Old Man and the Sea (3 page)

  
He always thought of the sea as la mar which
is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love
her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman.
Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines
and had
motorboats,
bought when the shark livers had
brought much money, spoke of her as el mar which is masculine. They spoke of
her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought
of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if
she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon
affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

  
He was rowing steadily and it was no effort
for him since he kept well within his speed and the surface of the ocean was
flat except for the occasional swirls of the current. He was letting the
current do a third of the work and as it started to be light he saw he was
already further out than he had hoped to be at this hour.

  
I worked the deep wells for a week and did
nothing, he thought. Today I’ll work out where the schools of bonito and
albacore are and maybe there will be a big one with them.

  
Before it was really light he had his baits
out and was drifting with the current.
One bait
was
down forty fathoms. The second was at seventy-five and the third and fourth
were down in the blue water at one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five
fathoms. Each bait hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait
fish, tied and sewed solid and all the projecting part of the hook, the curve
and the point, was covered with fresh sardines. Each sardine was hooked through
both eyes so that they made a half-garland on the projecting steel. There was
no part of the hook that a great fish could feel which was not sweet smelling
and good tasting.

  
The boy had given him two fresh small tunas,
or albacores, which hung on the two deepest lines like plummets and, on the
others, he had a big blue runner and a yellow jack that had been used before;
but they were in good condition still and had the excellent sardines to give
them scent and attractiveness. Each line, as thick around as a big pencil, was
looped onto a green-sapped stick so that any pull or touch on the bait would
make the stick dip and each line had two forty-fathom coils which could be made
fast to the other spare coils so that, if it were necessary, a fish could take
out over three hundred fathoms of line.

  
Now the man watched the dip of the three
sticks over the side of the skiff and rowed gently to keep the lines straight
up and down and at their proper depths. It was quite light and any moment now
the sun would rise.

  
The sun rose thinly from the sea and the old
man could see the other boats, low on the water and well in toward the shore,
spread out across the current. Then the sun was brighter and the glare came on
the water and then, as it rose clear, the flat sea sent it back at his eyes so
that it hurt sharply and he rowed without looking into it. He looked down into
the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the
water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the
darkness of the stream there would be
a bait
waiting
exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. Others let them
drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the
fishermen thought they were at a hundred.

  
But, he thought, I keep them with precision.
Only I have no luck any more. But who knows?
Maybe today.
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact.
Then when luck comes you are ready.

  
The sun was two hours higher now and it did
not hurt his eyes so much to look into the east. There were only three boats in
sight now and they showed very low and far inshore.

  
All my life the early sun has hurt my eyes,
he thought. Yet they are still good. In the evening I can look straight into it
without getting the blackness. It has more force in the evening too. But in the
morning it is painful.

  
Just then he saw a man-of-war bird with his
long black wings circling in the sky ahead of him. He made a quick drop,
slanting down on his back-swept wings, and then circled again.

  
“He’s got something,” the old man said
aloud. “He’s not just looking.”

  
He rowed slowly and steadily toward where
the bird was circling. He did not hurry and he kept his lines straight up and
down. But he crowded the current a little so that he was still fishing
correctly though faster than he would have fished if he was not trying to use
the bird.

  
The bird went higher in the air and circled
again, his wings motionless. Then he dove suddenly and the old man saw flying
fish spurt out of the water and sail desperately over the surface.

  
“Dolphin,” the old man said aloud.
“Big dolphin.”

  
He shipped his oars and brought a small line
from under the bow. It had a wire leader and a medium-sized hook and he baited
it with one of the sardines. He let it go over the side and then made it fast
to a ring bolt in the stern. Then he baited another line and left it coiled in
the shade of the bow. He went back to rowing and to watching the long-winged
black bird who was working, now, low over the water.

  
As he watched the bird dipped again slanting
his wings for the dive and then swinging them wildly and ineffectually as he
followed the flying fish. The old man could see the slight bulge in the water
that the big dolphin raised as they followed the escaping fish. The
dolphin were
cutting through the water below the flight of
the fish and would be in the water, driving at speed, when the fish dropped. It
is a big school of dolphin, he thought. They are widespread and the flying fish
have little chance. The bird has no chance. The flying fish are too big for him
and they go too fast.

  
He watched the flying fish burst out again
and again and the ineffectual movements of the bird. That school has gotten
away from me, he thought. They are moving out too fast and too far. But perhaps
I will pick up a stray and perhaps my big fish is around them. My big fish must
be somewhere.

  
The clouds over the land now rose like
mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills
behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple. As
he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water
and the strange light the sun made now. He watched his lines to see them go
straight down out of sight into the water and he was happy to see so much
plankton because it meant fish. The strange light the sun made in the water, now
that the sun was higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds
over the land. But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on
the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed
and the purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese
man-of-war floating dose beside the boat. It turned on its side and then
righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple
filaments trailing a yard behind it in the water.

  
“Agua mala,” the man said. “You whore.”

  
From where he swung lightly against his oars
he looked down into the water and saw the tiny fish that were coloured like the
trailing filaments and swam between them and under the small shade the bubble
made as it drifted. They were immune to its poison. But men were not and when
same of the filaments would catch on a line and rest there slimy and purple
while the old man was working a fish, he would have welts and sores on his arms
and hands of the sort that poison ivy or poison oak can give. But these
poisonings from the agua mala came quickly and struck like a whiplash.

  
The iridescent bubbles were beautiful. But
they were the falsest thing in the sea and the old man loved to see the big sea
turtles eating them. The turtles saw them, approached them from the front, then
shut their eyes so they were completely carapaced and ate them filaments and
all. The old man loved to see the turtles eat them and he loved to walk on them
on the beach after a storm and hear them pop when he stepped on them with the
horny soles of his feet.

  
He loved green turtles and hawk-bills with
their elegance and speed and their great value and he had a friendly contempt
for the huge, stupid loggerheads, yellow in their armour-plating, strange in
their love-making, and happily eating the Portuguese men-of-war with their eyes
shut.

  
He had no mysticism about turtles although
he had gone in turtle boats for many years. He was sorry for them all, even the
great trunk backs that were as long as the skiff and weighed a ton. Most people
are heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after
he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart
too and my feet and hands are like theirs. He ate the white eggs to give
himself strength. He ate them all through May to be strong in September and
October for the truly big fish.

  
He also drank a cup of shark liver oil each
day from the big drum in the shack where many of the fishermen kept their gear.
It was there for all fishermen who wanted it. Most fishermen hated the taste.
But it was no worse than getting up at the hours that they rose and it was very
good against all colds and grippes and it was good for the eyes.

  
Now the old man looked up and saw that the
bird was circling again.

  
“He’s found fish,” he said aloud. No flying
fish broke the surface and there was no scattering of bait fish. But as the old
man watched, a small tuna rose in the air, turned and dropped head first into
the water. The tuna shone silver in the sun and after he had dropped back into
the water another and another rose and they were jumping in all directions,
churning the water and leaping in long jumps after the bait. They were circling
it and driving it.

  
If they don’t travel too fast I will get
into them, the old man thought, and he watched the school working the water
white and the bird now dropping and dipping into the bait fish that were forced
to the surface in their panic.

  
“The bird is a great help,” the old man
said. Just then the stern line came taut under his foot, where he had kept a
loop of the line, and he dropped his oars and felt tile weight of the small
tuna’s shivering pull as he held the line firm and commenced to haul it in. The
shivering increased as he pulled in and he could see the blue back of the fish
in the water and the gold of his sides before he swung him over the side and
into the boat. He lay in the stern in the sun, compact and bullet shaped, his
big, unintelligent eyes staring as he thumped his life out against the planking
of the boat with the quick shivering strokes of his neat, fast-moving tail. The
old man hit him on the head for kindness and kicked him, his body still
shuddering, under the shade of the stern.

  
“Albacore,” he said aloud. “He’ll make
a beautiful
bait. He’ll weigh ten pounds.”

  
He did not remember when he had first
started to talk aloud when he was by himself. He had sung when he was by
himself in the old days and he had sung at night sometimes when he was alone
steering on his watch in the smacks or in the turtle boats. He had probably
started to talk aloud, when alone, when the boy had left. But he did not
remember. When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only when it
was necessary. They talked at night or when they were storm-bound by bad
weather. It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the
old man had always considered it so and respected it. But now he said his
thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy.

  
“If the others heard me talking out loud
they would think that I am crazy,” he said aloud. “But since I am not crazy, I
do not care. And the rich have radios to talk to them in their boats and to
bring them the baseball.”

  
Now is no time to think of baseball, he
thought. Now is the time to think of only one thing.
That
which I was born for.
There might be a big one around that school, he
thought. I picked up only a straggler from the albacore that were feeding. But
they are working far out and fast. Everything that shows on the surface today
travels very fast and to the north-east. Can that be the time of day? Or is it
some sign of weather that I do not know?

  
He could not see the green of the shore now
but only the tops of the blue hills that showed white as though they were
snow-capped and the clouds that looked like high snow mountains above them. The
sea was very dark and the light made prisms in the water. The myriad flecks of
the plankton were annulled now by the high sun and it was only the great deep
prisms in the blue water that the old man saw now with his lines going straight
down into the water that was a mile deep.