El almohadón de pluma
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El almohadón de pluma · Español, Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, 1917
LeerHoracio Quiroga · 1907
El almohadón de pluma
Una joven recién casada palidece en una casa fría y silenciosa, y sus médicos no saben decir por qué.
Alicia se casa con Jordán y se muda a una casa blanca y silenciosa donde la severidad de él deja poco espacio a la ternura. Luego enferma, con síntomas corrientes y sin una causa que los médicos sepan nombrar. En pocas páginas, Horacio Quiroga hace convivir en una misma escena el realismo doméstico y el horror.
- Primera publicación
- 1907
- Forma literaria
- Cuento
- Idioma original
- español
- Idiomas de los textos publicados
- español · vietnamita
- Tiempo de lectura
- ≈ 5 min de lectura
Por qué importa
Quiroga’s story begins like a domestic drama: a marriage, a couple, a house. Alicia has married Jordán, whose hard character leaves little room for affection, and the white, silent house presses on her. Then illness arrives, with ordinary symptoms and no cause. The doctor admits he cannot account for her weakness. The story is short and tightly built, and it still unsettles because it never quite decides whether it belongs to medicine or to nightmare. It is one of the best-known pieces in Quiroga’s collection Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (1917), a title that tells you what the book offers: love, madness and death.
Quiroga called Edgar Allan Poe his “first and principal teacher”, and the debt shows in his interest in mental illness and hallucinatory states. Yet he also wrote the Decálogo del perfecto cuentista, a set of rules for young writers that urges economy, precision and few adjectives, and stresses the importance of endings. This story obeys that lesson: clues are laid through the text like pieces of a detective puzzle, and the close arrives with an explanation in a scientific voice that may not fully convince, which is part of the effect. The 1917 collection was a success with readers and critics and is credited with establishing Quiroga as a master of the Latin American short story.
Read the opening pages slowly, because Quiroga hides his hints there: the chill of the house, the husband’s manner, the first small symptoms. Notice that the language of illness is plain and clinical while the details around it are not. Then read the husband and the cause of Alicia’s decline side by side; the Spanish Wikipedia article suggests they work as parallel figures, with Alicia as the victim of both. The story is short enough to read twice, once for the plot and once for the clues. Later writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar are named as having been influenced by Quiroga.
Introducción redactada para LitMundi con ayuda de IA y contrastada con las fuentes que se indican abajo.
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