Applied English for Diploma in Engineering A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Summary

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez narrates the story of Pelayo and his wife Elisenda, who discover an old man with wings in their courtyard after killing crabs in a rainstorm.

Pelayo, a poor fisherman, discovers a homeless, disoriented old man with incredibly huge wings in his courtyard. The old man speaks in an unfamiliar language. As a result, he and his wife speak with him in vain. Pelayo and his wife, Elisenda, believe after consulting a neighbour woman that the old guy must be an angel that attempted to come to take their sick child to heaven. The neighbour woman advises Pelayo to club the angel to death. And they lock the angel in the chicken coop, and their child's fever breaks in the middle of the night. As a result, Pelayo and Elisenda feel sorry for their visitor.

The local priest, Father Gonzaga, tells the people that the old man is most likely a fake angel because he is shabby and does not speak Latin. Father Gonzaga decides to seek advice from his bishop. He promises to obtain the true truth from the church's higher authorities. The news of the angel travels like wildfire, and the courtyard quickly takes on the appearance of a marketplace. Elisenda then comes up with the brilliant idea of charging a 5 cent entrance fee to visit the angel; they become rich very quickly. The old man mostly ignores the crowd, even when they pull his feathers and throw stones at him to get him to stand. When the visitors sear him with a branding iron to determine if he's still alive, he becomes angry. Rome takes its time determining whether or not the old guy is an angel, and while waiting for their decision, Father Gonzaga works tirelessly to keep the crowd under control.

When a travelling freak show featuring a Spider-Girl arrives in the village, the crowd begins to disperse. Spectators are permitted to question her, and she tells them how she was transformed into a tarantula one night for disrespecting her parents. This is more appealing to the general public than an old winged man who ignores the people around him. As a result, the curious crowds immediately ignore the angel in favour of the spider, leaving Pelayo's courtyard empty. The sad story of the spider woman is so well-known that people quickly forget about the old guy, who had only performed a few meaningless semi-miracles for his pilgrims.

Despite this, Pelayo and Elisenda have become very wealthy as a result of the admittance fees Elisenda has imposed. Pelayo quits his work and begins construction on a new, larger home. As the small boy grows older, the elderly man stays with them for several years, living in the chicken coop.

They ignore the angel and keep their kid away from the chicken coop. He quickly becomes a part of their lives, and they begin to accept him. The child pays him frequent visits. When the chicken coop falls, the old guy goes into the adjacent shed, but he frequently wanders from room to room inside the home, which annoys Elisenda.

He becomes increasingly weak and sick, and they believe he will die. But he quickly recovers. His feathers regrow, and he starts singing sea chanteys (sailors' songs) to himself at night. Elisenda watches as the elderly man extends his wings and flies off into the air, and to her relief, he disappears beyond the horizon.

To conclude, the old man appears as an eponymous (wrongly titled) persona who appears in a family's backyard on a stormy night. It also shows the combination of reality and illusion - a story that appears real yet contains elements of imagination.

Exercise from the Textbook 

Dwell Upon the Text

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

And: It had been raining for three days. The land and the sky all appeared grey. There were crabs everywhere inside and outside of the house. The courtyard was drenched. The newborn baby was in fever probably due to the bad smell of rotten shellfish. 

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

And: The very old man was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard, his face lying down in the mud. He was trying to get up but wasn’t able to. His dress was like that of a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs and a few teeth in his mouth. 

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

Ans: Pelayo and Elisenda imprison the old man in the chicken coop because of his strange identity and unclear mission. 

4. 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 because he did not understand the God‘s language nor he knew how to greet his ministers. 

5. Why do you think the crowd assembled to see the old man at Palayo’s house? 

Ans: The crowd assembled to see the old man at Palayo’s house because the old man was strange looking with wings in his body. 

6. What are these miracles that happened while the crowd gathers to see the strange man? 

Ans: Some miracles that happened while the crowd had gathered to see the strange man was a blind man who got three new teeth, a paralytic who almost won the lottery and a leper’s sores sprouted sunflowers. 

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

Ans: The people irritated the strange old man by throwing stones at him, trying to get him to rise in whatever ways possible ways and by bunting his side with an iron bar. 

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

Ans: The girl was changed .into a spider because she had disobeyed her parents and had gone dancing all night through the woods. 

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

Ans: One morning, Elisenda saw the old man attempting to fly when she was cutting some onions for lunch. His attempts were clumsy in the beginning but finally was able to flap his wings and gain altitude. 

10. Why do the neighbor woman, the father and the doctor who come to the old man, give three different interpretations of the man? 

Ans: The three people giving three different interpretations signify that people generally tell things from their own angle and no one’s interpretation is absolute. 

Reflect on the Text

a. Explain how different people like the neighbour woman, Father Gonzaga and the doctor speak of the strange man. Why do you think these three people gave different opinions? 

Ans: The neighbour woman said that the old man was and angel and he came to take the sick child away but the rain diverted his way. Father Gonzaga thought the man was an imposter because he did not return the Father’s questions in Latin. The doctor opined that the man was suffering from kidney disease and he would not survive for a long time. All these three people have given their views based on their knowledge. I would like to give another example of how opinions differ. A man had committed suicide by hanging. A business man came there and said that he died because of business failure. A young boy said that it was a love tragedy and a doctor came and added his view that the man was tired of his disease. There is a proverb in English, “many heads many tongues.” It’s natural for people to give their own views. 

b. Collect five magic realist happenings from the story and argue why they seem magical to you. 

Ans: The story is written in magical realist style in which the author has expressed the impossible things as if they are natural. The things which normally do not happen in reality are narrated in such a way that as if they have happened. The large number of crabs that died because of the rain, the man with buzzard wings, the old man creating whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic, a woman becoming a spider and the old man flying towards the unknown direction all are magical examples. The author has narrated these things in such a way that we feel them real while reading the story. 

c. The author introduces the episode of a woman who became a spider for having disobeyed her parents. This episode brings a shift in the story. What do you think is the purpose of the author to bring this shift in the story? 

Ans: The author has dealt with the two cases of magical realist happenings in the story. First, he shows the example of an old man with enormous wings and shows how crowds gather around him for days. Then he gives another example, a woman turning into a spider and the crowd leaves the old man and goes to the second happening. The author wants to show how human beings act as per their whims. He has tried to show how gullible human beings are. They do not look for the reason, rather they run after the propaganda. ‘ 

d. How do Pelayo and his wife take advantage of common people’s whim? 

Ans: Sometimes human beings lose their rationality, the power of reason and act with their impulse. They do not think about whether it can happen or not. Many people have a habit to go towards the direction from where the noise comes. They think, ‘Let’s see once what it is there.’ Pelayo and his wife take advantage of this kind of weakness inherent in common people. They charge five cents for every single entry and earn money to build a two-story house with gardens. The people do not hesitate to spend five cents because they see people ahead of them. Their curiosity makes people pay five cents. 

Go beyond the Text 

a. A large crowd gathered at Pelayo’s house everyday simply to see the old man. Narrate an event from another story or from your experience in which common people assemble without any solid reason. 

Ans: Long ago a friend came to our village in Nawalparasi from Nepalgunj. He told us a strange news about Nepalgunj. A young boy of about eighteen worked for a few months and created an object that looked like an improvisedhelicopter. He said there was a top fan, an engine, a sitting cabinet and a tail anda tail fan. The young boy had prepared that object by collecting the parts of tempos, motorcycles and even cars. The news spread in Nepalgunj and its neighbouring areas that the boy was going to test the flight of the helicopter at 12 o’clock on Saturday. He reported to us that about twenty thousand people gathered around that helicopter. People believed that the object would really take off. The crowd was waiting impatiently to see the helicopter take off. It was 2 o’clock. The crowd was still there and so was the object. There was no sign of flight. Later somebody informed them that the Chief District Officer did not give permission to the boy to try to fly that object. The CD0 believed that if the object really took off, the boy would fall and die. The object was taken near a lake thinking of security reasons. The crowd dispersed from there but my friend waited. Towards 3 o’clock, the boy tried to fly it even without permission. My friend said that the engine of the object started and produced large noise. The fans started to move. The remaining people cheered the boy thinking the helicopter was about to fly. They waited for the miracle to take place. But when the boy gave the flight gear, the start was off and he could not start the object again. Everybody became fools. 

b. The taste of children is different from grown-ups. What are the elements in the story that make ‘The Old Man with Enormous Wings’ a children’s story? 

Ans: The story ‘The Old Man with Enormous Wings’ falls into the genre of magic realism. This genre is also called the children’s genre because children are more fascinated by the unique and odd descriptions full of magical plots and events. In magical realism, a realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with weird elements of fantasy. They are dreamlike for grown-ups but for children, who are still in the process of developing of their reasoning faculty, they are more interesting. The story doesn’t contain symbolic elements and metaphors which are complex for children. Instead, they have a simple. narrative structure full of fun and wonder. For example, a sunflower appearing from a leper’s sore, or teeth growing in a blind man’s mouth, etc. make the story curious for the children.