The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2009) "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" (Spanish: El Ahogado ms Hermoso del Mundo) is a 1968 short story by Gabriel Garca Mrquez.

Plot
One Sunday morning, the village children find a seaweed covered body on the beach. They play with it until the adults discover the corpse and decide that it must be given a small funeral and thrown off the cliff on which their village rests, into the sea as they do with all dead bodies. In order to do so, however, they must clean the corpse before it can be given final rest. The village men carry the body up to the village so that the village wives can prepare it for the funeral, then go to neighboring villages to ask if the man was from there. Upon removing the seaweed, they observe his handsome face. The women of the village become attached to him and dream of the wonderful villager he could have been. Eventually, they name the man Esteban, to give him some sort of identity. At once they realize his physical qualities and translate how his personality must have been. The women believe that he could perform in one night what their husbands could not in the course of their lives. This leads to a postmortem development of his character. The strangers body is quite tall, and his face is humble with a firm jaw. Thinking of how he must have had to stoop to enter doorways and how he must have felt uncomfortable in small chairs makes the women feel pity and sympathy for the man who had not uttered a word. They dress him in a hand-sewn suit of bridal linen and attach little relics for his safety. This includes holy water jars and nails. Annoyed at the elaborate measures their wives are taking, the men of the village come to take the body. Nevertheless, they too are awed by the character they see in his face. Soon the entire town begins making excessive funeral arrangements and one of the village families is chosen to pose as his relatives and grieving widow. No sooner have the villagers thrust his body from the cliff than they realize that one day he may come again. In celebration of the new life they have discovered, the village men irrigate their bleak and barren land to produce flowers, and the houses are painted in bright colors to identify Estebans Village and give him a home to which he can return. And ships sailing by would know that the village of flowers and painted houses was Esteban's village.