A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS

A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS
GENRE : MAGICAL REALISM, FICTION
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ 
FIRST PUBLISHED : 1955

“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was first published in the pages of the New American Review (1955), much before the majority of his work and twelve years before One Hundred Years of Solitude, probably the most familiar of his stories. What we have here is a children’s story about a place warped by sadness and visited by a distressed, lost Daedalus. Yet its vibrant colour is all its own. It is a story deeply overlapping the febrile plenitude of fiction’s strangeness and the complex relationship we, as humans, have with each other. Like so much of Márquez’s writing the story aches with a luxurious language of sadness and beauty. 

"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, impeded by his enormous wings”

We are introduced to a world where Pelayo and Elisenda’s house has been inundated with crabs during a storm. The crabs are presented to the reader not as the product of magic or the sign of something extremely strange but instead as just a normal part of this world. We have entered a world where strange things exist and people take them in stride. Next, we are introduced to the old man with the enormous wings. Pelayo and Elisenda end up allowing themselves to believe that the old man both is an is not an angel, which is perhaps the only way to make sense of Elisenda’s comment-

“it was awful living in that hell full of angels.”

To begin, who is our eponymous figure? An angel? An old man? He’s got wings but little will to use them. The old man speaks neither Latin nor Spanish but some “hermetic” tongue. Perhaps the old man is 'the angel of death', as the neighbor suggests, his wings the ragged remnants of heavenly garb.  He is seen as a sailor and an angel, but he is also seen as “not a sailor” and “not an angel.” He exists outside of the range of knowledge available to the villagers. It’s important to note, however, that this insurmountable inscrutability does not stop anyone from choosing one theory over another and essentially investing full belief in that preferred theory. 

“Against the judgement of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death.”

The behavior of the villagers towards the 'old man' is remarkably negative. The author seems to liken many people to children; they are simply incapable of being aware that their actions have consequences.

“... 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 he weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal”.

Pelayo and Elisenda make a lot of money from charging admission fees: they stuff their rooms full of cash as the crowd queues beyond the horizon. The way they made money from the people's visit to the old man, suggests how religious ideas themselves are frequently corrupted by individuals looking for financial gain.

Around this time, a spectacular new carnival attraction arrives in town: a woman who has been changed into a spider. Even the 'spider-woman', a figure “full of so much human truth” who is able to tell her own story of fantastic transformation, seems like a symbol of the notion that human truth is fictive. It is a partial explanation, at best, of how the world around us actually works. The 'spider-woman' but appeals to the masses more than an old winged man who ignores the people around him. Despite all the attention thrust upon the angel, the reader is quickly reminded how fickle and superficial that kind of attention can be. Anyone who can convince us with their story and gain our pity is worth our attention. The angel is too mysterious for them.

One important part of the story is when both the angel and the child come down with a case of the chicken pox. By having the angel and the child contract chicken pox at the same time, Márquez further suggests to the reader that they are more closely linked than anybody else in the story. A doctor comes to check on them and he is baffled by the angel; he takes a curious listen to the angel’s heart, finding so much whistling there and bizarre sounds in his kidneys that “it seemed impossible for [the angel] to be alive.” Paradoxically, the angel is too close to being human to seem truly otherworldly, and too otherworldly to seem worthy of empathy.

"They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he [the doctor] couldn't understand why other men didn't have them too"

But the angel survives the winter, and as the days get sunnier his strength improves. Feathers reappear on his wings, and, though he still keeps to himself, he seems less depressed. He is beginning to use his energy for more than just mere survival, and this implies that he knows a change in his circumstances is coming. The old man making clumsy attempts at flight and finally managing to do so, is very important. At this point in the story, given that nobody has learned anything useful from the experience, it is evident that the angel’s meaning is generated by how little he means on the ground to the story’s characters. Though he has served his purpose (if, indeed, his task was to save the child), the townspeople have given him nothing in return, and they go back to life exactly as it was before the angel. 

Magical realism – the weirdness in which Márquez’s story is deeply imbued – disrupts the political intractability of fiction’s traditional relationship with its social origins, but that disruption retains and even clarifies a hard nub of political violence and communal ethics. 

“The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act.”

The mystery of the old man with enormous wings remains intact. The old man with wings is weirdly different. He is of and only himself.

“His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience.”

These introductory remarks must draw to a close. The old man waits, lending his body to the townspeople’s amusements and depredations in what Márquez describes as “a cataclysm in repose”. Márquez has given us something elusive and ethereal, but its brief and elusive reading has a strength which novels and epics would strain to match. Like the old man the story can give us much, if we give it mind. Draw your own interpretations. Márquez’s world is vast.