of your friends and neighbors sport feathers? In truth, stories with winged characters make up a pretty
small genre, but those few stories hold ap. 130special fascination. Gabriel García Márquez’s story “A
Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1968) features a nameless old man who falls from the sky during
a monsoonal rain. His wings are indeed enormous. Some of the poor people in the coastal Colombian
town where he lands take him to be an angel, but if he is, he’s a very odd one. He’s dirty and smelly, and
his ragged wings harbor parasites. It is true that shortly after he plops down in the yard of Pelayo and
Elisenda, their child recovers from a life-threatening fever, but his other “miracles,” if he has anything to
do with them, don’t work exactly right. One character fails to recover health but nearly wins the lottery,
while another, although not cured of leprosy, sprouts sunflowers from his sores. Still, the residents are
fascinated by this new arrival, so much so that the peasant couple constructs a cage and puts him on
display. Although the old man does nothing remarkable, so many people come and pay the small
admission fee that Pelayo and Elisenda become wealthy. We never know what the old man is, and
speculation among the townspeople is hilarious as well as occasionally bizarre (his green eyes suggest to
one character that he’s a Norwegian sailor), but his hapless, shabby appearance and long-suffering
silence clearly benefit the family in a nearly miraculous fashion. In the way of those who receive
miraculous aid, they are unappreciative and even a little resentful at having to provide for the old man.
Eventually the old man regains his strength and, seen only by the wife, flaps away, his ungainly flight
recalling a rather disreputable vulture more than any angel. Like Carter, García Márquez plays on our
notions of wings and flight to explore the situation’s ironic possibilities. In fact, he goes even further in
some ways. His winged character is literally caged; moreover, he’s dirty and unkempt and bug-ridden,
not at all what we expect from potential angels. On one level, the story asks us if we would recognize the
Second Coming if it occurred, and perhaps it reminds us that the Messiah was notp. 131generally
acknowledged when he did come. The angel doesn’t look like an angel, just as the King didn’t look like
a king, certainly not like the sort of military ruler the Hebrews had expected. Does the old man choose
not to fly? Has he been reduced in power and appearance purposely? The story never says, and in its
silence it poses many questions.
Of course, his mode of arrival poses another question for us.
What about characters who don’t quite fly or whose flights are interrupted? Since Icarus, we’ve had
stories of those whose flights end prematurely. In general, this is a bad thing, given what is the opposite of
flying. On the other hand, not all crashes end disastrously. At almost the exact same moment (the novels
were published within months of each other), Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie introduced
characters—two in each case—falling from great heights, from exploding airliners. In Weldon’s Hearts
and Lives of Men the contested child of an ugly divorce is kidnapped, and she and her kidnapper float
down to safety as the rear section of the plane, containing only the two of them, rather improbably
disobeys certain laws of aerodynamics to glide gently to earth. Rushdie’s two main characters, Gibreel
and Saladin, fall bodily to the ground, their landings softened by the snow-covered English beach on
which they land. In each case, there is an element of rebirth in their cheating what would typically prove
to be certain death. The characters are not inevitably better off in their new lives; Rushdie’s two are
particularly devilish, while Weldon’s little girl loses the immense privilege of her previous existence for a
very long time, gaining instead the sort of life Dickens would invent for one of his waifs. Nevertheless, the
act of falling from vast heights and surviving is as miraculous, and as symbolically meaningful, as the act of
flight itself. As thrilled as we are by the prospect of flying, we are also frightened at the prospect of falling,
and anything that seems to defy the inevitability of a plummeting demise sets our imaginations working
overtime.p. 132The survival of these characters demands that we consider the implications. What does it
mean to survive certain death, and how does such survival alter one’s relationship to the world? Do the
characters’ responsibilities to themselves, to life itself, change? Is the survivor even the same person any
longer? Rushdie asks outright if birth inevitably involves a fall, while Weldon poses questions that are
equally suggestive.