Complete summary of A Very Old Man
with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The story begins at Elisenda and Pelayo's house. Elisenda
and Pelayo are husband and wife. They live in a small house near the
courtyard. They have a newborn baby. The baby was sick and thus needs special
care. It was raining outside for the past three days. Since the baby was
sick, Pelayo and Elisenda are worried about their child’s health. As their
house was near the sea (courtyard) many crabs were killed due to rain and
some of them were also in Pelayo's home.
Pelayo thought that the baby was sick because of those
crabs. So, Pelayo began to throw those crabs into the sea. When Pelayo was returning
from the sea, he found a suspicious thing crawling in the mud. Pelayo went
closer to the suspicious thing. As he went nearer, he found an old man with
unnatural wings on his back lying in a miserable condition. He was covered
with mud and his wings were also torn up. He was in very bad condition.
Pelayo thought it was unreal so he called his wife Elisenda
from home to see the strange-looking old man. Pelayo tried to talk with the
old man. Pelayo's neighbor, who knew about life and death, was called to
identify the old man. The neighbor came to the old man and told Elisenda that
the old man was an angel and he is here to save the child from negative
power. After they kept the old man in their home the next day the baby was
also no sick and he also ate food.
Pelayo and Elisenda took pity upon the old man, especially
after their child’s recovery. They thought that the old man was an angel
because their baby was completely fine. Father Gonzaga, the local priest,
told the people that the old man was possibly not an angel because he was
untidy and didn't speak Latin. Father Gonzaga decided to ask his bishop for
guidance.
The old man’s existence spread quickly and pilgrims from
all over came to seek advice and healing from him.
Now the news was spread all over the village people had
different beliefs about the old man some told that he was a devil some told
that he was an angel. Not only in the village but the news was spread in
other villages too. People from many villages came to see the old man and every
day Elisenda would get tired. Elisenda now told Pelayo that they should
charge money to the visitors to see the old man. Pelayo was convinced by
Elisenda and they charged 5 cents to each visitor. They made a fence so that
visitors could see the old man nicely.
The old man, ignored the people even when they pluck his
feathers and hit him with stones to make him stand up. The old man lay
motionless for so many hours that visitors thought he was dead. He became
furious when the visitors sear him with a branding iron to see whether he was
alive. The only supernatural power old man had was patience. He was in pain
but he didn't show any sign of pain to people. He sat in a corner. After a
few hours, he was awake but with tears in his eyes. He was not able to even
walk he was crawling all day.
The visitors started to disperse when a carnival was
organized and a suspicious woman, whose half body was a spider and the half
body was of human, was brought into that carnival. It was said that she had
disobeyed her parents and thus she became a spider. The sad tale of the
spider woman was so popular that people forgot the old man. Now the center of
the attraction of that village was that spider woman but not the old man.
Pelayo and Elissenda have grown quite rich from the money
they collected as admission fees. Pelayo quit his job and built a new and
larger house. The old man continued to stay with the couple, still in the
chicken coop. He stayed there for several years till the boy grew older to go
to school. Once the chicken coop eventually collapsed and the old man moved
into the adjacent shed. The old man often moved from room to room inside the
new house. Elisenda was annoyed with the old man.
As the days passed, the old man’s health was seen
deteriorating. He could scarcely eat and his eyes had also become so unclear
that he went about bumping into posts. Pelayo and Elisenda were convinced
that the old man would die. Just then, he began to regain his strength. His
feathers began to grow on his wings and he began to sing sea chanteys to
himself at night. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for
lunch, the old man stretched his wings and took off into the air and she
watched him disappear over the horizon.
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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
[Original text]
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, and 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 and 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 spiritual 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 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 her 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 in 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 an 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
tow 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 have 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 the 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 decrepitude. 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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