The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
Storyboard Text
- 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
- The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed that we 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
- 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 scarped 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 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..don't bother, ma'am I'm fine where I am, his heels raw and back roasted from having done the same thing so many times...just to avoid the embarrassment of breaking up the chair
- That was how they came to hold the most splendid funeral they could conceive of for an abandoned drowned man..there were so many flowers and people it was hard to walk about...Some sailors who heard the weeping from a distance went off course..while they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs
- But they also knew that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors...they were going to paint their houses gay colors
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