The events take place at the University of Concepción before the 1973 coup d'état. The narrator is an 18-year-old young man. Students from the Faculty of Arts who go to poetry workshops led by Juan Stein and Diego Soto meet a 23-year-old man named Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, who is self-educated.
Ruiz-Tagle attracts the attention and makes friends with most of the women in both literary workshops, while he doesn't get close to the men, however, he is affable. In the group stand out the twin sisters Garmendia, Veronica and Angelica, "Fat" Marta Posadas, Bibiano O`Ryan, and the narrator.
In events of 1973, the narrator is imprisoned in the gymnasium and he sees a plane flown by Carlos Wieder, who writes aerial poetry. The literary critic Ibacache is also mentioned as someone who praises his skills vehemently.
When the narrator is freed, Bibiano goes to visit him to give him news. They have been expelled from the university, and several classmates, most of which in the poetry workshops they attended, have gone missing. Marta Posadas, or Martita, who became a close friend of Ruiz-Tagle, realizes after he moves away and disappears, that he is Carlos Weider, they are the same person. Marta also tells Bibiano that Alberto had told her the news that the group's poetesses, the Garmendia sisters, had died.
Juan Stein, director of the poetry workshop, and friend of Bibiano and the narrator, goes missing after the 1973 events. When they go look for him at his apartment, there's another family living there. Bibiano keeps track of his whereabouts around the world here and there. He sporadically appears and then disappears just as quickly. When he is killed in a riot, Bibiano tries to find his family but discovers that his mother passed away three years prior and Juan Stein, the real one, actually died a year before Bibiano went looking for him. His friend, a woman who lived in late Mrs. Stein's house, believes that he is buried in Valdivia, but Bibiano never finds his tomb.
Diego Soto, friend, and rival of Juan Stein (the impostor), on the other hand, disappears in 1974. He goes in exile in Europe and marries a French woman and becomes the father of two children, However, he is invited to a poetry event away from home and after the event, at the train station, he is stabbed for trying to help a homeless woman from being hit by three Neo-Nazi youths.
After these stories, he turns to C. Weider in 1974 as an air force pilot, continues to write aerial poems and a few years later he is arrested at a party. Bibiano finds in Chilean and foreign magazines part of Weider's work, has begun to grow his own legend, lives in Valparaíso, takes refuge in a farm in the South, until in 1977 a strategic game (Wargame) appears under his authorship and the pseudonym of El Piloto.
Years after the death of Ibacache, Weider is mentioned in a posthumous work. His track is lost in Germany, South Africa, and Italy. In 1992, his name appears in the judicial survey on torture and disappearances, and in 1993, he appears as belonging to the independent operative group responsible for the death of several students in Concepción for the coup d'état. Judgments are made that do not prosper and the case is forgotten.
Abel Romero, a famous policeman, enters the scene. Twenty years have passed and he finds our protagonist in Barcelona and proposes to find Weider. He pays him good money for him to find his trail. he finds him through a pornographic film company, in which Weider figured as a photographer. Here, six of the company are killed. He finds the place where he goes every afternoon, close to his apartment in Lloret (province). The protagonist recognizes him, feels fear, relief and when spotting Weider, the protagonist confirms his identity to Romero, who addresses his home. Back in Barcelona, Romero gives the protagonist the sum of three hundred thousand pesetas. And then Romero retires to Paris.
