aesthetic essay

The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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 brabant 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 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 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.