Old Man and the Sea (9 page)

  
Then the fish came alive, with his death in
him, and
rose
high out of the water showing all his
great length and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to hang in
the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a
crash that sent spray over the old man and over
all of the
skiff.

  
The old man felt faint and sick and he could
not see well. But he cleared the harpoon line and let it run slowly through his
raw hands and, when he could see, he saw the fish was on his back with his
silver belly up. The shaft of the harpoon was projecting at an angle from the
fish’s shoulder and the sea was discolouring with the red of the blood from his
heart. First it was dark as a shoal in the blue water that was more than a mile
deep. Then it spread like a cloud. The fish was silvery and still and floated
with the waves.

  
The old man looked carefully in the glimpse
of vision that he had. Then he took two turns of the harpoon line around the
bitt in the bow and hid his head on his hands.

  
“Keep my head dear,” he said against the
wood of the bow. “I am a tired old man. But I have killed this fish which is my
brother and now I must do the slave work.”

  
Now I must prepare the nooses and the rope
to lash him alongside, he thought. Even if we were two and swamped her to load
him and bailed her out, this skiff would never hold him. I must prepare
everything, then bring him in and lash him well and step the mast and set sail
for home.

  
He started to pull the fish in to have him
alongside so that he could pass a line through his gills and out his mouth and
make his head fast alongside the bow. I want to see him, he thought, and to
touch and to feel him. He is my fortune, he thought. But that is not why I wish
to feel him. I think I felt his heart, he thought.
When I
pushed on the harpoon shaft the second time.
Bring him in now and make
him fast and get the noose around his tail and another around his middle to
bind him to the skiff.

  
“Get to work, old man,” he said. He took a
very small drink of the water. “There is very much slave work to be done now
that the fight is over.”

  
He looked up at the sky and then out to his
fish. He looked at the sun carefully. It is not much more than noon, he
thought. And the trade wind is rising. The lines all mean nothing now. The boy
and I will splice them when we are home.

  
“Come on, fish,” he said. But the fish did
not come.

  
Instead he lay there wallowing now in the
seas and the old man pulled the skiff upon to him.

  
When he was even with him and had the fish’s
head against the bow he could not believe his size. But he untied the harpoon
rope from the bitt, passed it through the fish’s gills and out his jaws, made a
turn around his sword then passed the rope through the other gill, made another
turn around the bill and knotted the double rope and made it fast to the bitt
in the bow. He cut the rope then and went astern to noose the tail. The fish
had turned silver from his original purple and silver, and the stripes showed
the same pale violet colour as his tail. They were wider than a man’s hand with
his fingers spread and the fish’s eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a
periscope or as a saint in a procession.

  
“It was the only way to kill him,” the old
man said. He was feeling better since the water and he knew he would not go
away and his head was clear. He’s over fifteen hundred pounds the way he is, he
thought.
Maybe much more.
If he
dresses out two-thirds of that at thirty cents a pound?

  
“I need a pencil for that,” he said. “My
head is not that clear. But I think the great DiMaggio would be proud of me
today. I had no bone spurs. But the hands and the back hurt truly.” I wonder
what a bone spur is, he thought. Maybe we have them without knowing of it.

  
He made the fish fast to bow and stern and
to the middle thwart. He was so big it was like lashing a much bigger skiff
alongside. He cut a piece of line and tied the fish’s lower jaw against his
bill so his mouth would not open and they would sail as cleanly as possible.
Then he stepped the mast and, with the stick that was his gaff and with his
boom rigged, the patched sail drew, the boat began to move, and half lying in
the stern he sailed south-west.

  
He did not need a compass to tell him where
southwest was. He only needed the feel of the trade wind and the drawing of the
sail. I better put a small line out with a spoon on it and try and get
something to eat and drink for the moisture. But he could not find a spoon and
his sardines were rotten. So he hooked a patch of yellow Gulf weed with the
gaff as they passed and shook it so that the small shrimps that were in it fell
onto the planking of the skiff. There were more than a dozen of them and they
jumped and kicked like sand fleas. The old man pinched their heads off with his
thumb and forefinger and ate them chewing up the shells and the tails. They
were very tiny but he knew they were nourishing and they tasted good.

  
The old man still had two drinks of water in
the bottle and he used half of one after he had eaten the shrimps. The skiff
was sailing well considering the handicaps and he steered with the tiller under
his arm. He could see the fish and he had only to look at his hands and feel
his back against the stern to know that this had truly happened and was not a
dream. At one time when he was feeling so badly toward the end, he had thought
perhaps it was a dream. Then when he had seen the fish come out of the water
and hang motionless in the sky before he fell, he was sure there was some great
strangeness and he could not believe it.

  
Then he could not see well, although now he
saw as well as ever. Now he knew there was the fish and his hands and back were
no dream. The hands cure quickly, he thought. I bled them clean and the salt
water will heal them. The dark water of the true gulf is the greatest healer
that there is. All I must do is keep the head clear. The hands have done their
work and we sail well. With his mouth shut and his tail straight up and down
we
sail like brothers. Then his head started to become a
little unclear and he thought, is he bringing me in or am I bringing him in? If
I were towing him behind there would be no question. Nor if the fish were in
the skiff, with all dignity gone, there would be no question either. But they
were sailing together lashed side by side and the old man
thought,
let him bring me in if it pleases him. I am only better than him through
trickery and he meant me no harm.

  
They sailed well and the old man soaked his
hands in the salt water and tried to keep his head clear. There were high
cumulus clouds and enough cirrus above them so that the old man knew the breeze
would last all night. The old man looked at the fish constantly to make sure it
was true. It was an hour before the first shark hit him.

  
The shark was not an accident. He had come
up from deep down in the water as the dark cloud of blood had settled and
dispersed in the mile deep sea. He had come up so fast and absolutely without
caution that he broke the surface of the blue water and was in the sun. Then he
fell back into the sea and picked up the scent and started swimming on the
course the skiff and the fish had taken.

  
Sometimes he lost the scent. But he would
pick it up again, or have just a trace of it, and he swam fast and hard on the
course. He was a very big Make shark built to swim as fast as the fastest fish
in the sea and everything about him was beautiful except his jaws. His back was
as blue as a sword fish’s and his belly was silver and his hide was smooth and
handsome. He was built as a sword fish except for his huge jaws which were
tight shut now as he swam fast, just under the surface with his high dorsal fin
knifing through the water without wavering. Inside the closed double lip of his
jaws all of his eight rows of teeth were slanted inwards. They were not the
ordinary pyramid-shaped teeth of most sharks. They were shaped like a man’s
fingers when they are crisped like claws. They were nearly as long as the
fingers of the old man and they had razor-sharp cutting edges on both sides.
This was a fish built to feed on all the fishes in the sea, that were so fast
and strong and well armed that they had no other enemy. Now he speeded up as he
smelled the fresher scent and his blue dorsal fin cut the water.

  
When the old man saw him coming he knew that
this was a shark that had no fear at all and would do exactly what he wished.
He prepared the harpoon and made the rope fast while he watched the shark come
on. The rope was short as it lacked what he had cut away to lash the fish.

  
The old man’s head was clear and good now
and he was full of resolution but he had little hope. It was too good to last,
he thought. He took one look at the great fish as he watched the shark close
in. It might as well have been a dream, he thought. I cannot keep him from
hitting me but maybe I can get him. Dentuso, he thought. Bad luck to your
mother.

  
The shark closed fast astern and when he hit
the fish the old man saw his mouth open and his strange eyes and the clicking
chop of the teeth as he drove forward in the meat just above the tail. The
shark’s head was out of water and his back was coming out and the old man could
hear the noise of skin and flesh ripping on the big fish when he rammed the
harpoon down onto the shark’s head at a spot where the line between his eyes
intersected with the line that ran straight back from his nose. There were no
such lines. There was only the heavy sharp blue head and the big eyes and the
clicking, thrusting all-swallowing jaws. But that was the location of the brain
and the old man hit it. He hit it with his blood mushed hands driving a good
harpoon with all his strength. He hit it without hope but with resolution and
complete malignancy.

  
The shark swung over and the old man saw his
eye was not alive and then he swung over once again, wrapping himself in two
loops of the rope. The old man knew that he was dead but the shark would not
accept it. Then, on his back, with his tail lashing and his jaws clicking, the
shark plowed over the water as a speedboat does. The water was white where his
tail beat it and three-quarters of his body was clear above the water when the
rope came taut, shivered, and then snapped. The shark lay quietly for a little
while on the surface and the old man watched him. Then he went down very
slowly.

  
“He took about forty pounds,” the old man
said aloud. He took my harpoon too and all the rope, he thought, and now my
fish bleeds again and there will be others.

  
He did not like to look at the fish anymore
since he had been mutilated. When the fish had been hit it was as though he
himself were hit.

  
But I killed the shark that hit my fish, he
thought. And he was the biggest dentuso that I have ever seen. And God knows
that I have seen big ones.

  
It was too good to last, he thought. I wish
it had been a dream now and that I had never hooked the fish and was alone in
bed on the newspapers.

  
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said.
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” I am sorry that I killed the fish
though, he thought. Now the bad time is coming and I do not even have the
harpoon. The dentuso is cruel and able and strong and intelligent. But I was
more intelligent than he was. Perhaps not, he thought. Perhaps I was only
better armed.

  
“Don’t think, old man,” he said aloud. “Sail
on this course and take it when it comes.

  
But I must think, he thought. Because it is
all I have left. That and baseball. I wonder how the great DiMaggio would have
liked the way I hit him in the brain? It was no great thing, he thought. Any
man could do it. But do you think my hands were as great a handicap as the bone
spurs? I cannot know. I never had anything wrong with my heel except the time the
sting ray stung it when I stepped on him when swimming and paralyzed the lower
leg and made the unbearable pain.

  
“Think about something cheerful, old man,”
he said. “Every minute now you are closer to home. You sail lighter for the
loss of forty pounds.”

  
He knew quite well the pattern of what could
happen when he reached the inner part of the current. But there was nothing to
be done now.

  
“Yes there is,” he said aloud. “I can lash
my knife to the butt of one of the oars.”

  
So he did that with the tiller under his arm
and the sheet of the sail under his foot.

  
“Now,” he said. “I am still an old man. But
I am not unarmed.”

  
The breeze was fresh now and he sailed on
well. He watched only the forward part of the fish and some of his hope
returned.

  
It is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides
I believe it is a sin. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough
problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.