In the first story, a woman grows tired of being maltreated by a blind husband who treats his dog better than his children and she poisons both the husband and the dog. In the second, a man is kicked out of bed by his wife and struggles to come to terms with how to make a living with just a van and some products. In the third, a distorted figure watches how an elegant woman leaves home and returns in the moonlight. An employer curses his employee and swears it’s better to do things himself than wait for others to do them. Lucita, a maid, takes the dog for a walk, stopping to chat with the florist and grocer. She returns to the flat of her employers, who treat her with disdain. She attempts to bond with the baby boy of the family by pressing him to her breast, but she has no milk and the baby is upset. This prompts her to squeeze the baby harder since he no doubt is going to be as conceited as his father. The dog growls at her and Lucita regrets her cruelty, feeding the dog some ham.
In the sixth story, the narrator asks someone his name and addresses him by name, asking him what his name is. A blind man selling lottery tickets has his cassette player stolen. Some people standing by floor the thief and return the cassette player to the blind man. A husband rebukes his wife for sleeping with another guy. His own affair with a woman called Rosa was different. He didn’t let anyone know about it.
The stories become interconnected. A woman laments life in the city. Her mother says she should have stayed in the village and married Paco, her cousin, instead of Manolo. People were better before. The woman reminds her mother that her own husband used to beat her when he came back from the bar. Mauro, a paraplegic, has finally obtained a licence to open a newspaper kiosk, but people break in at night, stealing a few magazines and some chewing gum. He decides to stand guard one night.
Three men break into and steal a car, but there is hardly any petrol in the tank, so they decide to stop off at Mauro’s kiosk and take any money he may have left overnight so they can buy some. The woman’s husband, Manolo, wakes up and asks what’s for dinner before his night shift working as a taxi driver. He’s less concerned about what his son, Nando, might be doing out late at night than about making love to his wife. Nando, one of the men in the stolen car, says he will get out to steal the money, but Mauro is waiting inside the kiosk and fires at him with a shotgun. The police come and the occupants of a white Fiat 127 wonder why two policemen are pointing their guns at a paraplegic in a wheelchair. Manolo and his wife are just about to make love when someone rings the doorbell. It’s almost one in the morning.
Someone wonders so what? A man who earns his living by typing up documents types ‘dear Rosa’ whenever he’s distracted. He feels that his second-hand typewriter is alive and decides to give it free rein by introducing a blank sheet of paper. A grandmother with her granddaughter and the granddaughter’s parents poses for a photograph, but the photographer points out that they have to move since he’s using a video camera. The author, Suso de Toro, has mislaid two stories about the Minotaur, so there’ll be no Minotaur in this book, but he promises to return to the theme later. Siamese twins, locked in an embrace, fight over a woman. A villager returns to Caracas, having raped a twelve-year-old girl. He knows her relatives will come for him, but he didn’t mean her any harm and regrets that he will die without knowing her name.
A woman is treated courteously by a cashpoint machine, which greets her and adds 100,000 pesetas to her balance. She takes fright and hands back her cashpoint card to the bank, though later she regrets her action, having never felt so valued by a man. A killer jumper squeezes all the breath out of the person wearing it. Someone reads a poetry book and lights a cigarette while drinking a coffee. Outside it is autumn. A young man finds it difficult to relate to those around him, his only solace his right hand, despite his good nature. A villager almost gets run over by a paint distributor. A man is offered the opportunity to be unfaithful to his wife and curses himself for passing it up. Another man gets up. His wife has left him. He opens the door to go to work and finds there’s nothing there, no walls, no staircase or anything. He steps out, closing the door behind him.
A woman with a son in the village agrees to pose naked for a magazine. She misses Carlos, a timid man who doesn’t dare to approach her and who masturbates in front of her photograph in the magazine, which talks. A woman argues with her mother. A man masturbates and falls asleep. The author, when he was seventeen, planned to write the definitive Novel, but realized in time he hadn’t lived enough to have something worthwhile to say. Instead he wrote some short stories, which are better than the treatment they have received.
