The feather pillow

[Tale. Text complete.]

Horacio Quiroga

Their honeymoon was one long chill. Blonde, angelic and shy, her husband's tough
character chilled her dreamed of girlfriend's childishness. She loved him very much,
however, sometimes with a slight shudder when walking down the street together at
night, she would sneak a glance at Jordan's tall stature, who had been silent for an hour.
He, for his part, loved her deeply, without making it known.

For three months - they had married in April - they lived a special happiness.

Without a doubt she would have wished for less severity in that rigid sky of love, more
expansive and unwary tenderness; but her husband's impassive face always contained her.

The house they lived in had a little influence on their tremors. The whiteness of the silent
courtyard - friezes, columns and marble statues - produced an autumnal impression of an
enchanted palace. Inside, the icy shine of the stucco, without the slightest scratch on the
high walls, affirmed that sensation of unpleasant cold. When crossing from one room to
another, the footsteps found an echo throughout the house, as if a long abandonment had
sensitized their resonance.

In that strange love nest, Alicia spent the entire fall. However, she had ended up casting a
veil over her old dreams, and was still living asleep in the hostile house, not wanting to
think about anything until her husband arrived.

No wonder he lost weight. He had a slight attack of influenza that dragged on insidiously
for days and days; Alicia never recovered. Finally one afternoon she was able to go out
into the garden leaning on his arm. He looked indifferently from one side to the other.
Suddenly Jordan, with deep tenderness, put his hand over her head, and Alicia
immediately burst into sobs, throwing her arms around his neck. He cried for a long time
all his silent horror, redoubling his crying at the slightest attempt at a caress. Then the
sobs slowed down, and she remained hidden in his neck for a long time, without moving
or saying a word.

That was the last day Alicia was up. The next day she woke up fainted. Jordan's doctor
examined her very carefully, ordering her to be completely calm and rest.

"I don't know," he said to Jordán at the front door, his voice still low. He has a great
weakness that I can't explain, and without vomiting, nothing... If you wake up tomorrow
like today, call me right away.

The next day Alicia was still worse. There was consultation. A very acute, completely
inexplicable anemia was observed. Alicia didn't faint anymore, but she was visibly going
to death. All day the bedroom was with the lights on and completely silent. Hours went
by without hearing the slightest noise. Alicia was dozing. Jordán lived almost in the living
room, also with all the lights on. He paced incessantly from one end to the other, with
tireless obstinacy. The carpet muffled his steps. At times he entered the bedroom and
continued his silent movement along the bed, looking at his wife every time he walked in
her direction.

Soon Alicia began to have hallucinations, confusing and floating at first, and then
descending to the ground. The young woman, with her eyes wide open, did nothing but
look at the carpet on either side of the back of the bed. One night he suddenly stared.
After a while he opened his mouth to scream, and his nostrils and lips beaded with sweat.

-Jordan! Jordan! -she cried, rigid with horror, without stopping to look at the carpet.

Jordán ran to the bedroom, and when Alicia saw him appear, she screamed in horror.

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

Alicia looked at him blankly, looked at the carpet, looked at him again, and after a long
moment of stupefied confrontation, she calmed down. She smiled and took her husband's
hand in hers, caressing it tremblingly.

Among her most stubborn hallucinations, there was an anthropoid, leaning on the carpet
on his fingers, whose eyes were fixed on her.

The doctors returned to no avail. There was before them a life that was ending, bleeding
day by day, hour by hour, without knowing absolutely how. In the last consultation,
Alicia lay in a stupor while they pulsed her, passing her inert wrist from one to the other.
They watched her for a long time in silence and continued to the dining room.

"Pst..." his doctor shrugged his shoulders discouraged. It is a serious case... there is little
to do...

-That's all I was missing! -Jordan snorted. And he drummed sharply on the table.

Alicia gradually faded into her delirium of anemia, which worsened in the afternoon, but
always subsided in the first few hours. During the day her illness did not progress, but
every morning she woke up livid, almost in syncope. It seemed that only at night his life
left him on new wings of blood. When I woke up I always had the feeling of being
collapsed in bed with a million kilos on me. From the third day this sinking did not
abandon her anymore. I could barely move my head. He didn't want anyone to touch his
bed, not even to fix his pillow. His twilight terrors advanced in the form of monsters that
crawled to the bed and climbed with difficulty up the bedspread.

He then lost consciousness. The final two days he raved incessantly in a low voice. The
lights remained on mournfully in the bedroom and living room. In the agonizing silence
of the house, nothing could be heard except the monotonous delirium that came from the
bed, and the muffled murmur of Jordan's eternal footsteps.
Alicia died, finally. The maid, who later came in to undo the bed, now alone, looked at
the pillow for a while in surprise.

-Mister! -he called to Jordán in a low voice-. There are stains on the pillow that look like
blood.

Jordan approached quickly And bent in turn. Indeed, on the cover, on both sides of the
gap left by Alicia's head, you could see small dark spots.

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

"Hold it up to the light," Jordan told him.

The servant picked it up, but immediately dropped it, and stood looking at it, livid and
trembling. Without knowing why, Jordan felt his hair stand on end.

-What's up? -he murmured with a hoarse voice.

"It's very heavy," the maid said, still trembling.

Jordan lifted him up; It was extraordinarily heavy. They went out with him, and on the
dining room table Jordan cut the cover and wrapper with one cut. The upper feathers
flew, and the servant gave a cry of horror with her mouth open, bringing her clenched
hands to her shoulders. At the bottom, among the feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs,
there was a monstrous animal, a living, slimy ball. He was so swollen that his mouth was
barely visible.

Night after night, since Alicia had fallen into bed, he had stealthily applied his mouth - his
trunk, rather - to her temples, sucking her blood. The sting was almost imperceptible. The
daily removal of the pillow had undoubtedly impeded its development, but since the
young woman could not move, the suction was dizzying. In five days, in five nights, he
had emptied Alicia.

These bird parasites, tiny in the usual environment, reach enormous proportions under
certain conditions. Human blood seems to be particularly favorable to them, and it is not
uncommon to find them on feather pillows.
 ANALYSIS OF THE WORK

Number of paragraphs: 31

Cover title: The Feather Pillow

Narrative genre

Subgenre: Gothic story

Life and work of the author:

Horacio Quiroga

He was born on December 31, 1978, in Uruguay. Short story writer,

playwright and poet, he was a master of the Latin American story of vivid
naturalistic and modernist prose. His short stories, which often portray his
nature as the enemy of human beings under fearful and horrific traits,
earned him comparisons by the Americans Edgar Allan Poe.

Quiroga's life, marked by tragedy, hunting accidents and suicide, ended

by his own decision, when he had to drink a glass of cyanide in the
clinical hospital of the city of Buenos Aires at the age of 58, it was
understandable. who suffered from gastric cancer.

Among his most notable stories are the following:

- Tale of love, madness and death.
- jungle tales
- Anaconda.1

Time in which the work is developed

1
http://antologiadecuentosdeldoc.blogspot.com/2008/03/esse-est-percipi.html
It takes place in July 1907 in a house in Buenos Aires. It is an ancient
time where traditions were different from today.

Author's style
It has a narrative style.

Internal title
The feather pillow

Language Level
Worship
Examples:
“Their honeymoon was one long chill. Blonde, angelic and shy, her
husband's tough character chilled her dreamed-of girlfriend's
childishness.”

“Inside, the icy shine of the stucco, without the slightest scratch on the
high walls, affirmed that sensation of unpleasant cold.”

“The carpet drowned out his steps. At times he entered the bedroom and
continued his silent movement along the bed, looking at his wife every
time he walked in her direction.

Time spent on work

Linear

Brief review of the characters (main, secondary or others)

Alicia: is a young, blonde, angelic woman who is deeply in love with her
husband to the point of living alone in a large mansion far from the world
she had dreamed of.
Jordan: He is Alicia's husband, he is a young man, but although he was
deeply in love with her, he was not able to express it due to his rigidity.

The servant: she is the one who helps Jordán with Alice and appears for
the final outcome of the play.

The doctor: the one who attended to young Alicia, while she was in bed.

Main characters

- Alice and Jordan

Secondary:

- The maid
- The doctor
- The monster

Literary figures

Metaphor (found on the first page in the first paragraph)

“Their honeymoon was a long chill”

Epithet (On the first page in the 5th paragraph):

“That strange nest of love”

Hyperbole ( Found on the first page in the 6th paragraph)

“Redoubling the cry at the slightest attempt at a caress”
“The footsteps echoed throughout the house.”

Environment reflected in the work

Physical and social
Central theme of the work and determines the relationship.
Determine the relationship of the title and the developed topic

Theme: Love and death.

The author tells a scary story that reflects the anguish of a lover who sees
his wife slowly lose without being able to do anything and without being
able to express how much he loves her. The author makes an ending in
the story with the presence of a “bug.”

Author's intention
It was to let us know what happens due to parasites in the bird feathers of
the pillow and that enters human blood.

Summary of the work

Alicia and Jordán had gotten married and had been on their honeymoon.
The husband was silent and very serious and that is why they lived
silently. Alicia suffered from the flu and had to stay in bed. But one day
Alicia's illness relapses and her husband calls a doctor who begins to
treat her for a strange anemia that worsens at night. Jordán is by her side
day and night with the light on, but in a few days Alicia gets worse, she
can no longer get up and begins to suffer hallucinations of strange beings
that climb into her bed. More doctors come to try to solve the problem, but
without obtaining any improvement.

Finally Alicia dies and then the husband and his servant lift up the pillow
they use and which had a strange shape. When they do so, they see that
despite being extremely heavy and opening it, they find among the
feathers of the pillow a mysterious and disgusting being that had swollen
from drinking the blood of the woman, who had bled to death.
Synthesis of the work
It is the story of a young couple made up of Alicia and Jordán, both were
in love, they lived in a chilling and majestic house