A man emerges with total amnesia and no identity, taking the name 'Perramus' from the label on the raincoat he is wearing, then drifts through a military dictatorship unable to recall who he was or what he did. The erased self becomes a figure onto which a repressive state and its collaborators project whatever past is convenient.
Memory loss is depicted not only as injury but as adaptation: in a regime that punishes what you know and who you were, forgetting becomes a way to stay alive and unaccountable. The individual amnesia mirrors a society's collective refusal to remember its own complicity.
An authoritarian regime is shown governing by manipulating what counts as real and remembered, so that disappearances, denials and official fictions reshape the shared world rather than merely enforcing law. Terror operates through the control of narrative and recollection as much as through physical force.
Casting a blind, aging writer figure (Borges) as a character reframes literature and the blind seer as the keeper of truth precisely because physical sight is useless under a regime of lies. What cannot be seen with the eyes can still be perceived and named by one attentive to language and memory.