The novel opens with the announcement of the death of a father during a bedroom scene involving his son and closes on the same day of the year, over three decades later, in the same house, into which the intrusion of some burglars causes the past of two lovers to be released from a black box. In the course of these years, initiated by the meeting of a thirty-five-year-old author and a young student who writes poetry, the book unfolds as a novel of memory, a true inventory seen through the mechanisms of fiction. But it is also a narrative essay on the illusions and bitterness of love, and a double self-portrait with landscape – Spain in the 80s – and a rich gallery of real-life figures, some only too well-know, who act as witnesses to a tragicomedy of happiness, infidelity, personal quests and the longing for what could be.