In the summer of 1936, before the outbreak of the Civil War that plunged Spain into three tears of agony and terror, eight-year-old Moncho is beginning his first day at school. Butterfly's Tongue is about a friendship between the boy and his schoolmaster, born of their shared interest in animal and insect life. In Saxophone in the Mist a young musician discovers the meaning of music and of love in the face of a girl he meets on a foggy night at a fair; while in Carmina the boy listens as an old man relates how a village dog named Tarzan used to frustrate him in his attempts to woo his beloved.