January 1945, end of World War II. A young woman wrapped in a heavy military cape that hardly protects her from the cold escapes through Polish and Czech territories. She arrives in Vienna and then manages to reach Geneva, where “some friends”, a powerful Croatian member of the church and a Hungarian Franciscan monk, will be able to help her… Three years later, in 1948, she has started a new life in Buenos Aires. It has not been easy, she still needs to improve her Spanish, and she works hard in a restaurant kitchen to make a living; she lives in Frau Dorsch’s boarding house, but none of the other guests, mostly Rumanian and Hungarian emigrants know how she managed to escape from Europe…

The young woman is haunted by a dark past and only the innocent questions of her son Federico, conceived in Buenos Aires at the end of 1948, keep her from forgetting it once and for all. “Stories are not made up, they are inherited,” wrote Cozarinsky in his novel El rufián moldavo, and when Federico becomes an adult and takes control of his own destiny, he will close the circle of that hidden life with his own escape which will be an embarrassment for many surprising reasons.