The beloved, like God, is essentially an altar where the stock of love within us is consumed. This sacrifice, this offering, is not directed to God or the lover; they are merely the semblance for its execution. The sacrifice is an end in itself.

Alfonso Aldebaran, a middle-aged, entirely respectable man, unmarried, an employee for thirty consecutive years at the Ministry of Finance, develops, overnight, an inexplicable, uncontrollable, religious-type worship for the behind of his young maid, Anna.

But what was the special significance, the dark truth he discovered there? Why did Anna's behind manage to awaken his soul from its stupor and shed a ray of joy upon it?

This was a question to which he could not find any satisfactory answer; however, this inability was not irrational but imposed, as every object of worship harbors a mystery upon which the feeling of devotion is based and without which it would be impossible to exist and be understood as such; it is a mystery that seeks not to be solved but to remain as it is and reflects something of the enigma of the worshipper himself.

(Text from the back cover of the edition)