50 years

In 1960, a young lady from Southern Alabama, Harper Lee, 34, won the Pulitzer Prize with To Kill a Mockingbird. She had quit her job at the ticket office of an Airline to write the novel, it was her first and her last, because she never published anything else since then. In 1962, 50 years ago, the book-based movie was shot, with Atticus Finch becoming the hero of the time. I watched the movie when in Huntsville, AL, one Sunday afternoon, and it jerked tears from me. The great Robert Duvall, Boo, if I remember right, brings the boy home after the attack; the little girl is shocked. I can see now -while I cook in my kitchen- Atticus and the girl sitting down the stairs of the front porch, the former asking for an explanation: why things like that happen? And the good Atticus giving the best answer, ever: you live here, in this beautiful place -the South is lovely!-, but in this life there is also ugly stuff.

The year Harper Lee was born, the great Spanish bullfighter, Juan Belmonte, was 34. Belmonte has dropped out school at the age of 8, but became a voracious reader during his life. He was a revolutionary bullfighter. Gerardo Diego, only a few years younger than him, wrote about him:


Yo canto al varón pleno,
al triunfador del mundo y de sí mismo
que al borde —un día y otro— del abismo
supo asomarse impávido y sereno.


I guess nobody could expect that Belmonte will end his days contravening the expected -a bull goring- and the verses. He was obsess with loneliness and the horrible -and unfair- pains of the vanishing senescence, and became more and more despaired with life and its glimmering and deceitful light. He ended up committing suicide in April 1962, 50 years ago; he shot himself in Utrera (South Seville).