A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic
Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on
the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a
decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's
job is to tidy it up: he rants, that was what my work was all about,
cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were
piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger.
Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases
(the houses they were sad because no people were inside them), the
increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by
the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his
tenuous sanity, and by real danger--after all, the murderers are the
very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.