Born in the year Columbus discovered the Americas, the Portuguese merchant's ward Pablito is kidnapped by conquistadors and carried off to the New World. Brought up by stone-age Indians in the forest, he inherits an ancient secret during the last days of the Inca empire, and is caught in the currents of a winding river of time, flowing from the slave plantations of colonial Pernambuco to the swamps of antebellum New Orleans, to Chicago's World Fair, Hollywood, Las Vegas and New York, and on towards other new worlds. The confessions of a traveller through space and time, a Pig Indian warrior and opium-laced lover, a father and great-great-grandfather many times over, turned performing sideshow freak, this is the story of the many lives of a man who is 500 years old.