body from the cliff

El cuento trata de un cuerpo que encontraron unos niños a orillas del mar, y jugaron con el todo el día, enterrándolo y volviéndolo a enterrar. La gente del pueblo y padres de lo niños se dieron cuenta y pidieron a los niños que dejaran de jugar con el. Era claro que no les sorprendía ver un muerto sino que esta persona no pertenecía a su pueblo y tampoco a l pueblo vecino. Durante el día trataban de buscar su identidad, su origen los hombres del pueblo, mientras las mujeres admiraban su robusto y bello cuerpo. Todas los comparaban con sus maridos; tuvieron mucha imaginación sobre la vida de este hombre que hasta lloraron por como lo conocieran de toda la vida. Fue así como le pusieron un hombre y lo velaron correctamente a pesar de que los maridos de todas habían comenzado a tener celos del ahogado.

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 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 sea plants from his face, they discover 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 stranger’s 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 see his face and are awed by the character they see in him. 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 had the villagers thrust his body from the cliff do they realize that one day he may come again. In celebration of the new life they had discovered, the village men irrigated their bleak and barren land to produce flowers, and the houses were painted in bright colors to identify Esteban’s Village and give him a home to which he could return.