Libardino Romero, native of the town of Ébora, has taken two important decisions in his life. The first was to get married twenty years earlier to his wife, Matilde, a decision he now regrets. The second is to leave his wife and set out on an adventure, like Odysseus in search of Ithaca and Penelope. He works as an administrative assistant in an office, takes solace in books and films, but decides this is not enough and packs a bag with 10,000 pesetas, some underwear and his photo of the actress Margarita Vega, which has kept the flame of his passion alive all these years. He sets out from his house, bids farewell to the butcher who has bothered him in his first-floor apartment with the noise of his knives, cleavers, and the hum of his fridge, and heads to the main square. He is uncertain which direction to take and decides to follow the twenty-seventh car to pass in front of him, but is momentarily distracted by a man sitting on a red suitcase in the middle of the square, who claims to be Mephistopheles’s son and to dream everything into existence. He gives him the 10,000 pesetas so he will dream Libardino as an adventurer and heads back to the crossroads.

Libardino’s mother, Señorita Pura, had been born in 1909 after her mother had been cured of syphilis by Paul Ehrlich himself. At the age of forty, she gave birth to Libardino, who weighed almost seven kilos, despite being born at only five months (an excess of soul, said an Andalusian doctor). The local gossips wondered who the father could be and, since Libardino had plenty of blond hair, suspected it was the parish priest, Don Blas, so one Sunday, after High Mass, Señorita Pura paused outside the church and announced to all and sundry that the father had been a bullfighter by the name of Tomás Romero who had wooed her with mellifluous words, married her, they had spent one night together before he had been gored and killed by a bull in Seville. The priest increases the number of daily Masses in Ébora to six and includes talk about all kinds of subjects in his sermons after one night the statue of St Benedict in his church comes to life, telling him to take the rose in his hands and talk to his parishioners of culture.

Libardino remembers the night before, when his wife accused him of not having cleaned her portrait properly (he is expected to clean the house from top to bottom on every weekday), but it was his flatulence, which he normally tries to hide, that caused her to open the windows of their apartment and shout that she was living with a pig. Libardino decides to stop off at his office to say goodbye to all his co-workers, including Sacarino, who is the office boy and enjoys Libardino’s stories (Libardino says he is going to set up a House of Sexual Health and will appoint Sacarino as the manager, just as soon as he receives the inheritance of an uncle who lived in Macondo). He then meets the deputy director, a childhood friend who used to build tree houses and then rent them out to young couples looking for a little intimacy out of town (he would spy on them through a crack in the floor, but only for twenty seconds in order to limit the damage to his moral health). He tells him he is a spy, and that is why he is leaving.

The schoolteacher, Saladina Ferrer, who was forced to flee from Ébora by Franco’s army because she was a Republican, returns to the town to help the priest, Don Blas, with his mission to install culture in the local inhabitants and teach them to read. Despite the age difference, the schoolteacher, almost sixty, falls in love with the young priest. Meanwhile, one of the men who go to the Fountain of Enchantment to engage in conversation, Tintoreto, drinker of red wine and painter of coffins, is in love with Libardino’s mother, Señorita Pura. He has painted coffins for one of Franco’s generals who was afraid of the dark, so he introduced a light bulb in the coffin that would supposedly light once the earth fell on top of it, and for an emigrant to Cuba, beautiful pictures of mulatto women, but the emigrant returned to Cuba and the coffin ended up being used as a trough. Saladina catches Señorita Pura naked in the vestry and hears the priest running away, but it is not what she thinks. They ask her to sit on the font and inform her that Señorita Pura has the ability to levitate, but you can’t do this with your clothes on.

Libardino hands his remaining possessions – some underwear and a piece of cardboard with his earwax on it – to a woman in the street, who screams out loud and is assisted by a policeman. The policeman suspects the earwax is hashish and sets off in pursuit of Libardino, who manages to escape and meets a one-armed dancer, Susanito Cabral, who fell in love with a prostitute, Laura, in a nightclub in Zamora and danced the tango with her, they then went to a cheap hotel to spend the night in order to flee the next day, but her pimp had followed them in the car and beat Susanito up, depriving him of the use of his left arm. They go to a nightclub, where they meet a prostitute who is learning English so she can triumph in Hollywood, but are unable to pay for their drinks. A stray dog they have met along the way comes to their defence, and they manage to escape, seeking refuge in two bottles of 100 Pipers whisky and a cave in the mountainside, where Libardino feels sad at Susanito’s confession that he doesn’t have long to live.

Some itinerant sellers arrive in Ébora and promise to help Tintoreto conquer his love. On their travels, they met a young poet who wanted to commit suicide because the woman he loved was going to marry somebody else, the sellers gave him a magical perfume, he went to the church, where the bride abandoned her husband-to-be in the aisle and threw herself into the poet’s arms. Meanwhile, in the cave, the dog arrives with a newspaper in its mouth. Libardino and Susanito read that the writer and intellectual Xesús Dorrego Fernández has died, leaving behind a dog that knows how to read. This is the stray dog that they have found, which turns out to be called Suceso (Accident and Crime). Susanito then suffers what appears to be an attack of epilepsy, but he recovers and determines to set out in search of his beloved, Laura, for which they will need a vehicle, so they steal a van from a man who is grafting his trees. Libardino’s wife, Matilde, is in a bar, gossiping and playing cards with her friends. She informs the police inspector Aurelio Arias that Libardino has made off, having stolen three million pesetas from her mother. She wants the policeman to locate Libardino and bring him back, so he can be her slave again.

Back in Ébora, the priest, Don Blas, has tried and failed to explain the concept of the Trinity (three in one) to his congregation. He visits the schoolteacher, who has long been awaiting a declaration of love from the priest, and asks her if she understands what he means by “three in one”. She says she does, and the priest is so overjoyed he kisses her all over and skips off to his parish to babble away in front of the wooden statue of St Benedict. Saladina herself is so hypnotized by the experience, believing herself to be loved, that she never regains consciousness and remains in the house of Tintoreto, and Libardino, who has climbed a tree, refuses to come down until the itinerant sellers, the brother and sister Policarpo and Ernestina Montoya, produce a cinematograph and a white sheet and proceed to project the film Gilda.

In search of Laura, Susanito and Libardino arrive at a nightclub called Lasirene, which they assume to mean “The Siren” in French. They meet the owner, who offers them a drink and explains that the club is actually named after his wife, Irene, and his cat, Lasi. This is not a normal nightclub, here the women spend as much time as they like with the clients, endeavour to listen and soothe their troubled spirits, receive as much money as they like and give the owner just enough so that he can continue to live and write novels. Libardino thinks this will be an excellent place for Sacarino to come and work and gives him a call. Meanwhile, they meet the pianist, Leopoldo, who used to teach music at school. In Ébora, the mayor buys a new television set. His father, Priorato, cannot believe that small humans can exist inside the set and doesn’t understand what they are talking about when they mention Communists and Masons. He starts to dance when two dancers appear on the screen, but the effort is too much for him and he dies. The family and neighbours are afraid that the television has had a pernicious effect on him and ask the priest to come and exorcize it. It is then the mayor’s wife, Hortensia, who pays attention to the television and starts to talk to it. She won’t go to bed until Franco has appeared on the screen to say goodnight. When the sound stops working for fifteen days, she thinks it is because the television presenters don’t have enough to eat and starts preparing bowls and bowls of food for them, omelettes, broths, stews, which her husband has to surreptitiously throw away because there’s too much food for them to eat, until one day Tintoreto comes up with the idea of sending a letter from the workers to say that they now have enough to eat and there is no need to prepare any more food for them. Tintoreto takes the perfume the itinerant sellers give him, but the first woman he meets is not Señorita Pura, it is the shopkeeper, Romana, who falls irremediably in love with him.