among her most persistent hallucinations was
that of an anthropoid poised on his fingertips on the carpet, staring at her.
The doctors returned, but to no avail. They
saw before them a diminishing life, a life bleeding away day by day, hour by
hour, absolutely without their knowing why. During their last consultation
Alicia lay in a stupor while they took her pulse, passing her inert wrist from
one to another. They observed her a long time in silence and then moved into
the dining room.
'Phew. . .' The discouraged chief physician
shrugged his shoulders. 'It is an inexplicable case.
There is little we can do. . .'
'That's my last hope!' Jordan groaned. And he
staggered blindly against the table.
Alicia's life was fading away in the
subdelirium of anaemia, a delirium which grew worse through the evening hours
but which let up somewhat after dawn. The illness never worsened during the
daytime, but each morning she awakened pale as death, almost in a swoon. It
seemed only at night that her life drained out of her in new waves of blood.
Always when she awakened she had the sensation of lying collapsed in the bed
with a million-pound weight on top of her.
Following the third day of this relapse she
never left her bed again. She could scarcely move her head. She did not want
her bed to be touched, not even to have her bedcovers arranged. Her crepuscular
terrors advanced now in the form of monsters that dragged themselves toward the
bed and laboriously climbed upon the bedspread.
Then she lost consciousness. The final two
days she raved ceaselessly in a weak voice. The lights funereally illuminated
the bedroom and drawing room. In the deathly silence of the house the only
sound was the monotonous delirium from the bedroom and the dull echoes of
Jordan's eternal pacing.
Finally, Alicia died. The servant, when she
came in afterward to strip the now empty bed, stared wonderingly for a moment
at the pillow.
'Sir!' she called Jordan in a low voice.
'There are stains on the pillow that look like blood.'
Jordan approached rapidly and bent over the
pillow. Truly, on the case, on both sides of the hollow left by Alicia's head,
were two small dark spots.
'They look like punctures,' the servant
murmured after a moment of motionless observation.
'Hold it up to the light,' Jordan told her.
The servant raised the pillow but immediately
dropped it and stood staring at it, livid and trembling. Without knowing why,
Jordan felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.
'What is it?' he murmured in a hoarse voice.
'It's very heavy,' the servant whispered,
still trembling.
Jordan picked it up; it was extraordinarily
heavy. He carried it out of the room, and on the dining room table he ripped
open the case and the ticking with a slash. The top feathers floated away, and
the servant, her mouth opened wide, gave a scream of horror and covered her
face with her clenched fists: in the bottom of the pillowcase, among the
feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs, was a monstrous animal, a living,
viscous ball. It was so swollen one could scarcely make out its mouth.
Night after night, since Alicia had taken to
her bed, this abomination had stealthily applied its mouth--its proboscis one
might better say--to the girl's temples, sucking her blood. The puncture was
scarcely perceptible. The daily plumping of the pillow had doubtlessly at first
impeded its progress, but as soon as the girl could no longer move, the suction
became vertiginous. In five days, in five nights, the monster had drained
Alicia's life away.
These parasites of feathered creatures,
diminutive in their hatitual environment, reach enormous proportions under
certain conditions. Human blood seems particularly favourable to them, and it
is not rare to encounter them in feather pillows.
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