The dialogue that follows is very revealing about the relationship between the man and the boy, of whom we have had no description so far. “The Old Man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him”. The boy asks him if he can “offer [him] a beer”, and the reply comes “Why not? Between fishermen”. The relationship seems paternal, professional and that of close friends already, after only half a page of dialogue. The next section exposes more, the Old Man declines the request (not an offer, as if the Old Man was his boss) to go and “get sardines for you for tomorrow”, telling him to “go and play baseball”, like a child might in his spare time, however, the next thing he says is “you are already a man”, contradicting himself. Memories of the boy’s first fishing trip arrive so easily into the conversation it seems as if they talk about it in every conversation they have. The boy has a very vivid memory of the journey with the man (when he was five) – the “tail [of the fish] slapping and banging and the thwart breaking and the noise of the clubbing…you throwing me into the bow…and the noise of you clubbing him like chopping a tree down” – the rushedness and the number of present participles make it sound like a very young child recalling a memory or talking about something exciting that has just happened to him, so it seems that the memory has not changed since he was that young – as he says, “I remember everything from when we first went out together”. The language is very inclusive, he doesn’t say “when I first went out”, and they are certainly very close. The Man looks on him with “loving” eyes, and talks as if he was his father (“If you were my boy I’d take you out and gamble”, but is too wise to get carried away with the fantasy – “But you are your father’s and mother’s”. He says it with no resentment, but one could detect longing in the text.
The next scene is almost surreal – they are back at the Old Man’s house, a one-roomed shack. They talk about what to eat – “A pot of yellow rice with fish”, and the fishing arrangements for the next day “May I take the cast net”. However, we are told that “there was not cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. But they went through this fiction every day. There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the boy knew this too”. This bizarre element to their relationship may have grown out of the fisherman’s increasing poverty as he stopped catching anything, but is certainly odd. There is no mention of what the man thinks of the fiction, only the boy’s recognising of it, but no mention of what he thinks of it.
Soon, as the boy goes out to borrow some money for a lottery ticket, we see the role of father and son reversed as the boy warns the man “Keep warm old man – remember we are in September”. Again, bizarrely, he calls him “Old Man” rather than his name, which we have yet to find out. The boy goes out, and comes back to a sleeping old man – “Wake up old man”, again like a parent, waking a child. He instructs him “Come on and eat. You can’t fish and not eat…Keep the blanket around you, you’ll not fish without eating while I’m alive”. In a few paragraphs, he has grown from the boy saying about his father “I am a boy and must obey him”; to the “grown man” buying the Old Man a drink, and now to the Old Man’s father himself. The boy almost sounds impatient when the Old Man asks “Should we eat?” and he seems more in the vein of a carer than a parent suddenly, and his age is suddenly accented. Then, as quickly as the roles were reversed, they are reset, as the boy asks “Tell me about the baseball”, and the Old Man is now like a grandfather relating stories of his youth to a child on his knee. Their conversation about baseball leads to the boy asking “Who is the greatest manager, really, Luque or Mike Gonzalez”, the old man saying he thinks them equal, and then suddenly the boy, as a very young child might, says “And the best fisherman is you”. Like conversation with a very young child, the topic completely changes, and he comes up with this childish sentence, and the rest of the conversation is from a father to a son, including the old man saying “I’ll wake you up in the morning”
Although we have had no physical description of the boy at all, not even his name, we feel we know him, due to Hemingway’s skill with intimate dialogue, and we can see the very odd relationship that the boy and the Old Man hold – sometimes that of a father/son relationship, then business partners as fishers, and the boy caring for the old man. The mood can change in an instant, and it is compelling reading
