Magic Mike, a new movie, is a story about a male stripper who has an effect on every woman in the audience. They are drawn to his almost perfect looks, body, and dance moves. Each woman imagines he is their perfect man. In Marquez's short story "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World", Esteban is the "Magic Mike" to these female villagers. The imagination has incredible power to transform reality into our own perceived fantasy.
"Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen.." When the women get their hands on Esteban, they fell in love with this seemingly perfect drowned man. Suddenly, they see that their husbands don't add up to everything Esteban is. Magic Mike is portraying the perfect man that these women do not have. They begin to imagine that he is real- he has become a part of their own reality. Our imaginations will deceive us. These women have imagined that Esteban is their own, and have forgotten about their own husbands!
Although, we can imagine anything we'd like to. Nothing is impossible! And that is exactly how the women villagers are thinking. "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." The women do believe that nothing is impossible. If Esteban comes back, then he comes back, and they are more than okay with that.
The truth is that Esteban is just a part of their imagination. He is a "larger than life" figure who represents the women's needs and their desires of their dreams. In the end, the reality is that Esteban is just a dead, drowned man, and Magic Mike is just a movie.
