Walter Ferranini has been born & bred a man of the left. His father was a worker & an anarchist; Walter himself is a Communist. In the 1930s, he left Mussolini`s Italy to fight Franco in Spain. After Franco`s victory, he left Spain for exile in the United States. With the end of the war, he returned to Italy to work as a labor organizer & to build a new revolutionary order. Now, in the late 1950s, Walter is a deputy in the Italian parliament. He is not happy about it. Parliamentary proceedings are too boring for words: the Communist Party seems to be filling up with ward heelers, timeservers, & profiteers. For Walter, the political has always taken precedence over the personal, but now there seems to be no refuge for him anywhere. The puritanical party disapproves of his relationship with Nuccia, a tender, quizzical, deeply intelligent editor who is separated but not divorced, while Walter is worried about his health, haunted by his past, & increasingly troubled by knotty questions of both theory & practice. Walter is, always has been, & always will be a Communist, he has no doubt about that, & yet something has changed. Communism no longer explains the life he is living, the future he hoped for, or, perhaps most troubling of all, the life he has led.