In the early morning of March 31, 1970 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the annual birthday celebration of a prominent and wealthy young artist is taking place; and a train docked in Plaza Station filled with starving, drought-stricken migrant workers seeking relief gets turned away by the authorities, sparking a riot. From these two seemingly unrelated events, Ivan Angelo's remarkable novel connects and implicates the lives of a complex of characters, spanning three decades of tumultuous social and political history in twentieth-century Brazil. But with the central event--the celebration--missing, the reader is thrust into the middle of a puzzle, left to construct the story from the evidence that accrues in a range of comic, unnerving, misleading, and tragic episodes. First published in translation by Avon (1982).