the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a relic

The Sacred Heart of Jesus as a relic is a color picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that hangs on the brown guano walls of Santiago's shack, alongside a picture of the Virgin of Cobre. These are the only remaining religious images in the old man's home, relics of his wife. Once there had been a tinted photograph of his wife on the wall, but he had taken it down because it made him too lonely to see it; it was on the shelf in the corner under his clean shirt. The Sacred Heart picture thus stands as a survivor of domestic loss, a fixed point in a space otherwise stripped of personal mementos.

The Relic in the Shack

The shack itself is a one-room structure made of the tough budshields of the royal palm, called guano, containing a bed, a table, one chair, and a place on the dirt floor to cook with charcoal. On the brown walls of flattened, overlapping leaves, the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin of Cobre are the only decorations. They are described as "relics of his wife," indicating that they are not merely decorative but carry the weight of memory and absence. The old man's domestic space is thus marked by a sacred presence that outlasts the human relationship it commemorates.

The Sacred in Prayer and Promise

During his ordeal at sea, Santiago turns to the Sacred Heart and the Virgin of Cobre in a moment of explicit religious practice. He says, "I am not religious," but then promises to say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys if he catches the fish, and to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre. He commences to say his prayers mechanically, sometimes so tired that he cannot remember the prayer, and then says them fast so that they come automatically. He adds a personal petition: "Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is." The Sacred Heart, as part of the same devotional tradition, is implicitly invoked in this act of bargaining and supplication, linking the relic on the wall to the old man's desperate hope at sea.

The Dream of the Lions and the Sacred

Santiago's dreams are dominated not by religious imagery but by the lions on the beach. He no longer dreams of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreams of places now and of the lions on the beach. They play like young cats in the dusk and he loves them as he loves the boy. The Sacred Heart relic, as a static object in the shack, contrasts with the dynamic, recurring dream of the lions, which becomes the old man's true spiritual vision. The lions, not the religious picture, are what he returns to in sleep and what he dreams of at the very end of the book.

The Relic and the Ending

In the final scene, after Santiago has returned with the skeleton of the marlin, the narrative shifts to a party of tourists at the Terrace. A woman sees the great long white spine with its huge tail and asks what it is; the waiter says "Tiburon" (shark), and the woman remarks on the beauty of the tail. Up the road, in his shack, the old man is sleeping again, still sleeping on his face, and the boy is sitting by him watching him. The old man is dreaming about the lions. The Sacred Heart of Jesus remains on the wall, unseen by the tourists, a silent witness to the ordeal that has just concluded. The relic thus frames the story's movement between the sacred space of the shack and the profane space of the Terrace, between the old man's private suffering and the public incomprehension of his achievement.