This is the first novel that Jorge Semprun writes directly in Spanish, one in which both the characters and the historic setting of the story seem to demand it. Quismondo, Toledo, July 18th, 1956. Twenty years after the beginning of the Civil War, the Avendano family celebrates in their estate one last time the ceremony that every year re-enacts as part of a ritual the execution of the youngest brother by the local peasants. Among the guests are an American scholar intrigued by such a strange tradition, and an officer of the Social Political Brigade determined to find the man who answers to the name of Federico Sanchez, a communist agent. In the sequence of encounters, different versions overlap and complement each other to reconstruct the fateful events that gave origin to the ceremony.