Plot
Adela is a 43-year-old spinster who lives quietly alone in an isolated northern provincial Spanish village. With no other accomplishments of a "lady of rank" and a small annuity, she spends her days sewing and doing charity work. Never feeling particularly attracted to men, she is waited upon in her home by a faithful lady's maid named Isabelita, who adores her.
One day, the local bank manager starts to court Adela and sets his sights on marriage. Adela, repelled by the physical contact of her suitor, resolves, after an argument with her Isabelita over the situation, to consult a doctor. Adela fires Isabelita, but sees the doctor anyway. Adela discovers after the consultation that she is not a woman after all, but a man. The former Adela takes then a new masculine identity as "Juan", and moves from the village to Madrid.
Juan arrives in Madrid and accidentally meets Isabelita, the servant girl he fired when he was Adela. Juan searches for a job and a new purpose in his life with his new identity. Life is very hard in Madrid and Juan uses his sewing skills to bring him a small income and enable him to obtain a work permit. However, he has problems securing an identity card.
As Juan prospers, he falls in love with Isabelita, but denies himself consummation of their affair for fear of a poor sexual response. Eventually, Juan is able to fulfill his duties as a man and is successful with Isabelita. While making love to her, he warns that one day he will tell her a secret. Isabelita says then: "There is no need, señorita", showing that she has known for sometime his secret.
Read more about this topic: My Dearest Senorita
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)