La Rosa
y la Estrella
Thoughts, reflections and a prayer for the soul
Hermes Antares
Sometimes, in the deepest silence,
a star comes down to remind us who we are.
A rose and a star, talking through one night
A bud opens in the dark and asks the questions everyone asks sooner or later: who am I, where did I come from, where am I going. A star answers. Not with comfort — the star tells the rose exactly what waits for her: the cold, the wind, the hand that will one day cut her.
What grows between them across that single night is the whole book. And when the rose is nearly spent, something small and hard falls from inside her that she never knew she carried.
What was that? she asks.
You, says the star. Again.
Three books in one
The fable
One night. Two voices. A rose that must learn to stand where she was planted, and a star that has watched for centuries and never had anything to lose — until now.
Seventy-one words
Tenderness. Patience. Fear. Absence. Forgiveness. Each one has its own page. You are not meant to read them in order — you look for the one you need today, and the book opens there.
A journal in fifteen stations
The last part of the book is blank on purpose. Ruled lines, waiting. The rose found her word; the last page is where you write yours.
Forty-four years in a folder
Hermes Antares is a pen name. Hermes, in the old stories, is the one who carries the messages — not the one who invents them: the one who takes them across and hands them over. Antares is a red star, the brightest in Scorpius, and the ancients called it the heart of the scorpion.
He wrote this book by hand as a young man in the port of Veracruz, between 1982 and 1985, in a notebook. He worked in banking, in government, in a few ventures of his own — almost no writer lives on writing, and he would rather say so than pretend otherwise. The manuscript waited in its folder.
In 2002 he mailed two copies to Mexico City to register the work. The envelope came back sealed, and he still keeps it. Then the folder waited again, for another twenty-three years.
He lives and writes in Poza Rica de Hidalgo, Veracruz, Mexico.
What took so long
- 1982–1985 Written by hand in a notebook, in the port of Veracruz.
- 2002 Filed for copyright registration in Mexico City. Registration number 03-2002-121213393000-01.
- 2003 The certificate is issued on 17 January. The envelope comes back sealed, with the proof inside.
- 2019 A longer version is finished one night facing the sea. Then everything stops, and everything is put away.
- 2026 Rebuilt, completed and published for the first time.
The book is written in Spanish
There is no English edition. The fable, the seventy-one words and the journal are all in Spanish, and this page exists so you know that before ordering rather than after.
If you read Spanish, or if you are buying it for someone who does — a mother, a grandmother, a friend who left home a long time ago — it will reach them in the language it was written in. That was the point.
The edition
- Pages
- 244
- Format
- 5 × 8 inches
- Typeface
- EB Garamond
- Language
- Spanish
- Publisher
- Hermes Antares
- ISBN
- Pending
Print and digital editions in preparation.