Portal used to call him the little parrot, and make sport of his serenity and his languid air; and laughed to see him always shivering, even when close to the fire. When he put away his books, the West Indian was like a bird released from his cage. At such times, in place of the mental vigor to handle the heavy iron weights of science skillfully, the poor exile would display the riches of a brilliant imagination, all light and colors; or to be more exact, all spangles and phosphorescent gleams. The commonest phrase, on issuing from his lips, took on a poetic form; he could make rhymes as unconsciously as a mocking-bird sings, and could talk in rhythmical and harmonious verse an hour at a time.
But the sarcastic Portal used to say that the Cuban’s poetry had precisely the same artistic value as the tunes we compose and hum while we are lathering our faces preparatory to shaving, and had as much meaning read from the bottom up as from the top down.
“We’ll call him the mocking-bird instead of parrot,” he would say every time that the Cuban would display for us his poetical string of glass-beads which usually occurred after he had filled himself with coffee.
The other assiduous student came from Zamora; he had a narrow forehead and an obtuse mind. He had neither father nor mother, and the cost of his education was met by his octogenarian and paralyzed grandmother, who used to say: “I don’t want to die until you are a man, and have finished your studies, and can see your future secure.”
It was but a slight thread which bound the poor old woman to this world, and the lad knew it; so he displayed a silent and savage determination. As the Cuban studied with his memory, the Zamoran studied with his will, always kept tense. His poor mental endowments obliged him to work doubly. He neither took nights off on Saturdays nor had holidays on Sundays, nor any excursions whatever. No correspondence with a sweetheart for him; no—nothing but his books, his everlasting books, from morning till night; an equation here and a problem there, without relaxing his assiduity for a single moment, without being absent for a single day, and never saying “not prepared.”
“Have you ever seen such a fellow? He is always on the stretch,” my friend Luis Portal would say; “why, he’ll be a civil engineer before we are, if he does not burst his skin. How thin he is, and his hands are very feverish at times. His breath is very bad; his digestion must surely be out of order. No wonder it is, for he does not take any exercise nor any recreation whatever. Salustiño, it is all right to get ahead, but one must look out for his health!”
I got along well with Luis Portal, and we became fast friends, although our ideas and aspirations were so entirely different. Portal used to like to show himself a sagacious, practical person, or, at least, gave indications that he would be when he arrived at the age when a person’s moral nature becomes well-defined and unified.
We did not differ totally in our views; we had some opinions in common. Portal, like me, was a champion of self-help, and despised restraint or tutelage. He thought that a man should be self-sufficient, and should take advantage of his earlier years, in order to secure freedom or comfort for his manhood.
“We don’t appear like Galicians,” he sometimes used to say, “for we are so energetic in everything.”
I did not agree with him on this point, and bade him remember the adventurous and enterprising spirit the Galicians had displayed within a short time past.