The detail that stuck out the most to me in my readings of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was Father Gonzaga’s initial interaction with the angel.
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 impostor when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet his ministers. (219.)
This moment is illustrative of the theme of the work: The angel does not conform to human standards, and therefore must be punished for it.
Throughout the story, we see the angel’s misfortune: The whole reason he ends up captured is because he failed in his mission to collect Pelayo and Elisenda’s sickly newborn. He is then dragged through the mud, stuffed in a chicken coop, and kept there for literal years. The thought of this literal divine creature being treated in such a way is, I imagine, abhorrent to most readers. What I also find interesting is the detail that Pelayo “did not have the heart to club him to death” (118) and yet the story opens with Pelayo killing crabs. Marquez sets these creatures as foils against one another: Crabs may be killed right away, but they didn’t undergo near the trials that the angel did.
I found it interesting that with the story’s viewpoint, being mainly a conglomerate of the townspeople with individuals occasionally popping out to take control, the angel is rarely described in positive terms. “Angel” is typically a positive term in its own regard, but the angel in this described even in the title as “very old,” and at the end Elisenda reflects on him being “an annoyance in her life.” (225). Flipping the script on the usual story of encounter with the divine, Garcia Marquez creates a more interesting, more resonant tale of human treatment of creatures (and people!) we consider different from ourselves.