It’s 1942, and Portugal languishes under dictatorship and WWII rages just beyond its borders. Secrets, half-truths, and mistrust prevail in the state security office of chief inspector Varga, who makes professional privilege a cover for his unprofessional interest in a boldly carnal refugee and her alleged brother. Director/writer Saboga (screenwriter for Raúl Ruiz’s MYSTERIES OF LISBON) saturates the dark world of this predatory tale with steamy eroticism and paranoia, starting with the incestuous desires of his bi-curious adolescent daughter and including the family maid.

Abel, 47 years old, two wars - in the colonies and France, emigration - several scars from many battles lost, returns in a jump to Portugal, to his lost village in the northern interior, near the border, from where one day he'd be gone, also from a jump. A letter, from his brother Peter, warned him that everything changed. Even Teresa. Abel catches sight of his childhood in the village hills, the old tribe. From a distance everything seams to be in the same placesa, the old dog is all that remains of the past. In the village the Act of Passion will be performed and Teresa is one of the participants. Abel takes the old gestures and prepares his plan: eliminate one by one Teresa's suitors, to consummate during the act of the Passion, her death ...

Portugal, 1917. The country is experiencing a great political and social agitation and it is said that in Fatima the virgin appeared to three little shepherds.
Salomé, a young lady from the province, is one of the many girls who cheers Lisbon brothels, but she is such a special girl that a rich man invites her to live in his house and presents her to the high society of Lisbon. But her past will not stop chasing her and Salomé, who thought that this would be the beginning of a new life, will eventually lose everything by becoming an involuntary character of this miracle that agitated the country...

A loner, narcissistic and suicidal teenager attracts most of the people he meets like a fatal aura, a black light. He falls deeply in love with Teresa but does she exist or is she a mere figment, an image, a reflection? Teresa is an apparition. A pretext for an amoral violent uprising, for doomed love.

The story of the adventures, in the twilight of the eighteenth century, of a singular couple formed by a little orphan with mysterious origins and his young Italian nurse of a similarly uncertain birth. They lead us in their wake, from Rome to Paris, from Lisbon to London, from Parma to Venice. Always followed in the shadows, for obscure reasons, by a suspicious-looking Calabrian and a troubling cardinal, they make us explore the dark intrigues of the Vatican, the pangs of a fatal passion, a gruesome duel, banter at the court of Versailles and the convulsions of the French Revolution.