Somewhere in the USA, in the nineteenth century, a wealthy and cultured family spoke French and some Greek, read Shakespeare and played the piano. The only beautiful daughter of that perfect home was called Flora and everyone imagined her a goddess in a few years. But she suffered a strange illness that left her almost dwarfed, hunched, bald and half blind.
And psychologically it got worse: he became racist, with an explosive hatred for anyone whose skin was a little darker than his. Flora was so obsessed with her racism that she even made life impossible for her white family, which ended up throwing her out of her own home. Converted into hustlers, Flora earned her bread teaching piano and, unfortunately, she met a scammer who called herself a medium and an astrologer.
The couple, then, devoted themselves to dupe unwary, read the fate of others in the stars, bring and bring messages for the dead. That's how they lived very well. And one night, with the planet Venus aligned with Mars, that is, in a fatal combination of love and war, Flora became pregnant. But this time constellations and planets played tricks on her and did not reveal her secrets: she, who read the future of others in the heavens, never guessed that her husband, the astrologer medium, was going to abandon her when she learned of her new state .
And a child was born who almost killed her in childbirth. From then on he experienced a deep hatred towards the creature. To get rid of that weeping tragedy of five pounds, he gave it to a black servant to feed him. A punishment from the gods. At age ten, the child worked from before dawn and took turns up to 36 hours. "I saved $ 5 to buy a toy boat that cost 8. That was my dream. My mother took my money. She, the rich woman, forced me to live in misery. I will never forgive her. That day I wanted to kill myself."
Later, Flora married a loving man with a weak personality, who gave his last name to the baby. And it was so cruel that it forced the stepfather to physically punish the child. Then both, boy and stepfather, hugged each other to cry together. That boy was called Jack London, the great American writer. When he became a socialist, an American religious group decided to burn his books.
Years later, the Nazis did the same in Germany. "My ruthless childhood and my vagabond life made me a writer. I exchanged dramatic stories for food. That's how I learned the job."
In chess, too, forgetting the ladies and assimilating the past blows -although without so much bitter taste- opens the way to new triumphs.