Jaded ex-CIA operative John Creasy reluctantly accepts a job as the bodyguard for a 10-year-old girl in Mexico City. They clash at first, but eventually bond, and when she's kidnapped he's consumed by fury and will stop at nothing to save her life.
The Mexican painter Francisco Goitia, feeling his death approaching, manages to make a memory of his life: the reunion with his country and his people, his permanent search for identity as a man and as an artist and his struggle against the demons of the body and his subsequent religious conversion.