Sótano, El

Installed in chronic fatigue, the result of a non-specific ailment, the narrator of this novel decides to enter a luxury clinic effectively designed to restore sick bodies. There she surrounds herself with a select group of patients who, like her, give themselves over to the treatments that are given to them in the basement of the building. Among her companions is Rubén, who acts as master of ceremonies, and his wife Dolores, with whom the protagonist establishes an uncertain friendship. Also Mrs. Goosens and her nephew Adolfo, who seem to heal and get worse, respectively, at suspicious rates. When the physical improvement of the protagonist does not arrive, when the dynamics of the group seem to force its members to choose between loneliness or tyranny, misgivings emerge. And if the strange thing is precisely to be healthy? If identity, perhaps sicker than the body, can become a burden, would it be preferable to accept its dissolution or try to resist? And, given what seems like the beginning of the end, is it worth spending effort to write, in the narrator's words, "a novel with a sordid and criminal medical plot"? The basement is revealed, in an anomalous and fascinating narration, as the obverse of another possible novel, written with the freedom and precision with which a collage is constructed, dark and unpredictable like a spreading evil.