João Romão is the protagonist of the book: a Portuguese shopkeeper from Botafogo who gets rich at any cost, builds the São Romão tenement and, in the end, is on his way to marrying the rich neighbor's daughter and winning a title, after returning the slave Bertoleza to captivity.
He starts out as a shop clerk, inherits from his employer the business and one conto and five hundred milreis in payment of wages, sleeps on the counter and lives in privation. With the savings of Bertoleza, which he keeps as her confidant, and with stone stolen from the quarry and the neighboring building sites, he raises the first little houses and then ninety-five. The narrator diagnoses him in the first chapter: "a desperation to accumulate; to reduce everything to coin".
The book shows what he wants changing. The title of baron that Miranda receives costs him sleep and makes him feel for the first time what he lacks. He starts wearing fine clothes, learning to dance and reading newspapers, and arranges with Botelho the path to Zulmira, the baron's daughter. After the fire he keeps the insurance and Libório's bottles of money, and the tenement becomes São Romão Avenue.
In the end, to avoid losing the marriage, he returns Bertoleza to her former owner. When she kills herself, he flees to the darkest corner of the warehouse, and right afterward has the abolitionists who come to give him a diploma received in the parlor. The book does not decide whether he knows what he is doing or whether he sees only the sums: it shows both gestures, one after the other.