- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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, 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 any 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 celestial 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 he
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 a hero 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 if 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 and 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 two 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 gave 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 they 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 decreptitude. 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.
Translated by Gregory
Rabassa
© Source: https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MarquezManwithWings.htm
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