Cabo Polonio

Cabo Polonio is where Lucas Pereyra’s memory of first meeting Magalí Guerra Zabala becomes a landscape of desire, interruption, and unfinished possibility. Reached on foot from Valizas across dunes and open ground, it is both a physical destination and an emotional landmark: years or months later, as Lucas travels toward Montevideo, the approach to the coast brings their first excursion back into the present of his narration.

Setting and approach

The journey begins after Lucas and Magalí meet at a festival in Valizas. The following day, she agrees to show him the way to Cabo Polonio, and they set out early. Their route is measured less by distance than by the effort of crossing sand: they climb one dune, sink their feet into it on the descent, and continue over many more. At a crest, they look out at the sea, whose brightness Lucas remembers as an explosion. The landscape makes the walk physically demanding, but the pair continue together, with the prospect of the coast drawing them onward.

The route is not empty. Other walkers are making the same pilgrimage toward the Cabo, and the stream of visitors repeatedly interrupts the privacy Lucas and Magalí seek. When people approach, they stop embracing, sit up, and resume walking; Lucas experiences the passersby as intrusive witnesses. The contrast between the apparently open landscape and the limited privacy it affords gives the excursion its defining tension: there is room to wander, but no reliably secluded place to be alone.

Intimacy and interruption

On a dune, Lucas and Magalí kiss and become physically intimate. He recalls the encounter through bodily impressions, including the discovery that she has a genital piercing, and through her explicit expression of desire. The moment feels enclosed despite the exposed setting, as if the surrounding sky briefly formed a private space around them. That refuge does not last. A shout or whistle announces approaching walkers, and the two embrace, laugh, and continue along the route.

They eat medialunas Lucas has brought from the lodging and cover their heads with their shirts against the strong sun. Crossing a green valley, they try again to stop together, but walkers keep passing nearby. Near Cabo Polonio, they take shelter among ancient-looking rock formations, using the folds and recesses to seek privacy. Their attempt remains vulnerable to the movement of other visitors: by the time they continue, the surroundings are busy with voices, laughter, and children jumping between rocks. The place thus holds both the intensity of their attraction and the repeated failure of their attempts to escape an audience.

The settlement and what they learn

At Cabo Polonio, Lucas and Magalí wander among picturesque houses, ranches, and small shacks. They go into the sea to cool off, then have beer and small fried fish at a modest bar. After the strenuous walk and the interrupted intimacy of the route, these ordinary activities help them settle into a quieter mood. Their disappointment eases, though the encounter remains marked by the sadness of a new attachment whose future is uncertain: Lucas must return that afternoon, and Magalí must leave as well.

The conversation there deepens Lucas’s knowledge of her. He learns that she is twenty-eight, that Guerra is her father’s surname and Zabala her late mother’s, and that she sometimes lives with her father. She also has a boyfriend, who plays bass in a well-known Uruguayan metal band. Lucas tells her about his books and promises to send her a novel set in Brazil, though he has not yet written it. The exchange brings biographical facts and future plans into a day otherwise dominated by immediate sensation, without resolving the complications surrounding their attraction.

A remembered place

Cabo Polonio’s importance extends beyond the excursion itself because Lucas revisits it in memory while traveling from Argentina toward Montevideo to collect writing advances. As the bus moves through a landscape that seems to anticipate the sea, the coast calls up the summer in which he met Magalí in Rocha. The remembered destination is therefore reached twice in the narrative: first by walking with her through the dunes, and later through the movement of recollection during another journey.

That return links the physical place to Lucas’s imaginative attachment to Magalí and to Montevideo, the city where she lives. His idea of Montevideo is partly assembled from her messages and the images she sends, so the remembered coastal encounter helps shape a wider geography of longing. Cabo Polonio is not presented merely as a scenic stop: its crowds, rocks, sea, and brief refuge preserve the precise mixture of desire and frustration that Lucas carries into the later journey. The excursion ends without a settled future, leaving the place as a vivid beginning rather than a resolution.