See It to Believe It

On the third day of continuous rain, they had killed so many feisty crabs inside the house that Ezra had to cross his sopping courtyard and throw them back into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it might be due to the stench. It had been a sad world since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single hue of ash-gray and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a horribly common stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Ezra was coming back to the house following throwing the crabs an uncertain distance, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the back of the courtyard. He had to go awfully close to see that it was an old man, a horribly old man, lying with his face in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his large wings. Frightened by that nightmare brought to life, Ezra ran to get Scarlett, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the back of the courtyard where he had been. They both gaped at the fallen body with a startling stupor. He was clothed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his nearly bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his sorry condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge raptor-like wings, dirty and half-plucked, were eternally entangled in the thick mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Ezra and Scarlett very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him recognizable. Then they dared to speak to him, and he answered in a meager dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they trotted over the inconvenience of the giant wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some ancient ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a female neighbor who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their fatal mistake. “He is but an angel,” she explained to them. “He must have been coming down for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain must have knocked him down.” On the next day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Ezra’s house. Against the better judgment of the neighbor, 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 to what was supposed a much worse fate. Ezra watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens that were in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain halted, Ezra and Scarlett were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child who had been ill woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat something. Then they felt generous 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 ever-changing high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the very first glimmer of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having a good time with the angel, without the slightest reverence, throwing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but rather a circus animal. Father Augustine arrived before seven o’clock, very surprised at the strange news. By that time onlookers less unbecoming than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of illustrations concerning the captive’s future. The humblest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of more clouded in mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some people meanwhile hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Augustine, before sentencing himself to the role of a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the jagged 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 miserable man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the puffed up chickens. He was lying in the corner of his stall drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the indecencies of the world, he only lifted his connoisseur eyes and whispered something in his dialect when Father Augustine went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in the ancient language of Latin. The parish priest had his hintings of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His supposedly beloved ministers. He then noticed that seen close up he was much too mortal: he had a horrid smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by torrential winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud image of angels. He then came out of the chicken coop and in a short sermon warned the curious against the risks of being too trusting. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of common carnival tricks in order to trick the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the vital 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 own bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Pope in order to get the final verdict from the highest earthly courts. His wisdom fell on barren hearts. The magnificent news of the captive angel spread with such speed 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 very house down. Scarlett, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much trash from her own supposed marketplace of a home, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission fee to see the angel. The speculative came from far away. A traveling circus dropped by with a flying acrobat who flew 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 siderail post. The most unfortunate sops on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers long ago; a man from Rwanda who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars kept him awake; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less unfortunate or serious misgivings. In the very air of that shipwreck disorder that made the whole earth seemingly tremble, Ezra and Scarlett were exceedingly happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had stuffed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the very distant horizon. The angel was the sole one who took no part in his own act. He spent his space of time trying to get comfortable in his lent nest, confused by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire, as if they were a complement. Initially they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, was the very food prescribed for angels. He turned them down with a stout heart, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the penitents brought to him, and they never found out whether it was because he was supposedly supernatural or because he was a plain old man that in the end ate nothing but oatmeal mush mixed with grains. His only angelic virtue seemed to be patience. Certainly on the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar feed that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their unfortunate 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 were successful 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 supposed he was dead. He awoke with a start, bellowing in his airtight 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 part of the familiar earth. Although many people thought that his reaction had not been one of 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 Augustine held back the crowd’s excitement with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the true nature of the captive. But the coming mail showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time discovering if the prisoner had a navel, if his speech had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of the smallest pin, or whether he wasn’t just a faulty Norwegian with wings. Those desperate letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put an end to the priest’s apparent tribulations. It so happened that during those days, among so many other attracting 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 a lot less than the admission to see the angel, but people were allowed 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 honest horror. She was a frightening tarantula the size of a bighorn ram and with the head of a solemn maiden. What was most heartbreaking, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recalled the details of her misfortune. While still only a child she had sneaked out of her parents’ house to go to a frivolous dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap tore the sky in two and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a horrendous spider. Her only true nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A sight like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to pummel without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely was seen to look at mortals. Besides, the very few miracles that were said due 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 were a mere consolation, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel’s speculation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him to the ground. That was how Father Augustine was cured forever of his insomnia and Ezra’s courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms. Same old, same old. The owners of the house had no reason to wail. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that those dreadful crabs wouldn’t get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in. Ezra also set up a rabbit warren close to town and gave up his job as a bailiff for good, and Scarlett 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 bettering. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of rose oil inside it every so often, it was not in honor to the angel but to drive away the dung heap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old, decrepid one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he does not get too close to the chicken coop. Although 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 without care, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less aloof with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most childish of tricks with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with chicken pox at the same time. The medical physician 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 didn’t seem possible for him to be alive. What shocked 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 failed have them also. When the child first began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went to it dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. He would be driven out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later be found in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places while they grew to think that he’d be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Scarlett shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He found 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 cannula of his last feathers. Ezra 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 times they became alarmed for their sight, 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 joined with the first sunny days. He remained unmoving 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 belonging to a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decrepitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite wary that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars, when he thought no one could hear him. One morning Scarlett was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Following that she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his chipped 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. Although he did manage to gain altitude. Scarlett 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 continued 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 eternal horizon of the forever sea.