A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

- Gabriel Garcia

Characters

Pelayo

Elisenda’s husband who is a poor ordinary villager finds the old man. He grudgingly wishes to keep the winged old man in his chicken coop. Pelayo guards the old man from harm, humbly consults the village priest, and has the sense to resist the more extravagant advice he receives from the other villagers. Pelayo, however, does not want to take care of the man indefinitely and doesn’t feel bad using the old man to get rich.

Elisenda

Pelayo’s wife who convinces Pelayo to charge villagers to see the old man but later considers him to be a nuisance. A practical woman, she primarily concerns herself with the welfare of Pelayo and their child and is therefore relieved when the old man finally leaves.

The Old Man

The old man, with his human body and unexpected wings, appears to be neither fully human nor fully supernatural. On the one hand, the man seems human enough, surrounded as he is by filth, disease, infirmity, and squalor (=dirt, uncleanliness). He has a human reaction to the people who crowd around him and seek healing, remaining indifferent to their pleas and sometimes not even acknowledging their existence. When the doctor examines him, he is amazed that such an unhealthy man is still alive and is equally struck by how natural the old man’s wings seem to be. Such an unsurprised reaction essentially brings the “angel” down to earth, so any heavenly qualities that the old man may have are completely obscured. However, the narrator seems to take the old man’s angelhood for granted, speaking of the “lunar dust” and “stellar parasites” on his wings, and the old man’s “consolation miracles,” such as causing sunflowers to sprout from a leper’s sores, seem genuinely supernatural. In the end, the old man’s true nature remains a mystery.

Father Gonzaga

The village priest. As an authority figure in the community, Father Gonzaga takes it upon himself to discern (=distinguish/ determine) whether the old man is an angel as the townsfolk believe or just a mortal who just happens to have wings. Father Gonzaga is skeptical that the dirty old man could really be a messenger from heaven, but he dutifully reports the event to his superiors in the church. As he waits for the Vatican’s reply, he does his best to restrain the enthusiasm and credulousness (=gullibility) of the crowd of onlookers.

The Neighbor Woman

Pelayo and Elisenda’s bossy neighbor. The supposedly wise neighbor woman actually seems more like a silly know-it-all than a true counselor and is the first to suggest that the old man is a crippled angel. She tells Pelayo to club the old man to death to prevent him from taking Pelayo and Elisenda’s sick baby to heaven.

The Spider Woman

A freak-show attraction who visits the village. Punished for the sin of disobeying her parents, the spider woman now has the body of an enormous spider and the head of a sad young woman. The clear moral of the woman’s story draws gawking (=staring/gazing) villagers away from the old man, who is unable to offer the crowds such a compelling narrative.

 

Summary

During the continuous rain storm Pelayo and his wife Elisenda had killed so many crabs inside the house. Pelayo had to throw the crabs into the sea, because the newborn child had a fever all night and they thought it was due to the bad smell of crabs. While retuning after throwing the crabs, the light was so weak at noon that it was hard for pelayo to see what it was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. It was a very old man, lying face down in the mud, and he couldn’t get up. The man had very large wings. He was filthy and apparently senile (=disorientated /confused).

Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife.  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 any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were 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/ unintelligible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. He was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. 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.

After consulting the neighbor woman, they concluded that the old man must be an angel who had tried to come and take their sick child to heaven. The woman told Pelayo that he should club the angel to death, but Pelayo and Elisenda took pity on their visitor, especially after their child recovered.

Pelayo and Elisenda kept the old man in their chicken coop, and he soon began to attract crowds of curious visitors. Father Gonzaga, the local priest, told the people that the old man was probably not an angel because he was shabby and didn’t speak Latin. Father Gonzaga decided to ask his bishop for explaining.

Despite Father Gonzaga’s efforts, word of the old man’s existence soon spread, and pilgrims came from all over to seek advice and healing from him. One woman came because she’d been counting her heartbeats since childhood and couldn’t continue counting. An insomniac visited because he claims that the stars in the night sky were too noisy. The crowd eventually grew so large that Elisenda began to charge for seeing the old man. For the most part, the old man ignored the people, even when they plucked his feathers and threw stones at him to make him stand up. He became enraged, however, when the visitors sear him with a branding iron to see whether he’s still alive.

Father Gonzaga did his best to restrain the crowd, even as he waited for the Church’s opinion on the old man. The crowd started to disperse when a traveling freak/surprise show arrived in the village. People flocked to hear the story of the so-called spider woman, who’d been transformed into a giant tarantula with the head of a woman after she’d disobeyed her parents. The sad tale of the spider woman was so popular that people quickly forgot the old man.

Pelayo and Elisenda had grown quite wealthy from the admission fees Elisenda had charged. Pelayo quit his job and built a new, larger house. The old man continued to stay with them, still in the chicken coop, for several years, as the little boy grew older. When the chicken coop eventually collapsed, the old man moved into the adjacent shed, but he often wandered from room to room inside the house, much to Elisenda’s annoyance.

Just when Pelayo and Elisenda were convinced that the old man would soon die, he began to regain his strength. His feathers grew back and he began to sing sea chanteys (sailors’ songs) to himself at night. One day the old man stretched his wings and took off into the air, and Elisenda watched him disappear over the horizon.

  

Understanding the text

Answer the following questions.

a. How does the narrator describe the weather and its effects in the exposition of the story?

Ans:- It had been raining for three days in the exposition of the story, and Pelayo was dumping the crabs inside his house into the water. The sea and sky had become a single ash-grey entity, and the beach's sands, which had glinted like powdered light on March nights, had turned into a stew of mud and decaying shellfish.

b. Describe the strange old man as Palayo and his wife first encounter within their courtyard.

Ans:- When Pelayo and his wife Elisenda came across the unusual elderly man in their courtyard, they discovered him dressed as a rag picker (a person who collects and sells rags). Only a few faded hairs remained on his bald head, and he was in the terrible condition of a drenched great-grandfather, his large buzzard wings dirty and half-plucked entangled in the mud.

c. Why did Pelayo and Elisenda imprison the old man in the chicken coop?

Ans:- Pelayo and Elisenda imprisoned the old man in the chicken coop after discovering that he was an angel who had come with a plan to take their child.

d. Why was Father Gonzaga not sure about the old man being a celestial messenger?

Ans:- Father Gonzaga was not sure about the old man being a celestial messenger since he noticed that he didn't even understand God's language, Latin or how to greet his ministers.

e. Many people gathered at Palayo’s house to see the strange old man. Why do you think the crowd assembled to see him?

Ans:- Many people gathered at Pelayo’s house to see the strange old man. I think the crowd assembled to see him as they found him inside the chicken coop and wanted to have fun with the angel as a circus animal.

f. Some miracles happened while the crowd gathers to see the strange man. What are these miracles?

Ans:- Some miracles happened while the crowd gathers to see the strange man. These miracles are:

The blind man who didn't recover his sight but grew three new teeth, the paralytic who didn't get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers.

g. State the irritating things that the people did with the strange old man.

Ans:- The crowd began to irritate the strange old man since he was unable to impress them. They pulled his feathers and threw stones at him to get him to stand. They poked him with a branding iron and burned him. The old man did not react to them at first, but he eventually got aggressive due to unbearable pain.

h. How and why was the woman changed into a spider?

Ans:- The woman was changed into a spider because she had sneaked out of her parents' house without permission to dance and had disobeyed her parents, the lightning bolt of brimstone came through the crack of the tow of the fearful thunderclap in the sky, and the woman was changed into a spider.

i. Describe how Elisenda saw the strange man flying over the houses.

Ans:- Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when she sensed a wind coming in from the high seas and ran to the window, where she observed an angel making his first attempts at flight. He kept his balance and made it through the last few houses, miraculously holding himself up with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him disappear over the horizon.