When his long-lost brother resurfaces, Jacobo, desperate to prove his life has added up to something, looks to scrounge up a wife. He turns to Marta, an employee at his sock factory, with whom he has a prickly relationship.
In the Bolivian altiplano, Virginio and Sisa, an elderly Quechua couple who have lived a quiet life for years, face an impossible dilemma during an unusually long drought: resist or be defeated by the hostile environment and the relentless passage of time.
A French woman arrives in Montevideo, to meet poet Juan Carlos Onetti and investigate the story of the city. She is intrigued by the photograph of the day when president Bordaz was killed and a zeppelin flew above the city at the turn of the century. She is helped by a photographer and both fall into a police intrigue.