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The Old Man (the Angel)
Pelayo, a married man with a newborn son who lives in a rundown seaside town, finds the old man with enormous wings in his courtyard. Instead of finding the man’s presence miraculous, Pelayo assumes that he’s a shipwrecked sailor. Once the neighbor corrects him, he locks the angel in his chicken coop, abusing the man and charging locals admission to gawk at and even physically abuse him. From the admission fees, Pelayo experiences a change in economic fortune: he quits his job as a bailiff in order to set up a rabbit warren and he and Elisenda build a two-story mansion. Despite this change in status, Pelayo doesn’t meaningfully change as a person: he is the same, simple, bitter man at the end that he was at the beginning. Although he does not have many redeeming features, Pelayo does provide the necessities of life for his wife and child, and (in a way that is not especially caring or charitable) to the old man.
Pelayo Quotes in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
The A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings quotes below are all either spoken by Pelayo or refer to Pelayo. 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
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.
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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.
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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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Pelayo Quotes in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
The A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings quotes below are all either spoken by Pelayo or refer to Pelayo. 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
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.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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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