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Pelayo
Elisenda is Pelayo’s wife. She is ordinary and concerned primarily with getting by. When Pelayo finds the old man in the courtyard, Elisenda is the one who comes up with the idea to charge admission to see the angel, and she’s not contented with their new wealth, even when she and Pelayo make enough money for a new house. In fact, she sees the old man/angel as a nuisance, letting out “a sigh of relief, for her and for him” when he eventually regains his strength enough to fly away. Elisenda shows herself to be shallow: she never shows the angel any respect nor seems particularly bothered about the health of her child. In fact, her happiest moment in the story is probably when the admission money she and Pelayo have accumulated allows her to buy “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.”
Elisenda Quotes in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
The A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings quotes below are all either spoken by Elisenda or refer to Elisenda. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings Quotes
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.
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Pelayo and Elisenda take a closer look at the angel, trying to figure him out. As far as they can tell, nothing about him matches up to their expectations of angels—he’s far too raggedy and unclean. And besides, he can’t speak their language! If he had a proper halo and looked more pure then perhaps they would react more positively towards him, but his dirtiness and decrepitude remind them of their own existence in this mundane town. The fact that they find him “familiar” simply means that they don’t feel a reverence towards him—he is not enough like them for Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea
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.
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Elisenda is going about her usual daily business, doing the mundane but important work of preparing food. Even though she now lives in a much bigger house, has nice clothes, and, most importantly, a healthy child, she still doesn’t feel any gratitude towards the angel. He has only ever been an inconvenience to her, like a cockroach infestation (or even an invasion of crabs). While stories often end with a resolution of the central conflict, the point of this ending is that, in reality, nothing has changed in any of the characters’ ways of life. They haven’t learned any lessons Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi atque placeat. Molestiae earum eum. Libero sit beatae. At a deserunt. Sint aperiam consequatur. Minima porro perferendis. Sit neque odit. Tenetur qui dignissimos. Qui et ut. Voluptate labore corporis. Hic tempore lab
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Elisenda Character Timeline in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
The timeline below shows where the character Elisenda appears in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Pelayo finds his wife Elisenda and together they examine the man: he’s “dressed like a ragpicker,” nearly bald, with few...
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Pelayo and Elisenda try to speak to the man, but he responds in an “incomprehensible dialect” with a...
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...the angel to death because angels are “fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy,” Pelayo and Elisenda don’t “have the heart” for that. Instead, Pelayo carries the club and watches the angel...
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...few hours later, the sick child’s appetite returns and this good fortune makes Pelayo and Elisenda feel “magnanimous”: they decide that the next day they will put the angel on a...
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...the strange angelic creature that troops with bayonets have to come to disperse the crowd. Elisenda, frustrated with cleaning up the trash left by the crowd, has the idea to fence...
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...got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake.” Pelayo and Elisenda make a lot of money from charging admission fees: they stuff their rooms full of...
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Pelayo and Elisenda are not upset that the crowds have died down—they’ve made enough money in that short...
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...from room to room in the house “like a stray dying man.” Though Pelayo and Elisenda drive him out of one room, he quickly reappears in another. Elisenda grows exasperated and...
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...seems less depressed. He even starts singing sea shanties under the stars. One morning, while Elisenda is cutting onions in the kitchen, she notices the old man making clumsy attempts at...
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