An Angel Comes to Town...

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, religion is something of the imagination that may or may not help people and has nothing to prove its existence. In the beginning of the story, the angel arrived and Pelayo placed him in the chicken coop showing that the angel was no more important than the dirty animals that would later get eaten. He did not care enough about religion as symbolized by the angel so he did not treat the angel as if it were important. He chose to treat it as a burden to his everyday life. Even after his child's fever went away and he was quickly cured, Pelayo ignored the angel (religion) and decided that his child was better because of to the care he and his wife provided. In this case, religion provided no help to Pelayo. Pelayo and his wife went on to charge people five cents to view the crazy specimen of religion that they possessed. They did not care that he could have been divine, but used him to improve their financial well being and class. Although the church has religious foundations, for Marquez these religious foundations were something that was made up and used as a way to collect money and make a living for the people who worked for the church.

Pelayo showed his disinterest in religion when the angel arrived, but it took the town a little bit longer to decide that the imaginary angel was not as important as reality. The town's disinterest in the angel came when a human spider arrived. The spider became more relevant and real to the townspeople because she had been a human at one time, so it was possible that something as horrific as this could happen to them too. The people essentially left religion by no longer taking interest in the angel and moved toward the human. They moved from the imaginary or unproved (religion) to the real, even though it is hard to believe that a human could be turned in a spider for coming home late. Religion proved to be more of a burden at the end of the story than a help even as Pelayo and Elisenda made a lot of money by showing off the imagined creature that was representative of religion. As the angel left at the end of the story, "[Elisenda] 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". (455) She watched something that had been real for a short period of time (the angel) leave just as easily as it had come. Religion enters and exits people's lives, but it relies on faith and just as the angel left, there was no way to prove that he had been there in the first place. The whole idea of religion was just a dream. Religion or the presence of the angel had just been an "annoyance" and Elisenda was glad that it was gone. It went from being a burden to being a figment of her imagination.