Playa Ramírez

Playa Ramírez is the Montevideo beach that becomes the destination of Lucas Pereyra and Magalí Guerra’s afternoon together—and the scene of the robbery that destroys the day’s promise. Approached through Pereyra’s desire and literary associations, the shore first offers a place to linger with Guerra; there, the intimacy of their encounter gives way to assault, and the money on which Pereyra had based his hopes for work and family stability is taken.

Setting and Approach

The beach is close enough to become an unplanned continuation of the pair’s walk. At about five in the afternoon, Guerra suggests that they finish the remaining half of a joint at Ramírez. Pereyra does not know whether the name refers to a plaza; Guerra tells him it is the nearby beach. His phone has run out of battery, so he asks her for the time before they set off. The casual exchange places the outing in ordinary, shifting afternoon time: a walk that might continue, with no fixed plan beyond reaching the water.

On their way, they pass through Cordón and around an old building Pereyra later recognizes as Universidad de la República. Its façade reminds him of the blue image on a five-hundred-peso note. Towering plane trees make the street feel cathedral-like as they descend toward the shore. The route is therefore more than transit: familiar urban details keep turning into associations, and the beach is reached through a landscape Pereyra reads at once as actual city and as material already stored in memory.

A Shore Read Through Memory

Pereyra’s experience of Montevideo has been shaped by his attachment to Guerra and by the city videos she has sent him. He has imagined the city from fragments, songs, and images, and understands that much of the Montevideo he carries with him is invented. This earlier idealization accompanies him to Playa Ramírez: he does not arrive as a detached visitor but as someone whose perception of the city has been entwined with longing for the woman who lives there.

Near the descent, he recalls a scene by Onetti in which a man makes his wife walk in a white dress while he watches from the waterfront. The literary recollection overlays the present route with a scene of looking and being looked at. At the shore, the landscape itself resists a simple name. Pereyra asks why the water is called a river when it looks like the sea; Guerra explains that the water is mixed, sometimes greener and bluer, sometimes browner, and that the sea proper is generally considered to begin farther east, at Punta del Este. The exchange gives the coast a shifting character rather than settling it into one category.

The pair pause at the railing before going down to the beach. Beyond the breakers, kite surfers move beneath colored sails. As they walk barefoot along the water, their conversation also returns to an unusual phenomenon they had seen. Guerra speculates that it might be a field of force or a portal that opens and closes, generated by energy. These ideas belong to the afternoon’s speculative, exploratory mood; the beach is a place where perception and explanation remain open rather than resolved.

Intimacy and the Robbery

At the water’s edge, the walk becomes intimate. Pereyra and Guerra embrace, and their sexual encounter begins in a secluded stretch of the beach. A weathered sign warns that swimming is not recommended when the lifeguard is absent, a practical notice that sits near the scene without protecting the couple from what follows. Pereyra is turned away from the sea when two men approach. One forces his face into the sand and holds him down; when he tries to rise after hearing Guerra cry out, he is kicked in the ribs and abdomen.

The attack is swift, and its immediate terror is bound up with exposure and humiliation: Pereyra’s trousers are open, and he is pinned face-down in the sand. After a brief silence, the attackers run. He struggles to breathe with sand in his mouth, then discovers that the belt carrying the money and his backpack are gone. Guerra is there beside him, shaken but safe. The change in the beach’s meaning is abrupt: the same secluded shore that had offered privacy becomes a site of bodily danger and financial loss.

Loss and Aftermath

The stolen money is not incidental cash. Pereyra has traveled to Uruguay to collect fifteen thousand dollars in advances for two books, one of chronicles for Milenio and a novel for Astillero. He had expected the dollars to go much further than a transfer converted at Argentina’s official rate: exchanging them in Buenos Aires at the unofficial rate would leave him with substantially more. The money was meant to repay debts, catch up on bills, make repairs at home, and give him roughly nine months of uninterrupted writing time. Its loss at Playa Ramírez therefore wipes out both a sum of money and the future he had built around it.

The backpack contained his phone, house and car keys, and wallet with bank cards. His passport survives because he had put it in the zipped inner pocket of his jacket after leaving the bank; he is left with the clothes he is wearing, a ukulele, and some Uruguayan pesos. Guerra guides him along the edge of Parque Rodó and up Salterain Street to find a police station. The practical aftermath replaces the earlier anxieties of concealment and romantic uncertainty: the immediate problem is how to explain the missing dollars and return home without them.

Narrative Significance

Playa Ramírez concentrates the contrast between Pereyra’s imagined escape and the material vulnerability he carries with him. Before reaching it, he has pictured money as a way out of domestic debt and creative paralysis; at the beach, the money is physically taken, and those plans collapse into the need to report the assault and face its consequences. The setting also links several strands of the afternoon—city walking, literary memory, attraction, speculation, and sudden violence—without allowing any one of them to remain safely abstract. The shore is not merely a backdrop to the robbery: it is where Pereyra’s idealized Montevideo and his exposed, bodily experience of the city meet.