When a man has no more ideas, when he no longer knows why he does certain things, Antonio says to Paul, "it's like he's lost his shadow." Antonio thinks Paul has lost his shadow. An old Andalusian communist who'd returned to his country after a long exile in France, Antonio takes in Paul, who has fled home after being fired by the paper he worked on. "You think everything can be fixed," Antonio says to Paul. "Everything that goes on in your mind and in peoples' lives. You run away in your mind, but life catches up with you." Not just life, women, too. Paul's present girlfriend, Anne, and his ex, Maria, set out after him. This could turn into farce or tragedy. It in fact becomes neither. No one has to die in this story, but in fact someone does. Antonio, and with him, a whole slice of history, that period when people believed in social utopias. Paul loses his shadow, all right, but not the one Antonio had in mind, for Antonio was Paul's shadow...