When Pelayo and Elisenda first found the angel, their response was less an exercise in captivity and more an exercise in rescue ("He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down," says the wise neighbor woman).

But the next day, the angel has become, indeed, a captive: Pelayo has taken to watching over the angel with club in hand, then dragging the poor creature out into the chicken coop at night. They are afraid of the angel, who is familiar and yet unfamiliar to them, a creature which they would have ordinarily considered a thing of Heaven, nonthreatening, especially since he is so clearly infirm.

When their baby awakens the following day, having broken the fever at last and yearning to eat, the relief of that news inspires Elisanda and Pelayo to release the angel to the ocean, upon a raft with fresh water and food for three days.

I find this amusing and sad all at once. How in the world is a flesh-and-blood creature of such infirmity to survive that sort of treatment? What were the two young parents thinking? Why were they afraid? And yet, isn't this, in essence, the way so many people treat their elderly? Send them away, or find some other way to forget about them, that in the act of forgetting they might disappear?

Shakespeare's voluminous cast of characters often did such a thing. I've been reading condensed versions of the Bard in short bedtime stories to my six-year-old, and I am reminded that, in fact, this is what Leontes did to his best friend in "The Winter's Tale," is it not? And what about the Duke in "The Tempest?" Was he not cast away by people who wanted his throne?

So now I'm reading this story as if it weren't about an angel at all, but perhaps about a betrayed king or God, or about a character who symbolizes a forsaken grandeur, or a reference embodying the notion of a long-gone prosperity: the good old days.