A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

“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.” 

This quote describes the story’s setting and sets the tone of Pelayo’s life before finding the old man. He has a sick newborn, his home is filled with crabs, and the rain outside has not stopped. The colorful language contrasts with the dreary scene it evokes, imbuing it with beauty in the same way that magical realism draws out the fantastical in the everyday.

“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.” 

This sentence is emblematic of García Márquez’s writing style, which Rabassa has also captured in his translation. Both versions contain many commas and long, flowing sentences. In this passage, the audience, much like Pelayo himself, waits in suspense to discover why the old man is stuck in the mud.

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.” 

This moment foreshadows just how familiar Pelayo and his family will become with the old man as the story progresses. It is also one of the first clear examples of the story’s magical realism: the fantastic wings appear alongside the mundaneness of dirty mud. Notably, the man is “uncanny” both as a man (because of his wings) and as an angel (because his wings’ shabby appearance doesn’t correspond to conventional angelic