Cree en un maestro como en Dios mismo

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.