A special kind of anxiety grips Martin Santome after he approaches retirement age. He sees that his life has passed without him achieving anything worth mentioning. However, something changes after hiring the young woman, Abeyanda, in the office where he works, as he suddenly experiences feelings of happiness. After his life had deprived him of her for many years, since the death of his wife and his having to raise his children alone. Through Santome's diaries over the course of an entire year, Benedetti depicts for us the life of the middle class in Uruguay, expressing with great sensitivity the loneliness and lack of communication, love, happiness, and death, in a poetic narrative that qualifies this novel to be one of the most beautiful and powerful love novels. And elegance in Latin American literature.