Xosé Lendoiro, a Galician lawyer and self-funded poetry magazine editor, narrates from Rome in October 1992. Seeking inspiration, he buys a camper, separates from his wife, and tours Spain. At a campground near Castroverde in Galicia, a boy named Elifaz falls into a deep pit that locals call Devil’s Mouth. A first volunteer is lowered on a rope but surfaces in terror, claiming to have seen the devil. Lendoiro compares the scene to a Pío Baroja story, The Chasm, in which fear defeats duty. The campground’s watchman, a Chilean, volunteers next, descends without hesitation, and rescues the boy. Lendoiro learns the watchman’s name is Arturo Belano.

Two years later, Belano appears at Lendoiro’s Barcelona office, unemployed. Lendoiro assigns him poetry reviews for a law school journal. He later discovers Belano is conducting a passionate affair with his older daughter in the bedroom of his former family apartment. He spies on them repeatedly, unsettled equally by desire and paternal outrage. When he confronts his daughter, she confirms that she loves Belano; when he offers Belano an unpaid role on the prestigious magazine, Belano asks about pay and declines. Lendoiro undergoes what he calls a psychological transformation—envisioning himself as “the giant” (465)—and uses his influence to marginalize Belano professionally. He eventually notices his daughter suffering from persistent bad breath, which she blames on a wisdom tooth. Belano grows increasingly distant from her over the smell; she ends the relationship and declares against his inclusion in the magazine. Lendoiro later dreams of the howl from the chasm and rereads Baroja’s story multiple times, breaking down in his office and concluding that he is, and always was, a terrible poet. He contracts a fatal illness, travels through clinics in Barcelona and New York, and ends up in Rome, where he is told he has days to live. He takes nightly walks through the ruins near the Terme di Traiano, hearing auditory hallucinations of howls rising from a chasm, and closes with a Galician joke: A man in a forest meets 500,000 Galicians who are crying because they are alone and lost.

Daniel Grossman narrates in February 1993. Returning to Mexico after a long absence, he travels to Puerto Ángel, Oaxaca, to visit his friend Norman Bolzman, a philosophy professor who has ended his relationship with Claudia and lives in semi-isolation. After five pleasant days together, they drive back to Mexico City. En route, Norman speaks obliquely about his breakup, about a dream Claudia had involving the children they never had, and about Ulises Lima’s visit to them years earlier in Tel Aviv. Norman reveals that, on those nights, he heard Lima crying on the sofa in the dark. He came to understand Lima was weeping because he knew he would have to return—that, for him, wherever Claudia was had become Israel. At the moment, Norman turns to Grossman with the expression he wore as a teenager, a truck comes at them head-on. Norman swerves; the car crashes. Grossman wakes in a hospital in Puebla and learns that Norman died. After recovering, he searches Mexico City obsessively for Ulises Lima, hoping to decode Norman’s final conversation. He meets a woman who was once Ulises’s partner; she is visibly ill and reports that Ulises became a drug user and may be dead.

Amadeo Salvatierra resumes his story. He tells the boys that Encarnación Guzmán and Pablito Lezcano both married, events that affected Cesárea negatively. Soon after Pablito’s wedding, Cesárea told Amadeo she was leaving Mexico City for Sonora. He pleaded with her, arguing she was abandoning her literary life. She replied that she had always been a visceral realist, not a stridentist, that she had already quit her job, and that she was simply seeking what she described as the shared destiny of all people: a job and a home. He last sees her walking away, composed and resolute.

Susana Puig, a nurse on the Catalan coast, receives a final call from her former patient and lover, Arturo Belano. He asks her to park at a specific curve above a cove on a given day and simply watch—no conversation, no direct contact. She recalls their relationship: He was twice hospitalized at her clinic, they began an affair, she ended it when she recognized that he did not love her, and they remained friends. Following his instructions, she parks above the nudist cove and watches four men gather on the beach. A package is unwrapped, revealing two swords. She is unsure whether what she is witnessing is theater or something real, but she feels captivated by the sight.

Guillem Piña, a painter, describes his long friendship with Belano during the Barcelona years of the late 1970s and his own drift away from ambitious art-world ambitions toward teaching. When Belano re-enters his life years later, he arrives distressed about a critic, Iñaki Echevarne, whom he expects to write a damaging review of his new novel as collateral damage in Echevarne’s ongoing feud with the influential writer, Aurelio Baca. Belano asks Piña to serve as his second in a duel. They will fight with sabers until first blood. Piña agrees. They obtain a pair of real swords from Piña’s friend, contact Echevarne, and arrange the duel at the nudist cove. Before the fight, Belano shows them a plane ticket to Tanzania.

Jaume Planells, a journalist, narrates the duel from Echevarne’s side. He was recruited as Echevarne’s second and brought a female colleague, Quima Monistrol. On the beach, Planells and Piña step back while Belano and Echevarne fight with sabers. The duel is long and inconclusive; Planells sees Piña crying and a woman watching from a parked car on the ridge above. The contest ends when the point of Belano’s sword comes within a fraction of an inch of Echevarne’s chest; Belano draws back, and Echevarne then strikes him on the shoulder with the flat of his blade.

This chapter gathers together a series of brief monologues about the relationship between tragedy and comedy, delivered at or near the Madrid Book Fair in July 1994. Iñaki Echevarne offers a meditation on the lifespan of a literary work, concluding that everything beginning as comedy ends as tragedy. Aurelio Baca, a prominent novelist, catalogues his own moral limits. Pere Ordóñez contrasts an earlier generation of writers who renounced privilege with today’s literary careerists, concluding comedy ends as comedy. Julio Martínez Morales delivers a cryptic, numerically peppered monologue about the honor of poets. Pablo del Valle confesses he was supported for years by a girlfriend who delivered mail, left her after winning a literary prize, and is now haunted by the sound of her footsteps at night. Marco Antonio Palacios describes his calculated rise to literary prominence through flattery of established writers. Hernando García León recounts receiving a vision of the Virgin Mary, who commanded him to write a book that became a bestseller. Pelayo Barrendoaín, a poet struggling with mental health issues, walks the fair medicated and hand-in-hand with what may be a nurse, finding the whole spectacle ludicrous.

Felipe Müller closes the chapter with an airport story. Standing at the Barcelona airport just before Belano’s departure from Spain, Belano told Müller about two Latin American writers of their generation: a Peruvian poet who returned home at the moment the violent revolutionary group, the Shining Path, came to prominence, got caught between guerrillas and police, suffered a mental health crisis, and became a religious eccentric; and a Cuban novelist persecuted for his homosexuality, who escaped to the United States, achieved recognition, contracted AIDS, and died while finishing his last book. Belano kisses Müller goodbye and leaves. Müller concludes that what begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue that is no longer funny.

Clara Cabeza, secretary to the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, describes her daily duties before recounting an unusual series of mornings from her time as his secretary. Paz asks her to drive him to the neglected Parque Hundido in Mexico City, where he begins walking in slow circles. A stranger appears each day walking the same path in the opposite direction. On the third visit, Paz asks Clara to identify the man. She approaches him; he introduces himself as Ulises Lima, a visceral realist poet. She brings Lima to Paz’s bench. Paz recognizes the term visceral realists and asks whether the group was connected to Cesárea Tinajero. Lima confirms it, his voice heavy with emotion. They speak briefly and Lima departs. Neither Paz nor Clara returns to the park afterward. When Clara goes alone one morning hoping to see Lima again, he does not appear.

María Teresa Solsona Ribot, a competitive bodybuilder and pub waitress in Malgrat, narrates the second half. She rents a room to Arturo Belano, assuming he works for a newspaper before learning he is a novelist. They develop a daily domestic friendship over breakfast and late-night visits to her pub. She discusses her bodybuilding career and her admiration for a particular competitor; he quotes a French poem about sadness and having read everything, which she dismisses as pretentious. He tells her about his son, whom he visits weekly, and an ongoing painful attachment to a woman from Andalusia. After a fight she decides to help him. She meets a new love interest, returns from a bodybuilding championship to find Belano briefly transformed: He has been watching films and seems lighter. He recounts a pleasant dream: He is a young Arab boy delivering a cable and a barrel of payment to Indonesian soldiers, while his small brother asks about the cable’s length. She interprets the dream as a sign of improving luck. One night, while her boyfriend is visiting, she slips into Belano’s empty room and finds his suitcases packed. A week later, she accompanies him to the train station as he leaves town.

Jacobo Urenda, an Argentinian photographer based in Paris, recounts meeting Arturo Belano at a post office in Luanda, Angola. They bond over a shared Latin American background, and both find themselves as freelancers with little money in a dangerous city. Urenda notices a contradiction: Belano speaks of welcoming death, yet he carefully manages a daily regimen of medications for serious liver and digestive conditions. When Urenda returns to Paris, he sends the medicine Belano requires. Months later they meet again in Kigali, Rwanda. Belano is broke but has shed his death wish; he mentions casually that he once fought a duel with someone named Iñaki Echevarne and makes the cryptic claim that he is unsure who killed whom.

Urenda travels to Monrovia during the Liberian civil war. At the Center for Press Correspondents, a hotel for foreign journalists, he finds Belano’s name in the guest register. A German photographer named Herr Linke reports that Belano spent three days at the center before departing north with a pair of American journalists. Urenda joins a trip to the interior with a French journalist named Jean-Pierre and an Italian photographer. Their car is ambushed near the village of Black Creek; the Italian is shot and killed. The surviving group reaches the neighboring settlement of Brownsville, where their engine gives out. There, they find armed Mandingo soldiers sheltering with two white men: the celebrated Spanish photographer Emilio López Lobo and Arturo Belano.

Belano explains that Krahn snipers loyal to a warlord named General Kensey surround the area. The soldiers plan a breakout toward Thomas Creek; the civilians, led by a woman, plan to trek northeast through jungle to reach a road into Monrovia. Urenda, Jean-Pierre, and Belano agree to go with the civilians. That night, unable to sleep, Urenda overhears a long conversation between Belano and López Lobo. Belano speaks about his own past desire to die; López Lobo then reveals that his young son recently died of a disease in a New York hospital, that he grieved so completely he left the boy’s cremated remains on a subway train, and that his wife subsequently left him. Urenda realizes López Lobo intends to go with the soldiers to his death, and that Belano plans to accompany him so he will not die alone. At dawn, Urenda tries to dissuade Belano; Belano shrugs, says goodbye, and walks into the forest with López Lobo and the soldiers.

Urenda and the civilians reach Monrovia. He spends his remaining time in Liberia trying to find out what happened in the Brownsville area but receives no reliable information. A General Wellman tells him Kensey is dead, the opposing general Lebon is also dead, that peace now reigns in Black Creek, and that he has no knowledge of a settlement called Brownsville. Urenda leaves Liberia and never returns.

Ernesto García Grajales, a professor at the Universidad de Pachuca, identifies himself as the world’s sole expert on the visceral realists. He catalogs the fates of the group’s members: Some are dead, some have vanished, some work in other fields. He knows nothing about Arturo Belano. He also asserts that a figure called Juan García Madero was never a member—a young Chilean named Bustamante was—and confirms the 1970s group named themselves in deliberate reference to an earlier, little-documented visceral realist circle from the 1920s.

As dawn arrives, Amadeo Salvatierra completes his January 1976 account. He tells the boys that he alone kept Cesárea Tinajero’s memory alive after everyone else forgot her, and he describes his subsequent life as a public scribe in the Plaza Santo Domingo. One of the boys has fallen asleep on the sofa but continues to speak, and he promises they will find Cesárea Tinajero and her complete works, insisting they are doing it for larger reasons—for Mexico and Latin America—and out of their own desire. Amadeo sees their faces grown pale, asks whether any of this is worth it, and the sleeping boy answers with the slang term for yes. Amadeo rises, opens the windows to the new day, and turns out the light.