Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway Read Free Book Online Page A

dark. Once I could see quite well in the dark.
Not in the absolute dark. But almost as a cat sees.
       The sun and his steady movement of his
fingers had uncramped his left hand now completely and he began to shift more
of the strain to it and he shrugged the muscles of his back to shift the hurt
of the cord a little.
       “If you’re not tired, fish,” he said aloud,
“you must be very strange.”
       He felt very tired now and he knew the night
would come soon and he tried to think of other things. He thought of the Big
Leagues, to him they were the Gran Ligas, and he knew that the Yankees of New
York were playing the Tigres of Detroit.
       This is the second day now that I do not
know the result of the juegos, he thought. But I must have confidence and I
must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with
the pain of the bone spur in his heel. What is a bone spur? he asked himself. Un espuela de hueso. We do not have
them. Can it be as painful as the spur of a fighting cock in one’s heel? I do
not think I could endure that or the loss of the eye and of both eyes and
continue to fight as the fighting cocks do. Man is not much beside the great
birds and beasts. Still I would rather be that beast down there in the darkness
of the sea.
       “Unless sharks come,” he said aloud. “If
sharks come, God pity him and me.”
       Do you believe the great DiMaggio would stay
with a fish as long as I will stay with this one? he thought. I am sure he would and more since he is young and strong. Also his
father was a fisherman. But would the bone spur hurt him too much?
       “I do not know,” he said aloud. “I never had
a bone spur.”
       As the sun set he remembered, to give
himself more confidence, the time in the tavern at Casablanca when he had
played the hand game with the great negro from Cienfuegos who was the strongest
man on the docks. They had gone one day and one night with their elbows on a
chalk line on the table and their forearms straight up and their hands gripped
tight. Each one was trying to force the other’s hand down onto the table. There
was much betting and people went in and out of the room under the kerosene
lights and he had looked at the arm and hand of the negro and at the negro’s face. They changed the referees every four hours after the
first eight so that the referees could sleep. Blood came out from under the
fingernails of both his and the negro’s hands and they
looked each other in the eye and at their hands and forearms and the bettors
went in and out of the room and sat on high chairs against the wall and
watched. The walls were painted bright blue and were of wood and the lamps
threw their shadows against them. The negro’s shadow
was huge and it moved on the wall as the breeze moved the lamps.
       The odds would change back and forth all
night and they fed the negro rum and lighted
cigarettes for him.
       Then the negro ,
after the rum, would try for a tremendous effort and once he had the old man,
who was not an old man then but was Santiago El Campeon, nearly three inches
off balance. But the old man had raised his hand up to dead even again. He was
sure then that he had the negro , who was a fine man
and a great athlete, beaten. And at daylight when the bettors were asking that
it be called a draw and the referee was shaking his head, he had unleashed his
effort and forced the hand of the negro down and down
until it rested on the wood. The match had started on a Sunday morning and
ended on a Monday morning. Many of the bettors had asked for a draw because
they had to go to work on the docks loading sacks of sugar or at the Havana
Coal Company. Otherwise everyone would have wanted it to go to a finish. But he
had finished it anyway and before anyone had to go to work.
       For a long time after that everyone had
called him The Champion and there had been a return match in the spring. But
not much money was bet and he had won it quite