Summary
In the chiaroscuro of post-revolutionary Mexico City, where trolley sparks hiss against pre-dawn cobblestones, a consumptive music-hall virtuoso named Alejandro—part poet, part street-corner Orpheus—barters his last healthy lung for the tuition of his unwitting muse, the adolescent conservatory prodigy Estrella. His sacrifice is brokered through a clandestine pact with a cadaverous broker who traffics in human organs and memory; the price is not merely tissue but the erasure of Alejandro’s name from every public record. As Estrella’s star ascends on the gilded stage of Teatro Principal, Alejandro dwindles into shadow, coughing sonatas of blood onto manuscript pages he will never hear performed. Meanwhile, Sara García’s brothel-keeper—part bawd, part Cassandra—watches the transaction with eyes that have seen every permutation of flesh exchanged for hope, and she alone foresees the reckoning when the girl’s glorious debut will coincide with the man’s corporeal collapse. The narrative spirals through candlelit confessionals, anarchist pamphlets hidden inside piano benches, and a final pas de deux in which Estrella, now luminous in white tulle, dances the Danse Macabre with the specter of her benefactor while the orchestra—unaware that the composer lies dying in the wings—unleashes his posthumous requiem. The curtain falls on a single close-up: a scarlet petal of lung tissue pressed between the pages of a hymnal, a mute testament to the cost of art without authorship.
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