Jose Costa has just attended the Anonymous Writers Congress in Istanbul and is on his way back to Rio when a bomb scare on his flight forces him to spend a night in Budapest.
The narrator is haunted by nostalgia for the places of his childhood set in a city that can only be Rio de Janeiro. A drop-out from the privileged world of luxury beach apartments and sybaritic obsessions, he has entered the 'other' Brazil of wretched poverty and petty crime.