A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translated by Gregory Rabassa
On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his
drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all
night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky
were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like
powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that
when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see
what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see
that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous
efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.
Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the
sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute
stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very
few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of
grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in
the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their
surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an
incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience
of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship
wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and
death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.
“He’s an angel,” she told them. “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old
that the rain knocked him down.”
On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo’s house.
Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive
survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over
him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff’s club, and before going to bed he dragged him
out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night,
when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child
woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the
angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas.
But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole
neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence,
tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a
circus animal.
Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o’clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less
frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures
concerning the captive’s future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of
the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in
order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth
a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming
a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant
and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more
like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings
in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien
to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his
dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The
parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language
of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human:
he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his
main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the
proud dignity of angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious
against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use
of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element
in determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition
of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his
primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the
highest courts.
His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a
few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed
bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted
from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five
cents admission to see the angel.
The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the
crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel
but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a
poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a
Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got
up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In
the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with
fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims
waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.
The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable
in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had
been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the
wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down,
just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out
whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but
eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days,
when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the
cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones
at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in
arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been
motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his
hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought
on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world.
Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were
careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero
taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.
Father Gonzaga held back the crowd’s frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting
the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of
urgency. They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection
with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian
with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event
had not put and end to the priest’s tribulations.
It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the
town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her
parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people
were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and
down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a
ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish
shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still
practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents’ house to go to a dance, and while she was coming
back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the
sky in two and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider.
Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A
spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat
without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few
miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover
his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery,
and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like
mocking fun, had already ruined the angel’s reputation when the woman who had been changed into a
spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia
and Pelayo’s courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and
crabs walked through the bedrooms.
The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story
mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn’t get in during the winter,
and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren
close to town and gave up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high
heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in
those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn’t receive any attention. If they washed it
down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel
but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new
house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too
close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before
they child got his second teeth he’d gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling
apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most
ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the
chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn’t resist the temptation to
listen to the angel’s heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his
kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic
of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn’t understand
why other men didn’t have them too.
When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of
the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They
would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He
seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he’d be duplicated, that
he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted
that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also
become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his
last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the
shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the
tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they
thought he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to
do with dead angels.
And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He
remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see
him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the
feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have
known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no
one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was
cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew
into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They
were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of
knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn’t get a grip on
the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when
she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a
senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on
watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance
in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.
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