Clara, in her sixties, a former music critic, was born into a bourgeois background in Recife, Brazil. She lives in a unique building, the Aquarius, built in the 1940s, on the very posh Avenida Boa Viagem which runs along the ocean. A major developer has bought all the apartments, but she refuses to sell hers. She will go into the cold war with the real estate company that harasses her. Very disturbed by this tension, she thinks about her life, her past, those she loves.