An unwilling conscript in the First Carlist War, Martín returns to his family's farmhouse to find that his younger brother Joaquín has become a gigantism. Martín sees the commercial opportunity in marketing the "tallest man on Earth" as a freak attraction, and they travel around Europe with the increasingly distressed Joaquín serving as a circus act. Joaquín measures himself each night and is horrified that he continues to grow, well into adulthood, suspecting that the condition is terminal.