Hello and welcome to the newly rebranded Short Story Sundays! This week I’m going to be looking at a short story by Gabriel García Márquez, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.”

Our story starts with a married couple named Pelayo and Elisenda. Now, Pelayo and Elisenda have three problems: 1) they are extremely poor, 2) their house is infested with crabs after several days of rain, and 3) they have a sick child. So things are not really super great.

One day, while Elisenda is tending to their son, Pelayo is throwing out some crab corpses when he comes across something very strange in the courtyard. That strange thing turns out to be, well, a very old man with enormous wings. He seems to be having some trouble getting up because of said wings, and Pelayo and Elisenda can’t really communicate with him because he speaks a weird language they can’t understand. However, he kind of sounds like a sailor, so they figure that’s what he might be.

Because, as we all know, sailors are well known for their impressive wingspans.

Anyway, the couple decide to put him up in their chicken coop for now, then seek out an old lady in the neighborhood to get her perspective on the situation. The old lady tells them the old man is clearly an angel, here to take their ill child up to heaven with him. Naturally, she says, the solution to this problem is to just kill the angel.

Pelayo and Elisenda, naturally, think that this is a little extreme, and decide to just keep him around until they can figure out what to do. In the meantime, the kid actually recovers from his illness, so it seems like the old lady may have been wrong about the whole “taking the kid’s soul” thing.

The couple try to keep their guest a secret, but it’s a small town, and soon enough people hear about it and start crowding their house. This attracts the attention of the local priest, Father Gonzaga, who decides to take a look for himself to see if they have an angel on their hands. He goes to talk to the old man, but determines that he’s probably not an angel, since he doesn’t speak Latin. But he decides to send a letter off to the Vatican anyway, just to cover his bases.

In the meantime Elisenda decides that they should at least try to turn this situation to their advantage by charging people admission. This turns out to be a good idea, as people are still flocking to see the old man. Some are there trying to find cures for various afflictions, while others are mostly there to gawk and throw things at him, like food, and rocks. The throwing things largely comes to an end though when someone pokes him with a branding iron, causing the old man to start yelling at them in his strange language.

This scares the shit out of most of them, and the taunting more or less stops. Eventually, though, another curiosity shows up that attracts people’s attention away from the old man, in the form of a woman who was turned into a spider. The crowds thin out and things get a bit quieter from then.

The admission fees that the couple charged, however, has given them enough to build a new house. The years pass, and eventually the chicken coop collapses, meaning that the old man can’t be housed there anymore. This causes him to develop the rather disturbing tendency of popping up in random places inside their house. This won’t do, though, so they decide to put him up in the shed.

For a while it seems that the old man is taking a turn for the worse, to the point where Pelayo and Elisenda are worried that he might actually die. This worries them, not only because they’ve become kind of weirdly attached to him, but also because they have no idea what they’d do with a dead angel. This turns out to be a moot point, though, as he starts to get better.

More time passes, and the old man’s wings start to fill out a bit more, to the point that he can actually fly a little. Eventually he regains his strength, and flies towards the horizon as Elisenda watches from the kitchen window.

Now, to talk about the story, we need to talk about its rather interesting genre: magical realism. Magical realism is kind of like fantasy light: they generally involve stories rooted in reality, with a light touch of magical or supernatural elements to keep things interesting. They also tend to comment on various parts of the human condition. The roots of the genre are distinctly Latin American, but not all authors in the genre are.

The realistic elements of the story are, of course, the family’s struggles. Illness and poverty are things that people generally have to deal with in the real world. The magical element is, of course, the old man himself, who may or may not be an angel, but is clearly a supernatural being of some sort.

The themes of the story seem to be compassion vs cruelty, and how the way we treat those who are different or weaker than us determines our character. The crowds who come to see the old man torment him, at least until he shows that he’s not as weak as they think he is. Pelayo and Elisenda, on the other hand, do show the old man kindness, even if they are basically exploiting him. The fact that the old man seems willing to endure multiple indignities does seem to indicate compassion towards the family as well, since his staying with them does allow them a chance at a better life.

So basically the moral here seems to be that some people suck more than others. Also, you should read Gabriel García Márquez.

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