A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a popular Colombian novelist, short–story writer and journalist. He was born on March 6, 1928 in a small village in Colombia.. His first story ‘The Third Resignation’ was published in 1946. His first novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ won him international acclaim. Garcia Marquez is known for popularizing a genre called ‘Magical realism’. It is a term used to describe the prose fiction, which has a distinctive blend of fantasy and realism. It is marked by its imaginative content, vivid effects and lingering mystery.

‘A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings’ is perhaps the finest example of Garcia Marquez’s use of magical realism, combining the homely details of Pelayo and Elisenda’s life with fantastic elements such as a flying man and a spider woman to create a tone of equal parts, local-colour story and fairy tale.

This story is set in a unnamed coastal village, at an unspecified time in the past. The story is basically a comment on humanity, and the human need to interpret life’s events.It concerns the life of an ordinary couple, Pelayo and Elisenda, which is transformed by a brief extraordinary occurring. The story ends on a note of uncertainty as many important facts are left unresolved.

The story begins with odd, quasi – allegorical references to time,

‘On the third day of rain...’ 

Statements such as, ‘The world had been sad such Tuesday’ conflate time, the weather and human emotion in a way that seems mythical and magical. The swarms of crabs that must be killed, the darkness at noon – these strange events seem to foreshadow the eerie arrival of the outworldly visitor, the Angel.

One day, while killing the crabs, and disposing off their carcasses, Pelayo discovers a homeless, disoriented old man in his courtyard, who happens to have very large wings. A woman from neighborhood declares him as an angel, who was perhaps coming for the soul of their sick child, but the rainstorm spoiled his plans. She advises Pelayo and Elisenda to kill him, but they do not have the heart to do so. They lock him in the chicken coop for the night. As their child recovers from the fever, the two decide to put the Angel on a raft with three days supplies.

‘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.’

The next morning, the whole neighborhood gathers before the Angel as though he were a great attraction. He is a sanction, yes, but also very ordinary. The old man is far too human to match the image of angels who are perfect, powerful, and majestic and immortal. The Angel is described not only in human, earthly terms, but in terms of extreme weakness and poverty. ‘He was dressed like a rag picker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth.’

Garcia Marquez has used the symbol of ‘wings’ ironically, suggesting that the old man is both natural and supernatural simultaneously, having the wings like a heavenly angel but with all the frailties of an earthly creature.

‘His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked were forever entangled in the mud.’

This image in itself captures the balance of sublimity and crudity that dominates the story. He is a surreal coupling of the holy and the profane, and this trend continues throughout the story.

‘His pitiful condition of a drenched great grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had.’

Other motifs, such as the Angel’s speech, cement this surreal coupling of ‘magic’ & ’realism’. The Angel speaks ‘in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice’, though no one understands him. He may well be speaking the language of God, but to human ears it sounds crude. No one has the curiosity to learn the dialect and understand the Angel’s own perspective, rather they are happy to interpret events and write the Angel off. Here Marquez mocks the human nature, who never seem to understand the greater significance of life.

Marquez also marks the Catholic Church through Father Gonzago and his superiors in Rome. Father Gonzago believes dogmatically that if the Angel were a heavenly creature, he would speak the official language of the Catholic church – Latin and when he doesn’t, Father assumes that he must be an importer. ‘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 find verdict from the highest courts.’

The crowd, meanwhile, treats the Angel not like a supernatural creature, but like a ‘circus animal’. They try to provoke him by tossing him food and speculate about what should be done with him. Some feel that he should be ‘named mayor of the world’; others think “that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars.’ They attempt to assert ownership, even violently, as ‘when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers.’

People in general behave as though the Angel – And the other miraculous oddities of the world owe them something. Invalids come to be healed, even of illusionary diseases (such as the women counting her heartbeats, or ‘a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him.’) It is not enough to be an angel; you have to be a healing angel who benefits the absurd and ignorant humans. Even then, the Angel is treated worse than an animal. He’s like a cow, kept in a pen and milked for money and miracles.

Along these lines, the arrival of the spider woman is a kind of a literary joke. The spider–woman, unlike the Angel, invites clear, moralistic interpretation. The audience, in turn, rewards her with their business as ‘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.’

The spider woman is symbolic of the fickleness with which many self- interested people approach their own faith.

After the angel has made their fortune, Pelayo & Elisenda neglect him pointedly and horribly. Marquez has further blurred the distinction between natural and supernatural by specifying that when Pelayo & Elisenda build their mansion, they secure it from crabs and angels alike, thus treating both as equal nuisances. They leave in the pen, stinking and ill, until the structure collapses.

When the old man become free to roam about the house, Elisenda finds his presence so troublesome that she feels she is living in a “hell full of angels.” It is for this reason that she heaves a sigh of relief when she witnesses the old man’s departure, watching silently from the kitchen window as he finally flies away flapping his newly grown wing.

‘Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him…’ for she thinks he will have a better life away from them. Again, Marquez juxtaposes the miracle of a flying being with the mundane details of Elisenda’s superficial relief as she chops onions. The Angel flies off as ‘an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea’ vanishing from reality, becoming purely imagined and remembered, which, as a piece of the divine, and as a piece of Marquez’s own imagination, is exactly where he belongs.

One of the important aspects of the story ‘A very old man with Enormous wings’ is the sense of ambiguity or uncertainty that is present throughout the story. Marguez has used a constantly changing narrative voice to create this sense of ambiguity. This story is in the form of satire that mocks both the Catholic Church and human nature in general. Some examples of literary devices are given below:

Simile:           “…dressed like a ragpicker”

“…more like a huge decrepit hen”

Metaphor:     “In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble”

“his pitiful condition of a drenched great- grandfather”

Hyperbole:   “disorder that made the earth tremble”

“her spine all twisted”

Imaging:       “…dressed like a ragpicker”

“…more like a huge decrepit hen”

This story has elements of fact and fantasy. By combining factual and imaginative descriptions, and treating them with equal credibility, the author has suggested that both ‘ways of knowing’ are valid and necessary to achieve a balanced understanding. Magic seems to lie just beneath the surface of the story, waiting to break through, almost beyond the narrator’s control.