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.

This passage from the opening section of the tale is significant because it establishes the key motif that the magical and miraculous are a part of reality. It also shows the human tendency to quickly inure oneself to wonder and treat even the extraordinary as mundane. The old man’s enormous wings—a rare, quasi-magical feature—coexist with mud, representing reality. The wings are compared to those of a buzzard, a scavenger bird. Pelayo and Elisenda familiarize themselves with the old man so quickly that they become jaded to his appeal.

The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels.

Father Gonzaga’s assessment of the old man may seem wise, but it actually reveals the priest’s deep ignorance. This passage is an example of how the text uses satire effectively to illustrate its themes. In Father Gonzaga, the text presents a religious representative more obsessed with pedantry and bureaucracy than with empathy and charity. The priest does not judge the old man by his qualities but by how he greets members of the clergy. This shows that Father Gonzaga has begun regarding himself as a gatekeeper to God, rather than someone in the service of God. Further, he decides the old man cannot be an angel because of his human frailty and weakness. This is profoundly ironic, since a central tenet of Christianity is to be charitable toward the impoverished and physically weak.

What surprised 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 didn’t have them too.

The doctor is a minor character in the narrative, but his actions and thoughts carry great symbolic weight. He is one of the two people to treat the old man fairly. He chooses to examine the old man, thus treating him on par with the child who has contracted chicken pox. Ironically, it is the man of science—supposedly at odds with religion—who practices empathy. When he examines the old man, he notes that it is surprising the man is still alive despite the whooshing in his heart and kidneys. This provides scientific evidence of the old man’s otherworldliness, thus reiterating the text’s theme that the real and magical do not just coexist, but are also the flip side of each other. The doctor also concludes that the old man’s wings are “natural,” which inverts the expectations of normalcy. His open-minded examination shows that people’s notions of natural and unnatural are often based on limited knowledge and experience. That is why one must always be open to new ideas and knowledge.

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.

The concluding lines of the tale show that Elisenda, symbolizing the apathy of human beings, remains unaltered by the sight of the flying old man. Though she is relieved he is safe in flight, she is equally relieved he is away from her. Elisenda now finds it easy to watch the old man, since he is no longer her problem. This shows that she only ever viewed him as an annoyance, rather than as a guest or a wonder of nature. Elisenda embodies the jaded, cynical worldview of many adults.