A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings Summary | Detailed Summary

After three days of rain, the home of Pelayo and Elisenda is infested with a large number of crabs. The crabs are crawling in the house and in the muddy courtyard. The air stinks with the smell of rotting shellfish as Pelayo braves the mud to throw the invading crustaceans back into the sea. Walking across the courtyard in the gray muck, he can barely see what turns out to be a very old man lying in the mud. The old man's efforts to rise are thwarted by the fact that he is weighted down by large and muddy wings.

Pelayo is frightened and runs to get his wife who has been tending their sick child. Back in the courtyard, they assess the reality of the old man. He is poorly dressed, has only a few teeth, and he is almost bald. He has buzzard-like wings, only half-feathered and caked with mud. His appearance does little to suggest that he might once have had a grand or important presence. The couple stares at the old man for such a long time that he starts to become as familiar to them as a great-grandfather. When they speak to him, he answers in a language that they can't understand, though there is something about his speech that suggests he might be a sailor. They decide that he must be a poor castaway from a foreign ship wrecked in the storm. When they seek the opinion of their neighbor, a woman who is reputed to "know everything about life and death," she tells them the old man is an angel who must have been coming to take their sick child away, she says, but he was so old that he was unable to complete his mission in the face of the strong storm and was knocked to the ground.

By the next day, the whole neighborhood knows there is an angel at Pelayo and Elisenda's house. Because the woman who knows everything about life and death considers angels to be the "fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy," the people refrain from killing him. Pelayo, armed with a club, watches the old man from the kitchen window, and before going to bed , drags the old man out of the mud and locks him in the chicken coop.

The days of rain finally end that night, but Pelayo and Elisenda are still killing crabs in the house. After a little while, their child's health begins to improve; his fever breaks, and he asks for food. His recovery prompts them to feel charitable. They decide to put the old man on a raft with enough food and water for three days and send him to meet his fate upon the seas. However, when they go to the chicken coop in the morning to put this plan into action, they find the whole neighborhood is there. The crowd is teasing the old man through the wire of the coop without showing any reverence expected of people confronted with an angel. The people are throwing him things to eat through the fence as if he were an animal in the circus.

The priest, Father Gonzaga, arrives before seven that morning. By then the crowd is composed of people theorizing about the old man's future. Father Gonzaga is somewhat alarmed at the appearance of an angel in his neighborhood, and after consulting his catechism, decides to do a close-up examination of the creature in the chicken coop, who looks more like one of the hens than a supernatural being. Father Gonzaga speaks to the old man in Latin and becomes suspicious when the man cannot understand God's language. The priest thinks the old man is much too human in appearance to meet his expectations of an angel. The old man is smelly, his wings are covered with parasites, and he has no dignity. Father Gonzaga remembers that the devil is known for using tricks to fool those on the path to salvation. Wings alone are not enough to define the creature as an angel, he reasons; after all, both hawks and airplanes have wings, but they have more differences than similarities. The priest decides to write a letter to the bishop, knowing that the bishop will write to his primate, and the primate will write to the Pope for a final determination of what to do about the old man in the hen house.

Word of the angel spreads, and crowds descend upon Pelayo's courtyard. There are so many people that military troops with bayonets are called to keep the mob from knocking down the house. Elisenda, who is tired of sweeping up after the unwanted visitors, decides to put up a fence around the yard and charge admission.

Curious people come from far away. The crowds include invalids seeking cures, a man who is unable to sleep because he hears noises from the stars, and a sleepwalker who gets up in the night to undo all the things he had accomplished during the day. It is tiring for Pelayo and Elisenda to collect the admission fee from all the onlookers, but they are happy because they have amassed a considerable amount of money in only a week, and the line of people waiting to enter the courtyard still stretches as far as they can see.

For his part, the angel takes no notice of all the activity. He is concerned with making himself more comfortable in his nest, which is very hot because of the oil lamps and holy candles placed near him. The crowd tries to make him eat mothballs because the wise neighbor woman says that is what angels eat. He refuses the mothballs, however, just as he refuses the lunches brought to him by penitents. Whether it is because he is an angel or just an old man, he eats only eggplant mush.

The one quality he possesses that appears to be supernatural is patience. No matter what the chickens or the crowds do to him, they cannot get a reaction from him. The only time he became upset I was when one of the visitors burned him with a branding iron. He had been sitting so long without moving they thought he was dead. At the touch of the iron, however, the old man awoke in a panic that was far from ordinary and began to rant in his strange language. There were tears in his eyes, and his flapping wings raised a storm of dust and chicken droppings.. The crowds are careful not to bother him after that. They realize that his passive demeanor is not a sign of relaxation, but represents a "cataclysm in repose."

Father Gonzaga waits for a final judgment from his superiors, but the mail from the Vatican is slow in coming. The Pope and his advisers do not share the priest's sense of urgency and spend their time studying whether the old man's language could be related to Aramaic, discussing whether or not he has a navel, and how many times he might fit on the head of a pin. They wonder if he isn't just an old Norwegian man with wings.

During this period, a traveling show comes to town. This show features a woman who has been transformed into a spider because she had been a disobedient daughter. The admission fee to see this woman is lower than that to see the angel, and people can ask her questions as well, so the crowds leave the old man in the chicken coop to focus their attention on the spider-woman. Those who pay see a tarantula as big as a ram with the head of a sad young girl. Her appearance is the least of her attraction, however. The real entertainment comes from hearing the creature relate details of her situation with sincerity and evident pain. According to her story, she had once sneaked out of her house to go to a dance without her parents' permission. On the way home, after dancing all night, she was hit with a bolt of lightning that changed her into a spider.

The crowds find this story and the demeanor of the spider-woman much more accessible than the haughty angel who will hardly look at them. Additionally, few miracles were attributed to the angel, and those that did occur were odd. For example, a blind man grew three new teeth instead of recovering his sight; a paralyzed person won the lottery, but did not regain the use of his legs; and a leper sprouted sunflowers from his sores rather than being cured. These kinds of miracles had already tarnished the angel's reputation by the time the spider-woman came to town. Then she cured Father Gonzaga of his insomnia and took the final bit of the community's attention away from the old man in the chicken coop. Pelayo and Elisenda's courtyard becomes as empty as it had been before the angel's appearance.

In spite of the change in circumstances, the couple is happy. They use the money they made from the admission fee to build a large two-story house with gardens and balconies and nets to keep the crabs out in the winter. The house also has iron bars on the windows to keep out angels. Elisenda buys stylish new shoes. The only part of the property left out of the renovations is the chicken coop, which receives only the minimum care needed to control the stench given off by the old man.

When their child becomes old enough to walk, Pelayo and Elisenda caution him to stay away from the chicken yard, but as time passes, they become more accustomed to the old man's presence. Soon, the child is playing inside the decaying chicken coop. The angel tolerates the child without giving him any special attention. Both the old man and the child contract chicken pox at the same time, and the doctor who comes to treat the child gives in to his desire to listen to the angel's heart with his stethoscope. The sounds he hears make him wonder how the old man is staying alive at all. What surprises him most is the completely natural logic of the old man's wings. The doctor wonders why all humans do not have them.

By the time the child starts school, the weathered chicken coop has collapsed, and the angel drags himself around the house like a dying man. Pelayo and Elisenda shoo him out of the bedroom with a broom only to have him reappear in the kitchen a moment later. They begin to suspect that he has been duplicated, since they seem to find him in so many places at once. Elisenda becomes increasingly upset at his presence in her house. She says she is living in a "hell full of angels."

As time goes on, the old man loses nearly all of his feathers. Pelayo throws a blanket over him and allows him to sleep in the shed. The couple notices that the angel has a fever during the nights, and in his delirium, he rattles on in his strange Norwegian-like language. They think he is going to die, and no one, not even the wise neighbor woman, can tell them what to do with a dead angel.

The old man survives the winter, however, and his condition seems to improve with the sunnier weather. He stays in a far corner of the courtyard for several days without moving. Then, in December, large and stiff feathers begin to appear on his wings. The old man wants no one to notice his new feathers or the fact that he is singing sea chanteys during the starry nights.

One day, while Elisenda is cutting up onions for lunch, she notices a strong wind blowing into the kitchen from the sea. Through the window, she can see the angel making his first, clumsy attempts to fly. His fingernails scrape the ground, and he almost knocks over the shed during his experimental flights. At last, he manages to gain altitude, and Elisenda is relieved for both of them as she watches him fly over the last houses in the village, becoming smaller and smaller until he is just a dot on the horizon and no longer an annoyance in her life.