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Pelayo
Elisenda is Pelayo’s wife. She is ordinary and concerned primarily with getting by. When Pelayo finds the old man in the courtyard, Elisenda is the one who comes up with the idea to charge admission to see the angel, and she’s not contented with their new wealth, even when she and Pelayo make enough money for a new house. In fact, she sees the old man/angel as a nuisance, letting out “a sigh of relief, for her and for him” when he eventually regains his strength enough to fly away. Elisenda shows herself to be shallow: she never shows the angel any respect nor seems particularly bothered about the health of her child. In fact, her happiest moment in the story is probably when the admission money she and Pelayo have accumulated allows her to buy “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.”
Elisenda Quotes in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
The A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings quotes below are all either spoken by Elisenda or refer to Elisenda. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Quotes
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.
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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.
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Elisenda Quotes in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
The A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings quotes below are all either spoken by Elisenda or refer to Elisenda. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Quotes
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.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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.
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