In those days the gang gained two new members, also left-overs from the Jesuits' departure: Damaso Valentin and Eduardo Custodio. Damaso wore his hair in a brush cut; his
thin, elastic lips and the open smiling expression of his light brown eyes brought an enormous
joie de vivre to the group. The youngest of five brothers, all of whom had left home, he lived
with his widowed mother and two old servants in the most aristocratic part of town. Perhaps
because life was easy for him and his weekly allowance double that of his friends, Damaso was
always smiling, and when he did so he displayed a notched front tooth (souvenir of a childhood
fall) which he daintily caressed with the tip of his active red tongue. An adaptable and generous
boy, he accepted enthusiastically any plan suggested by his friends and his prosperity even
allowed him to place his small personal properties at the group's disposal. This was the case of
the hard rubber ball with which, shortly after they had met him, they began to play after school
on the sidewalk that ran alongside the park, defying the zeal of the municipal guards.
Eduardo Custodio was the other; pale, slow, and round-about in speech, with a touch of
humor, he suffered from a premature aging that showed in his nearsightedness, his heavy
eyelids, his limpness, and a certain stiffness of the legs for which he tried to compensate with
tenacity and pride when he played soccer, his great passion. He did not use glasses, and usually
combated his myopia by pulling at the outside corner of his eye to make images clearer, and
when he went to the movies or some other kind of show he used opera glasses that had
belonged to his great-grandmother.
Exercise 1:
Find the prepositional phrases (2), appositive phrase (1), participial phrases (2), infinitive phrase
(1), and gerund phrase (1) within the selected passage.