In "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," is the man an angel or a human being?

In the
magical realist world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez the boundaries between the real and the
fantastical are often blurred. That being the case, there's no definitive answer to this
question. The old man could be just that, an old man. Or he really could be an angel. Then
again, he might be neither, just a gigantic mirage. We simply don't know.

But in any case it doesn't much matter because the old man/angel (delete where applicable)
exists to tell us about the people who live in the remote coastal village in which the story is
set. And the story is about them, not the strange winged creature in their midst. To a large
extent, the old man/angel merely acts as a catalyst for the events that follow. Garcia Marquez
wants to use the old man/angel to...