Segundo (Raúl López Leyton) is an elderly man who works at a street market and loses his stall’s merchandise for failing to pay his license fee. To recover it, he must settle his balance within a week. While trying to raise the money, Mario (Miguel Ángel Pérez), his inept son, depletes the remaining resources. Unable to work, he decides to commit a robbery at a local business.

A portrait of the director’s young adulthood, set in the 1940s–1950s, in the electric capital city of Santiago. There, he decides to become a poet and is introduced, by destiny, into the foremost bohemian and artistic circle of the time.