After the Second World War, the United Nations has declared the blockade of Franco's Spain. In this historical context, for a time little known, lies the story of the widow of a Spanish army captain.
In Spain of the 1960s, a poor family of quinquis - a nomadic ethnic group with a tradition as old as that of the gypsises of Spain but with even more obscure origins - have a nomadic life marked by poverty. The son, Eleuterio Sánchez Rodriguez, nicknamed "El Lute", steals some chickens and is condemned to six months in jail. El Lute moves to the slum outskirts of Madrid with his common law wife, Chelo, starting an itinerant life as a peddler of pots and pans and living in a quinqui shantytown. He gradually embarks upon as life of petty criminality, eventually participating in the theft of a jewelry store during which a bystander is killed.
Don Rodrigo goes to the bank and when he is going to take his money there is a robbery. Then the bank refuses to give him his money back (257 pesetas, a small amount of money) with the argument that the money was robbed to him, not to the bank. He will fight against the bank till the last consequences.