This year in Spanish class we read El Almohadón de Plumas a short story by
Horacio Quiroga. This is the second story I have read by Quiroga, the first
being A la Deriva in last year’s
Spanish class. Having studied both stories in class, I have seen the
similarities of Quiroga’s writing style. Quiroga’s life was plagued with
tragedy and death – by illness, murder, and suicide, including his own. Death
is a major theme in his works, and it is always unexpected and unexplained. Bad
marriages and illnesses are also prominent themes in both his life and his
stories. Mrs. Lawless taught us about Quiroga’s life and the themes and styles
of his stories before we read them, and that really helped me to recognize the
important themes and more importantly why they were in there. Normally, you
read a book and then afterwards you might look up the author’s life. Already
knowing about Quiroga’s life, I noticed and understood why he wrote what and
how he did. (Similarity – In Lit, we learnt about Zora Neale Hurston after
reading Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Knowing that Hurston was in part writing about her life experiences, I was able
to recognize the similarities and understand the novel better.) Quiroga wrote a
Decalogue, the Ten Commandments of the Perfect Storyteller. This was a list of
rules that authors should follow to write a good story, like the Ten Commandments of being a good Jew or Christian (The first commandment is to believe in the master of writing as you would God). Having this list before
I read his stories prepared me to look for these things to see if Quiroga
followed his own rules, just as the list of themes allowed me to see which ones
appeared.
In El Almohadón de Plumas (The
Feather Pillow), the bad marriage of a newlywed couple leads to the
sickness and death of the wife. The beginning of the story focuses on the
marital problems of the couple, the husband is distant and cold and cannot
express his feelings, and the wife is forced to give up her dreams and resign
to her sad life. Quiroga himself had marital problems, his first wife committed
suicide and his second wife took their child and left him. So it is evident why
Quiroga would write about terrible marriages. The wife in the story becomes
ill, deathly ill, and the doctor cannot figure out why. Two of Quiroga’s
brothers died of Typhoid Fever, and he himself got cancer, which explains why
his novels always involve an illness (In “A
La Deriva” the man was poisoned by a snake). The wife in the story slowly
dies, but it is not until after her death that it is discovered what was wrong
with her. It turns out that there was an insect inside her pillow that was
sucking her blood from her head every night as she lay in bed. And that is
where the unexpected but never supernatural death occurs. Quiroga experienced
many deaths in his life, his stepfather killed himself in front of Quiroga,
Quiroga accidently killed his friend, and most unexpected was that he killed
himself when he found out he had cancer. As the master of Latin American horror
and suspense, much like Poe is in North America, Quiroga never ceases to
surprise and terrify. The idea of a disgustingly swollen spider hiding inside
your pillow sucking your blood is horrifying, and that is the exact idea that
Quiroga leaves you with. The last line explains that these parasites can reach
enormous proportions, prefer human blood, and are commonly found in feather
pillows. It makes your spine crawl.
One of the Delalogue’s rules is in
the importance of the first and last sentences. The first sentence of The Feather Pillow describes the
conflicting feelings of the honeymoon, which gave the wife hot and cold
shivers. It sets the stage for what is to come, the failing marriage. The last
line of the story leaves the reader with a terrifying, paranoid, and disgusted
feeling, afraid of a pillow. In A La
Deriva, the first line starts the story suddenly – the man steps on
something and receives a bite on the foot. It ends just as suddenly – he stops
breathing. Another one of the commandments was to use a minimal amount of
adjectives to describe the situation, and not more. A La Deriva did that in describing the man’s foot, saying it was
swollen like a sausage. In a simple phrase Quiroga paints a picture of the effects
of the poison, without any superfluous words. In The Feather Pillow the house is described as a palace, but empty. It
takes a few sentences, but it thoroughly describes the appearance and feelings
of the honeymoon cottage. I think that A
La Deriva follows the commandments more closely. It uses fewer words, but
still gets the point across, and the beginning and ending of the story are more
eventful, sudden, and unexpected.
The parasite in The Feather Pillow is a symbol for the
marriage. It is cloaked in the harmless pillow, but it is secretly sucking the life
out of the wife, as literally as the marriage is sucking her life figuratively.
The parasite sucks her blood and the marriage sucks her dreams, and both are
killing her, physically and emotionally.
It was suggested that the
husband might also be a symbol for the parasite, but I do not agree with that
entirely. The husband loved his wife, he just could not express it, and while
he was the reason the wife’s dreams were crushed, he didn’t kill her. I guess
the marriage and the husband are pretty much the same thing, but I guess I find
it harder to place the blame on the person than it is to place it on an
abstract concept of marriage. The husband and the marriage was not meant to
hurt the wife, but both did, just as the parasite did not suck her blood to
kill her, it sucked to feed itself, killing her was the unavoidable result. The
marriage did not mean to crush the wife’s dreams, it couldn’t help it, there
was no way it could be avoided, with the husband’s personality being what it was - duro, hard.
