Bizco painted crosses, stars and names upon his chest; Vidal, who didn't like to prick himself, stippled his own name on one arm and his sweetheart's on the other; Manuel didn't care to inscribe anything upon his person, first because he was afraid of blood, and then because the idea had been Bizco's.
Each harboured a mute hostility against the other.
Manuel, always with a chip on his shoulder, was disposed to show his enemy challenge; Bizco, doubtless, noticed this scornful hatred in Manuel's eyes, and this confused him.
To Manuel, a man's superiority consisted in his talent, and, above all, in his cunning; to Bizco, courage and strength constituted the sole enviable qualities; the greatest merit of all was to be a real brute, as he would declare with enthusiasm.
Because of the great esteem in which he held craft and cunning, Manuel felt deep admiration for the Rebolledos, father and son, who also lived in the Corralón. The father, a dwarfed hunchback, a barber by trade, used to shave his customers in the sunlight of the open, near the Rastro. This dwarf had a very intelligent face, with deep eyes; he wore moustache and side-whiskers, and long, bluish, unwashed hair. He dressed always in mourning; in winter and summer alike he went around in an overcoat, and, by some unsolved mystery of chemistry his overcoat kept turning green while his trousers, which were also black, kept quite as plainly turning red.
Every morning Rebolledo would leave the Corralón carrying a little bench and a wooden wall-bracket, from which hung a brass basin and a poster. Reaching a certain spot along the Americas fence he would attach the bracket and put up, beside it, a humorous sign the point of which, probably, he was the only one to see. It ran thus:
MODERNIST TONSORIAL PARLOUR
Antiseptic Barber
Walk in Gents. Shaving by Rebolledo.
Money Lent
The Rebolledos were very skilful; they made toys of wire and of pasteboard, which they afterward sold to the street-vendors; their home, a dingy little room of the front patio, had been converted into a workshop, and they had there a vise, a carpenter's bench and an array of broken gew-gaws that were apparently of no further use.
The neighbours of the Corralón had a saying that indicated their conception of Rebolledo's acute genius.
"That dwarf," they said, "has a regular Noah's ark in his head."