http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040112&s=miller
Suddenly Castro looked at me over the heads of the others and nearly shouted, “What is your birthday!”
“October 17, 1915,” I replied, pretending I was not astonished at the question.
He now pointed his long index finger at his right temple. All went silent. An expression of deep-delving sagacity settled over his face as he kept the finger pressed against his head. I sensed hambone overacting, but then recalled paintings of Cervantes’s Knight of the Sad Countenance, the heaven-directed gaze, the scraggly beard, the slanty eyebrows, the immemorial dark Spanish mournfulness, and Castro began to look normal. Now he raised the finger to point upward like a censorious teacher. “You are eleven years, five months and fourteen days older than I.” (I can’t recall the exact figures, but this will do.) Congratulatory laughter burst out and brightened the air. There was something almost touching in this childish demonstration of his calculating ability, and one recognized again his boyish hungering for the central distinction in a group. I thought of his idolization of Hemingway, another star who I am sure had felt the same driving need in himself. It was easy to imagine how they must have appreciated each other.
