The Feather Pillow

Their honeymoon was a long shivering chill. Blonde, angelic, and timid, the harsh character of her husband froze her dreamed-up bride’s childishness. She loved him a great deal, nonetheless, at times with a slight shudder when, returning together at night down the street, she cast a furtive glance at Jordán’s tall stature, mute for an hour. He, for his part, loved her deeply, without showing it.

For three months—they had been married in April—they lived a special bliss. Without a doubt she would have desired less severity in that rigid heaven of love, more expansive and unguarded tenderness; but the impassive countenance of her husband checked her at once.

The house in which they lived influenced their shudders not a little. The whiteness of the silent patio—friezes, columns, and marble statues—produced an autumnal impression of an enchanted palace. Inside, the glacial brightness of the stucco, without the slightest scratch on the high walls, affirmed that sensation of unpleasant cold. Upon crossing from one room to another, footsteps echoed throughout the house, as if a long abandonment had sensitized its resonance.

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

It is not unusual that she grew thin. She had a mild attack of influenza that dragged on insidiously day after day; Alicia never recovered. At last, one afternoon she was able to go out to the garden leaning on his arm. She looked indifferently to either side. Suddenly Jordán, with deep tenderness, passed his hand over her head, and Alicia immediately burst into sobs, throwing her arms around his neck. She wept at length all her silent terror, redoubling her crying at the slightest attempt at a caress. Then the sobs slowed down, and she remained a long while hidden in his neck, without moving or saying a word.

That was the last day Alicia was up. The next day she woke up fainting. Jordán’s doctor examined her with the utmost care, ordering absolute calm and rest.

“I don’t know,” he told Jordán at the street door, his voice still low. “She has a great weakness that I cannot explain, and no vomiting, nothing... If tomorrow she wakes up like today, call me at once.”

The next day Alicia was still worse. There was a consultation. An anemia of extremely rapid progression, completely inexplicable, was verified. Alicia had no more fainting spells, but she was visibly slipping away toward death. All day long the bedroom lights were on in complete silence. Hours went by without hearing the slightest noise. Alicia dozed. Jordán lived almost in the sitting room, also with all the lights on. He paced endlessly from one end to the other, with tireless obstinacy. The carpet muffled his footsteps. At intervals he entered the bedroom and resumed his mute pacing back and forth alongside the bed, looking at his wife every time he walked in her direction.

Soon Alicia began to have hallucinations, confusing and floating at first, which later descended to floor level. The young woman, with her eyes disproportionately wide, did nothing but look at the carpet on either side of the head of the bed. One night she suddenly stared fixedly. A short while later she opened her mouth to scream, and her nose and lips beaded with sweat.

“Jordán! Jordán!” she cried, rigid with terror, never taking her eyes off the carpet.

Jordán ran to the bedroom, and upon seeing 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 spell of stupefied confrontation, she calmed down. She smiled and took her husband’s hand in hers, stroking it trembling.

Among her most stubborn hallucinations was an anthropoid, resting on the carpet on its fingertips, that kept its eyes fixed on her.

The doctors returned uselessly. There before them was a life ending, bleeding to day by day, hour by hour, without knowing absolutely how. In the last consultation Alicia lay in a stupor while they felt her pulse, passing her inert wrist from one to another. They observed her for a long time in silence and went into the dining room.

“Pst...” her doctor shrugged, discouraged. “It’s a serious case... there is little to be done...”

“That’s all I needed!” Jordán snorted. And he drummed abruptly on the table.

Alicia faded away in an anemia subdelirium, aggravated in the afternoon, but which always remitted in the early hours. During the day her illness did not advance, but every morning she woke up livid, almost in a syncopal state. It seemed as if only at night her life slipped away in new waves of blood. Upon waking she always had the sensation of being collapsed in bed with a million kilos weighing on her. From the third day on, this sinking sensation never left her. She could barely move her head. She did not want them to touch her bed, nor even to fix her pillow. Her twilight terrors advanced in the form of monsters that dragged themselves to the bed and laboriously climbed up the quilt.

She lost consciousness thereafter. The final two days she deliriously muttered half-aloud without stopping. The lights continued to burn mournfully in the bedroom and the sitting room. In the agonizing silence of the house, nothing could be heard except the monotonous delirium coming from the bed, and the muffled murmur of Jordán’s eternal footsteps.

She died, at last. The maid, who entered afterward to make the bed, now alone, looked at the pillow for a while with curiosity.

“Sir,” she called to Jordán in a low voice. “On the pillow there are stains that look like blood.”

Jordán approached quickly and bent over in turn. Indeed, on the pillowcase, on both sides of the indentation that Alicia’s head had left, bloodstains were visible.

“They look like bites,” murmured the maid after a moment of motionless observation.

“Lift it to the light,” Jordán told her.

The maid lifted it, but immediately dropped it, and stood looking at it, livid and trembling. Without knowing why, Jordán felt his hair stand on end.

“What is it?” he murmured in a hoarse voice.

“It’s very heavy,” the maid articulated, not stopping to tremble.

Jordán lifted it; it was extraordinarily heavy. They went out with it, and on the dining room table Jordán cut the pillowcase and casing with a single slash. The upper feathers flew out, and the maid let out a scream of horror with her mouth wide open, bringing her clenched hands to her temples:—against the background, among the feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs, was a monstrous animal, a living and viscous ball. It was so swollen that its mouth was barely pronounced.

Night after night, ever since Alicia had taken to bed, it had stealthily applied its mouth—its proboscis, rather—to her temples, sucking her blood. The bite was almost imperceptible. The daily fluffing of the pillow had undoubtedly hindered its development, but since the young woman could no longer move, the suction was dizzying. In five days, in five nights, it had emptied Alicia.

These bird parasites, tiny in their usual environment, come to acquire enormous proportions under certain conditions. Human blood seems to be particularly favorable to them, and it is not uncommon to find them in feather pillows.