Laura burst out laughing, and she accompanied her brother back to
Valencia. Cæsar’s mother wished the lad to take his law course there,
but Cæsar decided to do it in Madrid.
“A provincial capital is an insupportable place,” he said.
Cæsar went to Madrid and rented a study and a bed-room, cheap and
unrestricted.
He boarded in one house and lodged at another. Thus he felt more free.
Cæsar believed that it was not worth the trouble to study law
seriously; and he imagined moreover that to study so many routine
conceptions, which may be false, such as the conception of the soul, of
equity, of responsibility, etc., would bring him to a shyster lawyer’s
vulgar and affected idea of life. To counteract this tendency he devoted
himself to studying zoology at the University, and the next year he took
a course in physiology at San Carlos.
At the same time he did not neglect the stock exchange; his great pride
was to acquaint himself thoroughly with the details of the speculations
made and to talk in the crowds.
As a student he was mediocre. He learned the secret of passing
examinations well with the minimum of effort, and practised it. He
found that by knowing only a couple of things under each heading of the
program, it was enough for him to answer and to pass well. And so, from
the beginning of each course, he marked in the text the two or three
lines of every page which seemed to him to comprise the essential, and
having learned those, considered his knowledge sufficient.
Cæsar had a deep contempt for the University and for his
fellow-students; all their rows and manifestations seemed to him
repulsively flat and stupid.
Alzugaray was studying law too, and had obtained a clerkship in a
Ministry. Alzugaray got drunk on music. His great enthusiasm was for
playing the ‘cello. Cæsar used to call on him at his office and at
home.
The clerks at the Ministry seemed to Cæsar to form part of an inferior
human race.
At Alzugaray’s house, Cæsar felt at home. Ignacio’s mother, a lady with
white hair, was always making stockings, and after dinner she recited
the rosary with the maid; Alzugaray’s sister, Celedonia, a tall ungainly
lass, was often ill.
All the family thought a great deal of Cæsar; his advice was followed
at that house, and one of the operations on ‘change that he recommended
making with some Foreign bonds that Ignacio’s mother was holding at the
time of the Cuban War, gave everybody in the house an extraordinary idea
of young Moncada’s financial talents.
Cæsar kept his balance among his separate activities; one set of
studies complemented others. This diversity of points of view kept him
from taking the false and one-sided position that those who preoccupy
themselves with one branch of knowledge exclusively get into.
The one-sided position is most useful to a specialist, to a man who
expects to remain satisfied in the place where chance has put him; but
it is useless for one who proposes to enter life with his blood afire.
As almost always occurs, the projecting of ideas of distinct derivation
and of different orders into the same plane, carried Cæsar into
absolute scepticism, scepticism about things, and especially scepticism
about the instrument of knowledge.
His negation had no reference,--far from it,--to women, to love, or
to friends, things where the pedantic and ostentatious scepticism of
literary men of the Larra type usually finds its fodder; his nihilism
was much more the confusion and discomposure of one that explores a
region well or badly, and finds no landmarks there, no paths, and
returns with a belief that even the compass is not exact in what it
shows.
“Nothing absolute exists,” Cæsar told himself, “neither science nor
mathematics nor even the truth, can be an absolute thing.”
Arriving at this result surprised Cæsar a good deal. On finding that he
was not successful in lighting on a philosophical system which would be
a guide to him and which could be reasoned out like a theorem, he sought
within the purely subjective for something that might satisfy him and
serve as a standard.