The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World
By Gabriel García Márquez
Gregory Rabassa, Translator
THE FIRST
CHILDREN who saw the dark and slinky bulge approaching through the sea let
themselves think it was an enemy ship. Then they saw it had no flags or masts
and they thought it was a whale. But when it washed up on the beach, they
removed the clumps of seaweed, the jellyfish tentacles, and the remains of fish
and flotsam, and only then did they see that it was a drowned man.
They had
been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and digging him up
again, when someone chanced to see them and spread the alarm in the village.
The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed that he weighed more than
any dead man they had ever known, almost as much as a horse,
and they said to each other that maybe he'd been floating too long and the
water had got into his bones. When they laid him on the floor they said he'd
been taller than all other men because there was barely enough room for him in
the house, but they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after
death was part of the nature of certain drowned men. He had the smell of the
sea about him and only his shape gave one to suppose that it was the corpse of
a human being, because the skin was covered with a crust of mud and scales.
They did
not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger.
The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone
courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a
desertlike cape. There was so little land that mothers always went about with
the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the
years had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs. But the sea was
calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats. So when they found
the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were
all there.
That
night they did not go out to work at sea. While the men went to find out if
anyone was missing in neighboring villages, the women stayed behind to care for
the drowned man. They took the mud off with grass swabs, they removed the
underwater stones entangled in his hair, and they scraped the crust off with
tools used for scaling fish. As they were doing that they noticed that the
vegetation on him came from faraway oceans and deep water and that his clothes
were in tatters, as if he had sailed through labyrinths of coral. They noticed
too that he bore his death with pride, for he did not have the lonely look of
other drowned men who came out of the sea or that haggard, needy look of men
who drowned in rivers. But only when they finished cleaning him off did they
become aware of the kind of man he was and it left them breathless. Not only
was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever
seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in
their imagination.
They
could not find a bed in the village large enough to lay him on nor was there a
table solid enough to use for his wake. The tallest men's holiday pants would
not fit him, nor the fattest ones' Sunday shirts, nor
the shoes of the one with the biggest feet. Fascinated by his huge size and his
beauty, the women then decided to make him some pants from a large piece of
sail and a shirt from some bridal linen so that he could continue through his
death with dignity. As they sewed, sitting in a circle and gazing at the corpse
between stitches, it seemed to them that the wind had never been so steady nor
the sea so restless as on that night and they supposed
that the change had something to do with the dead man. They thought that if
that magnificent man had lived in the village, his house would have had the
widest doors, the highest ceiling, and the strongest floor, his bedstead would
have been made from a midship frame held together by iron bolts, and his wife
would have been the happiest woman. They thought that he would have had so much
authority that he could have drawn fish out of the sea simply by calling their
names and that he would have put so much work into his land that springs would
have burst forth from among the rocks so that he would have been able to plant
flowers on the cliffs. They secretly compared hom to their own men, thinking
that for all their lives theirs were incapable of doing what he could do in one
night, and they ended up dismissing them deep in their hearts as the weakest,
meanest and most useless creatures on earth. They were wandering through that
maze of fantasy when the oldest woman, who as the oldest had looked upon the
drowned man with more compassion than passion, sighed: 'He has the face
of someone called Esteban.'
It was
true. Most of them had only to take another look at him to see that he could
not have any other name. The more stubborn among them, who were the youngest,
still lived for a few hours with the illusion that when they put his clothes on
and he lay among the flowers in patent leather shoes his name might be Lautaro.
But it was a vain illusion. There had not been enough canvas, the poorly cut
and worse sewn pants were too tight, and the hidden strength of his heart
popped the buttons on his shirt. After
'Praise the
Lord,' they sighed, 'he's ours!'
The men
thought the fuss was only womanish frivolity. Fatigued because of the difficult
nighttime inquiries, all they wanted was to get rid of the bother of the
newcomer once and for all before the sun grew strong on that arid, windless
day. They improvised a litter with the remains of foremasts and gaffs, tying it
together with rigging so that it would bear the weight of the body until they
reached the cliffs. They wanted to tie the anchor from a cargo ship to him so
that he would sink easily into the deepest waves, where fish are blind and
divers die of nostalgia, and bad currents would not bring him back to shore, as
had happened with other bodies. But the more they hurried, the more the women thought
of ways to waste time. They walked about like startled hens, pecking with the
sea charms on their breasts, some interfering on one side to put a scapular of
the good wind on the drowned man, some on the other side to put a wrist compass
on him , and after a great deal of get away from there, woman, stay out of the
way, look, you almost made me fall on top of the dead man, the men began to
feel mistrust in their livers and started grumbling about why so many
main-altar decorations for a stranger, because no matter how many nails and
holy-water jars he had on him, the sharks would chew him all the same, but the
women kept piling on their junk relics, running back and forth, stumbling,
while they released in sighs what they did not in tears, so that the men
finally exploded with since when has there ever been such a fuss over a
drifting corpse, a drowned nobody, a piece of cold Wednesday meat. One of the
women, mortified by so much lack of care, then removed the handkerchief from
the dead man's face and the men were left breathless too.
He was
Esteban. It was not necessary to repeat it for them to recognize him. If they
had been told Sir Walter Raleigh, even they might have been impressed with his
gringo accent, the macaw on his shoulder, his cannibal-killing blunderbuss, but
there could be only one Esteban in the world and there he was, stretched out
like a sperm whale, shoeless, wearing the pants of an undersized child, and
with those stony nails that had to be cut with a knife. They only had to take
the handkerchief off his face to see that he was ashamed, that it was not his
fault that he was so big or so heavy or so handsome, and if he had known that
this was going to happen, he would have looked for a more discreet place to
drown in, seriously, I even would have tied the anchor off a galleon around my
nick and staggered off a cliff like someone who doesn't like things in order
not to be upsetting people now with this Wednesday dead body, as you people
say, in order not to be bothering anyone with this filthy piece of cold meat
that doesn't have anything to do with me. There was so much truth in his manner
taht even the most mistrustful men, the ones who felt the bitterness of endless
nights at sea fearing that their women would tire of dreaming about them and
begin to dream of drowned men, even they and others who were harder still
shuddered in the marrow of their bones at Esteban's sincerity.
That was
how they came to hold the most splendid funeral they could ever conceive of for
an abandoned drowned man. Some women who had gone to get flowers in the
neighboring villages returned with other women who could not believe what they
had been told, and those women went back for more flowers when they saw the
dead man, and they brought more and more until there were so many flowers and
so many people that it was hard to walk about. At the final moment it pained
them to return him to the waters as an orphan and they chose a father and
mother from among the best people, and aunts and uncles and cousins, so that through
him all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen. Some sailors who heard
the weeping from a distance went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables
about sirens. While they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their
shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, men and women became aware
for the first time of the desolation of their streets, the dryness of their
courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they
faced the splendor and beauty of their drowned man. They let him go without an
anchor so that he could come back if he wished and whenever he wished, and they
all held their breath for the fraction of centuries the body took to fall into
the abyss. They did not need to look at one another to realize that they were
no longer all present, that they would never be. But they also knew that
everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider
doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban's memory could go
everywhere without bumping into beams and so that no one in the future would
dare whisper the big boob finally died, too bad, the handsome fool has finally
died, because they were going to paint their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban's
memory eternal and they were going to break their backs digging for springs
among the stones and planting flowers on the cliffs so that in future years at
dawn the passengers on great liners would awaken, suffocated by the smell of
gardens on the high seas, and the captain would have to come down from the
bridge in his dress uniform, with his astrolabe, his pole star, and his row of
war medals and, pointing to the promontory of roses on the horizon, he would
say in fourteen languages, look there, where the wind is so peaceful now that
it's gone to sleep beneath the beds, over there, where the sun's so bright that
the sunflowers don't know which way to turn, yes, over there, that's Esteban's
village.