Anna Davati is a very beautiful woman of about forty years who moves from the big city where she lives to a small provincial town to answer a job advertisement published in a newspaper.
She appears, therefore, at the home of Carlo Silvio, a writer of about forty-five who became blind after gaining popularity and international recognition after publishing only three books.
The man decides to withdraw from the world, retreating into his family home, through the books in his vast library, to devote himself to writing his new novel. In practice living as a hermit, and seeing no more people.
He looks for a secretary that would take care of the library, read the books that he will require that proofread his book. But puts a condition that he considers essential.His secretary must be ugly.
Anna, on the contrary, is a beautiful woman .She gets hired and with the passing of days, a rather complicated coexistence between them unfolds
Carlo Silvio introduces Anna to the world of literature, asking her to read passages that he particularly loves, and showing her the great characters of literature, while trying to break the wall of secrecy and mystery that surrounds her, subduing the woman to every kind of oppression and verbal aggression that his misanthropy suggests. But every time that Anna seems on the verge of leaving, he keeps showing that he cannot go on without her. The true character of Anna is indecipherable. Fragile at first sight, she is actually strong enough to stand up to him, answering him back.
Anna is a doctor who has suffered bullying from her abusing primary, which led her to a state of psychological exhaustion .She accepts the job offered by Carlo Silvio because it seems a way to hide from the world.
Since this revelation, the situation between the two changes.
The writer who speaks for erudite citations and flaunts cynicism and indifference, is actually an artist and a sensitive man and helpless, that feels so much upon himself the evils of the world to cause himself a blindness, as if to refuse to see what frightens or disgusts him.
Anna can explain this with the knowledge of a psychiatrist.
Only at this point, having abandoned all reserve and modesty, they feel that they can possibly rebuild their lives. Knowing, now that they have each other.