The Prologue opens the novel with a fable-like story describing the creation of a paper woman (later to be named Merced de Papel) by Antonio, a monk who once worked in a factory manufacturing people from the ribs of pigs. When the Pope decrees that all people will only be made through sexual intercourse, the monks close the factory and walk away. Their goal is to forget the factory and its location.

Trained as a doctor, Antonio leaves the column of monks to begin working as an origami surgeon. He creates organs and limbs from folded paper and uses them to perform transplants on people. When medical technology renders his paper organs obsolete, he chooses to create animals from folded paper, and eventually he creates the origami woman, Merced de Papel.

Chapter 1 introduces a series of narrators including the main narrators, Saturn and Little Merced, and incidental narrators. Plascencia divides the narrations across the book into three columns, with the first two columns always being those of Saturn and Little Merced and the third column shifting from one incidental narrator to the next. Saturn’s narration of the story is from an