Radisson Montevideo Victoria Plaza Hotel

The Radisson Montevideo Victoria Plaza Hotel is both a real place in central Montevideo and a threshold in Lucas Pereyra’s movement from fantasy toward action. A view of Palacio Salvo from one of its rooms helps draw him into the building; once there, he pays for a room and imagines sharing it with Magalí Guerra Zabala. The hotel gives physical form to a desire that had until then been carried through memories, messages, songs, and imagined versions of the city.

Setting and approach

Lucas reaches the hotel after leaving the terminal and walking toward Avenida 18 de Julio, the main axis of his limited mental map of Montevideo. That map contains only a few streets and landmarks, but it is also emotional: he has joined fragments of earlier visits to videos that Magalí Guerra Zabala periodically sends him. Her glimpses of the city have made Montevideo feel familiar before he has properly encountered it. He has imagined its bars through the song I Embraced You in the Night, whose video he has watched repeatedly, and has become attached not only to the woman who lives there but to the city constructed around her.

The contrast between that private geography and the working city begins as soon as he steps outside. Commercial movement, banks about to open, shops, street stalls, and the day’s ordinary business steadily erode the fantasy of Brazil that had occupied him. Yet walking does not simply replace imagination with fact. It gives his associations fresh material: he sees a couple of Brazilian visitors looking toward Palacio Salvo in Plaza Independencia and recognizes the building from an album cover Magalí Guerra Zabala had sent him. The image leads him to think of the hotel as the likely vantage point from which the photograph was taken. He crosses the street and enters.

The hotel and room 262

The lobby is sparsely occupied, with a marble floor, leather chairs, a high ceiling, smooth surfaces, and the spacious, impersonal luxury of an international hotel. Lucas appears hesitant when he asks the young receptionist about a room on an upper floor. He agrees to a double bed and learns that a night costs 240 dollars. He had expected the price to be high enough to decide the matter for him, but the cost does not stop him. He chooses the room.

Paying makes the decision bodily and awkward. Lucas has hidden his money in a belt and struggles to get it out, moving his hands on the far side of the counter in a way that leaves the receptionist watching uncertainly. He hands over his passport and pays 300 dollars in cash; because he is paying immediately, he does not need a card. The transaction marks a change from imagining access to taking a concrete, expensive step toward it.

He goes up to room 262, a number he likes, and drops his backpack on the bed before drawing the curtain. From above, he sees the unusual tower of Palacio Salvo and the river horizon. The room’s view joins the actual city to the visual chain that brought him there: the building, the album image, Magalí Guerra Zabala’s message, and his own desire. He thinks of the room as a place where he might stop sublimating his life through literature and enter reality instead. His imagined purpose is intimate and specific: he wants Magalí Guerra Zabala’s actual body beside him, rather than another solitary dream.

A room imagined as a meeting place

The room is empty, and Lucas’s plans remain plans. He sits on the bed and tests how well it springs, imagining that he will embrace Magalí Guerra Zabala there. At the same time, he recognizes the distance between staging an encounter and living one: he feels like a director scouting locations for a film he will never make. The hotel therefore holds both possibilities at once. It gives him a material setting for the encounter he wants, but his awareness of the room as a potential film location exposes how readily he can turn experience back into representation.

He has brought a six-hundred-page biography of Rimbaud to finish during the trip but has not opened it. He leaves it on the bedside table, a concrete remainder of the literary world he says he wants to move beyond. Before leaving the room, he goes to the bathroom, washes, straightens his hair flattened by the bus journey, looks at himself in the mirror, and takes a photograph of the window. It is ten minutes to two. The photograph preserves the view and makes the room’s significance portable: he can carry its image back into the afternoon, rather than leaving the hotel experience contained within the room.

Afterlife of the view

Later, during a meal with Magalí Guerra Zabala, Lucas shows her the photograph. She recognizes Palacio Salvo and identifies the hotel as the Radisson; her teasing approval of his initiative makes clear that she understands he has taken the room for them to be alone. Lucas confirms that this was his reason for reserving it. The exchange brings the private plan into their shared conversation, but it does not establish that they went to the room or that the hoped-for intimacy occurred.

The hotel’s narrative importance lies in this gap between intention and outcome. Its elevated view seems to promise entry into the city and into another person’s life, but the novel keeps the promise distinct from its fulfillment. The room is at once a paid-for space, a vantage point above Montevideo, and a mental set built from images and expectation. In Lucas’s larger experience of the city, movement repeatedly entangles actual streets with literary and personal associations: elsewhere, walking with Magalí Guerra Zabala, he recognizes the University of the Republic through its image on a 500-peso bill and recalls a scene by Onetti. The hotel concentrates that same process in a single location, where seeing Palacio Salvo becomes the route by which imagined desire briefly acquires an address.