Magical Realism Short Story Unit in conjunction with
100 Years of Solitude
“Two Words” – March 8
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” – March 9
“The Feather Pillow” – March 10
Magical Realism - a literary genre or style associated especially with Latin America
that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction 
We will read the stories in class and if you are not present you must read and answer the questions on your
own. This is a quiz grade due before you leave for spring break.
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“TWO WORDS”
by Isabel Allende
She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she had been baptized with that name or given
it by her mother, but because she herself had searched until she found the poetry of "beauty" and
"twilight" and cloaked herself in it. She made her living selling words. She journeyed through the country
from the high cold mountains to the burning coasts, stopping at fairs and in markets where she set up four
poles covered by a canvas awning under which she took refuge from the sun and rain to minister to her
customers. She did not have to peddle her merchandise because from having wandered far and near,
everyone knew who she was. Some people waited for her from one year to the next, and when she
appeared in the village with her bundle beneath her arm, they would form a line in front of her stall. Her
prices were fair. For five centavos she delivered verses from memory, for seven she improved the quality of
dreams, for nine she wrote love letters, for twelve she invented insults for irreconcilable enemies. She also
sold stories, not fantasies but long, true stories she recited at one telling, never skipping a word. This is how
she carried news from one town to another. People paid her to add a line or two: our son was born, so-andso died, our children got married, the crops burned in the field. Wherever she went a small crowd gathered
around to listen as she began to speak, and that was how they learned about each others' doings, about
distant relatives, about what was going on in the civil war. To anyone who paid her fifty centavos in trade,
she gave the gift of a secret word to drive away melancholy. It was not the same word for everyone,
naturally, because that would have been collective dece it. Each person received his or her own word, with
the assurance that no one else would use it that way in this universe or the Beyond.
Belisa Crepusculario had been born into a family so poor they did not even have names to give their
children. She came into the world and grew up in an inhospitable land where some years the rains became
avalanches of water that bore everything away before them and others when not a drop fell from the sky
and the sun swelled to fill the horizon and the world became a desert. Until she was twelve, Belisa had no
occupation or virtue other than having withstood hunger and the exhaustion of centuries. During one
interminable drought, it fell to her to bury four younger brothers and sisters, when she realized that her
turn was next, she decided to set out across the plains in the direction of the sea, in hopes that she might
trick death along the way. The land was eroded, split with deep cracks, strewn with rocks, fossils of trees
and thorny bushes, and skeletons of animals bleached by the sun. From time to time she ran into families
who, like her, were heading south, following the mirage of water. Some had begun the march carrying their
belongings on their back or in small carts, but they could barely move their own bones, and after a while
they had to abandon their possessions. They dragged themselves along painfully, their skin turned to lizard
hide and their eyes burned by the reverberating glare. Belisa greeted them with a wave as she passed, but
she did not stop, because she had no strength to waste in acts of compassion. Many people fell by the
wayside, but she was so stubborn that she survived to cross through that hell and at long last reach the first
trickles of water, fine, almost invisible threads that fed spindly vegetation and farther down widened into
small streams and marshes.
Belisa Crepusculario saved her life and in the process accidentally discovered writing. In a village near the
coast, the wind blew a page of newspaper at her feet. She picked up the brittle yellow paper and stood a
long while looking at it, unable to determine its purpose, until curiosity overcame her shyness. She walked
over to a man who was washing his horse in the muddy pool where she had quenched her thirst.
"What is this?" she asked.
"The sports page of the newspaper," the man replied, concealing his surprise at her ignorance.
The answer astounded the girl, but she did not want to seem rude, so she merely inquired about the
significance of the fly tracks scattered across the page.
"Those are words, child. Here it says that Fulgencio Barba knocked out El Negro Tiznao in the third round."
That was the day Belisa Crepusculario found out that words make their way in the world without a master,
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and that anyone with a little cleverness can appropriate them and do business with them. She made a
quick assessment of her situation and concluded that aside from becoming a prostitute or working as a
servant in the kitchens of the rich there were few occupations she was qualified for. It seemed to her that
selling words would be an honorable alternative. From that moment on, she worked at that profession, and
was never tempted by any other. At the beginning, she offered her merchandise unaware that words could
be written outside of newspapers. When she learned otherwise, she calculated the infinite possibilities of
her trade and with her savings paid a priest twenty pesos to teach her to read and write, with her three
remaining coins she bought a dictionary. She poured over it from A to Z and then threw it into the sea,
because it was not her intention to defraud her customers with packaged words.
One August morning several years later, Belisa Crepusculario was sitting in her tent in the middle of a plaza,
surrounded by the uproar of market day, selling legal arguments to an old man who had been trying for
sixteen years to get his pension. Suddenly she heard yelling and thudding hoofbeats. She looked up from
her writing and saw, first, a cloud of dust, and then a band of horsemen come galloping into the plaza. They
were the Colonel's men, sent under orders of El Mulato, a giant known throughout the land for the speed
of his knife and his loyalty to his chief. Both the Colonel and El Mulato had spent their lives fighting in the
civil war, and their names were ineradicably linked to devastation and calamity. The rebels swept into town
like a stampeding herd, wrapped in noise, bathed in sweat, and leaving a hurricane of fear in their trail.
Chickens took wing, dogs ran for their lives, women and children scurried out of sight, until the only living
soul left in the market was Belisa Crepusculario. She had never seen El Mulato and was surprised to see him
walking toward her.
"I'm looking for you," he shouted, pointing his coiled whip at her, even before the words were out, two
men rushed her -- knocking over her canopy and shattering her inkwell -- bound her hand and foot, and
threw her like a sea bag across the rump of El Mulato's mount. Then they thundered off toward the hills.
Hours later, just as Belisa Crepusculario was near death, her heart ground to sand by the pounding of the
horse, they stopped, and four strong hands set her down. She tried to stand on her feet and hold her head
high, but her strength failed her and she slumped to the ground, sinking into a confused dream. She
awakened several hours later to the murmur of night in the camp, but before she had time to sort out the
sounds, she opened her eyes and found herself staring into the impatient glare of El Mulato, kneeling
beside her.
"Well, woman, at last you've come to," he said. To speed her to her senses, he tipped his canteen and
offered her a sip of liquor laced with gunpowder.
She demanded to know the reason for such rough treatment, and El Mulato explained that the Colonel
needed her services. He allowed her to splash water on her face, and then led her to the far end of the
camp where the most feared man in all the land was lazing in a hammock strung between two trees. She
could not see his face, because he lay in the deceptive shadow of the leaves and the indelible shadow of all
his years as a bandit, but she imagined from the way his gigantic aide addressed him with such humility
that he must have a very menacing expression. She was surprised by the Colonel's voice, as soft and wellmodulated as a professor's.
"Are you the woman who sells words?" he asked.
"At your service," she stammered, peering into the dark and trying to see him better.
The Colonel stood up, and turned straight toward her. She saw dark skin and the eyes of a ferocious puma,
and she knew immediately that she was standing before the loneliest man in the world.
"I want to be President," he announced.
The Colonel was weary of riding across that godforsaken land, waging useless wars and suffering defeats
that no subterfuge could transform into victories. For years he had been sleeping in the open air, bitten by
mosquitoes, eating iguanas and snake soup, but those minor inconveniences were not why he wanted to
change his destiny. What truly troubled him was the terror he saw in people's eyes. He longed to ride into a
town beneath a triumphal arch with bright flags and flowers everywhere, he wanted to be cheered, and be
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given newly laid eggs and freshly baked bread. Men fled at the sight of him, children trembled, and
women miscarried from fright, he had had enough, and so he had decided to become President. El Mulato
had suggested that they ride to the capital, gallop up to the Palace, and take over the government, the way
they had taken so many other things without anyone's permission. The Colonel, however, did not want to
be just another tyrant, there had been enough of those before him and, besides, if he did that, he would
never win people's hearts. It was his aspiration to win the popular vote in the December elections.
"To do that, I have to talk like a candidate. Can you sell me the words for a speech?" the Colonel asked
Belisa Crepusculario.
She had accepted many assignments, but none like this. She did not dare refuse, fearing that El Mulato
would shoot her between the eyes, or worse still, that the Colonel would burst into tears. There was more
to it than that, however, she felt the urge to help him because she felt a throbbing warmth beneath her
skin, a powerful desire to touch that man, to fondle him, to clasp him in her arms.
All night and a good part of the following day, Belisa Crepusculario searched her repertory for words
adequate for a presidential speech, closely watched by El Mulato, who could not take his eyes from her
firm wanderer's legs and virginal breasts. She discarded harsh, cold words, words that were too flowery,
words worn from abuse, words that offered improbable promises, untruthful and confusing words, until all
she had left were words sure to touch the minds of men and women's intuition. Calling upon the
knowledge she had purchased from the priest for twenty pesos, she wrote the speech on a sheet of paper
and then signaled El Mulato to untie the rope that bound her ankles to a tree. He led her once more to the
Colonel, and again she felt the throbbing anxiety that had seized her when she first saw him. She handed
him the paper and waited while he looked at it, holding it gingerly between thumbs and fingertips.
"What the shit does this say," he asked finally.
"Don't you know how to read?"
"War's what I know," he replied.
She read the speech aloud. She read it three times, so her client could engrave it on his memory. When she
finished, she saw the emotion in the faces of the soldiers who had gathered round to listen, and saw that
the Colonel's eyes glittered with enthusiasm, convinced that with those words the presidential chair would
be his.
"If after they've heard it three times, the boys are still standing there with their mouths hanging open, it
must mean the thing's damn good, Colonel" was El Mulato's approval.
"All right, woman. How much do I owe you?" the leader asked.
"One peso, Colonel."
"That's not much," he said, opening the pouch he wore at his belt, heavy with proceeds from the last foray.
"The peso entitles you to a bonus. I'm going to give you two secret words," said Belisa Crepusculario.
"What for?"
She explained that for every fifty centavos a client paid, she gave him the gift of a word for his exclusive
use. The Colonel shrugged. He had no interest at all in her offer, but he did not want to be impolite to
someone who had served him so well. She walked slowly to the leather stool where he was sitting, and
bent down to give him her gift. The man smelled the scent of a mountain cat issuing from the woman, a
fiery heat radiating from her hips, he heard the terrible whisper of her hair, and a breath of sweetmint
murmured into his ear the two secret words that were his alone.
"They are yours, Colonel," she said as she stepped back. "You may use them as much as you please."
El Mulato accompanied Belisa to the roadside, his eyes as entreating as a stray dog's, but when he reached
out to touch her, he was stopped by an avalanche of words he had never heard before; believing them to
be an irrevocable curse, the flame of his desire was extinguished.
During the months of September, October, and November the Colonel delivered his speech so many times
that had it not been crafted from glowing and durable words it would have turned to ash as he spoke. He
travelled up and down and across the country, riding into cities with a triumphal air, stopping in even the
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most forgotten villages where only the dump heap betrayed a human presence, to convince his fellow
citizens to vote for him. While he spoke from a platform erected in the middle of the plaza, El Mulato and
his men handed out sweets and painted his name on all the walls in gold frost. No one paid the least
attention to those advertising ploys; they were dazzled by the clarity of the Colonel's proposals and the
poetic lucidity of his arguments, infected by his powerful wish to right the wrongs of history, happy for the
first time in their lives. When the Candidate had finished his speech, his soldiers would fire their pistols into
the air and set off firecrackers, and when finally they rode off, they left behind a wake of hope that lingered
for days on the air, like the splendid memory of a comet's tail. Soon the Colonel was the favorite. No one
had ever witnessed such a phenomenon: a man who surfaced from the civil war, covered with scars and
speaking like a professor, a man whose fame spread to every corner of the land and captured the nation's
heart. The press focused their attention on him. Newspapermen came from far away to interview him and
repeat his phrases, and the number of his followers and enemies continued to grow.
"We're doing great, Colonel," said El Mulato, after twelve successful weeks of campaigning.
But the Candidate did not hear. He was repeating his secret words, as he did more and more obsessively.
He said them when he was mellow with nostalgia; he murmured them in his sleep; he carried them with
him on horseback; he thought them before delivering his famous speech; and he caught himself savoring
them in his leisure time. And every time he thought of those two words, he thought of Belisa Crepusculario,
and his senses were inflamed with the memory of her feral scent, her fiery heat, the whisper of her hair,
and her sweetmint breath in his ear, until he began to go around like a sleepwalker, and his men realized
that he might die before he ever sat in the presidential chair.
"What's got hold of you, Colonel," El Mulato asked so often that finally one day his chief broke down and
told him the source of his befuddlement: those two words that were buried like two daggers in his gut.
"Tell me what they are and maybe they'll lose their magic," his faithful aide suggested.
"I can't tell them, they're for me alone," the Colonel replied.
Saddened by watching his chief decline like a man with a death sentence on his head, El Mulato slung his
rifle over his shoulder and set out to find Belisa Crepusculario. He followed her trail through all that vast
country, until he found her in a village in the far south, sitting under her tent reciting her rosary of news. He
planted himself, spraddle-legged, before her, weapon in hand.
"You! You're coming with me," he ordered.
She had been waiting. She picked up her inkwell, folded the canvas of her small stall, arranged her shawl
around her shoulders, and without a word took her place behind El Mulato's saddle. They did not exchange
so much as a word in all the trip; El Mulato's desire for her had turned into rage, and only his fear of her
tongue prevented his cutting her to shreds with his whip. Nor was he inclined to tell her that the Colonel
was in a fog, and that a spell whispered into his ear had done what years of battle had not been able to do.
Three days later they arrived at the encampment, and immediately, in view of all the troops, El Mulato led
his prisoner before the Candidate.
"I brought this witch here so you can give her back her words, Colonel," El Mulato said, pointing the barrel
of his rifle at the woman's head. "And then she can give you back your manhood."
The Colonel and Belisa Crepusculario stared at each other, measuring one another from a distance. The
men knew then that their leader would never undo the witchcraft of those accursed words, because the
whole world could see the voracious-puma eyes soften as the woman walked to him and took his hand in
hers.
Copyright © 1989 by Isabel Allende
From The Stories of Eva Luna, Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
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“Two Words” quiz questions
1. What does Belisa Crepusculario’s name mean? Why is it important?
2. Explain why Belisa decided to ‘make her living selling words.’ What kind of activities did this entail?
3. What kind of person is Belisa? Defend your answer.
4. What picture of Belisa Crepusculario’s world do you get from the story?
5. Why do you think Allendele says that Belisa has withstood ‘the exhaustion of centuries’?
6. What do you think are the two words Belisa gives the Colonel at their parting? What is their effect?
7. Why would a man such as the Colonel appeal to Belisa? What does she hope from him?
8. What do you think were the author’s goals and ideals when she wrote this story?
9. What are the main themes of this story?
10. What are the magical or fantastical realism elements of this story?
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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
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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
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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.
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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.
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” Quiz questions
1. The subtitle of "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is "A Tale for Children". Why do you think
García Márquez directs his story to children? What might be the differences between an adult
reader's take and a child's?
2. What's the role of poverty in this story? Who is poor? How does being poor change their role?
3. What if the Very Old Man had been a Very Little Baby? How would the story be different?
4. This story is one of the most famous examples of magical realism. How does García Márquez insert
the fantastic into the realistic setting?
5. García Márquez claimed that magical realism is actually just realism for Latin Americans, who live
with crazy, fantastic events every day. What do you think about that idea?
6. What role does religion play in the people's acceptance of this extraordinary event? What do you
think the story's attitude toward religion is?
7. Would you consider this story comic or tragic? Why?
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T H E F E A TH E R P I L L O W
B Y H O R A C I O Q U I R O G A [?]
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Her entire honeymoon gave her hot and cold shivers. A blond, angelic, and timid young girl, the childhood
fancies she had dreamed about being a bride had been chilled by her husband’s rough character. She loved
him very much, nonetheless, although sometimes she gave a light shudder when, as they returned home
through the streets together at night, she cast furtive glances at the impressive stature of her Jordan, who
had been silent for an hour. He, for his part, loved her profoundly but never let it be seen.
For three months – they had been married in April – they lived in a special kind of bliss. Doubtless she
would have wished less severity in the rigorous sky of love, more expansive and less cautious tenderness,
but her husband’s impassive manner always restrained her.
The house in which they lived influenced her chills and shuddering to no small degree. The whiteness of the
silent patio – friezes, columns, and marble statues – produced the wintry impression of an enchanted
palace. Inside, the glacial brilliance of stucco, the completely bare walls, affirmed the sensation of
unpleasant coldness. As one crossed from one room to another, the echo of his steps reverberated
throughout the house, as if long abandonment had sensitized its resonance.
Alicia passed the autumn in this strange love nest. She had determined, however, to cast a veil over her
former dreams and live like a sleeping beauty in the hostile house, trying not to think about anything till her
husband arrived each evening.
It is not strange that she grew thin. She had a light attack of influenza that dragged on insidiously for days
and days: after that Alicia’s health never returned. Finally one afternoon she was able to go into the
garden, supported on her husband’s arm. She looked around listlessly. Suddenly Jordan, with deep
tenderness, ran his hand very slowly over her head, and Alicia instantly burst into sobs, throwing her arms
around his neck. For a long time she cried out all the fears she had kept silent, redoubling her weeping at
Jordan’s slightest caress. Then her sobs subsided, and she stood a long while, her face hidden in the hollow
of his neck, not moving or speaking a word.
This was the last day Alicia was well enough to be up. The following day she awakened feeling faint.
Jordan’s doctor examined her with minute attention, prescribing calm and absolute rest.
“I don’t know,” he said to Jordan at the street door.”She has a great weakness that I am unable to explain.
And with no vomiting, nothing … if she wakes tomorrow as she did today, call me at once.”
When she awakened the following day, Alicia was worse. There was a consultation. It was agreed there was
an anemia of incredible progression, completely inexplicable. Alicia had no more fainting spells but she was
visibly moving towards death. The lights were lighted all day long in her bedroom, and there was complete
silence. Hours went by without the slightest sound. Alicia dozed. Jordan virtually lived in the drawing-room,
which was also always lighted. With tireless persistence he paced ceaselessly from one end of the room to
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the other. The carpet swallowed his steps. At times he entered the bedroom and continued his silent
pacing back and forth alongside the bed, stopping for an instant at each end to regard his wife.
Suddenly Alicia began to have hallucinations, vague images, at first seeming to float in the air, then
descending to floor level. Her eyes excessively wide, she stared continuously at the carpet on either side of
the head of her bed. One night she suddenly focused on one spot. Then she opened her mouth to scream,
and pearls of sweat suddenly beaded her nose and lips
“Jordan! Jordan!” she clamoured, rigid with fright, still staring at the carpet; she looked at him once again;
and after a long moment of stupefied confrontation she regained her senses. She smiled and took her
husband’s hand in hers, caressing it, trembling, for half an hour.
Among her most persistent hallucinations was that of an anthropoid poised on his fingertips on the carpet,
staring at her.
The doctors returned, but to no avail. They saw before them a diminishing life, a life bleeding away day by
day, hour by hour, absolutely without their knowing why. During the last consultation Alicia lay in a stupor
while they took her pulse, passing her inert wrist from one to another. They observed her a long time in
silence and then moved into the dining room.
“Phew …” The discouraged chief physician shrugged his shoulders.”It’s an inexplicable case. There is little
we can do …”
“That’s my last hope,” Jordan groaned. And he staggered blindly against the table.
Alicia’s life was fading away in the subdilirium of anemia, a delirium which grew worse throughout the
evening hours but which let up somewhat after dawn. The illness never worsened during the daytime, but
each morning she awakened pale as death, almost in a swoon. It seemed only at night that her life drained
out of her in new waves of blood. Always when she awakened she had the sensation of lying collapsed in
the bed with a million pound weight on top of her. Following the third day of this relapse she left her bed
again. She could scarcely move her head. She did not want her bed to be touched, not even to have her
bedcovers arranged. Her crepuscular terrors advanced now in the form of monsters that dragged
themselves toward the bed and laboriously climbed upon the bedspread.
Then she lost consciousness. The final two days she raved ceaselessly in a weak voice. The lights funereally
illuminated the bedroom and drawing room. In the deathly silence of the house the only sound was the
monotonous delirium from the bedroom and the dull echoes of Jordan’s eternal pacing.
Finally, Alicia died. The servant, when she came in afterward to strip the now empty bed, stared
wonderingly for a moment at the pillow.
“Sir!” she called to Jordan in a low voice.”There are stains on the pillow that look like blood.”
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Jordan approached rapidly and bent over the pillow. Truly, on the case, on both sides of the hollow left
by Alicia’s head, were two small dark spots.
“They look like punctures,” the servant murmured after a moment of motionless observation.
“Hold it up to the light,” Jordan told her.
The servant raised the pillow but immediately dropped it and stood staring at it, livid and trembling.
Without knowing why, Jordan felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.
“What is it?” he murmured in a hoarse voice.
“It’s very heavy,” the servant whispered, still trembling
Jordan picked it up; it was extraordinarily heavy. He carried it out of the room, and on the dining room
table he ripped open the case and the ticking with a slash. The top feathers floated away, and the servant,
her mouth opened wide, gave a scream of horror and covered her face with clenched fists: in the bottom of
the pillow case, among the feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs, was a monstrous animal, a living, viscous
ball. It was so swollen one could barely make out its mouth.
Night after night, since Alicia had taken to her bed, this abomination had stealthily applied its mouth – its
proboscis one might better say – to the girl’s temples, sucking her blood. The puncture was scarcely
perceptible. The daily plumping of the pillow had doubtlessly at first impeded its progress, but as soon as
the girl could no longer move, the suction became vertiginous. In five days, in five nights, the monster had
drained Alicia’s life away.
These parasites of feathered creatures, diminutive in their habitual environment, reach enormous
proportions under certain conditions. Human blood seems particularly favorable to them, and it is not rare
to encounter them in feather pillows.
“The Feather Pillow” Quiz Essay Prompt – one strong paragraph not an entire essay
Magical realism is a genre that challenges notions of the real by incorporating elements of the marvelous
into everyday ‘realities’. This is not to say that magical realist texts are disconnected from reality or lacking
political motivation, in fact, they have strong social relevance. Fantastic elements in literature can serve to
call attention to social untruths, rather than distract the reader from such issues. For instance, in One
Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez utilizes and takes to extreme the exoticism of Latin
America to show that it is precisely this kind of mythologizing that can lead to cultural miss-representation.
The power of language to influence our perception of the world is also examined in its capacity to shape
historic fictions. Knowing this, why is “The Feather Pillow” considered magical realism? Which realistic
elements are intertwined with ‘fantastic’ ones and what is the result?