A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is often regarded as a prime example of magical realism, a genre that blends elements of the supernatural with ordinary reality. Marquez writes about a man with wings, and a girl turned into a tarantula in his typical magically realistic narrative and satirizes the fickleness of Faith and humanity in his story. First published in 1955, it is a part of his collection of short stories called “Leaf Storm and Other Stories.”
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings | Summary
The story starts with Pelayo, who, while killing crabs during a rainstorm that has lasted days, notices a very old man lying in his courtyard. He is homeless and disoriented, speaks an unintelligible language, and has very large wings. The man, dressed like a “ragpicker” and apparently senile, was bald and had few teeth. With the help of a neighbor, Pelayo and his wife Elisenda conclude that the man is an angel who has come to take their sick child. The neighbor tells them to club the man to death, but the couple takes pity on him after their child recovers.
The old man is kept in a chicken coop with the hens; he attracts a number of visitors who are curious about him and throws him morsels of food like he weren’t a divine creature but a circus animal. Father Gonzaga concludes that he is not an angel since he is “too human,” shabby, and cannot speak Latin. Coming out of the coop, he warned the visitors of the dangers of being ingenuous and decided to consult with the Bishop. The people, however, did not heed his advice. Soon a vast number of people flocked to the coop, and Elisenda began charging the people to see the ‘angel’. People came to him for healing and miracles; a woman who had been counting her heartbeats since her birth but could not count anymore, a man who was apparently disturbed by the noise of the stars. Pelayo and Elisenda were largely happy about the money they were making. The man, however, had no part in “his own act”. He ignores the people when they throw stones at him or pluck his feathers to make him stand up. He, however, becomes very enraged when the visitors burn his side to see if he is still alive since he has been motionless for many hours.
Father Gonzaga tries to keep the crowds away however much he can, while he awaits the opinion of the Church. But the letter he received from Rome showed no urgency or alarm. However, when a traveling freak show arrives in the village, people soon begin to disperse. They are fascinated by the fate of the poor girl who was turned into a giant tarantula spider for disobeying her parents. The people soon forget the old man, who has only caused a few semi-miracles that were largely pointless. The tarantula spider with the head of a woman became extremely popular.
The couple, Pelayo and Elisenda, have meanwhile grown quite rich; Pelayo quits his job as bailiff and builds a large house, while Elisenda buys shoes and dresses of the finest quality. Their son also grows older. The couple does not pay any special attention to the old man and lets their child go into the coop. The child and the man come down with chicken pox at the same time, and the doctor is amazed that the man’s wings are so human and ordinarily attached to his body that he wonders “why other men” didn’t “have them too”. The old man continues living in the coop, and when it collapses, they move him into an adjacent shed. However, he often enters the house and roams around in the rooms, much to Elisenda’s annoyance. He had grown very old and kept bumping into things while Elisenda, in her annoyance, yelled that it was awful “living in a hell full of angels”. His eyes had grown foggy, and he only had the last of his feathers left. The couple was convinced that he was soon going to die.
Just when the couple is convinced that the old man will die soon, he begins to regain his strength, albeit in private. His wings grow out, and he begins singing sailors’ songs to himself. Elisenda watches him disappear over the horizon one day as he spreads his wings and flies away.
A Very Large Man with Enormous Wings | Analysis
At the very outset of the story, one realizes that Marquez sets the backdrop of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings against a highly religious coastal town, much like he does in his novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The setting is realistic; it is drab and mundane and has a strong sense of decay and death with the dying crabs and the sick child. Marquez presents the fantastical amidst the mundane.
The story is written in Marquez’s typical magic-realistic narrative but satirizes the Church and its men throughout the story. In the beginning, when the old man is found, he is immediately seen as an angel who has come to take Pelayo and Elisenda’s sick child away. The story also vividly talks about the kind of superstitions and beliefs people held when they flocked to the old man to cure or heal themselves, expecting him to perform miracles.
Marquez takes a dig at the Church through Father Gonzaga’s letter to Rome. The Church was in no particular hurry to deem the man an angel. Their conclusion that the man may just be a stranded Norwegian sailor makes them sound absurd and literal, with no particular wisdom to boast of.
Through Pelayo and Elisenda, Marquez also explores human nature and its ability to be kind and cruel. Initially, kind to the forlorn man, they extract income from the many people believing in the old man’s miracles and lose any particular affection they held for him. Marquez hints at the general narrow-mindedness of humankind when he critiques people through his story who never truly understand their purpose in life; the old man symbolizes the ‘other’ or the unknown whose presence disrupts the everydayness of the townspeople. Religion in this town is not a moral framework but only a hollow set of rules. At no point is the ‘angel’ treated with due reverence because it does not match their ideas of an ideal angel. Marquez thus illustrates that genuine faith among humans is easily perverted and degraded.
The old man even becomes a source of income for Pelayo and his wife, which might represent the Church’s money-making endeavors in the name of Faith. Indeed, when the spectacle does come to an end, it is not because the townspeople have developed a conscience but rather, because of another spectacle—the spider woman. The old man thus becomes redundant, having only performed a few pointless miracles. This ‘other’, the angel, thus turns out to be the most virtuous character in the story since he never retaliates against his mistreatment. In his patience, he gains the strength to finally fly away at the end of the story.
A Very Large Man with Enormous Wings | Character Sketch
The ‘angel’
The angel is an old and seemingly senile man who is discovered by Pelayo in his courtyard and is later kept by the couple in the chicken coop. The angel never harms anyone or retaliates against his mistreatment by the townspeople, who treat him like a circus animal instead of a divine being because he doesn’t match their idealistic notion of an angel. Once the townspeople are bored of him, he lives in a sorry state for years and is even taken advantage of by the couple for moneymaking. However, it is his patience that bears fruit in the end, and he regains the strength to fly away. He represents the fantastical ‘other’ in the town, where decay and drudgery are the norm and religion is a hollow set of morals.
Pelayo and Elisenda
Pelayo and Elisenda are the couple who house the old man. Elisenda comes up with the idea of charging people to see the angel and finds him a great nuisance, saying she is “living in a hell full of angels”. Towards the end of the story, however, she watches slightly regretfully as the angel flies away after gaining strength. She is shallow and never cares about the well-being of the angel.
Father Gonzaga
Father Gonzaga is Marquez’s prime critique of the Church; while he reviews his catechism, he is anything but kind to the angel. He warns the townspeople not to believe that the old man is an angel and is more concerned about following procedure by sending a letter to the Bishop. When the attention of the angel dies down, he is relieved that he does not have to think about the angel anymore at all. While he should be charitable and empathetic as a member of the Church, he seems to be glad when the responsibility is taken off him.
Literary Devices
- Personification: The entire first paragraph of the story has multiple examples of personification. Marquez writes, “The world has 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 world, the beach, etc. have been personified.
- Symbol: The symbol of wings is central to the story. The wings distinguish him from being just an old, forlorn man. Marquez seems to hint at the fact that miracles are not completely out of the ordinary; they are hardly idealistic but rather, emerge out of everydayness. The old man’s wings are hardly angelic, but they are so human and natural that the doctor who came to examine him wondered why other men didn’t have them.
- Simile: Some instances of simile in the text are as follows: “…hung everywhere like a ghost”, “March nights glimmered like powdered light”, etc.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel-winning voice of Latin America, has always been remembered for his brilliance with magical realism to satirize society and bring out its norms in their true light, and A Very Old Man with Large Wings is no exception. Using fantastical elements like a man with wings and a girl with a spider body, Marquez unearths the deep infatuation of humankind with spectacle and how easy it is to lose empathy and kindness in a world with hollow morals. He critiques the church, which is supposed to uphold people’s values through a legitimate system, but that too remains a set of codes and rules unfollowed.
