The Feather Pillow

Her honeymoon was one long shudder. Fair, angelic and timid, she found that her husband's hard character froze the childish dreams she had brought to marriage. She loved him very much, all the same, though sometimes with a slight shiver when, walking home together at night, she glanced up at the tall figure of Jordán, who had not spoken for an hour. He, for his part, loved her profoundly, without letting it show.

For three months — they had married in April — they lived a peculiar happiness. No doubt she would have wished for less severity in that rigid heaven of love, for a more open and careless 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 courtyard — friezes, columns, marble statues — gave the autumnal impression of an enchanted palace. Inside, the glacial shine of the stucco, without the slightest scratch on the high walls, confirmed that sensation of unwelcoming cold. Crossing from one room to the next, footsteps echoed through the whole house, as if long abandonment had made it sensitive to every sound.

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

It was not surprising that she grew thin. She had a slight attack of influenza that dragged on insidiously for days and days; Alicia never quite recovered. At last, one afternoon, she was able to go out into the garden on his arm. She looked indifferently from side to side. Suddenly Jordán, with deep tenderness, passed his hand over her hair — and Alicia burst instantly into sobs and threw her arms round his neck. She wept out all her silent terror for a long time, weeping harder at the least attempt at a caress. Then the sobs slowed, and still 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 the greatest care and ordered complete rest and calm. 'I don't know,' he told Jordán at the street door, his voice still low. 'She has a great weakness that I can't explain, and no vomiting, nothing… If she wakes tomorrow as she is today, call me at once.'

The next day Alicia was worse. There was a consultation. They found an anaemia of the most acute kind, completely inexplicable. Alicia had no more fainting fits, but she was visibly going towards death. All day the bedroom stood with its lights on and in total silence; hours passed without the slightest sound. Alicia dozed. Jordán lived almost entirely in the drawing-room, also with every light burning, pacing ceaselessly from one end to the other with tireless obstinacy. The carpet swallowed his footsteps. Now and then he went into the bedroom and continued his mute pacing along the length of the bed, looking at his wife each time he walked towards her.

Soon Alicia began to have hallucinations — confused and floating at first, and then descending to the level of the floor. The young woman, her eyes enormously open, did nothing but stare at the carpet on either side of the bedhead. One night she suddenly stared fixedly. After a moment she opened her mouth to scream, and her nose and lips were pearled with sweat. 'Jordán! Jordán!' she cried, rigid with terror, never taking her eyes from the carpet. Jordán ran to the bedroom, and at the sight of him Alicia gave 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 moment of stupefied confrontation she grew calm. She smiled and took her husband's hand between hers, stroking it, trembling.

Among her most persistent hallucinations there was an ape-like creature, resting its fingers on the carpet, with its eyes fixed on her.

The doctors came back, uselessly. There before them was a life ending, bleeding away day by day, hour by hour, and nobody knew how. At the last consultation Alicia lay in a stupor while they took her pulse, passing the lifeless wrist from one to another. They watched her a long time in silence and went on into the dining-room. 'Hm…' 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 a half-delirium of anaemia, worse in the evenings but always easing in the first hours of the day. By day her illness made no progress, but every morning she woke livid, almost in a faint. It seemed that only at night did her life go out of her in fresh waves of blood. Each time she woke she had the feeling of lying crushed into the bed with a million kilos on top of her.

From the third day this sinking never left her. She could hardly move her head. She would not let them touch the bed, nor even straighten her pillow. Her twilight terrors advanced in the shape of monsters that crawled to the bed and climbed laboriously up the counterpane.

Then she lost consciousness. For the last two days she raved without ceasing in a low voice. The lights stayed funereally lit in the bedroom and the drawing-room. In the dying silence of the house nothing could be heard but the monotonous delirium from the bed and the muffled sound of Jordán's eternal footsteps.

She died, at last. The servant who came in afterwards to strip the bed, alone now, looked for a moment in surprise at the pillow. 'Sir!' she called to Jordán in a low voice. 'There are marks on the pillow that look like blood.' Jordán came quickly and bent over it in his turn. Indeed, on the pillowcase, on both sides of the hollow that Alicia's head had left, there were small dark spots. 'They look like bites,' the servant murmured after a moment of motionless observation. 'Hold it up to the light,' Jordán said. The servant lifted it — and let it fall at once, 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 servant got out, still trembling.

Jordán lifted it; it was extraordinarily heavy. They carried it out, and on the dining-room table Jordán cut open the case and the ticking with one stroke. The upper feathers flew up, and the servant gave a scream of horror with her whole mouth open, her hands clenched at her hair: at the bottom, among the feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs, was a monstrous animal, a living, viscous ball. It was so swollen that its mouth could scarcely be made out.

Night after night, from the time Alicia took to her bed, it had stealthily applied its mouth — its proboscis, rather — to her temples, sucking her blood. The bite was almost imperceptible. The daily shaking of the pillow had no doubt hindered its growth at first; but from the moment the young woman could no longer move, the sucking became vertiginous. In five days, in five nights, it had emptied Alicia.

These parasites of birds, tiny in their usual surroundings, can under certain conditions reach enormous proportions. Human blood seems to be particularly favourable to them, and it is not unusual to find them in feather pillows.