A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
by Gabriel GarciaMarquez
Translated byGregory Rabassa
On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs insidethe house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them intothe sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thoughtit 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 mudand rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was comingback to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to seewhat it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He hadto go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face downin the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldnt get up, impeded by his enormous wings. Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who wasputting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of thecourtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He wasdressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his baldskull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenchedgreat-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His hugebuzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. Theylooked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soonovercame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they daredspeak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strongsailors voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wingsand quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from someforeign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman whoknew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was onelook to show them their mistake. Hes an angel, she told them. He must have been coming for the child, butthe poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down. On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was heldcaptive in Pelayos house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, forwhom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestialconspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watchedover him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiffs club, andbefore going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with thehens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rainstopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterwardthe child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they feltmagnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water andprovisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But whenthey went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found thewhole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel,without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openingsin the wire as if he werent a supernatural creature but a circus animal. Father Gonzaga arrived before His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread withsuch rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of amarketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse themob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted fromsweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yardand charging five cents admission to see the angel. The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flyingacrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attentionto him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of asidereal 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 runout of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldnt sleep because the noise of thestars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things hehad done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midstof that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisendawere happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their roomswith money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reachedbeyond the horizon. The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his timetrying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heatof 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 thewisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But heturned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinentsbrought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel orbecause he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. Hisonly supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the firstdays, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferatedin his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defectiveparts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get himto rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded inarousing 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. Heawoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in hiseyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwindof chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be ofthis world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of ragebut of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because themajority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his easebut that of a cataclysm in repose. Father Gonzaga held back the crowds frivolity with formulas of maidservantinspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of thecaptive. But the mail from 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 changedinto a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her wasnot only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted toask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her upand down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was afrightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. Whatwas most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincereaffliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While stillpractically 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 nightwithout permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in two and through thecrack came the lightning bolt of brimstone thatchanged her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs thatcharitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full ofso much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat withouteven trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals.Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mentaldisorder, like the blind man who didnt recover his sight but grew three newteeth, or the paralytic who didnt get to walk but almost won the lottery, andthe leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, whichwere more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angels reputation when thewoman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. Thatwas how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayos courtyardwent back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days andcrabs walked through the bedrooms. The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved theybuilt a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so thatcrabs wouldnt get in during the winter, and with ironbars on the windows so that angels wouldnt get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbitwarren close to town and gave up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisendabought 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 chickencoop was the only thing that didnt receive any attention. If they washed itdown with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it wasnot in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that stillhung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one. Atfirst, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began tolose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got hissecond teeth hed gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires werefalling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the othermortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of adog who had no illusions. They both came down with thechicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldntresist the temptation to listen to the angels heart, and he found so muchwhistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemedimpossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logicof his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that hecouldnt understand why other men didnt have them too. When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain hadcaused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself abouthere and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroomwith a broom and a moment later find him in thekitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew tothink that hed be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through thehouse, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awfulliving in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarianeyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he hadleft were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket overhim and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and onlythen did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious withthe tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was oneof the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die andnot even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do withdead angels. And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with thefirst sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthestcorner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning ofDecember some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers ofa scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But hemust have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that noone should notice them, that no one should hear thesea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda wascutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come fromthe high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught theangel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernailsopened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking theshed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldnt geta grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sighof relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the lasthouses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senilevulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions andshe 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 onthe horizon of the sea.
