Manila, 1945: a boy looks at the sea from the boardwalk, turning his back on a destroyed city. From a photograph of his childhood, Luis Eduardo Aute glances back to discover what remains in him of those eyes of a child with which he looked at the sea. With the battle of Manila as the setting, a bloody contest that claimed the lives of more than a hundred thousand people, the author remembers the boy who was and how, from that tragic experience, the figure of the basilisk began to stalk him, a being mythological in the form of a winged serpent capable of killing with its eyes, representing the adult world, degradation and death.