Young bride Evita arrives in the tropical coastal resort to marry the mathematics student Luis, who is doing his military service there. Soon she finds out that the colonial civil war has changed her fiancé into a bossy, pale copy of his commander Forza Leal. The two men are part of a unit that has to put out the ‘pockets of resistance’ from the ‘rebels’ that want the Portuguese out of the country.
He is frequently away and leaves his bride in the capital Maputo, insisting that she does not leave the house until he comes back, for fear of an attack by the indigenous population who start to sympathise with the rebels, the Portuguese army is trying to suppress. Evita declines as she does not want to be locked up in a house; instead she stays in a hotel and goes to the beach and the city by herself.
She also visits Helena, the wife of Luis’ direct superior and a woman who seems to be her direct opposite. Helena is a subordinate wife who does not leave the house her husband has procured for her. She spends her days bossing around her local servants and calculating the mathematical possibilities of losing her husband in the armed conflict that ravages the country. The two women will form a strange form of friendship that will lead Helena to reveal something about the Portuguese army that Evita perhaps knew already, but did not necessarily want to hear confirmed aloud.