The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. 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.

Basic set-up:

This passage is from the beginning of Márquez's story. Pelayo comes home after fishing to find… an old man with enormous wings just chillin' in his backyard.

Márquez throws us right into a Magic Realist world at the beginning of this story. In the very first paragraph, we are introduced to a fantastic happening: Pelayo comes home to find an old dude with enormous wings in his backyard. Happens everyday, right?

This is a great example of the way that the fantastic is incorporated into Magic Realist texts. Everything about the world that's described in this passage is normal: there's a house, there's a courtyard, there's Pelayo and his wife. But this normality is disrupted by the introduction of something strange, unfamiliar, and totally fantastic. Is this old guy with wings an angel? Is he a hallucination? Is he Superman? We have to keep reading to find out.

Combining the fantastic and mundane is a stylistic trademark of Magic Realist texts. Here, we have this crazy vision of an old dude with wings who's just popped up out of nowhere. But the details of the passage point to a familiar, mundane world that we all know. There's a house and a courtyard and a man and his wife. It's not like we're in Middle Earth or on the planet Krypton or something.

Even the old man with wings is familiar or mundane in some ways. Yeah, he has wings, but he's "dressed like a ragpicker," and he looks like a "drenched great-grandfather." He's balding, and he hasn't got a full set of teeth. He could basically just be an old homeless guy… except for the fact that he has wings.