The main character of the story, ironically nicknamed “the Professor”, is an insignificant-looking man in his forties with an absorbed and stunned expression on his face. Apparently shut off from the world around him, he pays unprepared and unpredictable attention to things, leading him to becoming distracted and following a train of a thought often incongruous to the contingencies of life. He leads a wretched life as a handyman in a dodgy house-cum-hostel in Rome. However, one day the drudgery of his life is thrown into a whirl by his encounter with the Marchesa, a prostitute who used to live in the house and who has tried to kill herself after a doomed love affair.