In a dark cinema, a woman is scared by scenes from the film Apocalypse Now and takes the hand of the man next to her. They continue holding hands after they leave the cinema, amazed to have found each other, and walk back to the hotel where Rose is staying. Rose invites the man, Francis, up to her room, where, after kissing, they take off each other’s clothes and make love. The city is San Diego in southern California, and the hotel is the Radisson. In the shower, Francis is bothered by the amount of light and the couple again makes love. Over some coffee, they tell each other the story of their lives. The following morning, they go for a walk in Balboa Park. Francis is amazed by the memories Rose has of Galway in Ireland, her native city, and goes on to tell Rose of the mythological creatures that inhabited the rivers of his home town, Padrón in Galicia. Rose is more interested in what Francis is thinking at the moment and suggests visiting the zoo in the park, where there are some pandas. On the way, Francis removes his T-shirt and the guard at the entrance tells him to put it back on. This puts Francis in a bad mood, but Rose tries to placate him. Francis finds the visit to the zoo dull, that is until they see the pandas for two minutes, having waited in a queue for half an hour. After leaving the zoo, they drive up the coast in the direction of Los Angeles and discover a secluded beach, where they stand in the waves and Rose asks Francis if he loves her. Francis prefers not to answer. After dinner in a Japanese restaurant, they return to Rose’s hotel, where Francis talks about his house on San Rafael beach and his work as a translator for a publisher in San Francisco, his friend Andy and the time he spent teaching Hispanic Literature in Chicago, and Rose tells him about her apartment in San Francisco, her work for an IT consultancy and a previous, unsuccessful relationship when she was living in Boston.

It is the start of spring, and Francis has just received the news that he is going progressively blind and won’t be able to see anything in six months. At the same time, he receives a phone call from his editor, Martin, summoning him to the publishing house. Francis wonders who he can turn to in his moment of need. He prefers not to bother Rose, with whom he is planning a future, nor Andy, his best friend, whose mother has recently died. He wonders if the diagnosis might be a mistake. He thinks his life until now has really been just one continual holiday. At the publishing house, Martin says there’s a Portuguese author, José Saramago, who is on the verge of receiving the Nobel Prize and they absolutely have to bring out his novel Blindness at the shortest possible notice, Francis will have to sideline all his other commitments, they agree on a fee and deadline, in time for the book to appear in the autumn.

As he leaves the publishing house, Francis realizes this could well be the last book he translates. On the way home, he stops off at Borders and buys two novels by Saramago, as background reading, and some Portuguese music he can listen to while he translates. He is intrigued by the character of Raimundo Silva, who falls in love with his much younger editor and is saved from emotional mediocrity, but decides to buy this novel later. This will give him an excuse to continue his conversation with the Afro-American girl who served him so courteously. He invites Rosa around for dinner and stops to buy a bottle of wine. He decides he is going to celebrate the new commission, the start of a new literary adventure, and returns to the idea that perhaps the doctor has made a mistake.

After dinner that night, Francis gives Rose the news that he is going blind. She doesn’t know how to react and foresees the difficulties this will pose for them. They go to bed, waking up in the night and making love while there is a storm outside. Rose then explains she had a nightmare about a blind boy kicking along a barrel full of scrotums, while Francis dreamed he was reading nineteenth-century authors in Braille, but then got involved in a political conspiracy and had his fingertips cut off, so he couldn’t read. The next morning, Francis considers how much worse it is to lose your sight than to be blind at birth. He returns to bed but, when he wakes up again, Rose is not there and he is left alone in the company of Lucretius, the cat Rose gave him. Francis decides to turn his attention to the first of the novels by Saramago, The Stone Raft, and then goes to buy some fish for his dinner. When he gets back, there is a message from Rose at work and from Martin, saying the contracts for the translation of the new book are ready. He feels uncomfortable with the way the television is a permanent accessory in American life, you have to drive to go everywhere, and couples always put their work commitments first. He and Rose see each other twice a week and at the weekends. He tries ringing a Portuguese friend, Rui Andrade, to talk about the translation, but the friend is away, studying the creole of Cape Verde. He has a read of Blindness and finds that it’s going to be a difficult book to translate. He has a cocktail and heads out to the beach for a walk.

On the beach, he handles and examines various shells, considering how everything that arrives on the beach is already dead. He helps a Chinese boy who is trying to fly a kite and is pleased that his knowledge can be useful, though he wonders how he will be able to do this once he is blind. After a delicious fish dinner, which he himself prepares, he goes back to his reading of Saramago’s novel, where he notices an absence of physical descriptions, something he needs when he is reading a book. Late in the evening, Rose calls him to see how he is.