"Who has banished the angels from the world, even though I still feel them around me?" A surprising thought for a young woman who has experienced firsthand that our world has more to do with hell than with paradise. One evening, Alma found herself on a aimless drive through São Paulo and ended up in the Favela Paraisópolis, where she was raped. To banish the shadows, she travels with her friend Almut to the land of their shared childhood dreams, Australia, and encounters a silence in the emptiness of the desert that reconciles her. Yet the dreamtime is long gone, the mythical world of the Aborigines has sunk: "My Australia was a fiction." Alma bids farewell to the reservations of the Garden of Eden and turns the world into her desert - not without leaving her mark on it. Whether from feet or wings: the aging literary critic whose path she crosses.