In these pages the photographer Castellon, one of the most attractive and enigmatic characters of recent Hispanic American literature, lives and dies. Through his camera lens the reader will see the fraudulent imitation of our nationalities, the defeated fantasy of ideals and utopias, and the concurrence of genius and misery in diverse settings, from the port of Greytown in Nicaragua, with its marble palaces in the middle of the jungle, to ghetto in Warsaw and the monastery of the Cartuja in Mallorca. In this magnificent novel the deep echoes of defeat, an inevitable companion of all human causes, are clear.