Every day, under fragile remedies, a part of humanity everywhere loses blood from a dark wound. The killer is the Moon.
—Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body
Healing comes from the Latin sanāre, and has several synonyms: to cure, to recover, to restore, to strengthen, to recuperate, to improve, to convalesce; and only one antonym: to fall ill (infirmāre), which, without the reflexive pronoun, turns the subject and the recipient of the action into the same entity. From many perspectives—verse, antiverse, footnote, exergo, graphic, datum, hieroglyph, diagnosis, prescription, medical history, chemical formula, other languages…—La O recóndita (Editorial Sol Negro. Lima, Peru, 2025), the latest book by Cuban writer, journalist, and professor Julio Antonio Molinete*, is a procedure for healing, even without the conscious awareness of the co-argumental element se. It can also be read as therapy in the persistent effort to model illness as an artifact, first suffered, then written, and finally displayed. The alliance between patient and document generates change, alleviates anguish. It does not achieve a full cure, but it provides relief.
From the very beginning, the book announces the injury in millennial genes that shape the present: “It is hidden diabetes. High glucose levels are buried in a remote corner of the tundra. And they can be there for more than four million years. When do they appear? When the permafrost melts due to the earth’s heat (…) That day, whose date I forgot, the doctor found the remains of a prehistoric animal with high blood glucose levels.” In truth, the symptoms had always been visible to everyone, even before the book, before the poet’s babbling, before his first steps: “My Mother says that when I was a baby, bibijaguas, santanicas, bite and run… crazy ants climbed into the crib.”
Everything pointed to monosaccharides, simple and essential sugars. But no one noticed them as clues for future clinical-poetic stories, structured (pre)texts of a blue circle, a defined symbol of life, infinity, and continuity. The secret O that many carry unconsciously emerges one day transfigured as a mark of the beast, a mandatory checkbox in forms, the first prick of the day, the last fixed thought at night. In Molinete’s case, his particular O had the impertinence of surfacing in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, adding to the (con)fusion of body and mind. It was then Ceronetti’s dark wound mixed with global desolation, his part for the whole, his army of ants alongside a flood of immediate, fatal events that surrounded and submerged him.
From the first episode, days passed without number or name, and the poet felt he could see through walls, that he was freshly ground stone:
I don’t know how long that walk from stone to dust, from dust to human body lasted. When I returned to myself, I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see through colors, through tar, through bricks. All effort was in vain. I could even see through my eyelids. On the other side of the lashes, a woman chewed words. I felt the snap of her tongue, the splash of her saliva, the flow of her lungs. I followed as if I were inside a niche.
For the informed (im)patient, other porous forms of existence arrived between reality and delirium, terms and parameters, another language to learn. New (inter)locutors also appeared, like Doctor Dalí—a questionable figure not only for the length of his mustache and his tics, but also because, quoting Ceronetti again: “Discovering that the doctor is not a God causes suffering, because we cannot abandon the idea that there exists above us the idea of a healing God.” Or for the essay cited in the book by Lina Meruane: “The doctor is not a researcher but a practitioner of the body’s trade. He is not neutral nor objective; he allows himself to be guided by preconceived ideas contaminated with notions of proper behavior or principles that even twist and contort scientific data, diverging from true knowledge.”
Alongside dialogues with the Doctor (“Are you sure you don’t take drugs?” Dalí asked, with a cubist gaze. His fingers twisted the right tip of his mustache as if sharpening a brush.”), La O recóndita maintains another dialogue: the whisper of Mother preceding his first writings. In Molinete’s case, Mother is not a character but an entelechy. Mother has been in his blood long before existing, traveling through his sweet cells, entering and leaving his physical and literary body with pre-established fluidity. She is a permanent synecdoche, one for another. Not even illness can alter this (co)relation:
She presses my index finger: she sees a rose. presses twice: it is yellow. three times: it is red. four times: it is green. She rubs my fingertip: I must look at the petals. A brief rub, no pressure: the petals are small. An intense rub: they are large, beautiful. She pricks my finger with her nail: there is a bee. She pricks and rubs with her nail: there is a hummingbird. She taps with her nail: it is sipping, they are sipping. We are. It is photochemistry. Mother and I. No one knows.
If La O recóndita is therapy, its discourse is healing—or at least its best attempt using suggestive, sometimes autistic resources to depict the self’s folding over itself through multiple representations. Everything works as a precise piece of the body’s puzzle. No detail is excessive when describing suffering; hence, the languages and registers blend naturally in the book: Spanish, English, Latin… medical, dietary, referential, bibliographic, hieroglyphic, nutritional, legal terms… Each portion of the artifact illuminates the spaces that the dark wound, his secret O, has occupied:
And I began to write everything. Signed. Designated by the. Forgetfulness. Ellipsis. Erasure. Illness. And. And. Struck. By him. By her. The void. The political violence of the void. Attacked by. Him. Her. The mimesis of the hiatus. And. And. The interrupted text. With. Without. Both. Both. Both together. As if. They allow. Allowed. Will allow. To find the. To join the. Fragments of him. Fragments of her. The I. The already. The rethinking. Of the already. Of the I. Of the body. Sick. Impostor. Hermetic. Hermeneutic. Ragpicker. Clumsy. Diver. Magnet. Sponge. Fossil. Documentary.
