The rain fell for a third day,
and they barely had time to deal with the crabs crawling into the house;
together they beat them with sticks, and then Pelayo
dragged them through a flooded yard and threw them into the sea.
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Together they beat them with sticks,
and then Pelayo dragged them through a flooded yard and threw them into the sea.
Based on the eponymous short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Belarusfilm NPO "tsentr" (Studio AFTS) 1989
Since Tuesday, it had been the same dismal picture:
sea ​​and sky had come together in some kind of ash-gray mass;
the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light,
had become a stew of mud and rotting shellfish.
Pelayo ran to get his wife Elisenda,
who was putting compresses on a sick child.
Together they gazed in a mute stupor...
Together they gazed in a mute stupor at the creature lying in the mud.
He was dressed like a ragpicker.
Several strands of faded hair stuck to his bald skull,
his mouth had almost no teeth,
and there was no grandeur at all in his form.
Soon everyone knew that Pelayo was holding captive a flesh-and-blood angel.
No one raised a hand to kill him,
although an all-knowing neighbor woman claimed that modern angels
were none other than surviving fugitives from heaven
and members of an ancient conspiracy against God.
[PROTOCOL]
The parish priest became suspicious
when he saw that this thing does not understand the language of God
or know how to greet His ministers.
Looking closer, he found that he was much too human,
this alleged angel:
he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors,
his wings were strewn with parasites,
his large feathers had been worn out by terrestrial winds,
and nothing at all in his beggarly appearance
measured up to the proud dignity of angels.
Father Gonzaga reminded them of the dangers posed by credulity.
He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of resorting to carnival tricks
to confuse the unwary.
Finally, the Padre judiciously argued that if wings were not an essential element
in determining the difference between a hawk and an airplane,
they were even less so for the recognition of this thing as an angel.
Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter...
write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate
and he in turn to the Pope
so that the final verdict would thus come down
from the very highest tribunal.
Finally he managed to gain altitude
and Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him,
when she watched him fly over the last houses of the village,
almost touching the roofs,
and wildly flapping his wings, like those of some senile hawk.
Elisenda watched him until she was through cutting the onions,
until he was no longer visible at all,
and was no longer an annoyance
in her life, but just an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.
THE END (1989) subs - Chapaev, Eus, Niffiwan 2019/2023, partly using Gregory Rabassa's translation