Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him.
From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the ‘wizened youth’ who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later.