Mexico is in the midst of Revolution when the protagonist returns after studying in Paris to find his native town in Chihuahua occupied by Francisco Villa’s revolutionary forces. He visits his deserted home and remembers people and events from his adolescence that provide glimpses of pre-Revolutionary society under dictatorship: his uncle, the chief of police; his sister’s involvement with a liberal political association; bathing with the girls from a local brothel; a labor strike that ended in a massacre. Returning to the present he discovers that his father has been assassinated and, in the company of his father’s former servant, joins the revolutionary movement.

Rogelio’s story, a young man of humble origin in the neighborhood of Tepito, who falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy grocer, Michelle, but his marriage to her will be a failure and he will end up as a one more drunk.

Two single women share an apartment, work together, and sometimes swap boyfriends. None of their romantic attachments seem quite as stable or enduring as their friendship.

Chronicle Caste War in Yucatan held in the nineteenth century, where the land and the people were the property of the landowners, who called themselves " divine caste ". On one hand, General Salvador Alvarado organized the revolution; on the other, the landowners hire Colonel Ortiz Argumedo to organized the defense of their autonomy. Don Wilfrido, one of the masters, do not hesitate to send his son to fight to maintain their wealth and privileges.

A young deaf-mute who lives and has intercourse with a blind man much older than she, inevitably attracts a shy driving instructor a strange, hallucinatory underworld, populated by those beings whose mutilation, impaired physical differences, have become rejected of society.