“The
Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez
A
Tale for Children
Translated
by Gregory Rabassa
1971
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
desert like 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 him
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 midnight
the whistling of the wind died down and the sea fell into its Wednesday
drowsiness. The silence put an end to any last doubts: he was Esteban. The
women who had dressed him, who had combed his hair, had cut his nails and
shaved him were unable to hold back a shudder of pity when they had to resign
themselves to his being dragged along the ground. It was then that they
understood how unhappy he must have been with that huge body since it bothered
him even after death. They could see him in life, condemned to going through
doors sideways, cracking his head on crossbeams, remaining on his feet during
visits, not knowing what to do with his soft, pink, sea lion hands while the
lady of the house looked for her most resistant chair and begged him,
frightened to death, sit here, Esteban, please, and he, leaning against the
wall, smiling, don't bother, ma'am, I'm fine where I am, his heels raw and his
back roasted from having done the same thing so many times whenever he paid a
visit, don't bother, ma'am, I'm fine where I am, just to avoid the
embarrassment of breaking up the chair, and never knowing perhaps that the ones
who said don't go, Esteban, at least wait till the coffee's ready, were the
ones who later on would whisper the big boob finally left, how nice, the
handsome fool has gone. That was what the women were thinking beside the body a
little before dawn. Later, when they covered his face with a handkerchief so
that the light would not bother him, he looked so forever dead, so defenseless,
so much like their men that the first furrows of tears opened in their hearts.
It was one of the younger ones who began the weeping. The others, coming to,
went from sighs to wails, and the more they sobbed the more they felt like
weeping, because the drowned man was becoming all the more Esteban for them,
and so they wept so much, for he was the more destitute, most peaceful, and
most obliging man on earth, poor Esteban. So when the men returned with the
news that the drowned man was not from the neighboring villages either, the
women felt an opening of jubilation in the midst of their tears.
'Praise
the Lord,' they sighed, 'he's ours!'
The
men thought the fuss was only womanish frivolity. Fatigued because of the
difficult night-time 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 neck 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 that 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.