Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

The Residencia looked like the campus of an English university.It was subsidized by private foundations, so a single room cost onlyseven pesetas a day (four for a double). My parents paid my roomand board, and gave me twenty pesetas per week pocket money, amore than adequate sum which was somehow totally inadequate.Each time I went home to Saragossa for vacation, I had to ask mymother to pay my debts from the preceding trimester, a transactionwe managed to keep secret from my father.The director, Don Alberto Jimenez, originally from Milaga, wasa man of impressive culture. You could study any subject you wanted,stay as long as you liked, and change your area of specialty in midstream.There were lecture halls, five laboratories, a library, andseveral playing fields. When my father asked what I intended to dowith my life, I told him that I wanted to become a composer anddesired above all else to leave Spain, go to Paris, and study at theSchola Cantorum. His refusal couldn't have been more categorical.I was supposed to do something "serious," and everyone knew thatcomposers tended to die of starvation. When I then expressed myliking for the natural sciences, entomology in particular, he suggestedI become an agronomist. I went ahead and followed his advice,registering for the agronomy degree; but although I got sterlinggrades in biology, my math, three years in a row, was nothing shortof catastrophic. I get lost very easily in the realm of abstract thought,and whereas certain mathematical truths seem self-evident to me, Isimply cannot follow, or reproduce, the proofs. At one point, myfather was so exasperated that he took me out of the university andkept me in Saragossa with a math tutor for a few months.When I returned to the Residencia, all the lodgings were full,so I shared a room for a month with Juan Centeno, the brother ofmy good friend Augusto. Juan was a medical student and left earlyevery morning, although not until he'd spent a significant amountof time combing his hair. The odd thing was that he always stoppedcombing at the very top of his head, leaving the hair in the back,which he couldn't see in the mirror, in complete disarray. This absurdhabit, repeated day in and day out, irritated me so much that after