The story takes place in 1969 and is told through the eyes of Valentín, an eight-year-old small, cross-eyed boy whose thick black-rimmed glasses sit heavily on his face. He lives with his grandmother due to the divorce of his parents. He dreams of being an astronaut one day and intently follows the ongoing space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. He no longer sees his Jewish mother, who was chased out of the family home by his imperious, dictator-like father. He misses her badly but hardly remembers her. His anti-Semitic father only occasionally visits to his mother and son, preferring to live the life of an Argentine playboy.