Cicadas

Cicadas enter the narrative at the very threshold of the narrator’s vacation: a dark insect on a white pillow turns an uneasy first night into a small, decisive encounter. The narrator’s uncertain identification, physical disgust, and quick attempt to put the creature outside make it both a living presence and the marker of her arrival in an unfamiliar place.

Description and Identification

The insect is three or four centimeters long, dark brown, motionless, and equipped with membranous wings. The narrator initially thinks it is a cicada, while allowing that its abdomen may have burst on the pillow. When she touches it with the hem of her bathrobe, it moves and then becomes still again; the observation confirms that it is alive but does not settle the identification beyond her first guess.

The narrator associates cicadas with a particular bodily and ecological character. She reflects that females lack elastic membranes in the abdomen, do not sing, and are mute, and that cicadas puncture olive trees and make sap drip from mountain ash. These details turn the brief sighting into more than a visual description: the insect’s silence and its capacity to wound trees accompany the narrator’s own recoil from it.

The First-Night Encounter

The insect appears while the narrator is preparing to sleep in an unfamiliar bedroom. She has opened the windows and turned off the lights; intermittent lighthouse beams cross the room, and she lies in her bathrobe with wet hair, waiting for daylight. In the darkness, she has already reflected that unfamiliar objects seem undefined and easily exaggerated. The cold, tissue-paper-like touch on the pillow leads her to switch on the light and discover the insect against the bright-white pillowcase.

Disgust dictates the encounter’s ending. The narrator cautiously lifts the pillow, carries it to a window, and throws the insect outside. She does not investigate further or remain with it; the creature is removed as soon as its presence becomes visible. The scene moves from uncertain sensation to brief recognition and then expulsion.

Narrative Significance

The narrator explicitly makes the disposal the beginning of her vacation. That framing gives an ordinary insect a structural role: it is the first distinct disturbance of the trip, arriving amid darkness, fatigue, and the disorientation of an unknown room. The contrast between the insect’s stillness and sudden movement also sharpens the scene’s uncertainty without making the encounter supernatural; the narrator’s tentative identification remains a matter of perception.

The cicada’s silence is a pointed detail in an otherwise vividly sensory passage. The narrator hears distant sounds outside, but the insect itself neither sings nor remains entirely inert: it moves when touched, then falls quiet. The scene thus begins the vacation not with a welcome or a settled view of the place, but with the narrator noticing, recoiling from, and removing a small living thing.