There are creatures in our lives that are soft and slimy, always floating on the surface of existence, just as a jellyfish floats on the surface of the water; without meaning, without purpose, without value...
Despicable, abnormal creatures belonging to an invertebrate animal lineage, referred to in English as spineless, while Cuban fishermen call them in Spanish Agua Mala... meaning: bad water.
The truth is that I was never, at any point in my life, concerned with those slimy creatures. The jellyfish is an animal with no mind, no heart, and no bones; bloodless, possessing nothing more than a simple nerve network spread throughout a radially symmetrical body. It moves through the water with rhythmic pulsations and without direction. If the waves cast it onto the sand, it dissolves and is finished; a contemptible and trivial creature.
Strangely enough, the jellyfish has been used in literature as a symbol of fragility and transience, of drifting and passivity; a creature that surrenders itself to the current without direction. In politics, too, a politician in the West is often described as a “jellyfish,” signifying the absence of a firm position and a “backbone.” He is the king of hesitation, drifting with currents and pressures, without any steadfast principle.
When I recently read, for the third time, the masterpiece of the exceptional novelist Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea—during my summer vacation, and a work that was mistakenly translated into Arabic as The Old Man and the Sea—I saw him describe this slimy creature as “bad water,” and I understood the secret behind the disgust I had always felt whenever its name reached my ears.
In the novel, a jellyfish floats beside the fisherman. The wise fisherman, Santiago, watches it with its swaying bubble on the water’s surface, then mockingly calls it “bad water.”
With his long experience, Santiago contemplates that bubble and knows what poisonous filaments lie beneath it, so he sarcastically calls it “bad water,” just as the Cuban fishermen do.
The fisherman Santiago loves and respects the sea, but he is not deceived by its appearances. He distinguishes between creatures he esteems and respects—such as the great fish, the turtles, and the birds—and creatures he despises for their falseness and baseness, among them this “jellyfish.”
That is why, later on, he takes pleasure in watching the turtles devour these creatures. In the end, he even crushes them beneath his feet on the shore, in a mixture of contempt and revulsion.
A wonderful novel, which I recommend that you read during your summer vacation.
Nice: Five o’clock in the evening, Cairo time.
