Each alternate chapter in the novel is headed ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’. In the first chapter, an author spots a young, blonde, almost albino woman reading his novel on the beach. In ‘Condensed Milk’, a sea captain, H.P. Stewart, runs into a gale off the Galician coast and remembers how he acquired his watch from a shipwreck off the Kentish coast when he was a boy. The owner of a restaurant, Ramiro, tells the author how a school-bus driver from Cornwall, Allison Atkinson, visited Galicia’s Coast of Death to leave some flowers for her great-uncle, who was buried there after a shipwreck. A student in Santiago, Xosé Miguel, writes to a priest staying with his parents, Father Florencio, to ask him to send money. An acquaintance, Xoán Carlos, then tries to blackmail the priest for a much higher sum. This chapter is written as a series of letters.
The author continues to imagine the woman from the beach reading his book, One Last Waltz, a historical novel set in Paris, in which he lampoons all social classes and in particular writers such as Hemingway. We are told of a plan to erect a monument to all those British soldiers who have lost a testicle in times of war. Over the next two days, the woman fails to reappear on the beach. A group of Galician infantrymen in the Rif War hit the town and want to visit a prostitute, but there are six of them and only one of her, so one of the party, a writer, suggests the bravest can have her, the one who is prepared to head into the mountains and come back with the ear of the guerrilla leader Abd el-Krim. By the end of the night, four have returned with an ear. Finally, on Friday, the woman reappears, her name is Almudena, and this is the fourth novel by this author that she has read. She invites him to dinner. The author arrives, meets her husband, Juan Pedro, and their five children (the author is surprised at the woman’s slender figure). In Buenos Aires, a plaque is erected, commemorating the names of 34 men shot in the town of B. in Galicia during the Spanish Civil War. One, however, a certain Francisco Cortiñas, held right-wing beliefs, attended Mass on a regular basis and was shot by a civil guard for refusing to hand over the typewriter that belonged to his imprisoned and left-wing brother. Over dinner, Almudena’s family, which appears to be quite well-off (a live-in maid, two German cars), asks the author whether it is possible to make a living from writing literature. The author is unsure how sincere to be in his response, whether to explain that most authors live a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence of writing and holding down a job that pays the bills. It turns out Juan Pedro is a surgeon.
The owner of the third most important brewery in Galicia relates to a journalist from the daily El Compostelano how he first tasted beer as a child at the 1889 Paris Exposition, in a beer tent belonging to the Free State of Bavaria. His second experience was in Cuba, where he was on military service, then in Santiago de Compostela as a university student, though even as a teenager he had recovered a crate with bottles of beer from an English shipwreck. Juan Pedro then begins to criticize the use of a third-person narrator in the author’s previous novel, A Papier-Mâché World. At some festas, the trumpet player in an orchestra hooks up with the young woman serving beer at a stall. They drink several beers laced with tequila, and he tells her all the places he has visited in the world, including Buenos Aires, where it seems the woman’s father lives. They end up returning to her room and, after making love, he offers to take her to Coruña, where he is due to play the following evening, though he knows, once it is morning, he will silently get dressed and leave.
The author seeks refuge in the bathroom of Almudena’s house and remembers his first kiss, as well as the painter J.M.W. Turner’s nocturnal scenes. He wishes he was back at the restaurant he frequents, sharing a drink with the owner, Ramiro. When he returns to the table, Almudena asks why he has chosen this exact place to come on holiday, and the author confesses it has to do with his first love. They ask him why he doesn’t write about it. The author admits he could write a novel about someone else’s first love, but not his own. In a manuscript discovered in a nursing home, we read about a certain ‘Xan’ who was sent with his regiment to Cuba. Xan begins to frequent the bar Le sourire du caïman, which is run by a black man called Prosper. Xan gains a reputation for being rich and demanding in his taste for women. Prosper offers to introduce him to a mulatto woman, Dolores Fueyo, the well-educated daughter of a Spanish landowner who lives in the south of the city. Xan and Dolores begin to meet, to have conversations and play draughts, she undresses in his presence, though it is some time before they make love. Xan is besotted and waits impatiently for their meeting each week, but one Tuesday he is confronted by Prosper in Dolores’ bedroom, who accuses him of sleeping with a married woman and tries to blackmail him. There is a scuffle, and Xan shoots Prosper dead. Xan is transferred to the capital, Santiago de Cuba. On the way, two criminals, Moncho and Cidre, escape, knocking Xan out with a rock so he won’t be suspected of having been in league with them. In Santiago de Cuba, he is employed behind a desk in the military government. One day, after work, he comes across Dolores in a restaurant, in the company of a man who is very different from the one Prosper claimed was her husband. Xan is then caught up in a battle with the Americans and thinks Moncho and Cidre did well to escape. Wherever they may be must be better than the trenches.
