Museu Nacional

The vacationers staying at the Barreiro Hotel in Araxá accompany the coffin of magnate Medeiros de Alcântara to the plane. Then they return to the hotel... At the beginning of the hydrotherapy season, Eduardo and Lúcia Feitosa, a wealthy couple from São Paulo, banker Belmiro and his wife, three spinster friends, Fátima, Teresa, and Belinha, Gen. Solon de Fuentes, the deposed former president of a South American country, writer Fernando Cavalcanti, banker Medeiros de Alcântara, and his wife arrive. In the hotel's halls and park, conventional life prevails, but it is in their rooms that the characters reveal their sexual and political dispositions.

Eugênio falls in love for Margarida, a poor girl who lives in his parents' farm. In order to avoid their love affair, the parents send him to a Catholic Seminary to be a priest. Just before his ordination, he meets Margarida again, and their old feelings for each other are triggered once more.

Swindler in jail devises a scheme to blackmail the family of recently deceased people, threatening to tell supposedly incriminating facts about their dead relatives' lives.

Cowboy Riobaldo is attracted to same sex Diadorim, not knowing that "he" is a girl dressed in man's clothes. After Diadorim's father is killed, she swears revenge, being joined by Riobaldo in this mission.