Extramarital Affairs in Lucas and Catalina's Relationship

Extramarital affairs in Lucas Pereyra and Catalina’s marriage are not a single secret but a pattern of concealment, inference, and unequal knowledge. Lucas suspects Catalina of seeing another man, while hiding his own encounters and treating secrecy as a skill. Their eventual confrontation reverses his assumptions: Catalina discloses that she is in love with a woman, and Lucas must face both the limits of his suspicions and the affairs he had kept from her.

Suspicion and Its Evidence

During a period of unemployment and creative paralysis, Lucas becomes increasingly consumed by the possibility that Catalina is unfaithful. Her late returns from meetings and foundation cocktails, sometimes after midnight, become evidence in his private case against her. He notices changes in her grooming, including smoother legs and a newly trimmed pubic area. Catalina says the latter is for a bikini as summer approaches, but Lucas converts even this ordinary explanation into a source of doubt.

He also fixates on details of her return home: the water running in the bathroom, the activity of washing and removing makeup, a shower before bed, and a strong scent of cologne. He imagines her smoking and drinking champagne on a terrace, then pictures her erasing the traces of the evening in the bathroom. Yet he admits that he is hypersensitive to smells and allows that the scent could have come from greetings at a year-end dinner. The evidence remains ambiguous; its force comes largely from the questions Lucas builds around it.

His imagined rival is initially a man connected with the foundation, perhaps a member of its board or one of the cardiologists. Lucas wonders where Catalina might meet him and whether she is preparing herself for someone else. These suspicions are not confirmed by the details he observes. Instead, his narration shows how he turns gaps in his knowledge into elaborate scenarios, while mistaking the specificity of his fantasies for proof.

Lucas’s Concealed Encounters

Lucas’s suspicion of Catalina takes place alongside his own infidelity. He recalls meeting a university student at the Mix motel on some Fridays before class. Their meetings lasted for several months; afterward, they appeared separately, and Lucas tried to dry his hair so that he would not arouse suspicion. The student eventually reconciled with a boyfriend, passed Lucas’s course, and left for Mexico. Their relationship was over by the time Maiko was about two years old.

He also recalls an affair with a Brazilian woman at the Pelícano motel. She spoke of her arguments with her bodybuilding boyfriend and uncertainty about returning to Belo Horizonte, disappearing for months before reappearing to arrange another meeting. She practiced jiu-jitsu and taught Lucas a hold that he later used playfully while wrestling with Nico. The affair therefore enters his account not only as sexual history but as a secret that has left a trace in his ordinary life, resurfacing as a remembered technique at a drunken barbecue.

Lucas describes his secrecy as carefully managed. He avoided being seen with women in public, regarding the few metres outside a motel as the principal risk. He returned after bathing, checked himself for stray long hairs, and deleted messages. In retrospect, he recognizes that this effort at concealment did not make his affairs invisible to Catalina. He believes that something accumulated in her, that she sensed what was happening in the blind spot between what he revealed and what he hid.

His self-image as a practiced, controlled lover sits uneasily beside the man he describes elsewhere: unemployed, asking Catalina for money transfers, borrowing from his brother, and watching his debts increase. He connects his jealousy to this financial vulnerability and to his sense of aging and diminished attractiveness. Rather than treating his suspicions as detached observations, he links them to feeling unable to provide and to a wounded masculine pride. The affairs and the jealousy thus become parts of the same conflict: he hides his conduct while fearing that Catalina’s desire has moved elsewhere.

Secrecy and Reprisal

Lucas comes to understand Catalina’s later secrecy as a possible response to his own. He says that after he calmed down and stopped seeing other women for a time, Catalina began returning late and keeping a hidden agenda of her own. He describes this as a more or less conscious act of revenge, but the qualification matters: this is Lucas’s interpretation, not a confirmed account of her motive. He can identify a pattern of mutual concealment without claiming full knowledge of what Catalina understood or intended at each stage.

His account also shows how he had imagined affairs through a narrow set of conventions. In his jealous fantasies, Catalina’s preparations point toward a male lover, and he mentally constructs advice about how a mistress should behave: she should avoid leaving traces, block her phone, and keep the encounter separate from ordinary intimacy. The fantasy exposes the rules Lucas associates with clandestine sex even as his own experiences contradict their supposed neatness. His affairs leave memories, habits, and suspicions behind; the secrecy he calls nearly perfect has not prevented consequences within the marriage.

Disclosure and Reversal

After a night that includes a hospital visit, Lucas and Catalina return home with Maiko due to stay at Catalina’s mother’s house. Catalina tells Lucas that they cannot continue as they have and that they need to discuss what they want. She asks who Magalí Guerra Zabala is. Lucas tells her, but senses that the disclosure disappoints her: his distant affection for Magalí Guerra Zabala seems less conclusive than the revelation she is preparing to make. The question shifts their conversation from Lucas’s suspicions about Catalina to the secrets each has withheld.

Catalina tells him that she is in love with a friend, a woman, and that the relationship has lasted nearly a year. She describes her as a doctor working at La Trinidad, whom she met at a foundation cocktail on a terrace. They have exchanged emails and messages, met, smoked marijuana at the woman’s home, and come to love one another. Catalina says she will no longer hide the relationship. Lucas, who had confidently placed his suspicions on a man from the foundation, had not considered that Catalina’s lover might be a woman.

The disclosure leaves him stunned and physically disoriented. He had expected a male rival and cannot immediately understand Catalina’s desire, asking himself whether she had ceased to like men or had ceased to desire him specifically. Her mother asks him about the situation; her father does not speak to her for two months, and the revelation becomes a shock among cousins and friends. Lucas initially experiences the response as a blow to his sexual identity and masculine pride. He acknowledges that this hurt helps explain why he rubs his own affairs in Catalina’s face, even though he believes she may no longer care. He says that he remains hurt but feels neither hatred nor anger.

The affair story is therefore also a story of misrecognition. Lucas’s suspicions contain real perceptions of distance and secrecy, but he assigns them a cause that reflects his own expectations, not Catalina’s actual relationship. His concealed encounters and his belief that he can control their visibility make him both observer and participant in the marriage’s hidden life. Catalina’s disclosure does not erase his infidelity or settle every uncertainty about what she knew; it makes clear that neither spouse possessed the whole truth. Their affairs expose the gap between secrecy as a private arrangement and secrecy as something that reshapes a shared life.