A Cataclysm in Repose
...thers come merely to gawk at the creature and in several instances to treat him cruelly. They threw stones at him and burned him with a branding iron. Up until this point, the author shows only examples of human greed and fear. Elisenda sees it as a way to make money. Her husband puts the angel in his chicken coop and they start charging money for people to view him. Even the priest warned the crowd against confusing the angel with a demonic presence. The priest was unable to show even the slightest faith that this might be a heavenly creature without writing to the Pope for some type of confirmation. The author is clear in showing how frail and unimaginative human faith can be. Nowhere do we see any example of a person or person’s coming only to marvel upon the presence of a possibly divine being. Pelayo and Elisenda keep the angel locked up in a coop with their chickens, indifferent to his possible suffering. They choose not to treat him with care or compassion, instead treating him like one of their farm animals. It appears that no one in the community protests against this treatment of a living creature, no matter what it may be. Rather than show caring, they make fun of him. The author finds this lack of compassion to be a worse trait that the ignorance around the appearance of the creature. In what appears to be a tale of fantasy, a woman changed into a spider shows up with a heartrending tale of how she came to be that way. Despite the ludicrousness of her story, the crowd seems to be able to believe in her more than in the appearance of an angel. Again, where is their faith? How weak and two-faced they show themselves to be. Although spiritual occurrences seem to be happening around them, the townspeople seem to dismiss them as “consolation miracles,” and at the same time believe in a woman turned into a spider simply because they could see and hear her story. They do not seem to find a spider’s body with a human head as odd as the appearance of an elderly man with wings. Again, this shows the lack of many humans to have faith in something they cannot clearly see or understand. My interpretation is that Garcia Marquez is trying to show that this is indeed a divine creature. One way he does this is by portraying the angel as infinitely patient, even when faced with a long period of cruelty or indifference at the hand of his captors. Also, the fact that Garcia Marquez is so annoyed with the characters behaviors shows that he is trying to prove to the reader that there may be something truly spiritual going on and that the people are too stupid to pick up on it. A strong example of this is when the people decide to be careful not to annoy the angel any longer, because they suddenly understood that “his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.” What does this mean, “a cataclysm in repose?” A cataclysm is usually a profound, very strong event, something out of the ordinary. It that is the case, then this would be an extraordinary being in a state of rest. The next question to be asked is why is he resting? Is he resting for a future journey? Has he stopped by to teach the people something? That are several possibilities here that I believe Garcia Marquez leaves up to the reader to interpret. At one point in the story, the family becomes so accustomed to the angel in the coop, that they allow their young son to go in and play around him. The fact that the boy and angel both come down with the chicken pox at exactly the same time does not strike them as odd in any way (perhaps another supernatural occurrence). The physician who examines the two patients is amazed at how natural the wings are on the elderly man, but still does not equate it to anything spiritual. Garcia Marquez again shows how limited man is in his thinking. Towards the end of the story, the coop disintegrates and the angel seems to appear in many places at once, driving Elisenda to distraction. Once again, however, rather than ...