The plot follows a private detective, an ex communist and former CIA agent, who travels from Barcelona to Madrid to discover the identity of the assassin of the leader of the Spanish Communist party who was stabbed during a blackout while presiding over a meeting of the party's central committee. The film is a thriller with ironic political overtones.
Luys Forest is a writer with a Falangist political past. He lives isolated in a coastal town, writing his memoirs (actually rewriting and adapting his autobiography with the times), and brooding over his failed marriage. His sister is worried about him and decides to send her daughter Mariana to stay with him. Mariana and a seemingly mute and artistic lesbian companion come to town to shake the stable world of Luys with their free and uninhibited ways. Soon begins a game of seduction that ends up exposing the intellectual game of Luys.
Joan Mares obsession for the lovely and luscious Norma Valenti takes epic proportions because he cannot let go of her. After he is injured by some skin heads, he uses his scars to pursue his life as a street musician. He devices a plan to get to Norma and she never catches on to his deceit, except she realizes that as Juan Faneca his performance in bed is exactly what she had experienced with Joan Mares because she concludes they were taught sex by the same prostitute.
In the slums of Barcelona, Fanny, a woman just released from prison, tries to carry out a revenge that has nourished for years: to kill "El Gallego", the corrupt and brutal policeman who killed her boyfriend
