At the edge of paradise, the water is mud green. Every night, they sit by the river and drink themselves into a stupor: the overweight blonde Franco, who lives in the luxury resort Paradise, and the sixteen-year-old Polo, who works there as a gardener. But Franco is no friend; he only needs Polo to indulge his grotesque sexual fantasies. These obsessively revolve around a single woman: the unattainable neighbor Señora Marián.

Still, Polo stays and drinks: to endure the toil, the humiliations, to avoid having to return to the village, where everyone works for the drug mafia – and where his pregnant cousin and his mother's accusations await him. The fat man claims the neighbor wants to seduce him, saying he must sleep with her, even by force if necessary. Polo finds this ridiculous nonsense, but gradually he transforms from a silent drinking buddy into an accomplice. And he senses his chance for a great escape.

With an eerie intensity, Fernanda Melchor narrates how desire gives rise to something dark, aggressive, and life-threatening. A highly explosive mixture of insurmountable class differences, frustration, and misogyny permeates "Paradais" in every sentence – down to the last crevice, leading to a wildly flickering end.