Andrés, nearly 16 in July of 1936, looks for love and fulfillment in Barcelona, during and just after Spain's civil war. His Catholic school closes at war's outbreak; his mother is in western Spain. To cross to her, he joins a Republican battalion. He has a morning with a countess, is sent by his commanding officer to the officer's house in Barcelona where he's attracted to the man's daughter, and ends up as a black marketeer. In 1940, he's reunited with his mother, who has, as he says, "won the war." In Barcelona he lives in comfort with her, dislikes her politics and boyfriend, and pursues medical studies and the arms of three older women. Can a man have more than one homeland?