To commemorate the centenary of the birth of Gregor von Rezzori, Sixth Piso publishes in this volume three long, previously unpublished stories in Spanish. Although these narratives are situated in different places and epochs, they have in common an identifiable trait throughout Rezzori's work: a great capacity to shape and fix the decisive moments that define the existence of their characters and the societies they inhabit. When a young aristocrat from the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire confronts a fierce swan that kills all the birds in their dominions, he does so in order to preserve his noble status before the peasants - and also to impress the sister who unleashes all kinds of passions Incestuous. With great mastery, Rezzori brings the transition to adulthood with the decline of an era whose solemnity is already ridiculous, as if he were waiting for the story to come to destroy it once and for all. In the tale that gives title to this volume we find a carver of sculptures of the Virgin that takes a hermit life to the edge of a vertiginous cliff. With a narrative tone that mixes the police story with the existential anguish of artistic creation, and combines the erotic with the grotesque, a certain black humor with a suggestive dreamlike atmosphere, the sculptor spends his days tormented by the memory of a painter brutally Murdered, and is torn between her vain efforts to find the perpetrator of the crime or continue her mental discussions with the deceased, whom she tries to convince, even beyond the grave, of the artistic value of her carvings. In the story that closes the book, the son of a military man and a well-known Italian designer, accustomed to luxury and dissipation, who lives under the maternal wing, will meet a young left-wing radical that will provoke a reversal in their existence, with Unforeseen consequences. These stories can be read as distinct signs of self-deprecation of societies and individuals who feel lacking in their own destiny and inevitably sink into a deeper hole as they seek out. With his elegant and precise writing, Rezzori explodes in front of our eyes whole worlds that suddenly become old, leaving to his readers the task of collecting the beautiful fragments that consign the transit between epochs.