The protagonist of the film is an old, well-off octogenarian who lives in the room of a bourgeois apartment. Also living there is his son Fabio?s family. Relations between father and son are cold: the conversations dry and sparse, while his daughter-in-law Elsa is respectful yet detached and the young maid is simple-minded yet unconsciously annoying. Only his relationship with his granddaughter is peaceful and loving. The old man is of a difficult character: he?s stubborn and intolerable due to a sense of solitude transforming into resentment towards living, anguish over seeing himself as some kind of fossil, a relic or mummy, while death?s tentacles penetrate his being with exasperating slowness. Desperate, the old man latches on to memories of fighting in the Spanish Civil War; he breaks away in fantasy?in a simple, archaic world free of complications and rudimentary in requirements. All the old octogenarian need do is remove his hearing aids to find himself on a mountain, in a desert of karstic rock, where a man of his same age lives in a hut and with whom he communicates with long silences and moans rather than few and indistinct words. But that primitive world holds no place for an old bourgeois and his complicated life experiences. Unfortunately there?s no place for him with his son?s family either; the old man realizes his death is awaited and almost longed-for. There?s nothing left for him to do but prepare an escape with no return after having erased all evidence of his existence. The old man is only a black dot in the final scenes: a black spot perched on the naked walls of a white room. By now he?s ready to join his old, moribund friend of the mountain, to be together in a desert of eternity.