The film tells the story of the Boteros, a middle-class Mexican family struggling against poverty after their father's death. Ignacia (Egurrola) is the Boteros mother, a desperate woman who chooses to sacrifice the destiny of her three older children, in order to protect Gabriel (Laguardia) the youngest one. She believes Gabriel will climb the social structure and bring back the lost fortune to the family. But destiny has other plans for the Boteros and tragedy will overcome eventually. Based on the novel of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz.
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.
A Literature professor arrives at a provincial hotel, lonely and consumed. All of the sudden he becomes wrapped up in a game of superstitions that the two women and the young girl that serve him lay out.