@habits

The children playing by the waves, seeing the dark bulge drift in from the sea, imagined it was an old ship. Then they saw it had no mast and their thoughts turned to a whale. But when it washed upon the beach, they removed the seaweed clumps, the jellyfish tentacles, and the fish remains. Only then did they see the drowned man.

They played with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and digging him up again, until a woman saw the spectacle and spread the alarm in the village. The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed he weighed more than any man they had ever known, as much as a horse or a great shark, and they told each other that maybe he’d been floating too long and the water had soaked into his bones.

When they laid him on the floor they said he was the tallest man they’d carried because he barely fit in the room, but they thought that maybe the ability to keep 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 hinted that it was a human corpse, because the skin was covered with a thick crust of mud and scales.

Without seeing his face, they knew that this dead man was a stranger. The village had only twenty or so wooden houses — each with its stone courtyards and overflowing vines — which spreadout out like a fan from where the river met the sea. So when they came upon the encrusted drowned man, they looked at each other and knew that none were missing.

That night the men did not work the sea. Some traveled to nearby villages to ask after missing people, and the women tended to his body. They removed the mud with grass swabs, they picked pebbles from his scalp, and with jagged tools used for cleaning fish they scraped the scales from his body. The women saw that the sea vegetation falling in little clumps on the dirt floor came from unfamiliar places and his clothes were filled with small vertical tears, as if he had floated through labyrinths of coral. They saw, too, that he faced death with a calm grace; he did not have the frantic eyes or frightened grimace of other drowned men. But only when they had finished hours later did they see the man in his natural state and it left them breathless. Not only was he the biggest, strongest, most stately specimen to chance upon their village, but his presence left no room in their imagination.

There was no bed large enough nor table sturdy enough to use for a wake. The summer clothes of the village’s tallest man would not fit him, nor the shoes of the villager with the largest feet. Fascinated by his size and beauty, the women made him pants from a piece of sturdy sail and a shirt from a large tablecloth. As they sewed, sitting cross-legged in a circle and sneaking glances at the body, it seemed that the wind had never been so unrelenting nor the sea so turbulent as on that night. In their silent reverie they saw him, strolling and smiling in their village, living in the house with the widest doors, his tall ceiling beyond anyone’s reach, secured by the sturdiest floor. They imagined his bed, carved from the hull of a giant sailship, held together by iron bolts, with his wife the liveliest, loveliest woman. They could hear his booming voice, drawing fish out from the sea simply by speaking their names. And they could not help but compare him to their own husbands, and they knew that he could do more in one night than theirs could in a generation. So they let theirs go, believing them weak and cowardly. As they wandered through that desert of fantasy, the eldest woman, who looked upon him first with compassion, sighed before she spoke.

‘His name is Dante.’

They looked at him, lying there on the now muddy floor, and they knew that it was true. Soon the wind died and the sea became drowsy. The heavy silence crushed their doubts and they were sure: he was Dante. These women who had made his clothes, combed his hair and shaved his face trembled with sorrow as they resigned themselves to dragging him along the ground. They understood then the burden his huge body bore in life and now in death. They saw him, forced to enter doors sideways, cracking his head on crossbeams, standing with hunched back and no room to stretch his legs or rest his arms. They could hear the lady of the house, looking for a sturdy chair and begging him, frightened and fascinated, sit here Dante, please, and he would instead crouch on the ground, lean against the wall, smiling, don’t bother miss, I can manage, his knees aching from having done the same thing many times, to avoid the embarrassment of breaking the chair, or overturning the table, and perhaps not knowing that the ones who smiled as they said don’t go, Dante, at least wait until the coffee’s ready, they were the ones who would whisper after, how nice, that handsome fool is gone and we can relax again.

As dawn approached, that very thought was on the women’s minds. So they covered his face with a linen handkerchief and so hidden he looked defeated, like the shrunken husbands of their secret reverie. One of the younger girls began weeping despite her best efforts. Soon the room was filled with sniffs which became wails and fed back on its own intensity as they poured tears for Dante, their poor, peaceful, obliging Dante. When the men returned with news that the drowned man was not from neighboring villages, the women felt a burst of jubilation amidst their tears.

‘Praise the Lord,’ they shouted, ‘he’s ours!’

The men saw those red faces and glistening eyes and thought it frivolous. After a sleepless night of tense inquiries, they wanted to remove the newcomer and start afresh before the sun became unbearable. They improvised a stretcher and tied it together with many lashes of seaworthy rope so that it would hold the weight of the body until they reached the cliffs. They wanted to tie an anchor to him so that he would vanish into the deepest waves, and stray currents would not wash him back to shore. But the faster they moved, the more cunning the women became in their delays. One would fasten a rusted bracelet to his wrist, another would pin a threaded ribbon on his shirt, yet another would place charms in his pockets for good luck, and after much repeating of stop doing that, woman, keep away, look you almost made me trip on the dead man, the men began to feel an uneasiness in their stomachs and started grumbling about why so many baubles and decorations for a stranger, because no matter how much they blessed and warded him, the sharks would chew him all the same, but they kept piling on their old relics, shuffling to and fro, while they sighed and sniffled, so that the men finally erupted with why do all of you raise such a ruckus over an ungainly corpse, a rotting nobody, a piece of cold sea-soaked meat. An older woman, shocked at their casual attitude, removed the linen handkerchief from his face and the men were left breathless, too.

The men knew he was Dante. It was not necessary to say it yet again. There could only be one Dante and there he lay, arms akimbo, shoeless, wearing ill-fitting pants made of sail, and with gleaming trinkets that made him seem like a god of Incan myth. And from his face they knew that he was ashamed, that he could not deny the burden of being so big or heavy or handsome, and if he had foreseen this tortuous journey, he would have found a more discreet place to drown in, honest, I even would have tied that anchor around my neck and crawled my way off the cliff not to upset people with this piece of cold meat, as you people say. His manner was so genuine that even the most hardened men, the ones who felt the lonely edge of endless nights at sea fearing that their women would stop dreaming about them and start dreaming of drowned strangers, even they and others who were harder still trembled in the chambers of their hearts at Dante’s sincerity.

And that is the origin of the most lavish funeral a village of twenty or so wooden houses could manage for a solitary drowned man. The women who had gone to get flowers in neighboring villages returned with other women who could not believe the story, and those women hurried home for more flowers still when they saw him, and more and more flowers and people began to appear, neighbors of the neighbors and so on, all wanting to see for themselves. But when the funeral ended they could not bear to carry him to the waters as an orphan and so they chose a father and mother from the best family, and named aunts and uncles and cousins and nephews, so that all the inhabitants of the village became his kinsmen.

While they fought for the honor of bearing him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, all became aware of the virginal emptiness of their streets, the dusty stones in their courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they absorbed the splendor of their drowned kin. They finally let him go without an anchor so he could return if he so desired, and as one they held their breath, the wind fluttering about and the sea’s crashing waves, as they imagined him floating into the abyss. They knew then that things must change, that their houses would need wider doors and higher ceilings and softer floors with sturdy chairs so that Dante’s memory could come and go without trouble and no one in the future would dare mutter the big handsome fool finally died, too bad, because they were going to paint their house fronts bright colors to make his memory eternal and they were going to labor hard in the unbearable sun digging springs and planting flowers on the cliffs so that in future years at sunrise the passengers on passing boats would awaken, and with drowsy eyes they would see the rows upon rows of sunflowers and roses and the captain, who would have come down amidst all the chatter, would point to the village with its twenty or so wooden houses where the river met the sea and say, look there, see that village where the sun’s so bright the sunflowers don’t know which way to turn, yes, over there, that’s Dante’s village.

***

The above is my remix of a beautiful short story by Gabriel Garcia Marques. Here’s another example.