A man walks with his child on the grass of a hill. He reaches an old country house, where years before he had spent his childhood during World War II. The deserted and desolate rooms make him travel back in memory to the time when the war was ending. Episodes of family life pass before his eyes: father, mother, grandmother and six children, of which he, Silvano, the youngest, was made mute by the shock of a bomb exploding. He remembers the meetings with Crimen, an old man who lived alone on the mountain. People said that when he was young he ate his wife out of love for her. Fascism has crumbled. In the chaos of the Liberation, Silvano's father is threatened. The boy, returning home from a stay in the hospital, hears that Crimen is dead. After a fight with his father, Silvano runs away to the mountain to find Crimen, but after the long road there it's not the boy who arrives, but Silvano as an adult. He observes the refuge in which the old man lives, and is moved by the human words of solidarity that the old man used to whisper to him.