The Feather Pillow

Her honeymoon was one long shiver. Blonde, angelic and shy, she found her childish bridal dreams frozen by her husband's hard character. She loved him very much, all the same, though sometimes with a slight tremor, when, walking home together at night, she would steal a glance at the tall figure of Jordán, who had not said a word for an hour. He, for his part, loved her deeply, without letting it show.

For three months (they had married in April) they lived in a particular happiness.

No doubt she would have wished for less severity in that rigid heaven of love, for a more open and unguarded tenderness; but her husband's impassive face always held her back.

The house they lived in had something to do with her shivers. The whiteness of the silent patio, with its friezes, columns and marble statues, gave the autumnal impression of an enchanted palace. Inside, the icy gleam of the stucco, without the faintest scratch on the high walls, deepened that feeling of unpleasant cold. Crossing from one room to another, footsteps echoed through the whole house, as if long abandonment had sharpened its resonance.

In that strange nest of love Alicia spent the whole autumn. She had, however, ended by drawing a veil over her old dreams, and she lived on as if asleep in the hostile house, not wanting to think of anything until her husband came home.

It is no wonder she grew thin. She had a light attack of influenza that dragged on insidiously for days and days; Alicia never got better. At last, one afternoon, she was able to go out into the garden on his arm. She looked from side to side without interest. Suddenly Jordán, with deep tenderness, ran his hand over her head, and Alicia at once burst into sobs and threw her arms around his neck. She cried for a long time over all her silent fear, crying harder at the least attempt at a caress. Then the sobs slowed, and she stayed a long while hidden against his neck, without moving or saying a word.

That was the last day Alicia was up. The next morning she woke in a faint. Jordán's doctor examined her with great care and ordered absolute calm and rest.

"I don't know," he told Jordán at the street door, his voice still low. "She has a great weakness I cannot explain, and no vomiting, nothing... If she wakes tomorrow as she did today, call me at once."

The next day Alicia was worse. There was a consultation. They found an anaemia of the most acute course, completely inexplicable. Alicia had no more fainting fits, but she was visibly going towards death. All day the bedroom stayed lit and in perfect silence. Hours passed without the slightest sound. Alicia dozed. Jordán practically lived in the drawing room, also with every light on. He paced without stopping from one end to the other, with tireless obstinacy. The carpet smothered his steps. Now and then he went into the bedroom and kept up his silent back and forth along the bed, looking at his wife each time he walked towards her.

Soon Alicia began to have hallucinations, confused and floating at first, which later sank down to the level of the floor. The young woman, her eyes opened far too wide, did nothing but look at the carpet on either side of the head of the bed. One night she suddenly stared at one spot. After a while she opened her mouth to scream, and her nose and lips beaded with sweat.

"Jordán! Jordán!" she cried, rigid with terror, without taking her eyes off the carpet.

Jordán ran to the bedroom, and when she saw him appear Alicia let out a shriek of horror.

"It's me, Alicia, it's me!"

Alicia looked at him wildly, looked at the carpet, looked at him again, and after a long while of stunned comparison she grew calm. She smiled and took her husband's hand between hers, stroking it and trembling.

Among her most stubborn hallucinations was an anthropoid, resting its knuckles on the carpet, with its eyes fixed on her.

The doctors came back to no purpose. Before them was a life coming to an end, bleeding away day by day, hour by hour, without their knowing in the least how. At the last consultation Alicia lay in a stupor while they took her pulse, passing the limp wrist from one to another. They watched her for a long time in silence and went through to the dining room.

"Well..." her doctor shrugged, discouraged. "It's a serious case... there's little to be done..."

"That's all I needed!" Jordán snorted, and drummed his fingers sharply on the table.

Alicia went on fading in her anaemic delirium, which grew worse in the evening but always eased in the first hours of the day. During the day her illness did not advance, but every morning she woke livid, almost in a swoon. It seemed that only at night did her life drain away in new waves of blood. On waking she always had the feeling of lying crushed in the bed under a million kilos. From the third day on, this sinking never left her. She could barely move her head. She did not want anyone to touch the bed, nor even to straighten her pillow. Her twilight terrors now came forward as monsters that crawled up to the bed and climbed with difficulty over the bedspread.

Then she lost consciousness. For the last two days she raved without stopping, under her breath. The lights stayed on, funereal, in the bedroom and the drawing room. In the deathly silence of the house nothing could be heard but the monotonous delirium coming from the bed and the muffled sound of Jordán's endless steps.

Alicia died at last. The maid, who went in afterwards to strip the bed, now empty, looked for a while in surprise at the pillow.

"Sir!" she called to Jordán in a low voice. "There are stains on the pillow that look like blood."

Jordán came over quickly and bent down in turn. Indeed, on the pillowcase, on both sides of the hollow left by Alicia's head, there were small dark spots.

"They look like bites," the maid murmured after a while of motionless study.

"Hold it up to the light," Jordán told her.

The maid lifted it, but at once let it fall, and stood staring at it, livid and trembling. Without knowing why, Jordán felt his hair stand on end.

"What is it?" he murmured hoarsely.

"It's very heavy," the maid managed to say, still trembling.

Jordán lifted it; it was extraordinarily heavy. They carried it out, and on the dining-room table Jordán slit the case and the lining with one cut. The top feathers flew up, and the maid screamed in horror with her mouth wide open, clutching at her hair with clenched hands. At the bottom, among the feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs, was a monstrous animal, a living, slimy ball. It was so swollen that its mouth could hardly be made out.

Night after night, since Alicia had taken to her bed, it had stealthily put its mouth (its proboscis, rather) to her temples and sucked her blood. The bite was almost invisible. Shaking up the pillow every day had no doubt kept it from growing, but once the young woman could no longer move, the sucking was dizzying. In five days, in five nights, it had emptied Alicia.

These bird parasites, tiny in their usual surroundings, can under certain conditions grow to enormous size. Human blood seems especially good for them, and it is not rare to find them in feather pillows.

Tales of Love, Madness and Death, 1917

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Horacio Quiroga, 1907. Translated for Zeitzung from the Spanish text at Ciudad Seva. Public domain.