Urrutia joins a seminary at 14, defying his father, to pursue his dreams of becoming a priest and poet.

Chile's preeminent literary critic Farewell invites a young Urrutia to his country estate, Là-bas.

Urrutia secretly watches Pablo Neruda recite verses to the moon beneath a pergola at Là-bas.

After a drunken dinner at Là-bas, Farewell fondles Urrutia on the balcony while lecturing him about the troubadour Sordello.

Urrutia builds a reputation as literary critic H. Ibacache in Santiago while his private poetry goes unrecognized.

Farewell tells Urrutia the story of an Austrian shoemaker whose mummified body is found sitting upright in his unfinished memorial.

Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah recruit Urrutia under Opus Dei to spend a year researching historic church preservation across Europe.

Traveling Europe, Urrutia discovers that parish priests use trained falcons to kill pigeons whose droppings corrode historic churches.

Urrutia returns to Chile and reads the entire Greek classical canon as Allende's socialist government unravels around him.

Pinochet leads a successful coup, Allende dies, and a relieved Urrutia calls Farewell, who is jubilant.

Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah recruit Urrutia to secretly teach Marxism to Pinochet and his military junta.

Urrutia travels to a secret guarded location outside Santiago and teaches the junta ten classes on Marxism.

Urrutia confesses his teaching assignment to Farewell over dinner; Farewell declares the classes were necessary.

A party guest gets lost at Canales's salon and discovers a blindfolded, beaten man strapped to a metal bed in the basement.

As Urrutia nears death, all the faces of people he has known flash before him and his narration ends.

The novella unfolds as the deathbed confession of Father Urrutia, a Jesuit priest and literary critic who must account for his actions under Pinochet's dictatorship. As a young man, Urrutia is drawn into Chile's literary elite through the influential critic Farewell, where he witnesses Pablo Neruda at his peak and builds his own reputation as the critic H. Ibacache. After a period of despair, shadowy Opus Dei operatives recruit Urrutia first for a church preservation project in Europe, then to teach Marxism secretly to Pinochet and his junta. Through a chain of moral capitulations — including attending María Canales's literary salons held above an active torture chamber — Urrutia becomes deeply complicit in the regime. The novella closes as his long-repressed conscience finally overwhelms him in his dying moments.

The core events of Urrutia's life and moral complicity under Pinochet.

Urrutia recalls his father moving like an eel through the gloom of their childhood home.

On his first visit to Là-bas, Urrutia enters a peasant cabin uninvited and perfunctorily blesses the house.

On a Sunday walk near Là-bas, Urrutia encounters five peasants standing motionless with their hands covering their faces.

At Salvador Reyes's home, Farewell prompts Reyes to tell Urrutia about meeting the German officer Ernst Jünger in occupied Paris.

Reyes and Jünger reunite at a Guatemalan painter's spartan attic and discuss the ambiguous painting called Landscape: Mexico City.

Urrutia falls into a prolonged depression, writing blasphemous and shameful poetry that he burns every morning.

A mugger accosts Urrutia during a morning walk through the streets of Santiago.

In Burgos, a feverish Father Antonio declares the Church's use of trained falcons a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

Father Antonio dies overnight and Urrutia releases the priest's grounded falcon Rodrigo alone into the dark sky.

In Saint-Quentin, a falcon accidentally kills a white dove mascot above a crowded town square, outraging the community.

After Neruda dies, Urrutia and Farewell conspicuously repeat to each other over the phone that the cause was cancer.

Pinochet falls asleep during Urrutia's third Marxism class.

Before one of the Marxism classes, Pinochet quizzes Urrutia on the reading habits of Chile's former presidents.

Urrutia brings Farewell one of Canales's prize-winning stories; Farewell derides it and laments the state of Chilean literature.

Farewell dies and Urrutia attends the funeral, asking young mourners what has become of his mentor.

Beneath the headline events of Urrutia's life lie the formative incidents and revealing encounters that fill out the portrait of his self-deception. From his earliest memory of a shadowy, eel-like father to his contemptuous encounters with Chilean peasants at Là-bas, Urrutia's elitism and repression surface in small but telling moments. The embedded story of Salvador Reyes and Ernst Jünger in occupied Paris mirrors the Chilean literary establishment's later indifference to atrocity, while Urrutia's depression, his mugging, and the violent European falconry episodes chart his gradual abandonment of conscience. After Pinochet's coup, secondary encounters — Neruda's suspicious death, the absurdity inside the junta's classroom, and Farewell's senile decline — fill out the picture of a man who rationalizes away each moral failure in turn. The pool ends with Farewell's death, completing the arc of the mentor-student relationship that shaped Urrutia's complicity.

The secondary moments that expose Urrutia's elitism, evasions, and complicity.

After seminary, Urrutia meets the influential critic Farewell, who warns him the critic's path is difficult in a barbaric country.

Traveling to Là-bas, Urrutia arrives at the deserted village of Querquén and feels exposed to the hellish indifference of nature.

Neruda interrupts Farewell's advances on Urrutia at the balcony and the guests toast both men together inside Là-bas.

After leaving Reyes's dinner, Farewell and Urrutia watch shadowy silhouettes projected on a restaurant wall by a lightning storm.

A drunken Farewell tells Urrutia he would either drag him into the bathroom or ask him to hear his confession.

In Avignon, Urrutia walks the countryside with a priest and watches the falcon Ta Gueule attack a flock of starlings.

In Namur, Father Charles hears Urrutia's confession beside a river; Urrutia does not mention releasing Rodrigo in Burgos.

In Rome, Urrutia weeps at the pope's feet and is overwhelmed by disturbing visions of falcons flying over the Atlantic.

After Allende's election, Urrutia visits an aging Farewell and the two commiserate over the country's political direction.

Pinochet invites Urrutia for a walk and garden lights magically illuminate around them as if conjured by the dictator's power.

Rumors spread through Santiago about Urrutia's secret Marxism classes, but no one seems to care.

Farewell grows senile and Urrutia feels both sadness and quiet schadenfreude at his once-great mentor's decline.

After democracy returns, it emerges that Canales's husband Thompson used the basement of their house to torture and murder dissidents.

Urrutia visits the derelict Canales house; she says she repents like everyone else and dares him to descend to the basement.

In his final moments, Urrutia realizes he himself might be the wizened youth crying out into the void.

The pivotal choices and discoveries of Urrutia's story illuminate the machinery of his self-deception and moral decline. His first encounter with Farewell and the unsettling journey to Là-bas set him on a path of literary ambition and repression, while the restaurant shadow play and Farewell's bleak despair about literature plant seeds of doubt that Urrutia refuses to cultivate. In Europe, moments of evasion — relishing the falcon's violence in Avignon, making a partial confession in Namur, weeping at the pope's feet in Rome — mark his gradual drift toward complicity in the Church's repressive project. Back in Chile, Pinochet's magnetic charm in the enchanted garden and the breezy indifference of Santiago society ease Urrutia's guilt and lock him into collaboration with the regime. By the time Canales's torture chamber is revealed and Urrutia confronts her in the derelict house, repentance is impossible, and the novella's final revelation — that Urrutia may himself be the wizened youth he has tried to silence — fuses his conscience and his guilt into a single devastating image.