Aura María, a young Mexican woman with a dark and troubled past, receives and offer to travel to Spain with a good work contract and lodgings in Madrid. Aura Maria's mother in order to finance the trip, has asked a loan from the bank and also the help from a gangsters family. This family in exchange for their help asked Aura Maria to carry a small chest wrapped in newspaper. In the airport she discovers that the content of the chest is cocaine which she flushes down the toilette. After a hell of a trip she arrives at Barajas airport and a woman dressed in black receives her with tears in her eyes thanking her for bringing her son's ashes. Once in Madrid she discovers her work contract, lodgings and her return ticket are false. Her world falls apart and she's forced to face her past full of pain and lies. Paisa a character who earns his living selling all kinds of stuff round hotels and brothels in the city center manages to get her a room in Madam Pura's motel. Madam Pura, a charitable soul who helps all kinds of people with problems, runs an erotic line to maintain the motel and its guests. Actually the motel is a world of its own and the place where Aura Maria finds her refuge, contrasting with the crude reality of the exterior. There she meets the rest of the characters: Oswaldo, the co-protagonist, an Argentinian Orchestra Conductor who's obsessed with Tchaikovsy's Oberture 1812; Olivetti, a transvestite who decided to dress as woman when he became a widower so he wouldn't fall in love again; or the son of the motel owner, Andrés, who died years ago in a traffic accident. In the motel dead and alive characters live together and until the end we won't find out who is who. Oswaldo, with the help of the motel guests and Aura Maria, is able to conduct his concert in the Opera Theater. While he does it we discover the reality of each character.