José Asunción Silva

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

José Asunción Silva (born November 27, 1865 in Bogotá; died May 23, 1896 in Bogotá) was a Colombian poet.

He wrote his first work, Primera Comunión, in 1875.

Traveling to Europe, he met Mallarmé and Gustave Moreau in Paris.

On May 23, 1896, about eleven pm, Jose Asuncion Silva, a 31-year-old poet from Bogotá's aristocracy, said goodbye to the friends with whom he would talk in tertulias--daily social gatherings--and gave his mother and sister Julia a kiss goodnight. Before leaving the room, one of his table companions stopped him to invite him to lunch for the following day. But Silva responded him that that would not be possible because of his ill health, and he added some words about the uselessness of life. His friend, attempting to reproach him for his pesimism, said to him then:
- If you keep on like this, it wouldn't surprise me if you shot yourself one of these days.
- Who, me? That would be peculiar that I killed myself! - Silva replied quickly, smiling.

After the goodbyes were said, Silva went to his room. He undressed and soon put on other clean clothes prepared for effect: cashmere trousers, patent leather boots and a t-shirt of white silk on which the drawn silhouette of the heart could be seen. Later it was discovered that that same morning the poet had visited his doctor friend, Juan Evangelista Manrique, on the pretext of requesting a dandruff remedy. Doctor Manrique would later remember that Silva had requested of him to outline on his t-shirt with a dermographic pencil the exact place where his heart was located.

The poet lay down on his bed and grasped the revolver that he had prepared for that moment. He placed the mouth of the barrel in the center of the drawing of his heart and pulled the trigger. The bullet flashed with a deathly lightning in his chest, and, a historian tells us, "put an end to the poem of his melancholy". Nobody heard the blast. The following morning, the old servant who entered the room bringing the breakfast tray found to the corpse, with its eyes open and expression calm.

He did not leave a note, nor an explanation for the reasons for the suicide. His funeral consisted, according to the norm imposed at the time by the Catholic Church, of throwing the corpse into a rubbish heap. Suicides did not have the right to be buried in the cemetery, which was reserved exclusively for the faithful.