Calisto Gavilan experiences an extraordinary vision, late one night in an Indian shaman's hut, high in the Peruvian Andes. Nearly asleep, he sees in the flame of an oil lamp, a fleeting vision of eight women who, according to his mule driver, he must have known and loved in his former lives. Calisto decides to search for those women in their present, youthful reincarnations. He cannot find them in Peru, and the muleteer advises him to look for them in far-away lands. Calisto travels to Europe to study the history of Spain and to write his graduate thesis about the Spanish conquest of the...