Vera Sigall, now eighty years old, lived a mysterious, ascetic life far from the limelight of literary circles. She has had a profound effect on those around her: Daniel, an architect and her neighbor and friend, unhappy in his marriage and career; Emilia, a Franco-Chilean student who travels to Santiago to write a thesis on the elusive Vera; and Horacio, an acclaimed poet with whom Vera had a tumultuous, passionate affair in her youth. As the three tell their stories, they reconstruct Vera's past-- and search for their own identities-- from the 1950s through the Pinochet dictatorship. -- adapted from front flap