A successful man, Max, a manager immersed in his pre-packaged world: our world.
Around him is an equally integrated wife, a young son who already announces by his behaviour that he wants to follow in his parents' footsteps, and a maid, Milagro. She is a young woman from South America, semi-illiterate, disarmed in the face of a reality that is not only foreign to her but which she seems to want to keep as such: almost as if she were afraid or ashamed of the strange and indefinable phenomena that occur in her presence and that perhaps allude to a mysterious and sacred sphere that seems to go in a completely different direction from the anxiety of possession that occupies the minds of everyone else. Milagro is like a small needle in the haystack of capitalism, poor and desireless, lacking that dissatisfaction that it is Max's job to induce or take for granted in human beings. She resembles Abel in her innocence, just as in Max, who does not understand and who is attracted to her whom he does not know and cannot truly know, one might recognise the effigy of Cain.
What is destined to happen when the irruption of the sacred upsets the falsity of the bourgeois world? The story that Paola Capriolo tells with her usual mastery in this new novel is one of the answers. And it flashes before us, for a moment, the heart of things, or at least its earthly reflection.