Lucas and Guerra reunite and spend an afternoon in Montevideo

The reunion between Lucas Pereyra and Magalí Guerra Zabala transforms a city Lucas has loved at a distance into the setting for an afternoon in which fantasy, bodily desire, and responsibility collide. He arrives in Montevideo to collect writing advances and meet Guerra, but their encounter ends not in escape together but in a pregnancy disclosure, a violent interruption, and his decision to return to Buenos Aires.

Journey and the city imagined

Lucas’s trip begins as a practical response to financial pressure. He is traveling to collect advances for two book contracts, signed months earlier, whose payments have arrived in Uruguay. A transfer to Argentina would convert the dollars at the official rate and incur income tax; collecting them in cash in Uruguay and exchanging them in Buenos Aires at the unofficial rate would leave him with more than twice as much. He knows that carrying more dollars into Argentina than permitted puts him at risk at customs. On the boat, the announcement that the free shop is open sharpens the irony: he is crossing a border to retrieve his own money, imagining it as a means of loosening the many constraints that poverty has placed on his life.

The crossing and the bus ride inland briefly suspend his usual sense of being stuck. As the bus passes palms and undulating fields, Lucas feels an unexpected happiness in the movement itself: the bright light, the open landscape, and the sensation of leaving ordinary life behind. The river is not yet quite the sea, but he experiences it as something about to happen. That horizon also draws him toward memories of Guerra, whom he met at a literary festival in Valizas during the previous January.

Montevideo is already present to Lucas before he walks its streets. Guerra has sent him occasional emails with songs and videos of the city, including episodes of Tiranos temblad. Her fragments have become, for him, a map made from longing as much as geography. Once in town, he navigates by Avenida 18 de Julio, locating familiar landmarks and the banks, while imagining that any doorway might open onto a scene from a song she shared. He recognizes that he has fallen in love both with a woman who lives there and with a city he has largely invented from memory, videos, and desire.

As he walks, the actual city keeps interrupting that private construction. A shouted catchphrase from Tiranos temblad makes him feel briefly included in Uruguay’s web of references. A tattoo-shop flyer, mentioning genital piercings, sets off thoughts about Guerra’s piercing and the questions he and she have never addressed in their emails; he keeps the flyer rather than throwing it away. The episode makes the city’s smallest objects feel personally addressed to him, a tendency he recognizes as part of being in love. Meanwhile, banks, shops, plazas, and ordinary street life give his imagined Montevideo a material route.

Waiting and arranging the encounter

Before Guerra arrives, Lucas waits at the old Santa Catalina restaurant beneath its yellow awning. He has seen her only twice: first in January, then in March at this same bar. The present meeting is therefore loaded with anticipation, but its setting is modest: a few diners, aluminum chairs on the pavement, and a place known for simple food. Lucas watches the direction from which she is expected to come and tries to manage his nerves. He worries about what they will talk about, whether she will agree to go to a hotel, whether exhaustion and anxiety will undermine his sexual confidence, and whether her boyfriend might appear to confront him.

Guerra arrives from the waterfront with a muzzled black pit bull marked by a white patch on its chest. She surprises Lucas by pressing two fingers firmly into the back of his neck; he jumps, knocks the table, and spills a nearly empty beer. She greets him affectionately, gives him the dog’s leash, and goes inside to the bathroom. For a few seconds Lucas is left standing with the leash, facing the dog’s awkward, subdued presence. Her arrival turns the imagined meeting into an immediate physical encounter, full of nervousness and familiarity at once.

Lucas has already taken the initiative of booking a room at the Radisson Montevideo Victoria Plaza Hotel. The idea comes to him while looking at Palacio Salvo: a photograph of the building on an album cover Guerra had sent him seems to have been taken from the hotel, and the chain of associations makes him decide that he can reserve a room for them. When Guerra learns what he has done, she recognizes that he has planned the meeting. Lucas confirms that he wants them to be alone. The room gives shape to his expectation, but the afternoon will not follow a simple progression from plan to fulfillment.

Walking toward intimacy

The pair walk through the city together, and Lucas’s literary and visual associations continue to mediate what he sees. In Cordón they pass the University of the Republic, whose façade he recognizes as the building printed on the five-hundred-peso note. Near the descent toward the waterfront, he recalls a scene by Onetti set on that street and describes the woman in the story being made to walk toward the shore. The shared walk brings his private store of books, images, and memories into the space between them, even as Guerra listens with curiosity rather than becoming merely a figure in his literary scenery.

At the beach, the two sit sheltered against a seawall. Lucas tries to play Zamba por vos on a ukulele, but he does not know the chords and his guitar knowledge confuses him. The failed performance gives way to a smaller exchange: Guerra’s purple ball-shaped lollipop and Lucas’s red one. They compare and trade them, then kiss, tasting grape and strawberry. Their contact deepens in the shelter of the stone steps. Lucas recalls their closeness as a continuous, murmured exchange rather than orderly dialogue; the scene’s physical intensity gathers faster than either a carefully staged seduction or a clear conversation could contain.

In the midst of their intimacy, Lucas asks Guerra to run away with him to Brazil that night. He proposes a week together and imagines that they could be alone there the following day. Guerra does not accept. She continues touching him, but tears come silently, and she gives a slight shake of her head. The contrast between Lucas’s urgent invitation and her tears makes plain that their desire does not erase the other attachments and obligations that shape her life.

Disclosure, violence, and return

Guerra tells Lucas that she is also pregnant. She is in her second month and does not know whether she will continue the pregnancy. The disclosure changes the meaning of the scene at once: Lucas’s imagined escape has encountered a reality that cannot be resolved by leaving together for Brazil. He recognizes that Guerra’s life is a knot of other people and circumstances, though in the immediate moment he is unable to understand what to say or how to respond. Their physical intimacy continues briefly, suspended between desire and the news she has just given him.

The encounter is interrupted when two men attack Lucas from behind. He is knocked face-down into the sand, pinned, and kicked; the exposed state of his body and unfastened trousers intensifies his fear and humiliation. When he hears Guerra being shaken, he tries to rise and is kicked in the stomach. The assault abruptly changes the beach from a protected corner for the pair into a scene of danger. After a pause, the attackers run, leaving Lucas struggling to breathe with sand in his mouth.

Later, alone under a shower, Lucas cries as he thinks of Guerra, of the affection he has received from her, and of the other forms of care in his life. He recognizes that the day has not simply confirmed his desire to leave with her: it has made him feel, alongside the shock of violence, the love of Catalina and Maiko and the hospitality he has encountered in Montevideo. He understands that he must return to Buenos Aires. The decision closes the afternoon’s escape fantasy without making the city or his feelings unreal; instead, the reunion leaves him with a sharper awareness of the people and responsibilities to which he remains connected.