The novel is divided into twelve short chapters. In chapter 1, the narrator is a pregnant woman who addresses the girl in her womb – Xoana – and tells her about the lineage of women from which she descends. She starts with her own great-grandmother, Pepa the Mole, who used to sing songs at fairs in Galicia, accompanied on the violin by a man called Maricallo. Pepa had suffered a case of the smallpox when she was young, which had pockmarked her face and left her without the use of her sight. She had a beautiful voice, however. At one of the fairs, in the town of Monterroso in the month of November, after their performance she took the purse of coins they had earned and went to lie down for the night while Maricallo did the round of the local bars. However, a man came in the night and raped her. Pepa preferred to protect the child in her womb – the narrator’s grandmother, Rosa – by inventing a story that she had been made love to by Charlemagne’s chamberlain, Einhard, who lay with the emperor’s daughter and was the subject of one of the songs Pepa performed. When they returned to the family house in July, Pepa gave birth and left her new-born daughter in the house while she returned to the road. The daughter grew up, healthy and happy, looking forward to her mother’s visits, since she would bring her trinkets from the fairs she visited and also a lot of caresses.

In chapter 2, we learn that there were plenty of illegitimate children, born out of wedlock, but the problem was not the social condition of the children, rather it was the lack of men to help with the hard work of cultivating the fields. Pepa’s family had plenty of land, but the land was not very fertile and there weren’t enough hands to make it profitable, since the family also had to pay tax on the land. As a result, Rosa, Pepa’s daughter, as soon as she was old enough (but still a child), went to work as a maid in the Big House that belonged to the local aristocrat, Don Álvaro Pardo de Outeiro. Don Álvaro was a womanizer and had more than twenty illegitimate children, whom he tried to help in one way or another. Rosa was used to obeying her master in all things, and this included going to bed with him, as a result of which she became pregnant, was sent back to the family house, where she gave birth to the narrator’s grandmother, Carolina, and great-uncle, Xenxo. Pepa returned from her travels, carrying the violin that Maricallo had bequeathed to her shortly before dying. She learned to play the violin and used to sing old ballads to her new grandchildren. Don Álvaro tried to help out, but soon stopped visiting Rosa after he fell into a state of melancholy on learning that his three legitimate sons had all died at the Battle of the Ebro, the longest and largest battle of the Spanish Civil War, in 1938.

In chapter 3, Carolina grew up strong, much stronger than her mother, and worked the land, digging, looking after the cattle, planting eucalyptus trees, which the narrator didn’t like, but Carolina insisted that it was thanks to the money they made from the eucalyptus trees that the narrator could study. Carolina herself had only been able to study a little with Dona Remedios. They had been so poor that Carolina had been forced to visit the neighbours and ask for any unpaired clogs they might have. Sometimes she would be forced to wear two clogs that were both meant for the same foot. Dona Remedios, the schoolteacher, had wanted to teach the children some embroidery, for which she had asked them to bring a piece of cloth, but Carolina had been so poor she had had to steal a piece of cloth from a neighbour’s scarecrow, wash it and leave it to grow white in the sun. The narrator’s great-uncle, Xenxo, had died when he was almost sixty. He had had an ongoing conflict with a neighbour called Severiano, who had a fig tree outside his house that banged against Xenxo’s bedroom window. Xenxo had asked Severiano to pull it down, Severiano had refused. After a fall, Xenxo had been taken to hospital, where in the night a strong gust of wind came along, ripping up the fig tree and leaving it on the ground. That same day, Xenxo had died. The narrator tells her unborn daughter these things so that she will know that her family has a past that is rooted in mystery. Carolina had married, but had only been with her husband for two years before he went to work helping to build a tunnel in Asturias. The tunnel had collapsed and he had been killed. Carolina hid her sadness, always smiling on the outside, but sad within. She died of a stroke when the narrator was studying the violin in Germany. The narrator had come back to Galicia to visit her grandmother in hospital and had played her her favourite song, which was based on a poem by the Galician writer Xosé Neira Vilas and talked of lost love.

In chapter 4, the narrator’s mother – Carme – was still a baby when her father was killed. She was doted on by her mother’s brother, Xenxo, who would do whatever he could to make life easier for her. As an orphan, she had the right to a free education in a convent in Zaragoza, and Xenxo was appalled when he found out that she was to go there and he hadn’t been consulted. In the convent, there was a marked difference between those pupils who paid and those who didn’t. The former were set apart to be ladies, they learned how to play the piano, they acted and sang in a choir, while the charity cases were set aside to be their maidservants later in life and given the task of cleaning or working in the kitchen. Even during break, in the playground, the two “classes” of students were not allowed to speak to each other. Carme rebelled and ended up being expelled. Back home in Galicia, she succeeded in completing her secondary studies and gained employment in a local factory, where she met and married one of the managers, the narrator’s father, Pedro. Carme became an active trade unionist and sometimes had heated arguments with her husband, whom she accused of siding with the management.