There were Pedro and Benigno, and Fernandez and Francisco, and Benito.
Benito was a tall, swarthy man, with immense gray moustachios, and hair
as harsh as tropical grass and gray as ashes. When he could spare his
cigarette from his lips, he would tell you in a cavernous voice, and
with a wrinkled smile that he was "a-t-thorty-seveng."
There was Martinez of San Domingo, yellow as a canary, always sitting
with one leg curled under him and holding the back of his head in his
knitted fingers against the back of his rocking-chair. Father, mother,
brother, sisters, all, had been massacred in the struggle of '21 and
'22; he alone was left to tell the tale, and told it often, with that
strange, infantile insensibility to the solemnity of his bereavement so
peculiar to Latin people.
But, besides these, and many who need no mention, there were two in
particular, around whom all the story of the Cafe des Exiles, of old M.
D'Hemecourt and of Pauline, turns as on a double centre. First, Manuel
Mazaro, whose small, restless eyes were as black and bright as those of
a mouse, whose light talk became his dark girlish face, and whose
redundant locks curled so prettily and so wonderfully black under the
fine white brim of his jaunty Panama.
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