This passage is adapted from the short story "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Márquez (© 1971 by Gabriel Garcia Márquez).
The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house, 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 lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings.
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. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. 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.
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. With the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire.
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. 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. 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 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. 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 even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing.
It so happened that during those days 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 and to examine her up and down. 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. A spectacle like that, with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. 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.
With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion 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.
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. 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. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions, 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.10