Leandro, an unemployed mason and his friend, Tocho, attempt to rob a tobacconist in the Vallecas district of Madrid, but Mrs. Justa, the tobacconist, impedes it alerting the neighbors who notify police. Inside the shop, the confrontation between the two friends and their 'hostages', the tobacconist and her niece Angeles, is relaxing, and a budding sympathy arises between them.

Paco, the teenage son of a Civil Guard commander in Basque Country, becomes addicted to heroin.

Set in a crumbling Spanish mansion, this gloriously comic and gothic story follows the fortunes of an innocent young priest as he enters a world of moral decadence, sexual intrigue and corruption of an aristocratic family in nineteenth-century Galicia.