the handsomest drowned man in the world

They called him Esteban, this used-to-be-alive thing washed ashore in one of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez' strange tales. Esteban , the man who made them see the colours and changed the smell of the sea forever.

I don’t know why Esteban crossed my mind just now. This is a very unlikely moment. My back hurts like a son-of-a-bitch and, still, work is piling up. Cup after steaming cup of strong bean juice and my usual stock of angst-ridden bands are keeping me awake. Yet…

I need to talk about Esteban. Today. On this day of the solar eclipse which I didn’t see.

The children were the first to see him, all covered in sea thingies. And they had played with him awhile before the adults discovered that the whatchamacallit was a dead, dead body of a drowned man. This sounds gross but trust Marquez to tell you the most unlikely things and make you believe they're run-of-the-mill and perfectly natural! 

So the few adults in that godforsaken island--where nothing grew and everything was grey and rocky--took the body and did what they could for it. 

Esteban’s drowned body was so huge they had to give up some of their own ragged shirts and pants and sew them together to clothe it. They cleaned it up and prepared it for a wake. While doing all these things, the women noticed how handsome he was--or maybe he just grew handsome in their eyes because they needed to see that; how noble; how big and tall. They started speculating how his life might have been--alternating between oohing-and-ahhing in admiration and feeling sorry for what they thought he must have experienced. 

A man like that should have a name. 

And they called him Esteban. Nothing else will do. He just was an Esteban. They agreed to find out who he belonged to-- this magnificent corpse that they looked at with both awe and pity. Yet,Esteban--dead and cold and not smelling-at-all--was more alive than the breathing people around him had ever been. 

Nothing was ever the same again in that wasteland.

Oh, hell! Maybe you should just read it! The story has the same title I lifted above. 
https://www.utdallas.edu/~aargyros/hansomest.htm

Then maybe I can ask those who have read the rest of the tale the same question I usually ask others: has an Esteban ever come upon your bare island?

Then perhaps you can tell me why this has crossed my mind just when the sun hid for a time.

"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... 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... 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." (GGM)