Others, of the older fishermen, looked at him and were sad. “Between fishermen.” They sat on the Terrace and many of the fishermen made fun of the old man and he was not angry. “Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace and then we’ll take the stuff home.” “Why not?” the old man said. “It is quite normal.” “He hasn’t much faith. I am a boy and I must obey him.” “I know,” the old man said. “I know you did not leave me because you doubted.” “It was papa made me leave. Stay with them.” “But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks.” “I remember,” the old man said.

We’ve made some money.” The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him. “Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

Old man in the sea ernest hemingway