Pablo, an aspiring writer with few scruples, travels to Madrid to seize the unfinished manuscript left by his late friend and mentor Eduardo, an ambitious novel meant to explain Argentina's enigmatic fate, shaped in the seventeenth century by a sophisticated, institutionalized system of "exemplary smuggling"; in attempting to complete this work, Pablo is driven to reconstruct his own life and Eduardo's, a sentimental, excessive, and contradictory Peronist, while a cast of vivid characters blends history, imagination, and emotional chronicle into a mosaic of Argentine identity, resulting in a novel that is neither nostalgic elegy nor strict historical reconstruction, but rather a celebration of the personal and the collective, and a singular literary experience within the great tradition of Latin American narrative.