Lucas Pereyra and Magalí Guerra Zabala reunite in Montevideo during a September visit that Lucas has invested with the promise of both financial relief and romantic escape. Their afternoon moves from an eagerly anticipated lunch to intimacy on the shore, where Guerra reveals that she is pregnant; an attack then abruptly breaks the encounter. The reunion matters not as the fulfillment of Lucas’s fantasy but as the moment that forces his imagined future to collide with other people’s lives and his own responsibilities.

The journey and the imagined city

Lucas travels from Argentina to collect advances on book contracts signed with publishers in Spain and Colombia. He had opened a bank account in Montevideo in April, but the money arrives only in September. If transferred to Argentina, the dollars would be converted at the official rate and taxed; collecting the funds in Uruguay and bringing them back in cash would leave him with more than twice as much after exchanging them in Buenos Aires. He knows he will return with more dollars than permitted, but considers the trip and its risk worthwhile. The money represents more than income: he has come to imagine it as a way out of the financial blockage that has kept ordinary plans and work stalled.

The crossing itself gives the trip the quality of a temporary release. As the ship leaves the harbor, Lucas feels relief at leaving his country, even briefly. The announcements in Spanish, Portuguese, and English and the newly opened duty-free shop sharpen his reflections on restriction and freedom. Later, on the bus, the palm-lined road, the changing landscape, and the sensation of travel bring on an intense, almost inexplicable happiness. The landscape makes the journey feel like passage toward another life, while Guerra’s memory—associated with the coast and the summer they met—draws that imagined destination closer.

In Montevideo, Lucas walks by means of a small, personal map: Avenida 18 de Julio, the banks, familiar plazas, and places connected to Enzo Arredondo. He has also been assembling the city from videos and songs Guerra sent by email. As he admits to himself, he is in love both with a woman who lives there and with the city he has made around her; much of that city is invention. Street details become charged with private associations. A flyer advertising tattoos and piercings makes him think of Guerra’s genital piercing, a subject they have never discussed. At Plaza Independencia, the Palacio Salvo links the actual street to an image from an album cover Guerra had sent him. The city is therefore both the setting of their meeting and a projection repeatedly corrected by what he encounters.

Waiting for Guerra

The lunch is arranged at an old, unpretentious restaurant called Santa Catalina, where Lucas waits outside beneath a yellow awning. He has been there with Guerra before, in March, when they drank beer at the same table. On that earlier visit, he described his plan to return regularly for money and to see her. She kept his advances at a distance, joking that there were many eyes in Montevideo. They did not kiss. Their conversation nevertheless gave Lucas fragments of her life: she lived with her boyfriend in Nuevo París, worked at a newspaper, and traveled to and from work by bicycle. She also told him about her mother’s rapid death from bone-marrow cancer, her estrangement from her father, and a brother living in the United States. Lucas gave her a book of Werner Herzog’s diaries, and she said she had read some of his work online. He had promised to come back soon but did not return until roughly half a year later.

Now, waiting for the woman he has seen only twice, Lucas turns anticipation into imagined scenes. When a pregnant stranger approaches, he briefly mistakes her for Guerra and imagines a tender afternoon together, including the possibility that she might want to have sex despite being pregnant. The stranger passes; the fantasy exposes how little Lucas knows and how readily he supplies what he hopes to find. His earlier confidence also falters into anxiety about what they will talk about, whether she will agree to go to a hotel, and whether her boyfriend might appear. The reunion begins before Guerra arrives, in the gap between his elaborate expectations and the person he is actually waiting to see.

The encounter and the revelation

Guerra arrives from the waterfront with a black pit bull wearing a muzzle. Her sudden approach startles Lucas: she embraces him, speaks close to his ear, and hands him the dog’s leash while she goes inside. The dog belongs to her former boyfriend, she explains, but he is no longer her boyfriend. This small disclosure changes the meaning of the dog and gives Lucas a first indication that the life he has been imagining may have changed substantially since their previous meeting.

After lunch, the two walk through Montevideo. In Cordón they pass the University of the Republic, whose building Lucas recognizes from the blue image on a five-hundred-peso note. The walk repeatedly turns streets into literary or personal landmarks: near the descent toward the waterfront, he recalls a scene by Juan Carlos Onetti. Such associations continue the pattern of the afternoon—Lucas experiences the real city through stories, memories, and images, while Guerra accompanies him through places he has partly imagined from afar.

At the beach, their closeness becomes physical. Lucas tries to play Zamba por vos on a ukulele but cannot find the chords; the effort gives way to sharing and trading lollipops, kissing, and lying together in the sand. He asks Guerra to run away with him to Brazil that night, offering a week away and the prospect of being alone together. She does not accept. As he presses the invitation, she cries and tells him that she, too, is pregnant, now in her second month, and does not know whether she will continue the pregnancy. The disclosure overturns the escape Lucas has been proposing. Guerra is not simply the beloved figure in his private story: she is facing a consequential decision of her own, within a complicated set of relationships and circumstances.

Attack and return

The intimacy ends when two men come upon them and assault Lucas. He is struck while his trousers are unfastened; Guerra cries out as one of the attackers shakes her, and Lucas is kicked again when he tries to rise. The men run off, leaving him unable to speak at first, with sand in his mouth. The attack makes the afternoon’s movement toward freedom suddenly physical and dangerous, and leaves him with pain in his ribs as well as the shock of what has happened. The supplied account does not establish the attackers’ motives or give details of what, if anything, they took.

Afterward, Lucas remembers Guerra’s embrace and the care he felt from people around him, including Catalina, his son Maiko, and Enzo Arredondo, who had offered him a towel. Alone in the shower, he cries—a rare response that he connects not only to fear and sadness but also to affection. He cannot accept that Guerra’s tenderness was false, yet recognizes that he will not see her again. The tears also bring his family’s love back into view, alongside the hospitality he has received in Montevideo. In the immediate aftermath, with his ribs hurting when he breathes deeply, Lucas reaches a clear conclusion: he has to return to Buenos Aires. The reunion does not deliver the escape he imagined; it ends by restoring the claims of attachment, vulnerability, and home that the journey had briefly suspended.