Translated by Gregory Rabassa
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.
