Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

The Virgin of Cobre is a statue of the Virgin Mary, found floating in the sea by two Indians and a slave in 1608 off the coast of El Cobre, Cuba.  She has nothing to do with baseball, save for the fact that the two seemingly makeup the background in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.  We often assume the background to be of less relevance.  Perhaps we shouldn’t with Ernest.

In his book, some critics point to an absence of women, believing it underscores the lack of regard the author had for them.  There are actually several.  There is the old man’s deceased wife, whose former possessions are described as relics and whose image is shrouded in the cleanest thing the old man owns.  One of those possessions is an image of one of the other women in the book, the Virgin of Cobre.

The statue was found perfectly dry, floating on a board on which was inscribed, “I am the Virgin of Charity.”  Charity meant something different then.  It was the virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake.  The King James Bible translated the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13:13 as, “And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”  King James opted not to use “love,” knowing perhaps the slew of things we all mean by that.

Hemingway’s old man, Santiago, has faith.  He has hope.  Perhaps his most admirable quality, however, is the charity he endures with.

In 1630, the statue would replace the patron saint of Spain, St. James, or as he is known in Spanish, Santiago, atop the altar in the church at El Cobre.  In 1928, she would get an entirely new house altogether.  Beneath the display of the Virgin of Charity in today’s El Cobre Basillica, is a room housing the gifts left for the Virgin’s intercession to the Almighty.  Some of them were given as part of request.  Some were a token of thanks.  Among them is a 1954 medal for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought.  But you have a right to.  Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.  Come on and kill me.  I do not care who kills who.