Benito Pérez Galdós was a man who had many lovers, but always refused commitment and marriage. He shut himself away and wrote like a galley slave to create characters through which he left traces of his own biography. In his memoirs he insists there is nothing noteworthy before 1864, but those who know his life tell of his first love, María Josefa Washington Galdós Tate, who marked him for his entire existence. This novel tells a fictional account of the love, and how it may have been the wound that made Galdós a writer forever enclosed with his own characters, "At sea", as he himself recounts, "in the task of feigning characters and events". 2020 was the centenary of Galdós' death, and although much has been written on his work and his life, very few know about his story of impossible love.