At the age of fifteen, Rainer Maria Rilke is interned in a military school in Moravia, the same one suffered by Robert Musil, and writes to his mother, telling her that he no longer believes in God. The following year he studied commerce in Linz and told him that he was a writer. When she begins her unique and very rare novel, she advises a writer friend that in her memories there is no one, that there is only the sea, the trees, the flowers, the castles, the things she loves, especially the puppy that is in her childhood.

One day the poet Albert Roig finds on a shelf a book, Rilke, which he had read at the age of eighteen. On the cover there is a portrait of the poet at fifty, very sad: he is sick with leukemia. And Roig, with a tender eye and a cheerful eye, looks at all his other portraits and those of his lovers. And he follows him to the theatre to see a drama by Ibsen, one by Strindberg, and to the museums and cathedrals of Venice, Paris, Toledo, Moscow, and attends his recitals and reads the books that the poet reads and sits next to him and lets him talk and talk. He's a Shakespearean character. The stories (the lies and the masks) of his life intertwine and revolve around a center that, like that of a rose, is empty. With the dust of these petals Roig has managed to build a book of wonders and a nude and unpublished portrait of the poet from Prague